Gay Fiction Speaks: Conversations with Gay Novelists

David Leavitt is best known to gay readers for a range of fiction on gay themes, especially The Lost Language of Cranes, Equal Affections, Arkansas, and The Page Turner. These have been celebrated by many gay and nongay writers, including Edmund White. Unusually, Leavitt’s first published work, Family Dancing, was a collection of stories, featuring both gay and nongay characters. Born in Pittsburgh in 1961, he grew up in Palo Alto, California, then studied for a degree in English at Yale University. Before graduating in 1983, Leavitt saw his first published story—“Territory”—appear in the New Yorker.

His first collection, Family Dancing (New York: Knopf, 1984), was published the next year to much acclaim and was nominated for both the National Critics Book Award and the PEN-Faulkner Award. This was followed by two novels—The Lost Language of Cranes (New York: Knopf, 1986) and Equal Affections (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1989)—and a second collection of stories, A Place I’ve Never Been (New York: Viking, 1990). In 1992 The Lost Language of Cranes was made into a film, relocated in London, for the BBC.

In 1989, Leavitt was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and became writer-in-residence at the Institute of Catalan Letters, Barcelona. He moved back to New York for a while, but eventually settled in Northern Italy with his partner and sometime collaborator Mark Mitchell. Their coedited Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories (New York: Viking, 1994) was followed by Mitchell’s own Penguin Book of International Gay Writing (New York: Viking, 1995), which featured an introduction by Leavitt. Next they coauthored Italian Pleasures (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1996) and coedited Pages Passed from Hand to Hand: The Hidden Tradition of Homosexual Literature in English from 1748 to 1914 (Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

Leavitt’s fiction career continued with the troubled reception of 1993’s While England Sleeps, a historical novel on gay themes set during the Spanish Civil War (new edition: Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995). This was the subject of a lawsuit in Britain by the writer Stephen Spender, alleging plagiarism, which was finally settled out of court. While England Sleeps was withdrawn, reappearing two years later after Leavitt made changes to the text. It was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize. Next came Arkansas (Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), a collection of three novellas—“The Term-Paper Artist,” “The Wooden Anniversary,” and “Saturn Street.” Leavitt’s next novel, The Page Turner (Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), is set in the world of classical music. Leavitt has since completed a new novel, Martin Baumann (Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000). Though Leavitt still lives in Italy, this interview took place in London on Monday, March 23, 1998.

RC I want to start by asking about the subject of AIDS. You’ve written about it in several short stories or novellas: “Gravity,” “A Place I’ve Never Been,” and “AYOR” in A Place I’ve Never Been; “Saturn Street” in Arkansas. Others, though, have tried to write about the subject on a larger canvas—within a somewhat epic novelistic account of gay life often. Were you tempted to write something on that scale?

DL No. I’m not, generally speaking, a big reader of epics. I very much like trilogies and tetralogies. I’m envious of Edmund White having had such a representative life. That allowed him to write a series of three novels that were both intensely personal or autobiographical and also historical. My life’s been so unrepresentative I can’t imagine how doing a similarly immediate project to Edmund’s would represent the last couple of decades. In relation to AIDS, the novel’s gotten a lot of crap. It’s basically been agreed that the novel’s the least successful form in dealing with AIDS.

RC Many people are suspicious of invention around the topic, and prefer memoirs. Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time was a big seller.

DL Yes. I’m not a big admirer of that book, personally. I reviewed his Becoming a Man for the London Sunday Times and was the only person who said anything negative. It’s the sort of book you don’t dare speak against. My feeling is that fiction comes out of really weird, quasi-unconscious parts of the psyche. There’s always a mixture of conscious and unconscious attraction to certain stories. You almost need to write the story in order to figure out the explanation for its interest. This is something I take for granted, but I find nonwriters don’t understand it. I don’t think any serious writer could sit down and write a good piece of fiction for ideological or propagandistic purposes. That’s why in the AIDS context I often harp on about Christopher Coe’s novel, Such Times. A lot of people hated that book. To me it’s extremely strange, but that’s all to its credit. Such Times is a response to the AIDS epidemic from the perspective of someone really bizarre. Christopher was a complete lunatic. Yet it has the integrity of representing his viewpoint with such clarity, elegance, and intelligence that I find it immensely rewarding and entertaining.

RC To me, Coe misunderstood the key elements of the tragedy of AIDS by wrapping it in material concerns. There are so many references to designer clothes that no longer fit, for example.

DL Well, I wasn’t great friends with him, but the fact that I knew Christopher will affect my reading here. Such Times is a very autobiographical book. Christopher did have a much older lover who was in a relationship; he was very rich; he did become sick and lose everything. He went from being immensely rich to being tragically poor, living in terrible squalor. Knowing that, and having visited him at his apartment, where he almost didn’t have money to eat . . .

DL No, but it was in his life. I’m committing the aesthetic sin of reading the book in the context of having known him. Such Times is almost an elegy for an extremely glamorous but unhappy life. Christopher was an alcoholic and drug addict who had a rough time. But he always loved luxury—with a connoisseur’s passion almost. That was the life he shared with Hans.

Your objections I understand totally. What I’d finally say about Such Times, though, is that for me it’s clearly a piece of serious literature—written by someone who’s a writer first, and a writer with AIDS second. That was something I harped on about at the Key West Literary Seminar on AIDS and Literature: I consider myself a writer first, and a gay writer second. If I had AIDS, I’d still consider myself a writer first. The world wouldn’t, but I would, and that’s the point of view I’d write from. I write for posterity. I think it’s a crock—the idea of people not writing for posterity but for other people in the same situation at this time. No real writer would ever think that, no matter how desperate the situation.

