TELLING A WHOPPER

By Paul Gray

"I was in trouble," writes a fictional narrator named David Leavitt at the beginning of The Term Paper Artist, the first of three novellas contained in the real David Leavitt's new book, Arkansas (Houghton Mifflin; 198 pages; $23). Sure enough, in a vertiginous display of life imitating art imitating life, those words, plus some sexually explicit terms that follow, got the real Leavitt in trouble all over again. Edward Kosner, editor in chief of Esquire, abruptly canceled the scheduled appearance of The Term Paper Artist in the April issue, causing the magazine's fiction editor to resign in high dudgeon and fueling literary gossip for weeks.

Why did Esquire kill Leavitt's story? Kosner has insisted that the decision was simply a matter of editorial judgment (or rejudgment, since the magazine purchased rights to print The Term Paper Artist last fall). Other sources, including Will Blythe, the fiction editor who quit, charge that the story was yanked because publisher Valerie Salembier feared its explicit homosexual content, including a proposed man-to-man tryst in the back of a Jeep, would offend advertisers, particularly of automobiles. Through her representatives at the magazine, Salembier has denied saying any such thing.

From his vantage point in Rome, where he has lived for two years, Leavitt views the Esquire flap with a mixture of irritation and bemusement. "I wish the story had been published," he says, sipping a cup of cappuccino at a Neapolitan cafe near the Chamber of Deputies. "I think it would have gotten a lot of attention as a story, and not as a news story." He doubts that any automobile ads would have been pulled from the magazine if his story had appeared in its pages. "Do you know how many gay men own Jeeps?"

He admits that The Term Paper Artist is provocative, but asks, "What's the point of writing if you don't provoke people?" Leavitt, 35, has won considerable renown and notoriety doing just that. His first collection of stories, Family Dancing (1984), and first novel, The Lost Language of Cranes (1987), were praised for their artful and frank treatment of gay characters and themes. But his ascending career hit a wall with the appearance of While England Sleeps (1993). Leavitt's novel included embroidered scenes from British poet Stephen Spender's 1951 memoir of the Spanish Civil War, World Within World, and Spender was outraged. Claiming incidents from his life had been plagiarized and rendered "pornographic" as well, the poet sued, and Leavitt's novel was removed from sale in Britain and the U.S. A revised version, answering legal objections, was published in 1995.

This controversy provides the impetus for the surreal plot of The Term Paper Artist. In the novella, the character named David Leavitt, distraught over the suppression of his novel and suffering from writer's block as a result, hides out at his father's house in Los Angeles and does halfhearted research at the UCLA library for a novel he's pretty sure he will never write. By chance he meets Eric, an attractive undergraduate, who invites him to his apartment to share some marijuana. Hoping for sex, Leavitt learns that the seductive Eric has a more complex transaction in mind: sex there will be, once the author has ghostwritten Eric's English term paper, and once that term paper has earned Eric an A. "I've got something you want," Eric says. "You've got something I need."

"Simple as that," the Leavitt character notes, "I became an industry," turning out term papers for seven college boys who hear of his service--and his terms--and seek him out anyway. His last client is a devout Mormon named Ben, who is so desperate for a good grade that will get him into law school that he is "willing to do things I'll be ashamed of for the rest of my life." Leavitt perks up at that "things." Ben believes both the cheating and the required method of payment are sins. "After all," Leavitt muses, "none of the other boys for whom I'd written papers had ever expressed the slightest scruple about passing off my work as their own."

The other two novellas in Arkansas, The Wooden Anniversary and Saturn Street, are perfectly fine, filled with interesting characters and mordant wit. But The Term Paper Artist is spectacularly effective fiction, an oblique and very funny commentary on Leavitt's real-life travails. Having been accused of plagiarism, he spins out a story in which he happily abets plagiarists.

"Writers often disguise their lives as fiction," Leavitt tells Ben near the end of the novella. "The thing they almost never do is disguise fiction as their lives." This is not quite true. Paul Theroux offered an invented autobiography last year in My Other Life, and Philip Roth did much the same in 1993 in Operation Shylock. The Term Paper Artist is as playful as those works and every bit as good.

--With reporting by Greg Burke/Rome

With reporting by GREG BURKE/ROME