Novelist David Leavitt.

DATE September 25, 2000 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: David Leavitt discusses his literary style
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

David Leavitt knows about the problems a writer can run into when his
fiction
is based on his life, and friends and family feel their secrets have been
betrayed. It's something the main character in Leavitt's new novel learns,
too. The novel is called "Martin Bauman; or, A Sure Thing." It's about a
young writer trying to break into print, while supporting himself at a
publishing house where he's assigned to read through the slush pile. He's
also trying to figure out how to come out of the closet.

David Leavitt's first book, "Family Dancing," a collection of short
stories, was published in 1984, when he was 23. And it was a finalist for
the
National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner prize. Now with
several books and a couple of major writing controversies under his belt,
Leavitt's a professor guiding young writers.

Leavitt's new novel begins when the main character, Martin Bauman, is in
college taking Professor Stanley Flint's famous seminar, The Art of Writing
Fiction. Flint is a professor who cultivates an aura of mystic authority.
Here's a short reading.

Professor DAVID LEAVITT: `Flint's seminar, to say the least, had a
different
rhythm. It worked like this: At the beginning of each session, a student
would be asked to read aloud from his or her work. The student would then
read one sentence. If Flint liked the sentence, the student would be
allowed
to continue. If he did not, however--and this was much more common--the
student will be cut off, shut up, sent to the corner. A torrent of
eloquence
would follow, the ineffectuality of this slight undergraduate effort
providing
an occasion for Flint to hold forth dazzlingly, and about anything at all.
His most common complaint was that the sentence amounted to baby talk or
throat clearing, this latter accusation almost invariably followed by the
invocation, "Remember Flint's first principle." And from us, the
responsorial
chant, "Get on with it."'

`Soon we understood that Flint loathed boyfriend stories, stories in which
the
protagonist was a writer, stories set in restaurants or cocktail lounges.
To
cocktail lounges, he showed a particular aversion. Any story set in a
cocktail lounge would provoke from him a wail of lamentation delivered in a
voice both stentorian and grave; a sermonizer's voice. For the truth was,
there was something deeply ministerial about Flint.'

`Meanwhile, the student whose timid words had provoked this outpouring would
have no choice but to sit and percolate, humiliated, occasionally letting
out
little gasps of self-defense, which Flint would immediately quash. An
atmosphere of hyperventilation ensued, the windows steamed. Those Flint had
maligned stared at him, choking on the sentences in which, a moment earlier,
they had taken such pride and which he was now shoving back down their
throats.'

`Yet when, on occasion, he did like a sentence or, even more rarely, when he
allowed a student to move from the first sentence to the second or from the
second to the third, it was as if a window had been thrown open, emitting a
breath of air into the churning humidity of that room, and yet, a breath
that
would cool the face of the chosen student only, bathing him or her in the
delightful breeze of laudation, while outside its influence, the rest of us
sweltered, wiping our noses, mopping our brows.'

GROSS: That's David Leavitt reading from his new novel, "Martin Bauman; or,
A Sure Thing."

A lot of people figure that the teacher in this novel is based on Gordon
Lish, the writer, editor and teacher who...

Prof. LEAVITT: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: ...was one of your teachers at Yale.

Prof. LEAVITT: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

GROSS: Is he one of the models?

Prof. LEAVITT: He's certainly part of the equation.

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

Prof. LEAVITT: But as I was working on the book--and I think this often
happens with fiction. Even if you start off with a real live model, the
character diverges from that model to the point that you start to forget
what's real and what's made up.

GROSS: Yeah. We--assuming that you had someone--Gordon Lish or someone
else in your life...

Prof. LEAVITT: Yeah.

GROSS: ... who had, as you described, an aura of mystic authority...

Prof. LEAVITT: Uh-huh.

GROSS: I wonder what impact that had on you as, you know, a young, growing
writer. You know, I could see how you'd really become a praise junkie in a
situation like that, where criticism was the equivalent of humiliation,
'cause
you weren't allowed to read any further if he didn't like the first
sentence.

Prof. LEAVITT: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: And praise was, you know, elevated to, like, bowing before you in
praise. I don't know. It could really turn you into a manic depressive or
a
praise junkie.

Prof. LEAVITT: Oh, I love that term `praise junkie.' I've never heard that
before. But I think it's perfect. The thing about me and to a great degree
about Martin Bauman, who is sort of my alter ego in this book, is that I
think I was a praise junkie long before I ever started taking writing
classes. That was something that was really endemic to my character from
very early on. But certainly, my--the habit of being a praise junkie
probably
meant that I was particularly attracted to teachers of this sort, which, I
think, a lot of people are, because a teacher like this really makes you
feel
that his or her praise means something.

