In the early 20th century, the modernists, encouraged by the Dada movement, practised literature with an increasing sense of poetic abandon. Just as Marcel Duchamp led onlookers awry with puzzling sculpture, James Joyce perplexed readers with his labyrinthine modernist masterpiece, Ulysses.

Literary modernism is characterised by satirical absurdity, potent symbolism, non-linear narratives, free-verse poetry, and individualism. Accordingly, the movement caused division in the literary world, alienating those who conformed to traditions. To this day, readers are divided by Joyce’s challenging work and William Faulkner’s unique approach to punctuation and sentence structure.

Over time, the literary world worked itself into wilder frenzies of non-conformity as the postmodernist wave dawned. The esteemed Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov was among the titans of this latter movement, famed for his unflinching embrace of taboos in Lolita and his progressive, seminal merge of poetry and prose, Pale Fire.

In Pale Fire, Nabokov constructed a novel around a 999-line poem. The novel comprised a foreword, the poem and several chapters of extended commentary. Channelling Joyce, Nabokov plays games with his reader, using a duplicitous narrator to challenge and perplex. In Pale Fire, he intended to parody academic commentators, himself included, who often take their jobs too seriously.

Nabokov’s bewildering 1962 classic is indeed one of the greatest works of deceptive fiction of all time. However, a more cunning, if less accomplished, example preceded Pale Fire by a couple of decades. The poetic feat in question occurred in 1943, courtesy of Australian poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart.

In the midst of World War II, a collection of poetry cropped up credited to the mysterious Ern Malley. The poet was an English expat living in Australia who was orphaned in his teen years. After reflecting on his trauma as poets often do, he died in a final tragedy, aged just 25. The posthumous poetry gained rapid popularity thanks to its tragic backdrop, with many describing Malley as a true great of Australian literature.

The one tiny spanner in the works of this particular story is that Ern Malley never existed. He was a cunning construct attributed to McAuley and Stewart. The young poets wrote the series of poems from Malley’s imagined perspective and aged them with exposure to sun and dust before sending them to Max Harris, editor of the modernist literary magazine Angry Penguins. The accompanying letter, signed by Ern’s bereft sister, Ethel Malley, claimed the poems were found among the dead poet’s belongings.

Harris, impressed by the poems and the profundity of their circumstances, published them in a special issue of his magazine, believing Malley to have been a real person. Eventually, the hoax was revealed, causing a scandal in Australia’s literary community. As McAuley and Stewart had intended, Harris was ridiculed for his folly, and debates ensued over the value and interpretation of modernist poetry.

In the wider literary field, the hoax led to increased scepticism among critics. The literary criticism that ensued could well have encouraged Nabokov’s decision to parody the critics in Pale Fire, an elaborate countermove to McAuley and Stewart’s hoax.