RC Gore Vidal once wrote that in the past he’d had a peculiar nineteenth-century sense of writing for posterity. I thought: “What’s peculiar or nineteenth-century about that?”

DL Yes. Edmund White annoyed me a little in his lecture at that seminar. I don’t think a good aesthetic argument means anything personal; in fact, it’s a healthy thing. I don’t think Edmund believed many of the things he said there. It isn’t borne out by his work. Edmund’s clearly writing to place himself in the pantheon. He was thrilled to be inducted into the American Academy. He’s very much writing with a sense of himself as a great writer who’ll be remembered.

I know this will sound harsh, but in the context of AIDS literature, everyone in the world thinks their story’s interesting. AIDS has made writers out of many people who wouldn’t have been writers otherwise, or it’s given mediocre writers a sense of being better than they actually are. Some will survive; it’s a crapshoot which ones. I think the one we’re all agreed on is Allen Barnett’s The Body and Its Dangers. Carole Maso, Peter Cameron, and I were the judges of the PEN-Hemingway Award the year we gave the prize to Bernard Cooper for Maps to Anywhere and the citation to Allen Barnett. It was a terrible struggle deciding which to give the prize to. Nowadays I regret we didn’t do it the other way around. We simply felt some of the stories in The Body and Its Dangers weren’t as strong as others, whereas Maps to Anywhere was pretty much consistently very strong. We were judging in a very cold, aesthetic way. But “The Times As It Knows Us” remains in my mind the greatest piece of fiction written about the AIDS epidemic, without question: not because of its political content; not because of what it’s about, but because it’s so well written, so smart. That, to me, is what makes anything last: the integrity of the prose. I do believe in the distinction between writers who’re under the gun—who’re dying—and those in a more contemplative position, as I am. But “The Times As It Knows Us” distinguishes itself from, say, Paul Monette. It stands out far above such works. It doesn’t mean these books haven’t had immense value in their moment. The one book on AIDS that’s going to last, though, is The Body and Its Dangers—and, I think, Such Times too. Little else, unfortunately. But we’ll wait and see.

RC Has anything with humor impressed you? John Weir’s The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, for instance?

DL Eddie Socket is a good book. I regret he didn’t write anything else yet. John Weir’s a good writer who has been very unpleasant to me, consistently, so it’s hard to stay objective. By comparison, Andrew Holleran was a saint to me at the Key West Literary Seminar. That made me feel very ashamed for what I’d written about Dancer from the Dance.¹ He was so above silly attacks that I felt chastened to some degree.

DL I may be. It was what I felt at that time. Unfortunately, we have to stick by our opinions, but I’m always willing to change my mind. I certainly admired him immensely there. Holleran’s a wonderful writer. I probably overstated this in my “Introduction,” but the flaw in his work is that he’s too distracted by beauty. An obsession with male beauty intrudes in Dancer from the Dance in a way. As I said, whereas we can afford to be distracted by beauty, literature cannot.

RC That’s a less worrying “mistake,” though, than the suggestion that there’s a flaw in a writer’s style. Are you saying beauty’s simply too dominant as an element of the story?

DL Yes. Edmund White’s always felt I was too harsh on Holleran. He said: “That’s Andrew. He’s obsessed with beautiful boys,” and dismissed it. My response was: “I’m obsessed with beautiful boys, but I think it’d be a mistake to allow that to control my writing.”

RC To return to the subject of AIDS, are there other works of fiction that will last?

DL Yes. He’s someone else who’s been really nasty to me in the press almost consistently. I was such an admirer of his Lantern Lecture that I wrote him a fan letter. When Family Dancing was published in the U.K., he came to the party. I don’t understand why he’s taken every opportunity to attack me that he can. Among English writers, the one I admire most is Alan Hollinghurst, a terrific writer. He hasn’t dealt with AIDS that much. Yet, according to Larry Kramer, Hollinghurst must be a piece of shit because he writes about sex. But Hollinghurst writes so brilliantly, obsessively, and neurotically about sex. I find it horrifying but also gripping.

Sex scenes succeed when they’re not only about sex; when they’re about psychology. That goes without saying in Hollinghurst’s work. I hope it’s true in my novellas and novels. I don’t see the point writing sex scenes otherwise. Sex isn’t of inherent literary interest unless it provides a way of revealing something not only about people but about the way they interact. What better measure of an intimate relationship than the way people interact sexually? When I wrote “Saturn Street”—in certain ways a very autobiographical story, even though “Phil” doesn’t exist—I was trying to describe a very low period in my life when I’d slipped into a terrible situation. The epigram “failure is forming habits” applied.

DL I’ve a friend in London who calls English phone lines all the time. He tells me these hysterical stories. But that became to some degree my life. It was a very demeaning moment. When I read part of “Saturn Street” out at the Key West Literary Seminar, it infuriated me that Larry Kramer said it was in poor taste. I was trying to describe that sense of horniness as a form of depression, which is the context out of which the whole novella evolves. But it’s very particular to the age of AIDS too, because it’s also about what happens when the libido continues to make demands, but the soul’s incapable of actual intimacy—particularly after a lover’s died; in this case, committed suicide. I played with that later on, when the narrator Jerry gives Phil the impression his lover died of AIDS even though he didn’t.

RC The positioning of Jerry as sexually needy, compared to Phil, who is HIV-positive, finding relative satisfaction felt totally persuasive. I felt you were undermining traditional AIDS pieties there. Stories often resonate that way when they eschew assumed values.

DL That’s absolutely true. John Hersey’s story about AIDS—“Get Up, Sweet Slug-a-bed”—also does that. In “Saturn Street,” though, the other thing I’d emphasize is that Jerry isn’t HIV-negative. He’s refused to be tested and very well might be HIV-positive.