At the same time, I have to applaud the kind of teacher that Stanley Flint
is
for instilling in his students an extremely high standard and making them
feel
that they're always striving to achieve that standard and that once they've
achieved it, the bar goes higher. So there's always something more to
achieve. And I think that that's very healthy for a writer. When you
become
too complacent or to sure of yourself, it seems to me, your writing usually
suffers, whereas if you're constantly trying to do something that you feel
you
can't do, your writing grows.

GROSS: If you have this strength to withstand that kind of criticism...

Prof. LEAVITT: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: ...which not everybody does--did you?

Prof. LEAVITT: Oh, yes. I'm pretty tough. I'm very thick-skinned when it
comes to criticism. I mean--which doesn't mean that it doesn't...

GROSS: But how can you be so crit--how can you be so thick-skinned and a
praise junkie at the same time?

Prof. LEAVITT: Well, let's put it this way. I've always been a praise
junkie, but I have become thick-skinned over the years because I've had to.
Martin is not only a praise junkie, he's also avidly in love with the idea
of
being a writer. And he does have very high standards for himself. And he
does want to be the best writer he can be. And that, in a funny way,
militates against the praise junkie in him.

There's a point in the book in which I talk about this. And I discuss about
how--the fact that in every writer, there are, really, two beings. On the
one hand, there's the artist who works in isolation. And on the other hand,
there is the professional, who is both his enabler, but at the same time,
his
enemy because what the professional has to do goes against the very nature
of
what the writer has to do. And yet, the two need each other, even though
they're constantly in conflict.

GROSS: How are they at odds?

Prof. LEAVITT: They're at odds because writing is such a deeply private
process. You sit alone in a room and create, and you dig things out of very
private parts of yourself; parts of yourself that in an ordinary situation
you
would never have to expose. Writing fiction is a process of
self-excavation,
to a great degree. Well, then when you publish a book, you're suddenly
taken
out of this situation of an almost artificial privacy and thrust into
exactly
the opposite situation. You're suddenly in the public limelight. And even
though you can tell yourself a thousand times, `It isn't me. It's the
book,'
at the same time, the book comes out of you. And so you naturally feel a
very
personal sense of identification with it.

And that's something that's always fascinated me. Writers have to be, at
the
same time, the most private people in the world and the most public people

in
the world, especially living as we do in an age where in order to be a
writer,
you do need to do publicity, you do need to give interviews.

GROSS: You've got to do interviews like this, yeah.

Prof. LEAVITT: Yeah, well, this interview is a pleasure, believe me,
compared
to some. But the--that's--you know, those are--when you think about it,
those are very opposing impulses. And it's tricky to manage to be both
those
people at the same time, especially because there's something about the
process of having to sell yourself--which every writer, obviously, has to
do--that goes very much against the grain of writing from an artistic
impulse.

GROSS: I want to go back to the teacher in your novel...

Prof. LEAVITT: Yeah.

GROSS: ...Stanley Flint. He's somebody who's full of, like, principles
that
young writers should follow and everything.

Prof. LEAVITT: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: And his second principle is to perceive something one had gone
through as particular or special was to commit not merely an error but a sin
against art. He wanted writers to articulate the commonality that binds us
all.

Prof. LEAVITT: Yes.

GROSS: Talk to us more about this principle and whether you agree with it
or
not; whether you think it's good advice.

Prof. LEAVITT: Well, you know, I'm not really one...

GROSS: Given to having principles.

Prof. LEAVITT: Well, no. I mean, I have principles, but I'm not very
pronouncey...

GROSS: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what I meant. Yeah.

Prof. LEAVITT: ...by comparison to Stanley Flint. However, I do think it
is
true, particularly in the age we're living in now, that writers need to
remember that fiction is about making an experience accessible to someone
who
hasn't had it necessarily. And since we're living in an age where if you go
into a bookstore, you'll see literature or fiction subdivided by all kinds
of
ethnic and sexual divisions. I--for example, a Border's I was in
recently, where I found that my books were under gay and lesbian literature,
but not under just literature. And then there was another section for black
literature. And I noticed that Toni Morrison was there, but she wasn't
under literature. When you're in a world which is so inclined to
compartmentalize, I think it's very important to remember that the whole
point
of literature is to move beyond the particulars. The particulars are
important, but so is the common ground that underlies them.

GROSS: My guest is novelist David Leavitt. His new novel is called "Martin
Bauman; or, A Sure Thing." We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH
AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: David Leavitt is my guest, and his new novel is called "Martin
Bauman;
or, A Sure Thing."

Another bit of criticism that the teacher in this novel passes on to the
student, your alter ego, is this. And this is about a story that the
teacher
has read of the students. `The trouble was it read like a public service
announcement. Also, you write as if homosexuality itself was interesting.
It's not interesting. All that's interesting is individual experience.'
What does the teacher mean here, and what do you think of the advice?

