Rhyme and Punishment

By Richard Lacayo

Truth is a slippery thing. Just ask Peter Carey. In True History of the Kelly Gang, which won the Booker Prize three years ago, the cunning Australian built a palace of fiction from the "true story" of a legend, the Aussie outlaw Ned Kelly. For My Life as a Fake (Knopf; 266 pages), his point of departure is an even more intricate falsehood, the Ern Malley affair.

In 1944 two Australian soldiers who hated the obscurities of modernist poetry conspired to invent Malley, a working-class genius, and fabricate his verse. Then they hoodwinked the editors of an Australian literary journal--called Angry Penguins, no less--into publishing the poems and proclaiming him an unsung master along the lines of T.S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas. But even after the prank was exposed, the poems outfoxed the pranksters. In-tended as satire of 20th century verse, they were taken up by readers as exemplary modernist beauties. Today you can find them in the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry, duly credited to Ern Malley, who everyone now knows was imaginary.

Can art have a life outside the intentions of the artist? In Carey's nimble revision of the Malley episode, we enter through Sarah Wode-Douglass, editor of a London poetry magazine, who is thinking back on a trip she made to Malaysia in 1972 in the company of John Slater, a goatish, prevaricating but celebrated poet. In Kuala Lumpur she stumbles upon Christopher Chubb, a disheveled Australian expatriate who has a bike-repair shop but also reads Rilke. Learning that Wode-Douglass is an editor, he tantalizes her, not with his own work but with a brilliant page by a "Bob McCorkle" and the promise of more.

Slater warns Wode-Douglass that Chubb is a hoaxer and that McCorkle is merely a phantom. This seems to explain everything until Chubb tells her the almost convincing story of how McCorkle--powerful, angry and nearly 7 ft. tall--turned up one day in the flesh. Is McCorkle flesh and blood or a projection of Chubb's imagination? And since Chubb's own verse is mush, how could he possibly have been the real author of McCorkle's stunning poems--the work of a man who had "ripped up history and nailed it back together with its viscera on the outside"?

Even as she is drawn into Chubb's beguilements, Wode-Douglass is a brittle, amusing narrator. But eventually she's just the audience for Chubb's less gripping story of his daughter's kidnapping by McCorkle, the figment with a beating heart. With this, the book seems to move from novel to fable, a world in which poems and children all have uncertain parentage. Even so, decoding that fable is another kind of pleasure. Carey's book begins with a quote from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Here's a story with another monster who strode into the world. But in a universe where so much is false, why should poetry, or any art, be required to stand on terra firma? All the same, there's no mistaking one fact. My Life as a Fake is the real thing. --By Richard Lacayo