IF I’D KNOWN THAT JANE AUSTEN had been a serious piano student as a teenager then perhaps I would have tried harder to enjoy Emma, which, to my profound irritation, was required reading for our final year of high school.
Although Austen was a much more accomplished musician than her creation Emma Woodhouse, she was not nearly as impressive at the keyboard as her most accomplished pianist, the enigmatic Jane Fairfax. Dedicated to her piano studies, Jane Fairfax was modest about her musicianship, and isolated by her beauty and talent. Though she always struck me as a significantly more intriguing character than Emma, in class I said nothing, by now superbly trained in the art of withholding a dissenting thought. In Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, the isolated but privileged Rachel Vinrace confesses her distaste for Jane Austen to a horrified Clarissa Dalloway: ‘She’s so—so—well, so like a tight plait.’ I couldn’t have agreed more. I held so many such thoughts that I felt it essential to share none of them. Listening to the incessant torrent of contrariness in my head made it all but impossible for me to hear anything else clearly.
I failed utterly to see what enchanted my peers about Emma Woodhouse. I thought she was a self-satisfied know-it-all, a spoiled daddy’s girl held in undeserved high esteem by a tiny claustrophobic community, and who gets everything she wants. Blind to the parallels between my own privileged existence and that of Austen’s heroine, I dismissed Emma as romantic pap. I choked on the limited options available to women in the first years of the nineteenth century, confused as to why we were reading about them in the latter decades of the twentieth.
Of all the things that bored me about the novel, what bothered me most was its obsession with marriage. The girls in my English class who had swooned over Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice the year before were now gaga about Mr Knightley. Why were sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girls in the late 1980s fantasising about marriage to a wealthy landowner, or to anyone? Marriage seemed to be the answer to almost any question the inhabitants of Austen’s novels could think of.
I was enormously relieved to discover, years later, that Ralph Waldo Emerson shared my concerns about Austen’s primary subject in his private notebook from the summer of 1861: ‘Never was life so pinched & narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer in both the stories I have read, “Persuasion”, and “Pride & Prejudice”, is marriageableness; all that interests any character introduced is still this one, has he or she money to marry with, & conditions conforming?…Suicide is more respectable.’
Outside my classroom, a ferocious pairing-off was taking place that had nothing at all to do with wedlock. At North Sydney train station, the girls’ school girls looked at the boys’ school boys looking at them. I would glance up from the novel I was reading to observe them through the windows of the bus, which I had ridden alone from Circular Quay in order to avoid social persecution. The girls boarded the bus squealing over seismic social developments that had just taken place on the train or the station platform, chewing gum to offset the cigarette smoke, their chins bright with pash-rash.
I couldn’t wait to be rid of the lot of them. Looking down my nose at everybody else was a paltry substitute for self-esteem. I dreamed of the University of Sydney, where I imagined that interesting men who wanted to discuss books and music roamed the campus like bison on the prairie. Before that day came, I could fantasise about Vince Jones and his band of musical men.
I hurried down the steps to the Basement with my oldest friend, Daniela, hoping no one had observed us getting out of my father’s car. We were sixteen going on twenty-three—or at least, that’s how I liked to think of us. For some reason I regarded twenty-three as a magical age by which I would not only look my best but also have this growing-up thing all figured out and confidently be pursuing my highly successful adult life.
Because my father had dropped us off for tonight’s gig, Daniela’s dad would be picking us up. At 11 p.m. On a Sunday night. In the era before mobile phones, our suggested pick-up times were estimates at best. It took a few concerts before we understood that jazz clubs operated on a schedule that bore little relation to the advertised performance times, and none whatsoever to the needs of an overprotective parent.
We had come to the Basement to see Vince Jones: trumpet player, singer and composer. As teenagers, our musical tastes were more mature than the rest of us, as though we were baby giraffes whose long legs had to wait for the rest of their bodies to catch up. Admittedly, Daniela was the one with long legs; my emerging shape was closer to that of a double bass. Make that a cello.