Prof. LEAVITT: Good advice. Good advice. I would give it to a student. I
think what the teacher means is that for fiction to come alive, for fiction
to really mean something to a reader, it has to describe lived experience,
lived human experience. And one of the problems, I think, with a lot of
so-called gay fiction, particularly in the late '70s and early '80s, was
that
there lay behind it a kind of propagandistic impulse or a political impulse;
the impulse being to some how further a cause, to make--the cause being or
the purpose being to make the lives of homosexuals more publicly known or to
portray homosexual men, particularly, in a more positive light, which was a
noble idea, but one that runs completely contrary to the essence of fiction,
which, again, is always about individual experience.

And when I look at my literary heroes and heroines, the writers I admire the
most, what distinguishes them is the degree to which they seem to move
beyond
both genre and propaganda. If you look at a novel like "Howard's End" by
E.M.
Forster, which is one of my favorite novels, there's a deeply political and
somewhat subversive subtext to that novel that has to do with the
destruction
of a certain way of life by technology. And yet on another level, this is
simply a story about the lives of human beings who interact and whose
motives
clash. And the novel works very well on both levels. You have to have both
levels, though. Otherwise you'll have what is more like a board game with
the
characters functioning as pieces in a kind of plot that has a moral or
political purpose. And that's not fiction; that's propaganda.

GROSS: Do you feel like you ever, particularly early in your career, wrote
fiction that was more like a public service announcement than it was like
good
literature?

Prof. LEAVITT: It's hard for me to say. Probably, I would say no, to the
degree that I'm able to judge my early work. I was more interested when I
was younger in the idea of--for example, homosexuality as not only an
integral part of someone's identity, but in some ways as, necessarily, the
primary part of someone's identity. I'm less interested now in--I guess
I've been very influenced by reading recently a biography of Kinsey. And
I'm more and more looking at sexuality as a very individual matter and
thinking that it's much more interesting, if you're even going to write
about
human sexuality, to write about people one by one, rather than assuming that
all men who call themselves gay, for example, have an enormous amount in
common, even sexually. They don't, necessarily.

GROSS: Well, this leads to something that your character says in your new
novel. He says, `I've long believed that one can deduce more about a man's
character from the attitudes he brings to sex than any other mode of

interaction.'

Prof. LEAVITT: Mm-hmm. That is an observation that I've also long held.
The sexual arena is one in which a lot of other aspects of our lives end up
being played out. A friend of mine who's a psychiatrist once said to me,
`Everything's about sex except sex, which is about aggression.'

GROSS: Yeah.

Prof. LEAVITT: And I'm not necessarily sure that I would sum it up quite so
neatly. But I do think that sex is about all kinds of things other than
sex,
and that the way people interact sexually can be very revealing of the
way--of their character and other parts of their lives, other facets of
their
lives. You know, that's something that I do believe very strongly. What,
to
me, makes writing about sex valid and interesting is if sex is used as a
sort
of a vehicle to talk about a relationship or to talk about personalities
rather than simply being presented for its own sake. And I think that is,
for me--what distinguishes pornography from non-pornography is if the motive
is merely to excite as opposed to expose or reveal aspects of human
character.

GROSS: Do you have a favorite literary sex scene that you think is
wonderful
at really getting to character through sex?

Prof. LEAVITT: Well, OK. I can think of two. In "Lolita," the first time
that Humbert Humbert makes love to Lolita after he's more or less
kidnapped her and they're staying in that sort of dreadful country hotel,
which is a--I wish I had the book in front of me because then I can describe
it in more detail. But I think that that's a wonderful example of the way
in
which psychology is revealed magnificently through a description of what is,
basically, a pretty unsuccessful sexual encounter.

Another scene that I would mention is in Alan Hollinghurst's novel "The
Folding Star." A quite amazing scene in which the hero is watching through
a
pair of binoculars a sunbathing boy with whom he's besotted, while
simultaneously being made love to by a very lewd friend of his, who is
somehow
aroused by the idea of having sex with him while he's simultaneously--while
he's longing for another--for someone else. I don't know how explicit I'm
allowed to get.

GROSS: Well, that's odd. But what does it say to you about the characters?

Prof. LEAVITT: Well, I think it's a wonderful scene because it shows a lot
about the way in which desire can be misdirected or directed in--the fact
that in a lot of sexual episodes, the desire isn't necessarily directed from
one person to the other. And this is something that, in this scene, the
characters are willing to admit and actually revel in, rather than fight
against and hide.

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

Prof. LEAVITT: And in the example I gave from "Lolita," there's no better
example I can think of in literature of the degree to which all sorts of
extra
sexual factors end up being played out sexually. So much has preceded that
scene in "Lolita"--the death of Lolita's mother, Humbert Humbert's, you
know--well, Delores Haze's attempts to seduce Humbert Humbert, his
percolating
desire for Lolita. And yet when it finally comes to pass, when the act
finally takes place, it's almost overburdened by how much it means. And it,
therefore, collapses under the weight of meaning that Humbert Humbert has
piled upon it. And I think that's beautifully, beautifully executed. And
it's one of the reasons why Nabokov is probably, I would say in the long
run,
my favorite writer on sex.

