David Leavitt

• Born: June 23, 1961
• Birthplace: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Biography

David Leavitt was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on June 23, 1961, the son of Harold Jack Leavitt and Gloria Rosenthal Leavitt. He grew up in Palo Alto, California, where his father was a professor at the graduate school of business at Stanford University. Being the youngest of three children—his brother, John, and sister, Emily, were nine and ten years older than he—resulted in a self-described precocity, which undoubtedly contributed to his remarkably early literary success. In a 1990 interview he remarked, “I grew up being the child in the room whose presence everyone forgot about. By the time I was twenty, therefore, I had absorbed an enormous amount, but I had experienced almost nothing.”

One of the pivotal events of his childhood was his mother’s long, futile battle with cancer. He explains, “The enormity of that experience cannot be minimalized. It has all gone into my work. Most of what I know about living and dying I learned from my mother.” The knowledge gained from his mother’s illness and death is reflected particularly in the moving portrayal of Louise Cooper’s twenty-year struggle against cancer in Equal Affections (1989) and also in the stories “Counting Months” and “Radiation,” which appear in Family Dancing (1984).

Leavitt left the West Coast to attend Yale University, graduating in 1983. An editor for The New Yorker read one of his stories in a student magazine and asked to see more of his work. He obliged by sending her everything he had written to that point, all of which she rejected. She finally accepted the story “Territory,” which was published in The New Yorker in 1982. This was reputedly the first story with substantial gay subject matter ever published in that magazine, and its appearance caused a stir.

Leavitt’s first book of short stories, Family Dancing, was published when he was only twenty-three years old, and much was made of Leavitt’s youthful success. The collection was praised by reviewers and was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Book Critics Circle Award. His first novel, The Lost Language of Cranes (1986), and Equal Affections, which followed, received mixed reviews. His work has met with more success in Europe than in the United States; his first three books were best sellers in Italy and Spain.

In 1989, Leavitt received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and he was appointed foreign writer-in-residence in Barcelona, Spain, at the Institute of Catalan Letters. His European experiences figure in his fourth publication, a collection of short stories entitled A Place I’ve Never Been (1990). The stories “I See London, I See France” and “Roads to Rome,” in particular, are reminiscent of the work of Anglo-American novelist Henry James, who often wrote about what happens when “innocent” Americans confront the complexities of European society. In 1993, he published While England Sleeps, a novel focusing on the relationship between two gay men in Europe in the 1930s on the eve of World War II. Leavitt’s belated acknowledgment that he had borrowed parts of the plot from events chronicled in the 1948 autobiography of Sir Stephen Spender prompted the threat of a lawsuit by the British poet. Leavitt made adjustments to the text, and the book appeared in a revised edition two years later.

The personal trauma that Leavitt experienced as a result of this public controversy resulted in a period of writer’s block that the author used as the basis of The Term Paper Artist, one of three novellas collected in the 1997 volume entitled Arkansas. This collection also includes a piece set in Italy, where Leavitt and his partner Mark Mitchell, also a writer, bought a farmhouse that same year. The couple subsequently cowrote two books about their encounter with Italian culture, including In Maremma (2001), which recounts their often comic experience of restoring their Tuscan property, abandoned for more than twenty years. Leavitt also wrote in 2002 a guide to Florence, Italy, as part of the highly touted Writer and the City series published by Bloomsbury.

Since 2000, Leavitt has been a faculty member in the creative writing program at the University of Florida in Gainesville. In part because he divides his time between the United States and Europe, much of his work since the beginning of the twenty-first century continues to explore the international theme. Three stories in The Marble Quilt (2001), for example, have European settings.

In addition, as evidenced by the novel Martin Bauman (2000), which mirrors many aspects of Leavitt’s own early career, and the nonfiction work The Man Who Knew Too Much (2005), which recounts the life of Alan Turing, a British mathematician who conceived the notion of the computer, Leavitt has focused increasing attention on how creative thinkers, whether gay or straight, must struggle to balance the demands of their talent and their personal desires.

