<\/p>
In the September 29 issue of the Weekly Standard <\/em> , Sam Munson reviews Peter Carey\u2019s novel, My Life As a Fake <\/em> , a fictionalized account of a famous Australian literary hoax. As Munson summarizes the (true) story: <\/p>\n Over a single wet weekend on an army base (or so at least the legend of their hoax has it), [Harold] Stewart and [James] McAuley composed reams of mock surrealist poetry. They invented a properly tragic biography of oppression and early death for the ostensible poet, whom they named \u201cErn Malley,\u201d and then \u2014 in the most brilliant part of the hoax \u2014 they came up with the idea of Ern\u2019s sister, a stodgy, philistine Australian housewife who had found the poetry in her late brother\u2019s effects and couldn\u2019t make heads or tails of it. <\/p>\n Posing as the sister, Steward and McAuley entered into correspondence with Max Harris, editor of the intensely fashionable surrealist quarterly Angry Penguins <\/em> \u2014 and Harris fell for the gag like a stone, publishing the whole corpus of the great unknown Australian poet. The truth quickly came out, and Harris was disgraced: a laughingstock among the literati and without highbrow defenders when he was prosecuted under indecency statutes for some other material he\u2019d published. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n Surely the most unbelievable part of this story is that there was a literary journal with the name Angry Penguins <\/em> . <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the September 29 issue of the Weekly Standard , Sam Munson reviews Peter Carey\u2019s novel, My Life As a Fake , a fictionalized account of a famous Australian literary hoax. As Munson summarizes the (true) story: Over a single wet weekend on an army base (or so at least the legend of their hoax […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature"],"yoast_head":"\n