GROSS: The writer in your novel works for a publishing house, and his job
is
to read through the slush pile. And one of the editors there has a list on
her bulletin board of sentences you shouldn't bother reading beyond.

Prof. LEAVITT: Uh-huh.

GROSS: Titles you shouldn't bother reading beyond.

Prof. LEAVITT: Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

GROSS: And words that you shouldn't bother being--reading beyond.

Prof. LEAVITT: Uh-huh.

GROSS: And the word that--you know, one of the words you shouldn't bother
reading beyond is `myriad.' Now I was thrilled that you chose this word.
And--no, let me explain why. When I was in a creative writing class in
junior high school, I got into the class several weeks into the semester.
And I thought, `Oh, God, everybody else in this class is so talented. And,
you know, what do I know?' And one of the students were--was reading a
composition. And it had the world `myriad'--it even had the word `plethora'
in it. And I didn't know what either of these words meant. And, boy, was I
impressed. And I was thinking, `These guys are really creative. These guys
can really write.' And I've since come to think of those words as usually
used in a real showy, pointless way.

Prof. LEAVITT: Exactly.

GROSS: They're real clunkers.

Prof. LEAVITT: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: So I'm just curious. Of all the words in the world, why did you use
`myriad' as that never-use-it kind of word?

Prof. LEAVITT: Well, I have to admit, I didn't know an editor who had a
list
like this, and the word was `myriad'--the word never to read beyond. And I
was quite charmed by that because it did seem to me such a perfect choice.
It's a quite--how else to put it--it's a pretentious word. It's a way of
saying something simple and making it unnecessarily complex. And now that I
say that, I suddenly fear that I may have done the same thing. But this
is--I
tell you, one of the humorous aspects of teaching is that you tell your
students, `Never do this, never do this.' And then if you happen to go on a
book tour in the middle of the semester and you're reading aloud from your
own book, you discover that you've done all the things you've been urging
your
students not to do.

GROSS: Can you think of an example of that?

Prof. LEAVITT: You know, we were talking about adverbs.

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

Prof. LEAVITT: And I said it's often unnecessary--that adverbs ought to be
cut whenever possible, because usually, they weren't necessary. And the
example I gave was, `He banged his fist angrily against the table.' I said,

you know, if he's banging his fist against the table, it's probably fairly
clear to the reader that he's doing it angrily. You don't really need
`angrily.' Well, I went to Atlanta last week, and I was giving a reading
from "Martin Bauman." I didn't come upon that exact sentence, but I came
upon the same kind of sentence. That is, an instance in which there was an
adverb that really was completely unnecessary. And I thought, `Oh, darn.
Why
didn't I cut that out before I published the book?'

GROSS: David Leavitt. His new novel is called "Martin Bauman; or, A Sure
Thing." He'll be back in the second half of the show. I'm Terry Gross, and
this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Coming up, coming out--more with novelist David Leavitt. He and the
main character in his new novel came out to their parents at the same time
they published a gay-themed short story.

And we'll remember the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, who often wrote about
war
and love. He died Friday at the age of 76. We'll listen back to a 1991
interview.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Back with writer David Leavitt. His new novel is called "Martin Bauman, or
A
Sure Thing." It's about writing and publishing as seen through the eyes of
a
young gay writer and his celebrated writing teacher.

Now in your novel, your character publishes his first story in a magazine,
and
that first story is about him coming out to his parents. And he imagines
himself saying to his parents, `Mom, Dad, guess what? I'm coming out in the
magazine.' Now the first story you published in The New Yorker was a story
about a gay character.

Mr. LEAVITT: Yes. Yes.

GROSS: Did your parents already know you were gay, or was that...

Mr. LEAVITT: No. No.

GROSS: ...part of your coming out?

Mr. LEAVITT: All that happened more or less exactly as it happens to Martin
in the book; it was the sort of double whammy. And we were talking earlier
about David being a praise junkie. In some ways, I think I hoped to temper
what I feared they would perceive as a piece of disappointing news by
offering
it in tandem with a piece of news that they couldn't help but be excited by,
which was that I was publishing a story in The New Yorker. And that seemed
to
me a strategy that is probably very typical for young gay men and lesbians
to
try to achieve in order to compensate for what they fear will be a great
disappointment to their parents.

GROSS: Let me just point out something about how you might have played your
cards wrong here, because you're basically saying, `Mom, Dad, I'm coming
out.
The good news is I'm getting published in the magazine, but the bad news is
now the whole world is going to know.'

Mr. LEAVITT: Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

GROSS: And it's probably like the last thing in the world they wanted the
whole world to know while they were first absorbing it.

