ALMOST IMMEDIATELY AFTER completing a draft of my novel, I become preoccupied with a letter housed in the National Library of Australia. The 1930s correspondence between the English and American publishers of an Australian novelist concerns their decision to reject that author’s most recent manuscript – so, of course, that’s where my thoughts fixate, yesterday’s triumph already faded to mocking echo:

We certainly would not dream of putting it on our own list, partly because it deals with homosexuality, but principally because it does not deal successfully with it, as for instance Thomas Mann does. Particularly I disliked the suggestion in the last chapter and other touches throughout the book of the more unpleasant side of this form of perversion: the little gifts of flowers and so forth. In short, it was not sufficiently tragic a book, as one dealing with this disastrous predilection should be.