Word: leavitts
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...trouble," writes a fictional narrator named David Leavitt at the beginning of The Term Paper Artist, the first of three novellas contained in the real David Leavitt's new book, Arkansas (Houghton Mifflin; 198 pages; $23). Sure enough, in a vertiginous display of life imitating art imitating life, those words, plus some sexually explicit terms that follow, got the real Leavitt in trouble all over again. Edward Kosner, editor in chief of Esquire, abruptly canceled the scheduled appearance of The Term Paper Artist in the April issue, causing the magazine's fiction editor to resign in high dudgeon and fueling...
...Esquire kill Leavitt's story? Kosner has insisted that the decision was simply a matter of editorial judgment (or rejudgment, since the magazine purchased rights to print The Term Paper Artist last fall). Other sources, including Will Blythe, the fiction editor who quit, charge that the story was yanked because publisher Valerie Salembier feared its explicit homosexual content, including a proposed man-to-man tryst in the back of a Jeep, would offend advertisers, particularly of automobiles. Through her representatives at the magazine, Salembier has denied saying any such thing...
From his vantage point in Rome, where he has lived for two years, Leavitt views the Esquire flap with a mixture of irritation and bemusement. "I wish the story had been published," he says, sipping a cup of cappuccino at a Neapolitan cafe near the Chamber of Deputies. "I think it would have gotten a lot of attention as a story, and not as a news story." He doubts that any automobile ads would have been pulled from the magazine if his story had appeared in its pages. "Do you know how many gay men own Jeeps...
...admits that The Term Paper Artist is provocative, but asks, "What's the point of writing if you don't provoke people?" Leavitt, 35, has won considerable renown and notoriety doing just that. His first collection of stories, Family Dancing (1984), and first novel, The Lost Language of Cranes (1987), were praised for their artful and frank treatment of gay characters and themes. But his ascending career hit a wall with the appearance of While England Sleeps (1993). Leavitt's novel included embroidered scenes from British poet Stephen Spender's 1951 memoir of the Spanish Civil War, World Within World...
Ultimately, Kahn-Leavitt's open-ended interpretation of "A Midwife's Tale" jives well with Ulrich's own goals for her work: "to take something that seemingly tells us nothing and interpret it and put it together so that we can implement it to try to understand something about gender and culture...