RC Yes. I’ve made the same assumption he makes: that, in not testing, he can position himself comfortably among the HIV-negative.

DL Exactly. I didn’t want Jerry to say: “Of course, my sexual history is such that I knew there was a 99.9% chance I was HIV-negative.” I wanted it to be very uncertain. He’s been in a long relationship, but it’s not clear it was monogamous. He needs to think of himself as HIV-negative in order to survive, and he’d rather not know. Phil’s the same way: that’s what links them in a strange way.

RC Years ago you said on the BBC’s Late Show that you felt attracted to AIDS as a theme but hadn’t written about it. You’ve subsequently written a number of stories about it. Do you feel you’ve mined the seam now?

DL Bear in mind that when I wrote “Saturn Street,” I didn’t set out to write a story about AIDS, but about Project Angel Food. I was most interested in the experience of volunteering to do something very important in the context of what I considered an extremely disreputable group. That remains part of the story. However, Phil took it over. He wasn’t at all meant to be the center of the story when I started writing. In that weird way characters do in fiction, he asserted himself. I’d invented someone I’d never met that I could easily have fallen in love with. There was someone like Phil when I was delivering, who I only talked to for ten minutes. But he stayed in my consciousness.

So often fiction for me is a “what if” proposition, concerning things that didn’t happen . . . but what if they did? I wrote Lost Language of Cranes along these lines: “What if my father were gay?” He isn’t, but what if he were? What if I’d fallen in love with someone to whom I was delivering meals? How would I have responded? In “Saturn Street” I’m not Jerry, exactly, but he’s like me. Frankly, I find strictly autobiographical writing less interesting than writing that’s speculative. “The Term-Paper Artist” too is certainly speculative.

RC You allowed yourself a swipe at mainstream American culture in the figure of “Dr. Delia” in “Saturn Street.”

DL Well, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, who’s the model for that character, seems pretty ripe for parody at this point. She’s such a public figure.

DL Yes. Curiously, my agent’s one objection to “Saturn Street” was that he thought I was too hard on Hollywood. He thought the whole sequence where the actress comes to deliver meals and everyone bends over backwards for her photo opportunity was too much. But that really happened, exactly the way I described it. Reality is often unconvincing in fiction. I decided to take the risk there because I felt quite condemning of a certain self-serving element in AIDS volunteerism.

RC It also seemed to be about American positivity: the indiscriminate hugging and so on.

DL That’s completely valid. Like most Americans, however, I have a love-hate relationship with all that. In a certain sense, I despise it, and that’s why I live abroad. In another, I’m deeply attracted to it. Whenever I’m in Los Angeles—and I’m there on average two months a year because my family lives there—I listen to Dr. Laura religiously. I’m almost addicted to it. Addiction itself is an American phenomenon.

RC I want to move on to ask you about E. M. Forster. He seems to be creeping more and more centrally into your work—even as a character in “The Term-Paper Artist.” He’s referred to in all three Arkansas novellas—and in The Page Turner. For many gay men, Oscar Wilde’s legacy as a gay writer is a more prominent one. Comparing the two seemed very suggestive in relation to your work, especially in the light of the comment of the narrator of “The Wooden Anniversary”: “‘Wilde is like Freud. Everyone thinks that just because he said something, it’s automatically true.’” ²

DL Wilde’s someone I love. He and Forster have a really peculiar relationship. Forster almost never talks about Wilde; he makes perhaps two references to Wilde in all his writings. Mark and I are both convinced this is intentional; that there’s an avoidance of Wilde. The one thing Mark came up with is a funny phrase in A Room with a View. Someone talks about having a “mauvais quart d’heure,” which is also in Wilde. This can’t be proved, but it suggested to me that Forster was very familiar with Wilde’s work.

Wilde certainly had a much more interesting life than Forster. Both, for me, are sources of immense wisdom and importance. Henry James is the writer who’s really problematic for me and who I’d put in opposition to both of them. I have an extremely complex love-hate relationship with James. He was horrible to Wilde—probably out of jealousy, because of the failure of his own play. Forster, of course, had an extremely ambivalent relationship toward James in Aspects of the Novel. I was talking to someone recently who felt I’d really been influenced by James. I said: “If it’s true, it’s against my will.” I’ll always admire James, but never love or even like him.

RC In Pages Passed from Hand to Hand, you placed Forster in a summative position—as the last featured author before gay literature goes aboveground, as it were. But the legacy after Forster isn’t straightforward, is it? Among others, Wilde, James, Forster, and Proust all exercise clear influence on gay writers. How do you compare the inheritance of each of these, specifically in the context of gay writing?

DL My feeling is that if you go beyond Forster, James, and Wilde and into the rest of the twentieth century, there’s suddenly an enormous amount of gay writing. But the more there is, the less of it exists that’s serious. It’s infinitesimal. If you look at a serious writer like Edmund White, you see all three of the English writers in his work—then, obviously, Proust above all. But there’s certainly a Jamesian obsession with detail, and a certain Wildean irony, and I think there’s also some Forster in his work. I think for any serious writer of the twentieth century—gay or not—those three writers are of immense importance. The other two I’d add would be Virginia Woolf and, curiously enough, Ford Madox Ford.

DL The Good Soldier’s my favorite novel, period. It’s magnificent. What makes it perhaps of particular interest to a gay writer is that it’s about sexual obsession, a recurrent theme in gay literature. Something I’ve often noticed is that the vast majority of really great male writers—gay or straight—share a certain sexual obsessiveness; whether it’s Ford Madox Ford, with all his ex-wives, or Oscar Wilde and Bosie. Forster’s appeared in a very suppressed, undirected way because his mother was always in the way. But I think he had great longings in his life that were never fully expressed.