Analysis

Although he is regarded as one of the leading lights of gay literature, Leavitt explores universal themes, and it would do him a great disservice to portray his writing as being of interest only to a limited audience. Indeed, he confronts head-on the problems faced by homosexuals in a heterosexual world, but he also explores feelings of alienation common to all people as the result of such conditions as mental and physical illness, shame, despair, physical unattractiveness, geographical dislocation, and career choice.

Leavitt often tackles this theme of separateness within the milieu of family life. Many of his works describe the precarious equipoise of collective harmony tentatively achieved in even the closest families while they also adroitly reveal the turmoil underlying the placid surface of everyday life. Both The Lost Language of Cranes and Equal Affections, for example, present characters shaped by apparently strong family relationships, yet those characters are ultimately defined more by what sets them apart from one another than by what binds them together.

This insight into family relations informs many of Leavitt’s short stories as well, particularly in his first collection, Family Dancing. In “The Lost Cottage,” for example, a family’s attempts to re-create their annual summer vacation six months after the parents have separated fail abysmally. The family gamely behaves as if a good time were being had by all, but the charade ends when Lydia, the mother, discovers that her estranged husband has settled his new girlfriend into a nearby motel. Lydia agonizingly declares to her family, “I will always love your father. And he doesn’t love me. And never will.” The children, including the gay son, Mark, whose simultaneous role as family insider and observant outsider is highlighted in the narrative, come to realize the depths of their mother’s despair and the fact that they are helpless to assuage her pain.

The title story, “Family Dancing,” also features a broken family in which the ties, for better or worse, remain strong. Suzanne Kaplan, who has a new marriage, a new figure, and a new life since her first husband, Herb, left her for another woman, throws a large family party to celebrate her “new self” and her son’s prep-school graduation. As the party guests admiringly watch a celebratory “family dance” performed by Suzanne and Herb and their son and daughter, the reader, who has been allowed a glimpse beneath the surface, knows that all is not well. Suzanne is still painfully in love with Herb, who no longer loves her; Herb’s show of devotion for his ungainly daughter hides his repulsion for her unattractiveness; and their son, Seth, has yet to inform them of his homosexuality.

Leavitt often explores the effect of illness, such as cancer or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), on an individual’s relation to family. In “Radiation,” a mother named Gretl takes two of her three children to a radiation therapy center while she has her treatments. The staff and patients chat cheerfully about new lawn furniture, children play games and read children’s magazines, and patients joke about the hospital gowns they must wear, belying the life-and-death purpose of the center. The mother’s life begins to be defined by her illness, as she realizes that the pain, suffering, and humiliation she now accepts as normal would have been unthinkable only a few months earlier. She cries alone in her room, unreachable in her grief, unable to accept sympathy or comfort even from her family.

Sometimes, when he or she is endowed with intelligence and imagination, an outsider can derive some compensation out of alienation from others. Such separateness offers, for example, opportunities for self-reflection and self-definition. In the story “My Marriage to Vengeance” from the collection A Place I’ve Never Been, the narrator, a lesbian named Ellen, reluctantly attends the wedding of her former lover Diana, who is marrying a man so that she can have a so-called normal life and “not have to die inside trying to explain who it is [she’s] with.” Though the experience of seeing her former lover get married causes her considerable pain, Ellen takes some comfort in the thought that Diana will be “contemplating a whole life of mistakes spinning out from one act of compromise” while she herself, even in her present state of abandonment, has an authentic life, “harder but better.”

For the literary artist, like Leavitt himself, looking at the world from the outside cultivates the essential skills of observation. In his novel Martin Bauman, the title character, much of whose story parallels Leavitt’s own early career, is cut off from others by virtue of his sexual orientation and his interior life; his separateness is a key ingredient in his desire to write, to put into words what he sees but that others, by virtue of their active but unconscious participation in the moment, cannot. Although it can be argued that he himself shares the same raw ambition characteristic of his compatriots, the novel’s narrator nonetheless hits the mark time and again in his efforts to capture the tireless machinations and shameless self-promotion of those caught up in the inbred publishing world of New York in the 1980s.