Mr. LEAVITT: But in a funny way, it was necessary for me at that point to
tell the whole world and not merely to tell them. But you're right; I think
it came as a real shock, because it meant that something they might
otherwise
have boasted about to their friends became a lot more complex.

GROSS: Yeah.

Mr. LEAVITT: And this was all years ago. And now, you know, with my
father,
we laugh about this because it seems so much a part of the past, but at the
time, it was, you know, a big deal.

GROSS: So did they brag to friends that you were in The New Yorker or was
that something they tried not to talk about?

Mr. LEAVITT: Well, actually, this is yet another instance in which the
novel
digresses from--or diverges from reality. I had told them that I had a
story
coming out in The New Yorker long before I told them that I was gay. So
they
had already started boasting to their friends. Subsequently, I came home
and
told them what the story was about, and they had to sort of double back to
compensate or to sort of alert their friends to what was going on. And yet
that didn't seem to me--this is an example of how sometimes reality just
doesn't work in a novel. It can start--be the jumping-off point for the
novel, but it isn't necessarily--I don't know--the best way to handle
something in a novel.

GROSS: Oh, great. Now tell me why that wouldn't have worked in your novel
and how you changed it in the novel.

Mr. LEAVITT: Well, I'll tell you, I think it wouldn't have worked in the
novel because, even though it was true, I found it hard--I wasn't convinced
that readers would be persuaded that Martin's mother would never have asked
him what the story was about, which is what happened to me. I said, `Mom,
I'm
publishing a story in The New Yorker.' My mother never asked me what the
story was about. Now if I tell you that that really happened, you'll
believe
me, though you might, I would imagine, be surprised because what mother
isn't
going to ask that question, I would think.

And yet I felt that I couldn't get away with that in a novel because it
strained credibility too much. And so I reconfigured it so that Martin
wouldn't actually tell them that he had a story coming out in the magazine
until he also, at the same moment, told them that he was gay. The other
reason I did that was because I wanted to end the chapter with the line,
`Mom,
Dad, I'm coming out in the magazine.'

GROSS: Now did you expect, when this happened to you, that your mother
would
say, `What's it about?' and that would have been your opportunity to come
out?

Mr. LEAVITT: No, but that has to do with certain oddities of my family that
don't translate on to the page very well. I was talking to my students
about
the fact that sometimes what is incredibly funny read aloud or what's
incredibly funny when you hear it as a stand-up comic routine falls
completely
flat on the page. And by the same token, things that seem very funny on the
page aren't funny at all when you read them aloud.

And I think that that's true, that that principle can be extended to a lot
of
fiction. There are things that simply don't work on the page, and to get
into
the whole question of why my mother wouldn't have asked me what the story
was
about would have been, first of all, to introduce yet another complex
element
into a novel that was already growing rather complex. It would also have
been
to drag the novel away from what was its real central interest. And
finally,
it would have been to go into territory that simply wouldn't have been very
interesting from a fictional standpoint or from a narrative standpoint.

GROSS: So why do you think your mother didn't ask you?

Mr. LEAVITT: Because I think my mother probably, on some level, guessed...

GROSS: Ah, OK.

Mr. LEAVITT: ...and didn't want to know.

GROSS: Right.

Mr. LEAVITT: But that would have--putting that into the novel, now that I
think it would have involved a lot more speculation about her motives than I
wanted to engage in, in this case. I was trying very hard in this novel to
steer clear whenever I could of the tactic of one character trying to guess
another character's motives...

GROSS: Right.

Mr. LEAVITT: ...because I wanted the novel--I wanted a different tone. I
wanted this to be very much a recollection of an older Martin of an early
period in his life.

GROSS: My guest is David Leavitt. His new novel is called "Martin Bauman,
or
A Sure Thing." We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is writer David Leavitt. His new novel about a young
writer
and his writing professor is called "Martin Bauman, or A Sure Thing."

Anybody who, like you, writes fiction that is based somewhat on
autobiography
and on the experiences of people who are close to you risks hurting or
offending those people who are close to you, 'cause they might read
something
that seems like it's based on something that really happened to them, and
either they interpret the incident differently or they're insulted about the

way you've characterized them, or they feel that you've betrayed a secret of
theirs. How have you dealt with that as a writer? Has that been a problem
for you?

Mr. LEAVITT: I consider it an occupational hazard, and it's been a problem
for me to some degree. And yet, I've got to say in all honesty I have been
written about; I have been the subject of fiction. So I've stood on both
sides of this fence. And it seems to me, especially when the people in
question are also writers, it's very important to remember that, no matter
how
upset we may be by what other people write about us, if we start yelling and
screaming about it, we're threatening the very freedom on which our own
creative lives depend.