It was so early in the evening that no one stood at the door collecting entry fees or looking out for horribly underage jazz fans. Once inside, we ordered Tia Marias with milk from bartenders who were kind enough not to laugh, and scoured the cosy venue for a seat with a view of the stage. Depending on how early we arrived at these gigs, we scored a bar stool each, one stool that we shared, or a dark corner of beer-stained carpet near the toilets, where we shifted our weight from one leg to the other while we waited up to two hours for the band to come on stage. When our Tia Maria budget was blown, we sipped water. Inside the Basement, H2O existed only in pricey sealed plastic bottles like a harbinger of the environmental future.
Vince Jones came to Sydney every three months or so, bringing with him several musicians who looked to be in their twenties, plus an extraordinary pianist named Barney McAll who seemed hardly older than Daniela and me. Fancy being so talented that you could leave school and travel around playing music like this, I thought.
I can’t remember how I first came to hear the music of Vince Jones. Born in Scotland, like my grandmother Alice, he emigrated with his parents to the mining town of Wollongong on the New South Wales coast in the mid-1960s, when he was eleven. Absorbing his father’s jazz record collection, Jones attributes the beginning of his real interest in jazz to hearing Sketches of Spain when he was fourteen. The sound of Miles Davis inspired a working-class white boy to pick up a trumpet and start writing his own songs, a perfect example of D.H. Lawrence’s idea of the ‘blind reaching out for beauty’.
From this tough environment sprang a musician who wrote songs about protecting the environment, respect for women, and the nature of power. My ears had been drenched in jazz standards and the Top 40. The lyrics of the former are full of women treating their man wrong, men abandoning women, misery and loss. On commercial radio, all I heard were songs about sex, featuring banal rhymes: Hold me tight / morning light / feel all right and all that…jazz. The dominant number one singles in 1986 included ‘Venus’ by Bananarama, John Farnham’s ‘You’re the Voice’, Madonna’s ‘Papa Don’t Preach’, and the comic version of ‘Living Doll’ by The Young Ones with Cliff Richard. Jones’s songs, originating from a profound sense of social justice, were a revelation.
I’d started to fantasise about one day writing books and plays. The marks my new English teacher gave me for my essays were so good that I felt for the first time that I could form an original opinion about a text and clearly express it on the page. Despite the increasing intensity of my piano studies—I was preparing for eighth grade, the final level of exams prior to the performance diploma—I really couldn’t see any point in continuing to the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, which seemed the inevitable next step. Even if I was good enough, which I doubted, I already knew I didn’t aspire to join an orchestra or teach. The only place I wanted to play the piano was on a stage like in the Basement, as part of a jazz ensemble. But I dismissed the idea as ludicrous: I’d never seen a woman pianist in a live jazz band, and there were no women pianists in the bands in my father’s record collection.
My mother never once encouraged me to aspire to marriage for its own sake. ‘These days, when girls earn money and go where they please, I just don’t know why you would,’ she said repeatedly. Then, as an afterthought: ‘Unless you wanted children, of course.’ I think she had concluded from my limited childhood interest in dolls that I wasn’t overly maternal.
In the mid-1980s, when my mother first began drip-feeding me what I heard as her preference that I remain single, my parents had been married for twenty-five years. In her words I hear ambivalence about the institution of which she remains a member—and the fact of her financial dependence on my father. I hear her saying that while it’s nothing personal, if she had felt she’d had another choice to make, she might well have made it.
As a teenager I thought the point of our education was that we could make our way in the world independently of—or interdependently with—men. Reading Emma, I felt coerced into admiring Mr Knightley because he owned most of the surrounding land. As far as I could tell, all he’d done was inherit it—literally born lucky. Other male characters with admirable traits but fewer resources were passed over like barren ground. It infuriated me that a school whose supposed mission was to encourage young women to live fulfilling and independent lives was feeding us this diet of fantasy. That it was somehow acceptable, even encouraged, for a teenage girl to aim for a rich man rather than become independent. Reading about the social calibrations of bright young women thrown together because of proximity and socio-economics, at the expensive girls-only school my parents struggled to pay for, felt claustrophobic.