Influences are rarely obvious. That’s becoming clearer and clearer to me. A lot of times I’ve felt when people have asked me about them and I’ve mentioned Alice Munro or Grace Paley among more contemporary writers, there’s a sense of great disappointment—certainly among stupid gay journalists. They ask: “What about gay influences?”—as if by necessity my literary influences have to have been gay. To me that’s completely irrelevant.

I have an idea about this which I had hoped a visit I made to Paris this last weekend would address. I was supposed to be in a debate—a very French thing. But the guy who ran it not only gave me the wrong time for the debate. He gave me the wrong subject. He said it was on the question “Is There Such a Thing as Gay Literature?” But I was supposed to be on a panel for: “Is There Such a Thing as a Homosexual Hero?” That’s one of these French subjects about which I have nothing to say, so I pretended to be sick. I couldn’t take part. It was going to be me and three French lesbians. I knew they’d all have long speeches prepared. I had prepared too—but for the wrong subject. Anyway, what I was going to say about the matter of whether gay literature exists was that I think it’s the wrong question. To me the important question is: “Is there such a thing as a gay reader?” That’s infinitely more relevant. Whether one thinks of oneself as a gay writer is beside the point. What’s important is that whether there are people who seek out books with gay content. Obviously there are. As long as there are gay readers, there will be a tradition—one of reading, not writing. And it’s a fascinating thing to trace—especially before gay literature reemerges from the underground—the extent to which this readership defined a tradition. But you don’t tend to see what a lot of more simple-minded critics want, which is a sort of chain of influence, of the sort Harold Bloom mapped in relation to poets.

If you look at things like niche marketing, the way people market gay books: that’s based on the knowledge on the part of publishers that there’s a set readership. The problem emerges when that readership is appealed to with such intensity that other readers are shut out. But that’s a very contemporary problem.

RC It ties in with Reed Woodhouse’s designation of you as an “assimilative” gay writer—in other words, appealing to a mainstream readership.³ I wondered how you felt about that description.

DL It doesn’t bother me at all. A feminist writer called Susan Brown-miller, who wrote a famous book about rape, Against Our Will, said something very smart to me: “Feminists are my constituency, but they’re not my readership.” It made a lot of sense. It suggested that in a political sense she felt an alliance with this group, but it wasn’t exclusive. That’s how I feel. Gay people are my constituency and form a part of my readership, but they’re not who I write for. I don’t think any serious writer writes for a particular readership. The readership will sometimes define the writer’s role. But it seems backward to look at this question purely in terms of the writer.

RC Have you ever written with the reader’s perspective in mind—in other words, chosen to write something because you felt it was something you would like to have been able to read?

DL That was certainly true of The Lost Language of Cranes. That book I wrote simply because it was a book that hadn’t existed when I was a teenager, so in a sense I was writing as a reader; I was writing the book I wanted to read. But that was probably the only instance where I wrote from the point of view of a reader. The only other way I’ve done something similar is that sometimes I imitate. I don’t mean While England Sleeps and the Stephen Spender controversy. That wasn’t imitation at all. But all writers imitate. If I read something I admire, I’ll often end up trying to imitate it, though usually it eventually won’t resemble what I started imitating at all.

RC Edmund White has spoken of having an ideal reader in mind. Has that never been necessary to you?

DL Not really. I understand what Edmund’s saying. He’s imagining a pure reader—someone who brings nothing to the book except appetite. But I don’t need to think of that consciously.

RC Appetite—but also literariness. Many writers want an understanding of the circumstances of gay life, plus literariness.

DL Or literariness, and “gay” second. I think most serious writers find it very tiresome to be pigeonholed. I hate to use that word because it’s such a cliché. Still, it is tiresome to have constantly to deal with the expectation that, because you’re an openly gay writer, you’re also, as it were, a professional homosexual who can be expected to give a disquisition at the drop of a hat on any political topic relating to homosexuality. This happens to me all the time. I’ll be on a radio show and will suddenly be asked to comment on gay marriage or something. I do the best I can. But I’m not an opinion machine. Something else I think is problematic is the fact that you’re expected constantly to stay on good terms with the gay community in America. This can result in being put in some really low-level situations which other writers would not find themselves in or tolerate.

I had to cancel my American book tour for The Page Turner because we were moving house. But one reading I was supposed to give was at a gay bookshop in Atlanta. I’ve no idea if this is a serious bookshop, but the publicist from Houghton Mifflin called me up and said: “We’ve had a change of schedule. They said if you read on Thursday, no one will go because it’s gay bingo night.” I thought: “It’s hard to imagine Julian Barnes, Jeanette Winterson, or Susan Sontag being told that.” Likewise it’s hard to imagine any of those people tolerating having to give a reading in front of a huge display of porn videos, which I’ve done on hundreds of occasions—most recently in Paris at Les Mots à la Bouche. The situations you find yourself in are so undignified, yet you’re expected to tolerate them because this is the “community.” I don’t mean to say I’ve anything against degeneracy at all. I’m a great fan of it. But when I’m doing a literary reading, I’d like to do it in a dignified setting.

RC A lot of esteemed American gay writers are quite happily associated with erotic writing and porn. Many seem happy to feature in anthologies of it.

DL I’m not. I doubt Edmund is. I think he doesn’t have as complicated or tormented a relationship with the so-called gay community as I do. I find the normality and social acceptance of porn in American gay circles a little weird. First, it makes porn much less exciting. Second, it institutionalizes a very questionable industry. If you look at a lot of porn videos, these kids are victims of exploitation. They’re all on drugs—tons of drugs are available on those sets. They’re dying of drug overdoses every second—like Joey Stefano. Yet the head of a big porn video company’s treated almost like Harvey Milk in San Francisco. He’s on every board; he’s the constant guest at various dinners for AIDS foundations. He’s an eminently respectable citizen. I’ve got to say I find that really disturbing. I’m always happy to do readings at gay bookshops, but I prefer those that have a somewhat more serious aspect.