You know, the other thing I want to say about this which I think is really
important is that I think any serious writer is writing for the future, not
for the present. And these kinds of issues are relevant only for a very
short
time. And it seemed to me that it would be a great artistic mistake to hold
back on something for fear of hurting someone in the short run, which
doesn't
mean that you should go and write something that's sadistic or cruel. But I
think you really will hurt yourself as a writer if you leave out some aspect
of your own experience simply for the sake of not wanting to offend someone
else who was part of that experience.

And the thing to remember, of course, is that no one owns human experience.
If you and I have a conversation, it belongs to both of us, and I think it
belongs to both of us in an artistic sense as well and we both have the
right
to write about it, which is why I would never, ever voice an objection to
anyone writing anything about me, no matter how much I personally disliked
it,
no matter how much I was hurt or offended by it. And believe me, people
have
written...

GROSS: Well, have you been hurt or offended by things people have written
about you?

Mr. LEAVITT: Oh, of course, many times...

GROSS: Name something.

Mr. LEAVITT: ...both fiction and journalism. Well, an ex of mine wrote a
short story about a character who was very clearly based on me that was
published in an anthology a few years ago, that I was quite--I would say I
was
wounded by.

GROSS: What was wounding about it?

Mr. LEAVITT: What was wounding about it was that it seemed to me personally
unjust. However, I realized that that was irrelevant to the story's value
as
literature. Whether I personally considered it unjust was a little bit
like--I mean, it ties into what Stanley Flint says at the end when he quotes
Beethoven as saying, "Do you really think I'm worrying about your miserable
fiddle when I compose?" Feelings of something being unjust, feelings of
something being unfair, that's the miserable fiddle, and what matters is not
the fiddle; what matters is the composition. And I will allow that that
story, no matter what I might have felt about it personally, has every right
to exist and every right to remain in the arena of literature, because
finally
I was just the jumping-off point for it.

GROSS: Now on a somewhat related note, you wrote a novel a few years ago
that
was inspired by a memoir from the writer Stephen Spender, and he basically
accused you of stealing his life for your book, and he sued you. Your books
were pulled from the shelves until a new edition acknowledging the debt to
his
memoir was published. And I think you guys settled out of court, and then
he
died. Do I have the sequence right?

Mr. LEAVITT: It was settled--yeah, it was not settled for money. The terms
you've just laid out were the settlement.

GROSS: That you republish it...

Mr. LEAVITT: Yeah.

GROSS: ...with an acknowledgment of his book.

Mr. LEAVITT: And with certain changes made. That was a very odd situation,
because it was a case in which what the case was about legally was very
different than what the case was about morally, as it were. Morally, it was
really about his outrage at the use to which I had put this episode of his
life. Legally, it was about whether he owned the rights to his own life.
And
you remember I said earlier that I think experience doesn't belong to
anyone.
Spender was effectively saying, `This experience belongs to me.' And what
backed him up legally was the fact that he'd written a memoir in which he
had
recounted this episode from his life.

Now, obviously, it wasn't the only source that recounted this episode, and,
obviously, the episode wasn't something he invented; it had actually
happened
and it involved other people besides him. And yet according to English
copyright law, you actually can copyright a sequence of facts, which came as
a
complete shock to me because it goes against most of the principles of
American copyright law, and it certainly isn't something that seems to jive
very well with the First Amendment. But that was how it was legally.

As I've thought about it in retrospect, though, I don't think the problem
was
simply the fact that I used, as the basis for my novel, this episode from
his
life; I think the problem was that he didn't like the way I used this
episode
from his life. And so often that's the case. If the person in question
approves, then you have no problem. If the person in question doesn't
approve, then you have a problem.

You know, you look at a book like "Primary Colors," and that was a book
which
really only existed to tantalize people as to who was who. But it's
probably
a book that won't have much lasting interest historically because, as time
goes by and more is learned about the Clintons and about the campaign, the
interest of the book is going to naturally disappear.

I'm trying to write, and I think any serious writer is trying to write, a
book
in which the opposite is the case, that as time goes on, people will become
more and more interested in it because of what's inherently worthwhile about
it. And yet, at the same time, I don't want to discount these issues. And
one way in which I tried to acknowledge them is by actually having Martin
have
the very experience we talk about. He discovers towards the end of the book
that he is a character in Stanley Flint's novel.

GROSS: His teacher.

Mr. LEAVITT: His teacher. And his bewilderment and shock at finding out
that he has been, in his own view, misportrayed leads him to quite a lot of
rumination on the very questions we've been talking about. What happens in
the novel is that he discovers at a certain point that Flint lives more or
less across the street from him, and he's never known this, which is
entirely
possible in New York because so many people live in every building. You can
live across the street from someone for 10 years without ever seeing the
person. And he comes out early in the morning to watch Flint going to work
and follows him once to the subway. Then Flint writes a novel in which his
alter ego, in his novel, finds himself being stalked by a student whom he
thinks may be in love with him, and Martin realizes that Flint has seen him
and that he has given the episode a very odd spin in terms of his own
interpretation of it.