In 2004 Leavitt published The Body of Jonah Boyd, the story of a faculty secretary at a fictional university and her relationship with her boss's family and their friends. In 2007, he published The Indian Clerk which was a finalist for The PEN/Faulkner prize. The novel has been categorized as a literary subgenre known as a fictionalized biography.The story concerns Srinivasa Ramanujan who taught math at Trinity College before the start of World War I. In 2013, Leavitt published The Two Hotel Francforts a novel which takes place in Portugal in 1940 and portrays the romantic lives of two expatriate couples during World War II.

In essence, Leavitt has developed a well-deserved reputation as a prose stylist who often mines autobiographical material to validate the contention that there is something universal in the particular and that each individual situation speaks to the general human condition.

“Territory”

First published: 1982 (collected in Family Dancing, 1984)

Type of work: Short story

A son introduces his gay lover to his mother for the first time.

“Territory,” the opening story in Family Dancing, revolves around the first meeting between the two most important people in Neil Campbell’s life: his mother, Barbara, and his lover, Wayne. Although the action revolves around Barbara and Wayne’s meeting, the most richly detailed and emotionally powerful relationship in the story, as in much of Leavitt’s work, is between mother and son. Barbara has been a devoted mother, PTA member, volunteer at school, and active member of the Coalition of Parents of Lesbians and Gays. Neil’s father is “a distant sort,” often away on business and emotionally absent even when home, so it is Barbara to whom Neil feels emotionally bound.

Neil is flooded with memories as his lover’s arrival forces him to reconcile the boy his mother knew with the man whom Wayne loves. As he nervously awaits the visit, he remembers the day he “came out” to his mother and “felt himself shrunk to an embarrassed adolescent, hating her sympathy, not wanting her to touch him.” He also recalls the Gay Pride parade his mother attended to show her support, succeeding only in embarrassing Neil and inflicting pain upon herself.

The story revolves around simple events: Wayne’s introduction to Barbara, their first dinner together, and a trip to a theater. The meaning, however, lies not in the events themselves but rather, as is the case in the fiction of Henry James, in the small gestures. When Wayne takes Neil’s hand at dinner, Barbara’s almost imperceptible reaction speaks volumes about her discomfort in their presence. Later, when Neil tries to put an arm around both Wayne and his mother at the theater, she responds by stiffening and shrinking away, unwilling to give her son unqualified emotional approval of his sexual orientation.

As Barbara attempts to cope with the reality of Neil’s adult life, Neil also must recognize that his mother is not the same woman he remembers. She has “grown thinner, more rigid, harder to hug,” and even her dogs are not the dogs of his childhood. He no longer feels a part of her life, a condition he both desires and fears. Barbara, for her part, cannot reconcile the young man Neil has become with the child she remembers. She tells him, “I remember when you were a little boy . . . I remember, and I have to stop remembering.” Neil, who “wept in regret for what he would not be for his mother, for having failed her,” knows that, as he tells Wayne, “guilt goes with the territory.” As Leavitt so movingly illustrates in this story, the forces that exist between parent and child are, like the power of fate, beyond the reaches of good intentions.

Equal Affections

First published: 1989

Type of work: Novel

A family faces its children’s homosexuality, its father’s infidelity, and its mother’s cancer and eventual death.

Equal Affections chronicles the history of the Cooper family: Nat and Louise, their children, Danny and April, and Danny’s lover, Walter. Although the plot sounds melodramatic—Louise is fighting a twenty-year battle with cancer, Nat is having an affair with an old family friend, and both Danny and April are gay—Leavitt handles his characters and situations with such restraint and understatement that the novel never deteriorates into soap opera. Rather, it presents a subtle study of family dynamics.

The family’s history unfolds through a series of flashbacks, arriving at the present as the family is brought together by Louise’s final bout with illness. As they watch her die, each character struggles to define a place in the family circle as well as an identity outside it. The temptation to isolate themselves from “messy” human relationships battles with the insistent pull of family ties in each of them.