RC Some of the shops that are more about books, and have diversified less into porn, are closing.

DL Yes—because porn’s their bread and butter; what they make their money on. I don’t even mind that, necessarily. But when I read at A Different Light in Los Angeles, a store I like, they don’t put me in front of a cock! At Glad Day in Boston, I was reading with Falcon videos right behind me. It was the weirdest thing.

RC It’s an interesting example of the late twentieth-century novelist being surrounded by visual culture.

DL Exactly. I’m not a prude at all. You can tell from my writing. However, I require a certain amount of seriousness. I consider writing a deeply serious business. In the context of my work, I feel I never take myself seriously enough. The last line of the very long novel I’m now writing is going to be: “And I went off to try to learn to be serious.” My main complaint about most gay writers today is that very few are serious.

DL Well, to give an example, if you look back in time, it’s much clearer that Oscar Wilde was a serious writer and Ouida wasn’t.⁴ I don’t know if you’ve ever had the “joy” of reading Ouida’s Friendship. I read it when I was obsessed with the English community in Florence. But she’s not a serious writer. She was writing to sell, not to change the world or be part of literary history. Wilde was—that’s obvious.

RC Yet Wilde’s veneer of profound unseriousness has had its legacy in gay culture. Many writers mask a real dedication under a superficial flippancy.

DL Yes. When I say this, I don’t mean to be humorless. A lot of the work in Pages Passed from Hand to Hand I wouldn’t call deeply serious. But it’s work of deep historical interest. Unserious work can be interesting in terms of learning about history. But it’s not interesting in terms of changing your life, the way I believe great literature can be. Moving into the present, this is all much less clear. But if you read a writer like Allen Barnett, it seems obvious he’s a serious writer; likewise, Allan Gurganus and Edmund White, though he’s a very unusual case. There’s a certain glibness that finds its way into Edmund’s work at points. It seems so shockingly different from what came five pages before.

RC When you speak of literature as potentially life-changing, it occurred to me that, at its narrowest, the popular idea that gay literature might act as a tool for affirming one’s sexual identity is not about changing lives at all. If “affirmation” is what’s needed, that invariably means something highly conservative.

DL Yes. It’s like Roland Barthes’s distinction between “plaisir” and “jouissance”—pleasure and bliss. Pleasure is what confirms everything you already believe; bliss is what cuts right to the quick.

RC I want to ask a little more about your public profile. Some of your views, as expressed in the press and in the “Introduction” to the Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories, have been controversial. Even so, other writers, on occasion, have unleashed some surprisingly strong negative comments on you, as you’ve already mentioned. Do you think in part this has to do with your crossover success?

DL It has to do, I think, with a certain envy, based on the fact that I’ve had a degree of crossover success that’s somewhat rare. The only other gay writers I can think of offhand who’ve achieved the same degree of crossover success would be Edmund, Allan Gurganus, Alan Hollinghurst, and Jeanette Winterson. Even Andrew Holleran’s read primarily by a gay audience. Three people have been consistently vicious to me: in the States, Ethan Mordden and Felice Picano whom I’ve never met, and in England, Adam Mars-Jones. With Felice, it seemed clearly a generational thing. He wrote somewhere that I wrote as if I didn’t have a penis. Mark said if I ever met him I should say: “Mine’s bigger than yours!” Adam’s attacks on me have amazed me, because I respect him so much, and have always been nice to him. On the other hand, Alan Hollinghurst has been very nice. He reviewed Equal Affections, which he didn’t like, but wrote a very intelligent negative review. That never bothers me. It was a review I learned something from. Then I met him; he’s been extremely friendly to me. I think Hollinghurst’s a serious person who understands as I do that there’s no reason why people can’t disagree and still respect each other. I don’t mind being criticized at all; I mind being attacked. There’s a clear difference.

RC I think the range of attacks on you is interesting. Felice Picano speaks of you as a neutered writer; on the other hand, While England Sleeps saw you accused of being unduly pornographic.

DL I just ignore this. All this kind of criticism seems irrelevant because it’s not coming from anyone serious. To use an Italian expression, it is on a very low level. It’s criticism that doesn’t derive from serious thought about a work. It’s derived from a political position; from a desire to have one’s own voice heard. Every writer who’s ever lived has to deal with this—particularly in the cesspool of gay politics.

RC What leads you towards being sexually explicit at a particular point in a novel?

DL I’ve always followed the edict of Flannery O’Connor there. Her feeling about writing about sex was: “Do it if it’s necessary.” There are situations where sex is an important aspect of human experience and becomes relevant. For example, in While England Sleeps I was writing about an intense love affair between two young men. Sex is going to be a part of that. I was always trying to use sex as a way of depicting the evolution and eventual falling apart of a relationship. Pornography’s much more about the marketplace; about selling sex. There’s nothing wrong with that. I like pornography. But I don’t consider what I write pornography, because I write about sex as a way of pursuing a literary agenda. Given that the relationship in While England Sleeps is deeply sexual, it seemed to me eminently obvious that was the way to do it.

I have sexual obsessions. I’m aware of that. It’s something I’ve criticized both Andrew Holleran and Robert Ferro for in their work. But I have the same thing: my little, extra-literary obsessions that work their way into my work. Mark’s always saying: “Goddammit, you have such a fetish about boxer shorts. If I read one more scene with someone in boxer shorts, panting!” He’s right, so I’m trying to control that. It just happens. But by and large the instances where I allow an extra-literary concern or obsession to find its way into my work are rare. I’m proud of the fact people have generally really admired my sex scenes. They say they feel real. Gordon Lish once said that the mistake everyone makes in writing about sex lies in thinking the sexy thing is the black silk stocking; what’s really sexy is the dirty white sock.