GROSS: Can you tell us what the incident was in the Spender memoir that you
built your novel around?

Mr. LEAVITT: Oh, yeah. Spender had a friend/lover--it's still
unclear--whose name was Tony Hindman(ph). And at a certain point, he ended
their relationship rather abruptly. It was a relationship in which there
was
a very wide gulf of class: Hindman was working-class; Spender was
upper-class. And Tony, more or less in retaliation, went off to Spain to
fight against Franco. Well, he got in over his head, and at a certain
point,
he tried to escape. He was arrested and he was on the verge of being tried
for desertion, and Spender went to Spain to try to help him and wasn't
actually in the end very successful. And the whole thing sort of blew over.
But it was that idea of a writer whose lover, after being spurned, goes off
to
fight in the Spanish civil war and who then finds himself in the position of
having to go and try to save him from the firing squad that became the
inspiration for my novel, although again, it differed from Spender's
experience in so many more ways than it resembled it.

So I guess what I'm saying is I tried to--all the things we've been talking
about, all these issues, you know, of incorporating aspects of one's own
life
and other people's life into fiction, I've tried to make part of what this
book is about.

GROSS: Why, at this point in your life, did you want to get those issues
into
a novel?

Mr. LEAVITT: You know, I've been thinking a lot over the last couple of
years, and really since the Spender lawsuit, about the border territory
between memoir and fiction. It was something that obviously was brought
home
to me when I found myself being sued by Spender because of the fact that
this
episode of his life that I used as the basis of my novel had also formed the
basis of his memoir. That started me thinking about the difference between
memoir and fiction.

Around the same time, I started having a lot of conversations with Edmund
White about his decision in novels like "The Farewell Symphony" to re-create
his own life as a novel rather than simply writing a memoir. And his
motive,
he said, was that he didn't want to be hemmed in by reality; he wanted to be
able to go off in whatever direction his imagination took him while using
his
own life as a kind of starting point.

And then I wrote "The Term Paper Artist," which is a novella about a writer
named David Leavitt who is being sued by an English poet and who, in his
despair, strikes a deal with some undergraduates at UCLA to write term
papers
for them in exchange for sex. And once again, this was the beginning of a
whole very important train of thought for me that had to do with the degree
to
which reality and imagination are separate. I mean, there are two
completely
contradictory commonplaces that people bat around about writing all the
time.
One is, `Write about what you know,' and the other is, `Fiction is
make-believe.'

GROSS: Yeah, exactly, right. Those are very contradictory, yeah.

Mr. LEAVITT: Those two, very contradictory and kind of irreconcilable. But
that was what I wanted to explore in the book. I'm really convinced that
fiction comes down to contradictions, and that is one of the contradictions
that's at the heart of this book.

GROSS: Well, David Leavitt, thank you very much for talking with us.

Mr. LEAVITT: Thank you, Terry. It's been a pleasure, as always.

GROSS: David Leavitt's new novel is called "Martin Bauman, or A Sure
Thing."

Coming up, we remember the popular Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. He died
Friday at the age of 76. This is FRESH AIR.

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Interview: Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai discusses his poetry and
philosophy in a 1991 interview; Amichai died on Friday
TERRY GROSS, host:

One of Israel's most popular poets, Yehuda Amichai, died Friday at the age
of
76. He had lymphoma. Many of his poems were about war. His view of life
was
shaped by war. He fought in four of them, including Israel's war for
independence, the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. During
World
War II, he fought with the British army in the Middle East.

Amichai was born in Germany in 1924 and fled the Nazis with his family in
1936. They settled in Palestine. Poet Edward Hirsch said about Amichai,
`He
had the rare ability to characterize the complex fate of the modern Israeli,
the private individual inevitably affected by the public realm of war,
politics and religion.'

I spoke with Amichai in 1991, during the Gulf War, when Amichai and his
fellow
Israelis were wearing gas masks during Scud missile alerts. He had left his
home in Jerusalem five days earlier for an American book tour. I asked him
to
read a poem from the book that he had just been published, "Even a Fist Was
Once an Open Palm with Fingers." This poem is called "What Did I Learn in
the Wars?"(ph)

Mr. YEHUDA AMICHAI (Poet): "What Did I Learn in the Wars?" `What did I
learn
in the wars? To march in time to swinging arms and legs, like pumps pumping
an empty well. To march in a row and to be alone in the middle. To dig
into
pillows, feather beds, the body of a beloved woman, and to yell "Mama" when
she cannot hear and to yell "God" when I don't believe in him. And even if
I
did believe in him, I wouldn't have told him about the war, as you don't
tell
a child about grown-ups' horrors.

What else did I learn? I learned to reserve a path for retreat. In foreign
lands, I rent a room in a hotel near the airport or railroad station. And
even in wedding halls always to watch the little door with the exit sign in
red letters. A battle, too, begins like crisp metal drums for dancing and
ends with a retreat at dawn. Forbidden love and battle, the two of them
sometimes end like this.

