The Sons of Clovis

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Tags: summer-2011, UQP

An edited excerpt from The Sons of Clovis, published by UQP

The Sons of Clovis by David Brooks

Ern Malley? Again? The story of the Ern Malley hoax has surely been told often enough. Ern is, after all, an Australian icon.

Novels have been written about him. Worldwide, poems have been created in parody and homage. His work has influenced his country’s literature – indeed is accredited (at one and the same time!) with the origins of Australian postmodernism and (a little implausibly), with delaying the appearance of modernism in this country for at least 20 years.

His collected works sit almost at the centre of the most recent edition of The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry. Writers and painters alike – Sidney Nolan and Randolph Stow amongst them – have stated openly that he gave them the freedom to be themselves. Not bad for a poet who never existed and, whose credentials, let alone country of origin, have never really been investigated.

How much of the real story has been told? Has it ever been told? Ah, but everyone thinks that they have the real story.

While I wouldn’t want to dismiss them all – Michael Heyward’s study, for one, is useful indeed, and any subsequent writer on this subject will be much indebted to it – previous renditions all seem to me to share the one basic, if quite understandable, flaw: they have taken the hoaxers – avowed liars – at their word, and their account is the story the hoaxers wanted people to believe.

But how much can you trust a hoaxer? Isn’t it possible the explanation of the hoax – the hoax’s peritext, as Gerard Genette would call it – was itself a hoax of some kind? It would hardly be the first time in the long and fascinating, still largely untold history of hoaxes – hyperliterature, as they might be called, or “fictive fictions”, or “writing without borders”.

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