Danny, the quintessential “good son,” has buried himself in a comfortable but stale upper-middle-class existence, surrounded by electronic gadgets. His lover, Walter, has become more involved with his computer sex partners than with Danny, tempted by the possibility of living “without ever having to touch, without ever having to show your face!” April, completely self-absorbed, immerses herself in her career as a lesbian folk singer, fitting her family into her life only when her busy schedule allows.

The characters also struggle between the opposite pulls of domesticity and “wildness.” Walter sees parallels between his life and Louise’s, noting that they have both sublimated their wild sides to domesticity and conformity. “He saw her as a woman of guileless passion who, for one reason or another, had suppressed that passion and instead fixed her gaze on the dependable horizon of the domestic sphere.” Walter also has determined to “incorporate his sexual nature into a life of suburban domesticity, uproot the seed of homosexuality from its natural urban soil and replant it in the pure earth of his green garden.”

Nat and April, on the other hand, rather than seeking to tame their “wildness” with domesticity, have summoned it to help them break out of the domestic rut. April, although she possesses strong domestic instincts, demonstrated by her love of baking and her desire to have a baby, escapes domestic routine through her career. Nat, a quiet and unassuming man by nature, seeks to subvert domesticity by conducting an illicit affair.

As she faces her death, Louise also comes to terms with her growing sense of “aloneness,” as her illness slowly separates her from her family. She realizes that her separateness is the source of her strength as well as her pain because it allows her to control her own destiny. Conversely, Louise’s death brings Walter to the realization that “like it or not, he was inextricably bound with the people who had mattered to him and who mattered to him now, the people whose loves defined him, whose deaths would devastate him. He would never, could never be. . . self-invented, untouchable, a journeyer among the keys. And for this he was glad.”

The Lost Language of Cranes

First published: 1986

Type of work: Novel

The lives of a quiet married couple and their son unravel as the son’s revelation of his homosexuality forces his father to face and confess that he too is gay.

Leavitt’s first novel, The Lost Language of Cranes, is the story of two men of different generations coming to terms with their sexual orientation. Like much of Leavitt’s work, it is also the story of a family coming apart at the seams.

Rose Benjamin, a copy editor, and her husband, Owen, director of admissions at a private boys’ school, lead a tightly structured life, devoting their days to work and their evenings to reading in their twin rocking chairs. Every Sunday, they go their separate ways; Rose reads the paper and works in the apartment, while Owen spends the day at a gay pornographic cinema. Rose has no idea how Owen spends these Sundays and would never dream of asking. When she accidentally meets Owen on the street one Sunday while taking a walk, Rose realizes that after twenty-seven years of marriage, she hardly knows him: “She had stumbled into her husband on a strange street corner, running some mysterious errand she knew nothing of, and they had spoken briefly like strangers, parted like strangers.”

The first cracks appear on the surface of the Benjamin family life when Rose and Owen learn that their New York City apartment will be converted into a co-op, and they must either buy it or move out. Once their sanctuary from the outside world is threatened, the rest of their carefully structured life begins to crumble as well. Their son, Philip, infatuated with a new lover, wants to share his happiness and reveal his homosexuality to his parents, giving little thought to the effect this announcement might have on them. Philip’s “coming out” inspires his father to confess to his own long-hidden sexual orientation, and Rose is forced to confront the fact that her married life has been based on a lie.

The Lost Language of Cranes also highlights the differences between two generations of gay men. Philip, although initially hesitant to reveal his homosexuality to his parents, has come out to the rest of the world. He has a network of friends and a night life in gay bars that his father never had. Owen, aware he was “different” since childhood but believing that his homosexuality was a disease, forced himself to deny this “difference” for years. Finally, when he could no longer suppress his sexuality, he began visiting a pornographic movie house, engaging in sexual acts with nameless, faceless men but suffering severe guilt when he returned home to Rose.

This novel, like most of Leavitt’s work, explores what critic Robert Jones has called “the desire to find a language that describes the isolate worlds we inhabit.” The title refers to a case study of a boy abandoned by his mother in an apartment near a construction site. Lacking human contact, the child identified and “bonded” with the cranes he saw operating outside his window, devising his own language based on the noises they made, thus creating a language that had meaning and emotional resonance for him. Likewise, the members of the Benjamin family struggle to make sense of their own individual “languages” in the context of their familial relationship.

