David Leavitt

March 1997

Leavitt alone

These new novellas are a good argument for self-absorption
by Robert David Sullivan

David Leavitt is the kind of writer who makes people shout "Stop the presses!" -- literally. Four years ago, his novel While England Sleeps was pulled from bookstores to appease English poet Stephen Spender, who claimed that Leavitt's story too closely resembled his own life story. (A revised edition was eventually published.) Last month, Esquire magazine killed an excerpt from Leavitt's new book, Arkansas, on the grounds of "taste." This time, at least, the publicity could help Leavitt's book sales.

Another article about David Leavitt is in our books section.
Arkansas consists of three novellas, and Esquire's homosexual panic was prompted by the first tale, "The Term Paper Artist." Regrettably, it is now certain to overshadow the other two stories, both of which are better. "The Term Paper Artist" would have gained notice in any event because the protagonist is Leavitt himself. The fictional David Leavitt has the same name, age, and career as the real person, but he's been placed into an obviously made-up situation -- and one that doesn't put him in very a good light. Leavitt (the real one) calls attention to this trick when the fictional Leavitt says, "Writers often disguise their lives as fiction. The thing they almost never do is disguise fiction as their lives."
Not that Leavitt wants us to forget his real-world problems. He confides in the reader early on: "Would I ever be allowed to forget what had happened with While England Sleeps? I wondered. Would the scandal that had attached itself to the novel's publication -- to quote a helpful journalist -- `taint my aura' forever?"
Such passages are more defensive than playful; they almost dare critics to knock Arkansas. At any rate, Leavitt is a good enough writer that he shouldn't try to win points for being a sport about his troubles in the press. We get enough of that from other celebrities, the kind profiled in Esquire.
It's possible that the self-deprecating set-up is what got Esquire interested in "The Term Paper Artist" in the first place. Perhaps it took a while for everyone to get around to finishing the story, which is really a smarter version of a porn-magazine standard. Here, Leavitt writes A-plus term papers for hunky UCLA boys, who then let him suck their dicks.
"The Term Paper Artist" is erotic in a sort of creepy way. Unlike the straight guys in gay porn, most of Leavitt's clients seem like they'd be just as happy getting serviced by a vacuum cleaner. There are also some funny moments, as when a customer reacts to what Leavitt considers an outstanding paper by saying, "to me it sounds a little pretentious." Many of us would consider it degrading to do a college jock's homework for him and then kiss his unappreciative ass, but the fictitious Leavitt somehow regains his confidence as a writer that way. Perhaps Lars von Trier can bring "The Term Paper Artist" to the screen as a follow-up to Breaking the Waves.
It's not easy to put complete trust in David Leavitt's work. His best short stories, in Family Dancing and A Place I've Never Been, brilliantly capture the emotions of longing and isolation in gay men and in all members of broken families. But he has occasional continuity problems, and there are frequent wrong notes in his descriptions of places and events. Nearly all of Leavitt's narrators are self-conscious about their powers of articulation, and their frequent apologies can be jarring, causing us to think of Leavitt at his word processor rather than the story at hand. Take this passage from "The Term Paper Artist": "[His cock] rested upon a pile of lustrous black pubic hair rather like a sausage on top of a plate of black beans: I apologize for this odd culinary metaphor, but it was what entered my mind at the time." It's telling that Leavitt considers it more important to convey his narrator's state of mind than to set down a believable description of another character.
Thankfully, these distractions aren't as frequent in the other two novellas in Arkansas. "The Wooden Anniversary," a melancholy version of a bedroom farce set in Italy, brings back the characters of Nathan and Celia from a story in Family Dancing. Leavitt is polite enough never to call Celia a fag hag, but the phrase is too brutally efficient to pass up here. At one point, Celia lashes into her longtime gay friend: "When you think you've hurt someone you bolt and run. You put the letters away unopened. You ignore the messages on the answering machine." In the end, though, it is Celia who is responsible for the mix-ups and mistaken assumptions that push this story along.
"Saturn Street" is another absorbing tale with sad humor, this time involving a screenwriter who delivers meals to people with AIDS in Los Angeles. Leavitt's imagery here is more concrete, and more satisfying, than in most of his stories. For instance, there's the kitchen where he collects the box lunches: "At a moment in our history notorious for its devotion to dishes described as `light,' the Angels drenched their vegetables in butter, dolloped slices of pecan pie with whipped cream, sopped chicken thighs in yolky batters." There are also moments of humor. Sitting in the waiting room of an AIDS clinic, the narrator imagines a gay version of "Goofus and Gallant," the old cartoon intended to teach kids manners: "Gallant asks: `Am I hurting you?' Goofus says, `Shut up and take every inch of it, faggot.' " The narrator finds himself drawn to one of his clients, but he is unable to act on his feelings -- or to cope with the idea of another man in his client's life. As in many of his successful stories, Leavitt wins our sympathy for a rather self-absorbed character.
Despite the artifice of "The Term Paper Artist," Arkansas isn't a great departure from Leavitt's short-story collections that preceded While England Sleeps. But with so many bloated novels on the best-seller lists, that's not such a bad thing.

Robert David Sullivan is a contributing writer to the Boston Phoenix. He can be reached at Robt555@aol.com.

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