Sydney, 1926
Euphemia Mallard
Paris has rhythm but Sydney, that morning, had syncopation—a sharper thing, trimmed, almost hygienic. One could slice into it and still find a melody. I had been listening to a man from America explain his concept for a “symphonic poem on metropolitan walking.” He said it as though pedestrianism were an illness and Paris the cure. His name was August Clay, and he wished for me to assist with the words.
We met near Circular Quay, where ferries announced themselves by shudder rather than horn, and where suit jackets shone with the conviction of prosperity. I was at that time publishing under the name E. Fenwick—which, like a masque, permitted curiosity without offence. He had read The Harbour Drift, and mistook its cruelty for patriotism.
Clay wished to write the libretto before composing a note. “Otherwise you become,” he said, “a prisoner of the pretty.” Each time he used the word pretty, he drew the syllables out as if practising an overtone on a reed instrument. Sydney’s prettiness, he felt, was a problem of architecture and character: verandahs too agreeable, women too busy understanding what they were supposed to want.
“You’ll write it as if he’s you,” he said—“an American in Paris, but not nostalgic. Not even sympathetic. Just aware. The music should blush before its own ambition.”
I had the sense that he was describing me. I agreed, because curiosity requires at least one unwise agreement per day.
The first sketches were done on butcher’s paper, spread atop a café table near Kings Cross. He traced measures with a fountain pen that left blue constellations where beats should have fallen. His idea of tempo resembled gossip—unpredictable, self-satisfied. Between us, on the tiled floor, a radio played a foxtrot rearranged as jazz; the singer—a contralto—replaced every proper noun with baby or honey. It was a method of deletion that struck me as philosophically modern.
“Sydney lacks that irony,” Clay said. “Here, when someone says sweetheart, they mean it.”
“And what is lost?” I asked.
He considered. “Harmony.”
To amuse him, I described a myth I’d once heard from a ferry steward—that the harbour tides, taken together, hummed in B-flat. “You could test it,” I told him. “Each jetty with a tuning fork.” He lifted his notebook, marked harbour = chorus of flats, unresolved. Thus the central image of his piece found its footing: a man crossing a city, unable to locate the tonic.
The libretto began not in Paris but in an ambiguous clearing of reflected light—perhaps water, perhaps glass. Lines arrived like overheard conversations:
My shoes remember you, / they have danced on every breakfast street.
He objected, found it too moral. I told him that morals were merely compressed rhythms—one notes the beat but rarely the harmony.
By August, Clay had decided we should observe Sydney as research for Paris. “A city in disguise will tell you the truth,” he said. We walked through markets, listened to hawkers chant fish prices like plainchant. One morning among boxes of lemons and paper fortunes, he began recording a pattern on the back of a receipt book—a rhythm derived from women haggling about fennel. It was rude and exacting.
He asked why I lived here when my sentences belonged elsewhere. I told him proximity lent danger the flavour of understanding. Too far away, and everything appears romantic; too close, and one starts taking notes.
A student from the Conservatorium came to visit, bringing sheet music that had been smudged by sea air. She told us about a new movement—“aural modernity.” Music to describe the effort of listening. Clay seemed pleased. I watched him trace her speech into staves, pretending to be careless. He was never careless. I found his precision erotic, in that it presumed resistance.
He left for Melbourne in October to perform sketches of the first movement—“The Crossings”—as part of a modern exhibition. He telegraphed daily, demanding phrases to insert as captions: ‘A continent’s misunderstanding becomes motif,’ or ‘Dissonance rehearses delight in secret.’ I obliged, half in jest. He promised to return, bringing with him a proper piano and the promise of Paris. He did neither.
The following winter, an article in The Argus quoted him describing the “Sydney collaboration” as an example of colonial curiosity mistaking itself for insight. Imagine the neatness of that insult. I folded the paper and placed it beside my notebook. By then, I had rewritten the libretto as a detective’s dream sequence: a musician interrogating a city so charming it refuses to confess.
I never sent it to him.
A year later, in the cafés of Macleay Street, one could still hear a rhythm that might have been his—brisk, syncopated, content with its own forward motion. I had begun another story by then, one about women who mistake reflection for destination.
Occasionally, I heard someone whistle a tune that could have been ours. It was always too bright at the edges, as though the melody itself blushed when noticed.
Once, a stranger hummed it descending the steps near Woolloomooloo. I found myself following the direction of the sound, knowing it was unwise. Analysis, after all, is the twin of pursuit. Yet the ear is an excitable organ: it hears before thinking, and by the time one considers, one is already too close.
You are here: States of Grace > Philosophy