Robber of Dead Men's Dream

from Cabinet

Ern Malley caused a scandal amongst the Australian literati after World War II. Malley was not a poet at all but a hoax perpetrated by Harold Stewart and James McAuley. The two tricksters' intention was to expose an eagerness to find edgy modern poetic genius in what was worthless and arbitrary. They did not intend for Malley to continue to attract readers decades afterward.

In this piece in Cabinet, Christine Wertheim explores the continuing fascination of Malley the episode, Malley the poet, Malley the vehicle of cultural critique. Reprinted verbatim is Malley's poem "Durer: Innsbruck 1495," which was in fact written by McAuley and discarded only to be resurrected and then lavishly praised:

I had often, cowled in the slumberous heavy air,
Closed my inanimate lids to find it real,

As I knew it would be, the colorful spires

And painted roofs, the high snows glimpsed at 
 the back,

All reversed in the quiet reflecting waters—

Not knowing then that Dürer perceived it too.

Now I find that once more I have shrunk
To an interloper, robber of dead men’s dream,

I had read in books that art is not easy

But no one warned that the mind repeats

In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still

The black swan of trespass on alien waters.


What McAuley wrote as a fairly straightforward account of a poet admiring a painting became doubly ironic since the "interloper," the "black swan of trespass" and the "inanimate lids" all point to the nonexistence of the author.

When the author closes his eyes, either the painting or the reality is paradoxically revealed to him, and to us.

The "robber of dead men's dream" seems to suggest that reviving a centuries-old work of art could be construed as a crime. When Ern Malley was exposed as a fake, it was a vandalization of high culture. But when John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch revived Malley's reputation, the "robbery" proved a great gift.