But above all, I learned the wisdom of camouflage, not to stand out, not to
be
recognized, not to be apart from what's around me, even not for my beloved.
Let them think I'm a bush or a lamb, a tree, a shadow of a tree, a doubt, a
shadow of a doubt, a living hedge, a dead stone, a house, a corner of a
house.
If I were a prophet, I would have dimmed the glow of the vision and darkened
my face with black paper and covered the magic with myths. And when my time
comes, I shall don the camouflage garb of my end, the white of clouds and a
lot of sky blue and stars that have no end.'

GROSS: That's Yehuda Amichai reading his poem "What Did I Learn in the
Wars?"

Now I want to ask you about a line in that poem.

Mr. AMICHAI: Yes.

GROSS: The line is `To yell "God" when I don't believe in him.'

Mr. AMICHAI: Yes.

GROSS: You know, there's an old saying that there aren't any atheists in a
foxhole.

Mr. AMICHAI: Is there a saying like that over here?

GROSS: Yes, there is. Yeah.

Mr. AMICHAI: I feel as if I had said it, yeah. That's exactly what I mean,
yes.

GROSS: So have you found, in the wars that you've fought in, these
conflicting feelings of not believing in God yet needing to believe in
something, basically?

Mr. AMICHAI: I don't know as it's so much belie--I don't think it has to do
with believing. It's just crying out something. So if someone says, you
know, a lot of people who are believers ...(unintelligible) you see, if it
comes to bad times or even if you experience something very, very beautiful
and good, you say, `Oh, God, it was wonderful.' So `God' is just a thing
you
say because no one knows what it is and who it is. But it's something
beyond--so instead of saying, `Oh, fate' or `Oh, supreme intelligence' and
so
on and so on.

It's like I called my father Dad and my mother Mommy and never it came to my
mind to call my father Dad. What's that? It's a name; it's a word. I
never
say, `OK, the biological machine to produce me.' So it's just a dad, so
it's--these things of childhood and I think it's very great. It's a need to
know that you can call something, even if you don't believe in it and if the
God you imagine would be would be, because Allah and God are the same,
actually. Both Muslims and Jews and Christians believe in the same God.
And
yet each one prays to the same God to give victory to his arms, so it must
be
something much more which we will never understand, and OK, because I'll
never
understand what it is, so why should I bother with it?

GROSS: Excuse me for the stereotype...

Mr. AMICHAI: Yeah.

GROSS: ...but I know a lot of writers feel that they're more comfortable
reading or writing, you know, at a desk than doing very physical things like
fighting in a war.

Mr. AMICHAI: Yeah, yeah.

GROSS: And I wonder if, through all the wars that you've fought in, you've
felt like a very kind of physical type of person or if you felt
uncomfortable
in that role.

Mr. AMICHAI: I didn't start my life as a poet. I started writing only
after
two wars. But I was sensitive to it and words probably were welling up in
me,
but I never thought of--you know, when I was in the army, I was in the army.
And I don't feel I am a poet. It's totally meaningless. It's not a
profession. You are a poet when you write a poem. The moment you don't
write
a poem, you are not a poet.

And it's just--to give you an example about the last few weeks and all these
(unintelligible) in so-called sealed rooms. A lot of people, of course, ask
me, `Well, have you written a poem about it?' You know, they always ask you,
if something's happening, `Oh, write a poem about it.' But I forget that I'm
a
poet. And I think poets are just constantly aware (unintelligible) very bad
shape and people should be not aware constantly, `I am a poet, so what do I
have to say?'

GROSS: In the introduction to one of your books, to a book of collected
poems, the translator and editor, Chana Bloch...

Mr. AMICHAI: Yeah.

GROSS: ...tells about one of her friends describing how, at the beginning
of
the 1973 war, the Yom Kippur War...

Mr. AMICHAI: Yes.

GROSS: ...her friends were going off to fight the war and they were packing
copies of your books of poems. And I wonder if you hear stories like that a
lot.

Mr. AMICHAI: Well, quite a lot, you know, because my poems are out of
experience, whether it's a love poem or a poem about the death of my father
or
a poem about the wars, because I wrote only about my own experience so other
people can use it. And there's a kind--I believe that every poem should
always tell the truth, not say sweet things about situations we are not
sweet,
but on the other hand, not say, `Everything is bad, everything's rotten and
death.' And so I think every poem, I wrote it for myself as a kind of
healing
or a kind of soothing song to keep myself going. And eventually other
people
in similar situations can use my poems as a healing or to go on.

GROSS: Yehuda Amichai, recorded in 1991. He died in Jerusalem on Friday of
lymphoma. He was 76.

(Soundbite of music)

(Closing credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.
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