The Page Turner

First published: 1998

Type of work: Novel

A young piano student learns that both art and love have their price.

In a variation on the character triangle that Leavitt successfully explored in his groundbreaking short story “Territory,” the novel The Page Turner features a mother and son and the effect that a third party, the son’s lover, has on their familial bond.

As the novel begins, eighteen-year-old Paul Porterfield, a piano student just finishing his last year in high school and preparing to enter Juilliard in the fall, has been engaged to turn the pages of the musical score for Richard Kennington, a forty-something piano virtuoso, during a chamber music concert in San Francisco. An ardent fan of Kennington’s work and ambitious to replicate the older man’s success for himself, Paul relishes a chance to meet his idol. Pamela Porterfield, Paul’s mother, sits in the audience in anticipation of her son’s ancillary role in the musical performance, her dreams of her son’s future as bright as Paul’s own.

What would appear to be a relatively inconsequential event in both their lives becomes the catalyst for a life-altering relationship between Paul and Richard when the two meet again in Italy some months later. Paul and his mother are in Rome as one stop in a graduation trip for him and as a way for her temporarily to escape the pain of her husband’s infidelity and desertion. Upon discovering that Kennington has just finished a concert engagement in that city, Paul tracks Richard down in his hotel room, motivated in part by his ambition and in part by his unacknowledged physical desire.

Their affair, though brief, has consequences for all three characters. Paul confirms his sexual orientation and takes his first steps toward establishing a pattern of relationships with older men. Richard, initially swept away by his passion for Paul, ultimately flees from the scene to return to the ambivalent comforts of his older companion and manager, the sixty-one-year-old Joseph Mansourian. Pamela, initially misinterpreting Richard’s interest in Paul as an attraction to her, confronts her son’s homosexuality and eventually, with the knowledge acquired through the pain of her own life, comes to be a source of wisdom to her son as he copes with the realization that ambition and love are not always requited.

The title of the novel refers to both the compromises that individuals often make regarding their initial career objectives and the secondary roles that individuals often come to play in their personal relationships. During the course of the narrative, Paul discovers that he lacks the talent to be a concert pianist; at best, he may be able to carve out a career as an accompanist. Similarly, in his connections with other men, Paul is slated to play an attendant part; he will be the companion and helpmate. In effect, his allotted role in art and love parallels that of the two principal women in his life—his teacher, Olga Novotna, who gave up her own concert career to be the mistress of the composer Kessler, and his mother, Pamela, who took on the roles of housewife and mother.

In the end, both Paul and Pamela come to share the realization that there are compensations to be found in a supporting role and that “page-turning is an art in its way.”

Summary

The characters populating Leavitt’s fiction, whether gay or straight, strive to overcome a sense of separateness, a sense of being on the outside of life looking in, but they often succeed only briefly in making meaningful connections with the rest of the human race. At best, they come to terms with the fact that isolation is part of the human condition rather than a lonely vigil kept only by themselves.

Bibliography

Bleeth, Kenneth, and Julie Rivkin. “The ‘Imitation David’: Plagiarism, Collaboration, and the Making of a Gay Literary Tradition in David Leavitt’s ‘The Term Paper Artist.’” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 116 (Winter, 2001): 1349-1363. Analyzes Leavitt’s novella as a response to Steven Spender’s accusations of plagiarism in While England Sleeps.

Bohlen, Celestine. “Writer on the Rebound: This Time, He Takes Liberties with His Own Life.” The New York Times, February 25, 1997, p. C11. Notes that while Leavitt’s book While England Sleeps was pulled from the presses after the English poet Stephen Spender filed a plagiarism suit because of sexual suggestions concerning his autobiography, Leavitt’s story “The Term Paper Artist” features a character called David Leavitt who has gone home to his father’s house to brood over a vengeful English poet’s accusation of plagiarism.

Dederer, Claire. "The Purloined Letters." Review of The Body of Jonah Boyd, by David Leavitt, The New York Times, 30 May 2004, www.nytimes.com/2004/05/30/books/the-purloined-letters.html. Accessed 31 Oct. 2017.