DL Not for me. I know writers for whom dialogue’s a nightmare. Dialogue too is very easy for me. But descriptive writing’s the hardest—particularly descriptions of nature and landscape. I don’t have that natural knack for it that Forster had. Whenever I describe landscape, I find I always slow down. It becomes a bit labored. Also, descriptions of people’s physical appearance often aren’t easy. They can be—Eric in “The Term-Paper Artist” was very easy to describe because I imagined him so fully—the thick, stupid lips and so on. In my early work—the stories in the New Yorker—my editor would say: “You forgot to say what she looks like.”

RC In terms of characterization, do you feel there’s an inappropriate pressure on gay writers to prioritize the sexual; to insist on the centrality of sex, sexuality, and sexual expression to character?

DL Yes, but once again that’s subject matter. Subject matter, I think, ultimately is the least important aspect of literature. I find criticism centered on subject matter often seems to miss the point. Also, I think some of my books have been very focused on sexual identity as a subject: Lost Language of Cranes preeminently, and some stories. Others haven’t. The Page Turner’s a love story in which the protagonists are gay, but I don’t see sexual identity as particularly relevant to that novel, with the exception of the scene where the mother meets Kennington.

RC In the preface to While England Sleeps, you wrote of your aim of producing a post-Stonewall account of an earlier period; implicitly, one which can be more overtly interested in questions of sexual identity than books written in the thirties. The Page Turner though, one can think of in a contrasting way. I compared it to the Victorian erotic novel Teleny; it seemed like a version of that, with the explicit sex taken out. Both works feature the representation of sexuality through music, for instance: there’s that obsessive passage in Teleny relating to watching a pianist touch his keyboard.

DL In terms of The Page Turner, my own jury’s still out. I don’t know whether it’s a good book. I’ve very mixed feelings about it. I read it over recently and really enjoyed it. I thought it was a readable, pleasurable book. But I don’t think I’ll ever think of it as one of my most important. It was a very tormented book to write, but if I compare it to the book I’m writing now, I think that book’s a thousand times better. The Page Turner’s a small, quiet novel. I think it’s quite successful in those terms. But I don’t see it as a work of great importance. It was a transitional novel—something I had to do to get on to what I’m writing now. It’s called Martin Baumann, which is the name of the hero.

RC You’ve dashed my hopes by not having had Teleny in mind when writing The Page Turner.

DL Well, I very much could have, subconsciously. I was writing that book all during the period Mark and I were doing Pages Passed from Hand to Hand. Teleny was very much on our minds. Mark wrote the introduction to it in the book. He was fascinated by the way Teleny literalized that old cliché of “musical” meaning “gay.” He’s just finishing a book on virtuosity, in which there’s a long analysis of Teleny as an example of the virtuoso as sexual virtuoso, one of various ideas about piano virtuoso Mark wants to write about. I find Teleny fascinating.

RC You’ve always displayed a keen interest in unearthing the architecture of past gay lives, While England Sleeps being perhaps the most distinct example. With The Page Turner, I felt that, in writing about the present, you’d chosen a slightly unusual context—the rarified, conservative, slightly anachronistic world of classical music. There’s only music and maybe the world of antiques that still offer this particular, highly aestheticized and still sublimated or indirect homosexuality.

DL Yes. What fascinated me about it was the exploitative edge. This happens in the world of literature too, but much more on the surface; much more blatant. The blatancy’s one thing that freaks me out.

You’re right; antique hunting is the other world—and interior design, where there’s this old-fashioned idea of taking a younger man under your wing. Of course it’s not Kennington, finally, but Mansourian who does that in The Page Turner. It’s this idea of a network; of passing boys back and forth. That I think is very true. What I think makes the novel have more than that is the fact that Paul is so arrogant and idealistic. He’s not one of the cynical young men who’s perfectly willing to do this. He just finds himself in the situation where, suddenly, instead of what he expected—this romantic idea of a great love—he finds himself propositioned by an older man in exchange for tickets to the Berlin Philharmonic.

RC I want to ask you about working method. You revealed that you already had the last line of the novel-in-progress established. Could you talk a little about the importance of knowing that to your sense of the book’s structure as a whole?

DL My friend Amy Hempel always begins with the last line. She says it gives her something to work toward. Almost always I begin with the last line too, but not always.

RC Is it a confidence trick; something that allows you latitude in the middle section while affording some sense of security about the novel as a whole?

DL Yes. The last line of The Page Turner was sort of its beginning, too: “as if a moment could be lived so hard it bruised.” Exactly what that moment would be wasn’t clear to me. Initially, The Page Turner was set at the end of the nineteenth century. It was going to be about a young man on a Grand Tour’s painting of the Tuscan sky in this purple color “as if a moment could be lived so hard it bruised.” It went through all these incarnations before it finally occurred to me that that was the ending. I desperately wanted the book to have a happy ending, but I realized there wasn’t one for Paul and Kennington, so I gave it to two minor characters, Bobby and Teddy, whom I adore.

Likewise with some of my stories I’ve begun with the last line; “A Place I’ve Never Been,” for example. With the three Arkansas novellas I didn’t. In fact, the last line of “Saturn Street”—probably my favorite ending among anything I’ve ever written—came about miraculously: “‘Anywhere’s always been my favorite place.’”

