My Life as a Fake (24 page)

Australian readers will have noted certain connections between Bob McCorkle and Ern Malley. Indeed, McCorkle’s early verse is lifted word for word from Malley’s ‘The Darkening Ecliptic,’ first published in the literary magazine
Angry Penguins
in 1944.

Of course, Malley’s poetry and biography constituted a hoax conceived by two talented anti-modernists, Harold Stewart and James McAuley These conservatives wrote not only the verse I have borrowed for Bob McCorkle but also the wonderful letters they attributed to Malley’s equally fictitious sister, which fabrications also appear in
My Life as a Fake
, though in much-abbreviated form.

The editor of
Angry Penguins
, Max Harris, having already been humiliated, was then called into court on the same charges faced by my fictional David Weiss, and I have drawn from transcripts of his bizarre trial.

‘I still believe in Ern Malley’ Harris wrote years later.

‘I don’t mean that as a piece of smart talk. I mean it quite simply. I know that Ern Malley was not a real person, but a personality invented in order to hoax me. I was offered not only the poems of this mythical Ern Malley, but also his life, his ideas, his love, his disease, and his death…. Most of you probably didn’t think about the story of Ern Malley’s life. It got lost in the explosive revelation of the hoax. In the holocaust of argument and policemen, meaning
versus nonsense, it was not likely you closed your eyes and tried to conjure up such a person as the mythical Ern Malley … a garage mechanic suffering from the onset of Grave’s Disease, with a solitary postcard of Durer’s ‘Innsbruck’ on his bedroom wall. Of someone knowing he is going to die young, in a world of war and death, and seeing the streets and the children with the eyes of the already dead.

‘A pretty fancy. It can have no meaning for you. But I believed in Ern Malley. In all simplicity and faith I believed such a person existed, and I believed it for many months before the newspapers threw their banner headline at me. For me Ern Malley embodies the true sorrow and pathos of our time. One had felt that somewhere in the streets of every city was an Ern Malley … a living person, alone, outside literary cliques, outside print, dying, outside humanity but of it….

‘As I imagined him Ern Malley had something of the soft staring brilliance of Franz Kafka; something of Rilke’s anguished solitude; something of Wilfred Owen’s angry fatalism. And I believe he really walked down Princess Street somewhere in Melbourne….

‘I can still close my eyes and conjure up such a person in our streets. A young person. A person without the protection of the world that comes from living in it. A man outside.’

Four of those I wish to thank are poets whose names are not unfamiliar, while another, Sir Frank Swettenham, was a colonial administrator now of dubious repute. During the three years it took to write this novel I have been touched by the generosity of family and friends, and those so close it is often hard to tell the difference—Maria Aitken, Carol Davidson, Peter Best, Gary Fisketjon, Michael Heyward, Paul Kane, Alec Marsh, Patrick McGrath, Lucy Neave, Sharon Olds, Robert Polito, Jon Riley, Deborah Rogers, Mona Simpson, Alison Summers, Betsy Sussler, and Binky Urban. Two gifted Malaysian writers, Rehman Rashid and Kee Thuan Chye, were selfless in the assistance they offered one who had come to them as a stranger. If this book contains errors of locution or history, the fault is mine, the stranger’s. Another Malaysian writer, Dr. M. Shanmughalingam, not only offered advice and friendship but also allowed me to read his unfinished autobiography, which proved invaluable to my understanding of the Tamils who are such an important part of Malay society. In Kuala Lumpur, Victor Chin provided me with an intense tutorial in shophouse culture. Khoo Salma Nasution, the author
of Streets of George Town, Penang
, was a powerhouse; on my third visit to that almost perfect island, she found me an entire lifetime’s worth of places and memories which have made their way, sometimes coded, mostly transmuted, into this narrative. Lastly I must thank John Dauth, the former Australian High Commissioner in Malaysia, whom I am now pleased
to call a friend; and also Simon Merrifield, presently counselor at that same High Commission, who organized that memorable dinner when, straight off the flight from New York City, I met with so many of Malaysia’s great minds and spirits. In a novel which contains its fair share of Ezra Pound, it is perhaps appropriate to conclude with the last lines of his translation of Rihaku’s “Exile’s Letter.”

Copyright © 2003 by Peter Carey

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Australia by Random House Australia, Sydney.

Excerpts from
The Darkening Ecliptic
by Ern Malley reproduced by arrangement with the copyright owners of the James McAuley Estate, c/o Curtis Brown (Aust) Pty Ltd; the literary estate of Harold Stewart; and with permission of the Max Harris Estate from Ern Malley’s
Collected Poems
(ETT Imprint, Sydney, 1993).

The writings of Max Harris have been reproduced with permission of the Max Harris Estate from Ern Malley’s
Collected Poems
(ETT Imprint, Sydney, 1993).

Excerpts from Ezra Pounds “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly” from
Collected Shorter Poems
reproduced with permission of Faber and Faber.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Carey, Peter [date]
My life as a fake: a novel/Peter Carey.
p. cm.
1. Literary forgeries and mystifications—Fiction. 2. British—Australia—Fiction.
3. British—Malaysia—Fiction. 4. Women editors—Fiction. 5. Australia—Fiction.
6. Malaysia—Fiction. 7. Poets—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9619.3.C36M9 2003
823’.914—dc21          2003052746

eISBN: 978-0-307-53877-2

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