I failed to grasp the sexual politics of Austen’s world: the inconvenient truth that in the early decades of the nineteenth century, marriage was the one chance any woman had of making a secure future for herself. Austen’s portrait of small-town English life, her nuanced characterisations of unremarkable people, and her empathy with Emma’s struggle to keep from meddling in other people’s lives and to know her own flaws, passed over my sixteen-year-old head like the elements of the periodic table in Chemistry class.
My naive sympathies lay with the troubled heroines of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, a romantic fictional universe in which working-class women were admired from afar, then from close up, then left for dead, socially and financially speaking. In Hardy’s novels, men often held the power to ruin a woman’s life, but the passion between the characters seemed beautiful and painful and true. In reading, I could indulge my insatiable taste for melancholy, fascinated by the exquisite struggles of fictional others, because I’d not experienced anything like it and was quite certain I’d be clever enough to avoid that sort of thing.
Emma Wedgwood was one of the more naturally talented of the many upper middle-class women studying the piano in Britain in the first decades of the nineteenth century. With a family fortune made in pottery, Emma, like so many of her contemporaries in fiction, was never in the market for an actual job. As a star piano student at the Greville House school, she performed for Prince George of Wales’ consort Mrs Fitzherbert, studied with the virtuoso pianist Ignaz Moscheles, took several lessons with Chopin, and completed her grand tour of Europe when she was sixteen. By the age of thirty, Emma Wedgwood had had the economic luxury of declining several offers of marriage. When she accepted the proposal of her first cousin, the naturalist Charles Darwin, she understood her job was to propagate the species.
In his 1871 Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, written more than thirty years after his marriage to Emma, Darwin argues that birdsong and human music are the outcomes of the evolutionary process called sexual selection: ‘The impassioned…musician, when with his varied tones and cadences he excites the strongest emotions in his hearers, little suspects that he uses the same means by which, at an extremely remote period, his half-human ancestors aroused each other’s ardent passions, during their mutual courtship and rivalry.’49
Ardent passions indeed: following their wedding in January 1839, Emma Darwin was pregnant for more than a decade, bearing ten children, of whom seven survived. As this picture of domestic harmony suggests, music-making remained an important part of their marriage.
‘The suspicion does not appear improbable that the progenitors of man, either the males or females, or both sexes, before they had acquired the power of expressing their mutual love in articulate language, endeavoured to charm each other with musical notes and rhythm,’ Darwin concluded.50
One hundred and twenty years after Darwin published these words, such ancient charms were working on me through Vince Jones and his band. Our love wasn’t mutual, but I didn’t care. I parsed the lyrics of his original songs, looking for insights into the workings of his mind, imagining the day when we met and became—what? Friends? Colleagues? Lovers? Truly it was as ludicrous a fantasy as that entertained about marriage by the girls with whom I had studied Emma.
On reflection, I suspect what I responded to most strongly was the distinctiveness of Jones’s own compositions and the unmistakeable sound of his voice. It was probably the first time I had experienced, regularly and up close, the extraordinary power of an original creative artist. It was his voice—not just in the sense of his distinctive singing style, but also of his unique approach to songwriting and interpreting familiar tunes by folk and soul singers—that so charmed me, in the Darwinian sense. I suppose that’s what I wanted to be myself: original and distinctive in some way. Yet I felt as ordinary and invisible as everyone else, and too self-conscious to risk standing out.
The members of Vince Jones’s band always wore suits. Perhaps it was because they were from Melbourne, where somehow I already understood that the men dressed with more care than their Sin City counterparts. But to be honest, I didn’t care what they wore: their melodies and rhythms, as Darwin put it, were enough for me. Their clothes weren’t for my benefit. If they were willing to don a suit, I reasoned, then it didn’t seem beyond the realm of possibility that one day I could drag one of them home to meet my parents.
