David Leavitt

"Privacy is overrated" says gay lit's one-time wunderkind and now prolific stalwart, David Leavitt, "Before I came out, privacy was a prison to me. So after that liberation, the idea of privacy became my enemy."

Martin Bauman; or, a Sure Thing, Leavitt's latest work of privacy-bending fiction, is a sweet and sour autobiographical reflection on his wunderkindergarden, literary Manhattan in the eighties. Critics and would-be in-the-know readers have begun to delight—and fume—in guessing "Who's who?" among the dramatis personae of Martin Bauman.

"I know some of the people who appear as characters in this unhappy book," wrote one indignant reader who posted his review on Amazon.com"...my initial curiosity turned first to disbelief, then outrage. I have some sense of how much his distortions must be hurting those former friends, and I feel sad for them and angry at Mr. Leavitt's malignant memory."

In an telephone interview from Gainesville where was about to begin teaching writing for the fall semester at the University of Florida, Leavitt suggested that the very notion of the thinly veiled fictional character is a silly one: "Every writer writes about his family and friends."

But the characters that come from such real-world inspirations, Leavitt insists, can't just be coy pawns in superficial literary games. If they don't take on lives of their own, the books they appear in won't take on lives of their own either.

"A work of literature lasts beyond the response it provokes upon publication. If you write a story based on a real person, you've invaded privacy. But one doesn't want to get hung up in that."

Leavitt points to one of his favorite novelists for an example: "E.M. Forster's Aunt Laura was scandalized by Howard's End, but hardly any contemporary reader is aware of that."

Like his beloved Forster, Leavitt explains that while he has clearly drawn deeply from the well of his own experience in Martin Bauman—and in his other fictions, too—the experiences have not been merely pumped directly onto paper, but rather used as fuel for combustion in an artist's mind; hidden energy is released, light is shed.

In Leavitt's new novel, the character of Martin Bauman is solidly based on Leavitt himself, and Martin's boyfriend Eli has clear roots in writer Gary Glickman (Leavitt's one-time partner who himself has published short stories drawn from the pair's relationship), and there are notable fictionalized stand-ins for Larry Kramer, Meg Wolitzer, and other Manhattan literati. But Martin's feared and exalted writing teacher Stanley Flint is a largely imaginary figure, not based on any actual mentor of the author's.

Leavitt is quite open about all of this. "I'm not willing to play these games that other writers play." The genuinely interesting literary gamesmanship, he suggests, in Martin Bauman has little to do with divining who's fact and who's fiction in this particular book, but in exploring the larger ongoing emotional issues involved when people draw on each other in creative writing.

"In the novel," explains Leavitt, "Martin struggles with writing about his family and friends, only to find himself transformed—unflatteringly—into a character called Simon in Flint's novel."

Reading Flint's book after being cautioned by a friend, Martin's trepidation over his mentor's rendition of him leads to one of the book's most resounding artistic statements:

"Flint's portrayal...upset me less than I'd feared it would, for the simple reason that no scenario of me, no matter how offensive, could have possibly matched the scenarios I'd dreamed into being...Flint did not write that Simon was ugly, or that he scratched his balls in class, or that he mooned at his teacher in some effeminate and unseemly way...as I came away from it, I found myself charged with emotion, a combination of humbled surprise at the degree to which he had gotten me exactly right, and a conoisseur's gratitude for the spectacle of a well-made thing. Nor did it matter that in certain crucial ways Simon did not conform remotely to his more ragged and self-contradictory model: what was important was that he conformed to himself, he was real and vivid to me in a way that I myself would never be..."

"As a novelist, [Flint] viewed fact as merely one of many ingredients to throw into the stew, along with invention, hearsay, books, history, the news...there was no point in my being offended by what Flint had written..."

While he is clearly offering up a credo for artists' creative rights here, Leavitt is too sophisticated—and too sensitive—to set aside all ambiguity. Martin's eloquent reaction to Flint's novel is followed on the next page by a brief, uneasy discussion between Martin and his father about family friends' distress over Martin's largely imaginary—but by coincidence, fairly accurate—depiction of their troubled daughter:

"'Dad, it's fiction—'

"I know it's fiction. That's the trouble. The only thing that upets them more than the stuff you got right is the stuff you made up.'

It was no use. I couldn't persuade him that the freedom to make a promiscuous hash of things was one upon which the imagination depends, while he couldn't wake me up to the truth that because of my book, people were suffering. He was suffering."

"It's rife with contradiction," admits Leavitt, "But contradiction is the stuff of life."

Martin Bauman is Leavitt's second major work to overtly toy with the simultaneous riches and hazards yielded by the alchemy of fact into fiction, following his 1997 novella "The Term Paper Artist", published in his collection Arkansas, and featuring a writer- narrator named David Leavitt. (An interim novel, 1998's The Page Turner introduced the theme of mentor relationships that Leavitt expands upon in Bauman). It's a motif that Leavitt is intent on pursuing in future work, and which took hold of his consciousness after the now notorious 1993 uproar over While England Sleeps. Leavitt was sued by the semi-closeted British writer Sir Steven Spender, who took offense at a the involvement of a character inspired by him in gay sex scenes.

Rather than resulting in lasting trauma, the Spender affair spurred Leavitt—whose earlier works were occasionally derided for an unadventurous elegance—to take on the more complex meta-fictional challenges he has come to relish.

"In his case, [Spender] said that I was willing to append my 'pornographic' fantasies to his life, and that I would never do that to myself. So I decided to do just that." In "The Term Paper Artist," the character David Leavitt writes college papers for male students in exchange for blow jobs.

Actually naming his character David Leavitt was a bold step, one that worked nicely in a sharp and startling novella. But Leavitt has taken one-step back from this self-referential technique in Bauman , understanding that, at novel length, cleverness is not enough.

"A lot of young writers start out being very experimental and never really learn the notion of traditional craft. That's part of why I'm starting to teach. Flannery O'Connor, Cheever, Gurganus. In order to do something new, you have to know the basics."

As Phillip Roth began with more straightforward autobiographical elements in works such as Goodbye Columbus and Portnoy's Complaint and moved on to create his more self-referential and intellectually challenging Zuckerman books, David Leavitt has demonstrated a mastery of 'the basics' in Family Dancing, The Lost Language of Cranes, Equal Affections, and A Place I've Never Been, and is now committed to taking his own work to a new level of ambitious experimentation. But not without the gorgeous phrase—making that continues to deliver plenty of old-fashioned joy in the prose of Martin Bauman. Not without a ride in a Checker Cab described as "this yellow behemoth, the manatee of the automotive world" past "an all-night grocery store, where a Korean girl stood moistening lettuce heads with a spray bottle"

"If you make playing with mirrors-within-mirrors the entire book," Leavitt argues, "It's not a novel, it's a party trick. It may be interesting to analyze, but it's not really fun to read. A writer's first duty is to give the reader pleasure. If you sacrifice that for the sake of an idea or a game, you're lost."