Heller, Dana. Family Plots: The De-Oedipalization of Popular Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. One chapter analyzes The Lost Language of Cranes in terms of its positioning of female characters within the family framework as it is reimagined in a homosexual context.

Iannone, Carol. “Post Counter-Culture Tristesse.” Commentary 84 (February, 1987): 57-61. Iannone’s article discusses representative themes of Leavitt’s work, including his short stories and his first novel, The Lost Language of Cranes.

Klarer, Mario. “David Leavitt’s ‘Territory’: René Girard’s Homoerotic ‘Trigonometry’ and Julia Kristeva’s ‘Semiotic Chora.’” Studies in Short Fiction 28 (Winter, 1991): 63-76. Argues that the mother-son-lover triangle in the story “Territory” calls for two different theoretical frames for analysis: René Girard’s “erotic triangle” in his 1965 book Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, and Julia Kristeva’s theory of a “semiotic territory” in her 1984 book Revolution in Poetic Language.

Leavitt, David. “Interview with David Leavitt.” Interview by Jean Ross. In Contemporary Authors, vol. 122, edited by Hal May and Susan M. Trosky. Detroit: Gale Research, 1988. Leavitt, in a telephone interview transcript, discusses his writing habits, his training in creative writing at Yale University, the Family Dancing collection, and his novel The Lost Language of Cranes. Also reflects on his brief editorial assistant’s position at a New York publishing house.

Leavitt, David. “Interview with David Leavitt.” Interview by Sam Staggs. Publishers Weekly 237 (August 24, 1990): 47-49. In this interview, Leavitt refers to his collection of stories A Place I’ve Never Been as the first book of “the middle years” of his career; Staggs claims the stories in Leavitt’s collection reveal the maturity that his earlier work hinted at, with several excellent stories exploiting the theme of Americans in Europe.

Leavitt, David. “The New Lost Generation.” Esquire 103 (May, 1985): 85-88. In an autobiographical remembrance of adolescence in California, Leavitt compares the activist, socially conscious late 1960’s generation with that of his own “Yuppie” era.

Leavitt, David. “New Voices and Old Values.” The New York Times Book Review, May 12, 1985, 1, 26-27. In a lengthy review of several books by contemporary authors, including Marian Thurm, Peter Cameron, Meg Wolitzer, Elizabeth Tallent, and Amy Hempel, Leavitt cites similarity of themes in their handling of crises in the traditional family and reveals as well elements of his own work and concerns.

Leavitt, David. “The Way I Live Now.” The New York Times Magazine, July 9, 1989, 28-29, 32, 80-82. Leavitt, in a personal revelation about his homosexuality, discusses the way in which AIDS has affected his life. He also discusses his involvement with ACT UP, the radical AIDS activist organization, and his views of that organization’s necessity and positive influence.

Lilly, Mark. Gay Men’s Literature in the Twentieth Century. Washington Square: New York University Press, 1993. A full chapter is devoted to a discussion of The Lost Language of Cranes in the larger context of “coming out” narratives.

Lo, Mun-Hou. “David Leavitt and the Etiological Maternal Body.” Modern Fiction Studies 41 (Fall/Winter, 1995): 439-465. Discusses the figure of the mother in some stories from David Leavitt’s debut collection, Family Dancing; comments on Leavitt’s obsessive interest in the specter of the strong mother, even as this interest can take the form only of looking everywhere except directly at the relationship between maternity and homosexuality.

Preston, Alex. "The Two Hotel Francforts by David Leavitt." Review of The Two Hotel Francforts, by David Leavitt, The Guardian, 23 Nov. 2013, www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/24/two-hotel-francforts-david-leavitt-review. Accessed 31 Oct. 2017.

White, Edmund. “Out of the Closet, onto the Bookshelf.” The New York Times Magazine, June 16, 1991, 22-24. White writes about the 1980’s generation of openly homosexual writers and how the AIDS epidemic has both decimated their ranks and at the same time created a maturity of creative writing as writers react to the disease and its threat.