This is perfectly true. If you ride out toward Glebe point along the Glebe Point Road then take a dive down to your left around Mansfield Street then weave around through the streets and lanes below Woolley Street which is near the tennis courts once owned by Lew Hoad’s family you will come upon the confluence of John and Clare Streets. There is a powerful aura there of course. The fellows who used to present the Listen Up program on 2MBS FM told me they had found it and decided to take a photo of me under the sign that indicates John Street at an angle to the left and Clare Street to the right. I appeared several times on their show, once reading the lyrics of Surfer Bird by The Trash Men while they sped my voice up manically and broadcast simultaneously from a number of other sound sources, including vinyl, CD, cassette and so on, mostly carrying music in different keys. Also live oboe played by one of the lads who was a music student. I desperately chased my own voice, a sensation somewhat like running in mud. Everything went to air simultaneously and it was tremendously exciting. My voice was impassioned to the point of hysteria. Actually I sounded like a hot gospeller in delirium. I was also interviewed as Dr Chang, the heart surgeon who saved Kerry Packer’s life. I do not know what prompted me to adopt a Scottish accent, but soon my interviewers were also locked in a frenzy of rolling ‘r’s. None of us could do it easily so we all reared back in our seats and lunged forward like striking cobras to set the ‘r’s rolling. Sometimes we shook our jowls to left and right like a dog with a bone, or as if we had ball bearings in our mouths. It worked. The ball bearings rolled so to speak. Also they introduced me as Elvis Presley, for which I adopted a ridiculously posh accent, the reason being, as I recall, that I had come back from the dead as an Elvis impersonator but, tragically, could no longer do the Southern accent. This was heart rending, specially when I sang “Love me tender, love me true/all my dreams fulfilled/ Oh my darling I love you/And I hope you’re on the pill”. In a voice somewhat like Stephen Fry’s. We never did get round to the photo.
Nevertheless I rode down there a year or so ago – to John and Clare – and balanced for a few minutes on the manhole that marked the central hinge at the meeting of these significant streets. The still centre of the turning world, to quote T.S Eliot. There was a park ahead of me, beyond the sign, and angling to my left a row of small houses (along John). While I balanced a bearded man came out of the houses and began busying himself in his small front yard. When he glanced at me I told him a had a certain proprietorial feeling toward this little area because I was in fact John Clare.
This is the last time I will mention my name: In an America accent he asked me whether I was the John Clare who wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald. I said yes and he told me he very much liked my writing, which was very nice and revealed him as a man of taste. A better class of person in fact. I asked him whereabouts in America he was from. ‘Boston,’ he told me.
I had two questions. ‘Is that so?’ and ‘Does The Boston Evening Transcript still exist?’ In both cases the answer was ‘Yes’. If you have the Collected Verse Of T.S. Eliot you will find a poem dedicated to The Boston Evening Transcript in the section headed Pruffrock and other Observations. Here are a few lines:
‘The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript
Sway in the wind like a field of wheat.
When evening quickens faintly in the street
Waking the appetites of life in some
And to others bringing the Boston Evening Transcript…’
That is more than enough.This is a disastrous blunder. These lines have made my writing disappear. Still, the Boston Evening Transcript is certainly the best name for a newspaper I have ever heard – though The Sydney Morning Herald is not bad. In fact I had wondered whether the former was real or an invention of Eliot’s. It is real and I imagine it is a transcript because the copy is telegraphed to the printers. Watching the horrible explosions at the end of the Boston Marathon, I wonder if it still exists today. In a moment I will Google it, and you might do the same. Though we don’t know each other, this is something we can share.
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