Nov 13 2008
The Official Ern Malley website
I have been using The Official Ern Malley website as a source for information for the seminar I am presenting next week on My Life as a Fake by Peter Carey.
So so book - it’s an entertaining read, but not as good, I think, as many of the other works we have talked about in the Fiction/nonfiction course. But anyway… that’s not the point 
The point I was going to mention - is how in the heck does someone who never existed - Ern Malley, for example - end up with an “official” website?
The same way as does Harry Potter, actually. Whoever owns the rights to the work can, I suppose, claim the title of “the official” site.
In the case of Ern Malley, the levels are a bit odd. The poems were written by Harold Stewart and James McAuley as Ern Malley. They were supposedly submitted to the Angry Penguins literary journal by the fictional Malley’s fictional sister after his fictional death.
Eventually, the issue of copyright came up - which is of interest as that was the topic of our pubic texts class this week and is the topic of the colloquium I’m heading out to attend shortly.
In this case, Stewart and McAuley gave the copyright for the Ern Malley poems to the publisher they had duped with them, Max Harris - and apparently, pretty much the whole Ern Malley story ended up a part of Harris’ estate - hence the “official” website.
The other topic we discussed this week in Public Texts is that of censorship - and there was an issue of that involved in this affair as well - Harris wound up being tried for obscenity re: the Ern Malley poems. You would almost think they’d planned it that way - but they didn’t
