Sincerely, Ethel Malley is Stephen Orr’s tenth novel and I’ve read and reviewed all but one of the others, so I can confidently say that this is the best one he’s ever written. It works on so many levels: it’s a great story in its own right; and it has wonderful characters used to explore enduring themes like courage, fortitude and integrity as well as loyalty and trust within friendships and family. The transformation of the central character and narrator is both entirely credible and wondrous. But then there are questions which emerge from the book as a whole: what is truth and and who gets to tell it? who protects the individual against the power of the press? what is lost when it is so difficult to do anything worthwhile in a conservative milieu? why is tradition so mercilessly hostile to modernity? how and why does a culture drift into mediocrity? and anyway, what are the arts and why do they matter ?
This remarkable novel is a fictionalisation of the notorious Ern Malley literary hoax. Although it’s not at all necessary for enjoying the novel, for those not familiar with the hoax, it’s well worth reading up on this at Wikipedia because it’s a significant element of Australia’s literary history which influenced the trajectory of modernist poetry in Australia.
Briefly, what happened was this: in 1943, two conservative Sydney poets, James Macauley and Harold Stewart, rivals of the precocious Max Harris and not best pleased about the success of his modernist literary magazine in South Australia, cobbled together some random texts and submitted it for publication as modernist poetry. Harris fell for the hoax and in 1944 published the poems in a special edition of the magazine, with a Sidney Nolan cover and a brief bio of the poet: ‘Ern Malley’ who had died young, leaving the poetry to be discovered amongst his effects by his sister Ethel. The hoax was subsequently revealed and Max Harris was tried and convicted for publishing poems that were ‘obscene’. Angry Penguins folded in 1946, but by the 1970s those same poems were regarded as good examples of surrealism, and in what I can’t resist calling ‘poetic justice’ today they are read more often than anything written by Macauley or Stewart.
(The excerpts from the poems that are quoted in the novel show just how this could indeed be so.)
Set in 1943-44, Sincerely, Ethel Malley tells Ethel’s story, and she is a brilliant creation. From her bemused discovery of the poems to her naïve uncertainty about what to do with them and her subsequent contact with Max Harris via a local ‘expert’, she becomes a warrior on behalf of her brother when the storm about authenticity of the poems erupts. When the newspapers get hold of the story, it becomes the talk of the town in sleepy wartime Adelaide. Denying the existence of Ern soon becomes a case of denying her existence too, and ever the loyal sister, she sets about demolishing the doubts.
Max Harris’s girlfriend Von is jealous of Ethel, because Ethel has something Von can’t compete with. Ethel is a salt-of-the-earth, uneducated woman who—like her brother Ern—is of the sort routinely denied the chance to reach her potential by poverty, family tragedy, and an education system that in those days petered out early for people of her class. But the way she so quickly grasps what modernism is about, eclipses Von’s understanding of Max’s ambitions. Ethel can extrapolate from her growing understanding of modernism to discuss not only poetry, but also modernist art by Willian Dobell and drama such as James Joyce’s Exiles, and Max enjoys conversation with her. Stephen Orr is a teacher, and he knows the way that the most unexceptional student can blossom given the right teaching at the right time. That’s what Max, for all his flaws (and his doubts) does for Ethel. Her remarkable intelligence blooms.
I walked up the hill, in the back door of the art gallery, past the Impressionists, Conder, Streeton, and all the others who were happy painting Australia as it looked. Anyone could do that. But how it didn’t look? I shouldn’t have ever doubted Mr Nolan. Now, I knew, we needed him and his Malley-like landscapes. I wondered if he’d suffered the same outrages. (p.222)
But good as it is, Sincerely, Ethel Malley is not just an entertaining historical novel and a literary hoax. It is also a novel of our time. When Ethel and Max encounter Rus Nielsen at Speakers’ Corner, Orr uses it to raise the issue of toxic populism:
[Max} returned to Nielsen and said, ‘Rus, it seems you’ve already made your mind up. You hate people who love culture because you don’t understand it yourself. And instead of trying to (these things, like anything worthwhile, take some effort) you find it easier to destroy the people involved, to laugh at them, to call into question their motivations. And like Hitler, you agitate people into a frenzy, telling them it’s okay to hate what they’ve always hated, because it’s somehow different, and we can’t tolerate difference, can we, Rus?’
Max, my hero, again. ‘Ethel, there’s no use buying into it, this idiot knows what he’s doing. If you people choose to go along with it, so be it. You’ll get the society you want, but in the end, might not like it.’
‘So that’s my fault?’ Rus said. ‘A little bit arrogant, wouldn’t you say?’
‘See, tactic number one. Identify the enemy and characterise as a moral danger.’
‘Now you sound ridiculous’.
‘Use of emotive language. Short, simple words.’
‘What, you writing an essay about me, Max?’
‘Reduce everything to imperatives. Black and white. Are you with us or against us? No complexity in any argument. That’s another thing Hitler does.’ (p.218)
And of course you can substitute the name of a former American president and see what Stephen Orr is getting at.
I loved the way this novel played with its core mystery: what, and who is real in this story? Sincerely, Ethel Malley is going to be one of my Best Books of the Year, and it’s destined for shortlists everywhere, I am sure of it.
To learn more about Sincerely, Ethel Malley, you can Join Miles Franklin longlisted novelist Stephen Orr and critic Simon Caterson, author of Hoax Nation, to talk literary hoaxes and all things Ern next Thursday April 22nd. The event is hosted by Readings. Book here.
Image credit: The Ern Malley edition of Angry Penguins. Featured on the cover is a Sidney Nolan painting inspired by lines from Ern Malley’s poem Petit Testament, which are printed on the cover, bottom right: “I said to my love (who is living) / Dear we shall never be that verb / Perched on the sole Arabian Tree / (Here the peacock blinks the eyes of his multipennate tail)”. The painting is now held at the Heide Museum of Modern Art. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=499696
Author: Stephen Orr
Title: Sincerely, Ethel Malley
Publisher: Wakefield Press, 2021
Cover design by Liz Nicholson
ISBN: 9781743058084, pbk., 441 pages
Review copy courtesy of Wakefield Press.
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