The blue room

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Little gifts of flowers

It’s unclear whether Boyd, who would have been two years old when Wilde was convicted and imprisoned for gross indecency, similarly literalised his homoerotic fantasies. Contemporaneous reviews of Brenda Niall’s 1988 biography, Martin Boyd: A Life, commend Niall, in a way that reveals the soft prejudice of the times, for how she handled the subject of Boyd’s sexuality. Paraphrasing Boyd’s family friends – who referred to Boyd, endearingly, as Floppy – Niall writes that Boyd was probably ‘too fastidious for casual sex, and with too strict a sense of honour to exploit the innocent, he probably repressed and aestheticized his sexuality’. This conclusion is buttressed by the conspicuous absence of the only work in Boyd’s catalogue that presumably possessed an unambiguously homosexual point of view, of which we know little except that there were flowers.

In a way that strikes me, again, as typically Australian, Boyd is slightly behind the times with his fin de siècle attitude towards classicism and homo- sexuality. His novels are uniquely appealing to me for the narcissistic reason that they are perhaps the only Australian books I can imagine myself having written. It’s why I find the correspondence about The Shepherd of Admetus so appallingly fascinating. I’ve read countless gay novels, by gay authors, in an attempt to discover my own writing. The author to whom I feel closest, by virtue of nationality, style and subject, wrote one such novel, and for all anyone knows, it might have been rubbish.

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Shelf life

Non-fictionEarly in his career, Charles Dickens notably underestimated the reputational risk of library-shelf browsing when he invited the critic George Henry Lewes home for tea. Over steaming cups, Lewes eyed naff triple-decker novels and bland travel books, ‘all obviously the presentation copies from authors and publishers’. He recalled the experience in a waspish elegy published shortly after Dickens’ death: ‘A man’s library expresses much of his hidden life, I did not expect to find a bookworm, nor even a student, in the marvellous “Boz” but nevertheless this collection of books was a shock.’

Safe as houses

IntroductionSometimes, if I can’t get to sleep, I imagine I’m back in the house where I grew up... I like to go back there in my mind’s eye, conjuring the slightly crooked hallway, the doors that never neatly fit their frames, the tiny kitchen with its overwhelmingly wheaten spectrum of 1980s browns. Like handwriting on old foolscap, the more specific details have long faded with time, but the feeling remains: that ineffable sense of calm and familiarity that I associate with being home.

Steering upriver

Non-fictionAt dawn I cross the bridge, Missouri to Iowa, and turn down the gravel drive. Though I’m different now, this place is the same as it always is this time of year: the sun glowing red over the paddock next door, the grass not yet green, the maple stark. I go away, come back again, and home is like a photograph where time winds back, slows into stasis; where the carpet has changed, but the dishes have not, the cookbooks have not, the piano and artwork and bath towels have not. Here, I can be a child again, my best self, briefly. I hold on to this moment for as long as I can, because too soon I’ll remember how disobedient I am, how bossy and domineering, how I slammed my door until Dad took it off its hinges, how soap tastes in my mouth, how I pushed on these walls until they subsided.