The novel I’m writing now is very autobiographical. It clearly had to end with the narrator at a low ebb, realizing he’s gone completely in the wrong direction and that he has no choice but to try to start again; probably to leave America. The novel begins in 1980 and ends on New Year’s Eve 1990. It’s clear that the last line will be: “And then I went off to try to learn how to be serious.” The character has just been told by his teacher that his great mistake as a writer has been that he’s never been adequately serious. That’s why his career, which began at a high ebb, has sort of fallen apart. Mine hasn’t, but in the novel it has. I’m not writing about what happened with While England Sleeps, but psychologically that’s the moment where the book’s going to end.

RC What do you have other than the last line? This book may be differently structured if it’s closely autobiographical.

DL Sometimes I have a very clear arc; others not. It’s always different. I usually begin with the donnée; what James called “the air-blown grain”: some little nugget of story. With The Page Turner it was this idea of a mother, her son, and a man, and the idea that the mother mistakes the man’s intentions and thinks they’re for her, not her son. It was originally called Citizen of the World and set in the English community in Florence around the turn of the century. The Kennington figure was a kind of exile from a British sex scandal. But I never got anywhere with that. I wrote eighty pages that are going to be part of my archive at Yale.

Then there was the second donnée, which came from going to a lot of concerts with Mark and seeing a page turner, a young woman in an Angora sweater with big tits, page-turning for some very heterosexual pianist. Every time she reached over to turn the page, these tits were in his face. I thought: “God, that must be very distracting.” She was very sexy and clearly dressed to allure. You don’t wear a sweater cut down to here, then lean over, which you have to do . . . I thought: “This is such a potentially erotic situation—a page turner and a pianist.”

RC That’s the erotic angle. There’s also an analogy in the literary world: the idea of the literary “page turner”—the editor or proof editor of others’ work; once again, someone at a very frustrating remove from creativity.

DL I see the closest literary analogy as the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. It’s this horrible, big, money-making conference which takes place every summer in Vermont. Amy Hempel calls it “Club Bread.” They’ve an extremely complex system whereby you go on all these different levels. It’s an amazing meritocracy. At the very top are the really famous writers who’re treated like gods, like E. L. Doctorow. There are two other levels for writers there to teach. They eat in different dining rooms. For the students who apply, on the lowest level you pay; on the next, you have to work as a waiter. You’re still a student, but you don’t have to pay. The next level has the full scholarships: they don’t have to pay or work as waiters. Can you imagine being an aspiring writer, and working as a waiter, bringing food to E. L. Doctorow? It’s horrifying! A lot of these male writers go there because they know they can get laid. Pretty girls who’re aspiring writers say: “Oh Mr. Whatever—I admire your work so much.” “Why don’t you meet me for a drink after?” So this is very similar to The Page Turner, except that Kennington’s a decent guy. He’s not out to exploit Paul.

DL He’s not cynical. He’s still longing for that early love he never had because he got hooked up so early on with a much older man. That was the other thing I wanted to explore. I’ve always been fascinated by age-divergent relationships. I’ve never been in one, but I’ve always had a little bit of a “daddy” complex. I’ve always had fantasies about one. In me as a young man, there was this great divergence between my sexual fantasies and my romantic ones. My romantic fantasies were always about finding a peer; my sexual fantasies were always about finding a dominating older man. Because I was eighteen, by “older” I meant a thirty-year-old!

RC Haven’t you used a similar disparity in Equal Affections? A character talks about the recurring problem of wanting someone to strip off but not respecting him.

DL I think that disparity’s very common. It makes sense to me. The person about whom you have the most intense fantasies isn’t necessarily the person with whom you want to spend your life, because in choosing a partner you’re choosing somebody you’re with all the time. That’s very different than sex. Sex is part of it, but I think most people—heterosexuals as well—don’t end up marrying the people to whom they’re most intensely attracted—almost without exception.

RC A similar divergence is the source for the many narratives about adultery you’ve written.

DL Exactly. I’ve gone through so many ideas about this whole question in my own life: the fact that it seems so normal in gay relationships to be open and have sex outside the relationship. I’ve ended up being extremely conservative and monogamous because in my case I don’t think a relationship could withstand the pressure of too much extracurricular activity.

RC I was thinking of “Houses,” where Ted tells Paul: “You can’t love two people.” Paul tells himself: “It’s possible in the heart but not in the world.” That’s a comment born of ethical concerns. Do you think of yourself as a writer who is interested in ethics?

DL I certainly believe I am. The thing I’m struck by is that without exception, almost all the male writers I know are just such out-of-control whores—gay and straight! The straight ones I know get away from their wives and just instantly want to get laid. With the gay writers, it’s much more overt. I do think there’s this obsessive-compulsive element to most gay men’s pursuit of sex. Edmund has written brilliantly about how the great preoccupation in the seventies was the feeling that everyone else was getting more sex.

RC There’s a searing honesty to his writing on sex, which falls short of disavowal. Nevertheless in reading it, you can only see things going horrifically wrong.

DL Yes. It also allows him to write about it with immense humor, which is what makes The Farewell Symphony, for all its flaws, immensely readable. The flaws, I think, have to do with the moments it ceases being a novel and becomes a not-very-interesting autobiography. He should have left some stuff out.

But sex is ultimately so much about obsession. Obsession’s what makes sex interesting. It’s also what makes life fatiguing. As my therapist once put it, at a certain point—when you can give up your fantasies and give up being obsessive about sex—suddenly there’s so much more time for other things. Also, life’s suddenly so much more peaceful.

DL Yes . . . though most male writers I know are just shameless. They get away from their wives for three seconds and they’re looking for nookie. I was just at the Harbourfront Conference in Toronto with Colm Tóibín, who’s openly gay, but it’s only one of many issues for him. We were probably the two most virginal people at that entire conference. It was so funny: here were these two gay men not doing anything. All the straight guys there were desperately looking for sex.

DL It always changes. I never write longhand. I always write on computer, which I find an immensely helpful tool. It means I can experiment; I can play around. I can look at sentences five different ways and decide which is best. I think it’s essential, though, to read material over in hard copy, because it looks totally different on the page than on the screen. I can’t explain why, but a sentence that looks good on the screen can read horribly on paper. I’ve talked to other writers about this and they all agree.

RC Can’t the neatness of the printout also pose a danger—it looks great; why change it?

DL No, because I mark it up. It doesn’t look professional once you start going through it. You see how bad certain sentences are.

DL Thousands. There’s a constant process of printing out, reading over, marking up, then going back to the computer. I generate huge amounts of paper. I have to print out all the time. I’m also constantly saving older versions of things, so I’ll have all these files: “MB” is for Martin Baumann, so: “MB 1”; “MB 1—old version”; “MB 1—older version.” I want to save them in case I want to go back to something. I always have a file called “Bits and Pieces.” That’s where I put things I cut out that I might want to use later, though I almost never do.

I’ve never written in longhand. I think and type faster than I write, so it’s much more sensible.

DL These days, in the mornings. Other times, in the afternoons, but never at night. I don’t write well at night. I’m an “early to bed, early to rise” person. Mark and I are usually in bed by ten and up by seven. I need a lot of sleep. I like to sleep nine or ten hours’ sleep per night if I can. Now we’re in the country, there’s not really anything to do at night, so we read, play with the dog, talk. I think once I’m settled in the country, I want to be on a schedule where I write early in the morning; where I get going at eight and work until noon, maybe. I don’t assign myself a schedule because I know there are going to be days when I write more and days when I write less.

RC Your new rural setting makes me think of the preface to Pages Passed from Hand to Hand. There’s a slightly nervous concession in it to the importance of the urban among gay men. At the same time, there’s the peculiar recognition that you’ve recently moved from the city to the country. There’s a sense of personal reclamation suggested in that.

DL Very much so. We became obsessed with the “greenwood.” It’s such a recurrent theme in gay literature before 1914; in fact it’s the theme.

RC The pastoral context was the only one in which gay desires could be played out, historically.

DL Yes. It was very much after 1914 that you start to see this reversal; where the city is the place where the young gay man finds freedom. The ultimate example of that, I think, is The Seraglio by James Merrill—and, of course, Willa Cather. Forster’s comment in the “Terminal Note” to Maurice was that he felt he was writing about an age in which it was still possible to disappear. But he felt at the time of writing the note it no longer was. I don’t think it’s possible to disappear, but I’m a great believer myself in the advantages of rural life. I’ve lived in cities, but I’ve never really felt like an urban person; that it was my context. It’s curious. There’s a real phenomenon of writers who can afford it moving out of the city now: Allan Gurganus; Jeanette Winterson, who’s off in the boondocks somewhere. Now she says she’s just bought a house in London. But having a house in London and a house in the country doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t want to go back and forth at this point. I don’t want a split life. I like visiting cities, but what makes the visits possible is the knowledge that I still have my house awaiting me.

RC To return to the idea of the donnée or inspiration for your work: you write stories, novellas, and novels. Is it easy to see whether you’re being given one as opposed to another?

DL Usually. The only exception was “The Wooden Anniversary.” It began a novel and became a novella. The donnée there was the cooking school, and the battle over the Italian between Nathan and Celia.

DL Not necessarily. I’ve written another short story, which hasn’t been published yet. I intend to write more stories. I have ideas for them, and a contract to write another book of them. Whether my novels will grow longer, I don’t know. For me the more relevant question’s that of moving toward my own life as a source for the fiction. I wrote While England Sleeps because I felt I’d exhausted my own experience as a place to go in looking for stories. I’ve written so much that derives obliquely from my own experience that I wanted to go into something completely unrelated. But While England Sleeps, curiously enough, ended up from a psychological standpoint being very autobiographical. At that point all my best writer friends were feeling the same thing: the need to get away from their own experience. Now I feel quite the opposite; I feel the need to delve back into it. Aspects of my life that I never thought worthy of writing about I suddenly see as eminently worthy. I used to have a great fear of the literary novel, for instance—the book set in the world of writers. There was a great prejudice against it that Cynthia Ozick articulated in a story called “Levitation.” The couple in it talk about the “forbidden thing,” which is to write about writers—more specifically, to write about writers in New York, which she calls the “forbidden city.” It suddenly occurred to me that, just as sex seemed valid a subject for fiction, why not write about the literary world, so long as you write about it somewhat from a point of view away from it. Anything that’s too much “insider” alienates readers. You have to assume the position of someone exploring the world as if he weren’t part of it.

DL It’s a very fantastical novel. It’s also historical. It’s set specifically in the New York literary world of the early eighties, which is history to me. It describes the literary “brat pack,” so called, in very fantastical terms. I’m going to have these two opposing gay “mentor” writers, who couldn’t be more different, fighting for the soul of the writer. The writer is trying to decide between, on the one hand, the “good man”; on the other, the “good artist.”

DL Exactly. One mentor is a literary man; the other is not an aesthete or a great writer.

RC There’s a paradox to this: in this interview, you have positioned yourself clearly within the aesthetic camp; for the novel you presumably have to see the virtues of the other camp.

1. See Leavitt’s “Introduction” to David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell, eds., Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories, xv–xxviii, xvi–xx.

2. Leavitt, “The Wooden Anniversary,” in Arkansas, 75–132 (quotation from 109).

3. Reed Woodhouse, originally in an article, “Five Houses of Gay Fiction,” for the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review; subsequently in his Unlimited Embrace: A Canon of Gay Fiction, 1945–1995 (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 139–55.

4. Ouida (1839–1908) was the pseudonym of Marie Louise de la Ramée, a Romantic novelist of Anglo-French origin.