Among Men : The love story of a brilliant boy beauty from West Virginia and a demonic man-god from Greece : THE GOD IN FLIGHT, <i> By Laura Argiri (Random House: $23, cloth; 496 pp.)</i>

In “The Western Canon,” Harold Bloom recounts a conversation with the novelist Gore Vidal in which Vidal remarked “with bitter eloquence, that his outspoken sexual orientation had denied him canonical status.” Bloom politely disagrees; in his estimation, what’s kept Vidal out of the canon is the fact that he writes historical novels. “History writing and narrative fiction have come apart,” Bloom argues, “and our sensibilities seem no longer able to accommodate them one to the other.”

An interesting claim--and yet one that I suspect the novelist Laura Argiri would vigorously protest. She has been working for 18 years on “The God in Flight,” a novel that both by Vidal’s rules and Bloom’s ought to be blasted out of the canon at first volley. Set at Yale in the 1880s, this is essentially a love story that features a brilliant, neurasthenic boy beauty from West Virginia called Simion Satterwhite and a strapping, demonic man-god from Greece by way of Oxford called Doriskos Klionaros. They are mad for each other in the most Hollywood sense of the phrase--Doriskos has even drawn pictures of Simion before meeting him--and essentially the “plot” of the novel describes the prolonged obstacle course--malevolent father, scheming spurned (male) mistress, all manner of illness graphically rendered--that the pair must maneuver before they can finally achieve Big Happiness in a meadow. “If you ever make love to me, it’ll rock us both like thunder,” Simion says to Doriskos. That by the end of the novel he has, and it has, indicates the sort of predictability--not to mention cartoonishness--into which “The God in Flight,” at its worst moments, devolves. But this is a very mixed-up book, and to speak only of its worst moments is to do it inadequate justice.

In “The God in Flight” Argiri seeks to explore the bonds of “Ukranian love” that crisscrossed the intellectual landscape of the late-19th Century to create an unpublicized but vital network. Yale, lovingly and accurately reproduced here, is her “world in miniature” (to borrow a phrase from E. M. Forster), and like the larger Victorian world, homosexual intrigues rule it. Women are nearly invisible, the faculty is largely made up of discrete “sodomites,” while most of the supposedly heterosexual boys seem to prefer buggering their swish dormitory mates to visiting brothels or wooing girls from New York.

Into this suppurating ambience of athlete’s foot and gin-soaked carpet arrive both the burdened, primitive Doriskos, a gifted sculptor born to an Athenian whore, but raised by a dilettante English Lord, and Simion, who is tiny, bookish, delicately constituted. (I lost count of the number of times he was called “pre-Raphaelite.”) Big and small, dark and fair, hairy and smooth, these heroes personify the twin poses toward which 19th-Century homosexual aesthetics inclined: they are the swarthy Southerner and the androgynous Northerner, Lord Byron’s Eusthatius Georgiou, “with those ambrosial curls hanging down his amiable back,” and Oscar Wilde’s Lord Alfred Douglas, “quite like a narcissus, so white and gold.” But Simion also has a wildcat side, a bitchiness he’s developed as a defense against his father, the brutal fire-and-brimstone preacher John Ezra, who seems to have walked straight out of Dickens. There’s trouble from Page 1. Indeed, it would be tedious to catalogue all the woes to which the world subjects this pair (and to which they subject each other); suffice it to say that academic persecution, cigarette burns, gunshot wounds, blackmail and starvation all get trotted out. Along the way a lot of vomiting takes place, and is graphically rendered in terms both of color and texture.

That Argiri manages to keep these soap-opera machinations churning along with such lusty vitality testifies to her distinctly novelistic temperament. And yet as “The God in Flight” progresses one can’t help but suspect that she’s really too good a writer for this kind of thing. Moments of lyricism take the reader by surprise, such as when the narrator describes New England winter cold as “the frigid exhalation of all those dead, once-murderous Puritans, whose vicious revenants are married to the Arctic weather currents. It is the pathetic fallacy in action, the violent, pragmatic American soul.” As the novel moves forward, moreover, so do the characters, bursting through their cardboard suits with human fists. Doriskos in particular reveals more and more complexity until he seems entirely too interesting for the lurid situations into which his inventor keeps thrusting him. One wants to find a less trashy plot for him to live in.

Where “The God in Flight” really comes into its own, in fact, is not in its “story” at all, but in its reinvention of history. Argiri has clearly read very well in the literature of 19th-Century homosexuality, and as a result the world she creates seems absolutely real. For instance, she takes care in avoiding the term homosexual, which hadn’t yet come into English usage, while her interjection into the dialogue of such Victorian slang as spend for come is so subtle one hardly notices it. Indeed, she never shows off; her knowledge is woven too seamlessly into the text to call attention to itself; and though Pater and Ruskin make walk-ons, to Argiri’s immense credit, Oscar Wilde doesn’t even get a mention.

More importantly, Argiri understands the way intellectual gay men in the late 19th Century thought and felt. Restrained from sexual experimentation by the reticence and prudery of their Victorian parents, some tried to banish their lust through such horrifying surgical procedures as cauterization of the urethra, while others projected it into the holy adoration of a noble ideal (usually Greek in origin). Ironically, all-male schools in England and America provided ideal environments for homosexual sex, which was rampant in the dormitories; but for those in whom, to quote John Addington Symonds, “poetry and power of expression and the visionary pomp of dreams awoke . . . only beneath the touch of male genius,” the shameless erotic sporting of other boys had little appeal: it included “no refinement, no sentiment, no passion.” As Simion’s friend Andrew explains: “Nice people do it nicely, and beastly people do it like animals. It’s very different--Peter and Topher and Gibbs buggering one another in their sordid room, and Alexander and Hephaistion making godlike love in one’s imagination.” This feels exactly right, as does Doriskos’ disdain for the wanton lewdness of an Oxford pupil, his insistence on holding out for a higher love. What feels less right is his actually finding that love: that is the sort of thing that happens in novels like “The Lord Won’t Mind,” and I had been beginning to hope Argiri was going to write another “Middlemarch.”

The problem may be that in projecting herself into these 19th-Century characters, Argiri has internalized the highly subjective terms of their psychology without giving those terms a much needed 20th-Century critique. Thus she accepts--and literalizes--the dream of “godlike love” but fails to consider the narrative consequences of turning a Victorian fantasy into a 19th-Century reality. Thus she divides sex into two realms, one profane and dedicated to the satisfaction of base salivating need, the other sacred and dedicated to the service of transcendent love, but fails to take into account the possibility that this duality may not be quite as cut and dried as it seems. A peculiar strain of Victorian conservatism pimples the seemingly radical veneer of the novel: sex between men is good, it seems to tell us, as long as it’s the right kind of sex between the right kind of men. Otherwise sex between men is “beastly.”

I think the key to this novel--its pleasures as well as its embarrassments--lies in the fact that it was begun in a freshman writing class at Harvard and worked on over the next 18 years. A jarring inconsistency of tone fissures the text. Some chapters ring with that odd admixture of sophistication and simpletonism that so often characterizes the work of talented college freshmen; some exude that magic freshness unique to writers finding their voices for the first time; some vibrate with the full-throated confidence that can be achieved only by a novelist in her prime. Even more invidiously, a battle seems to be being waged on every page between Argiri’s impulse toward literature and her impulse toward trashiness. It’s as if George Eliot were wrestling with some of her more faintly remembered contemporaries, authors like Ouida or Marie Corelli, for the control of this young writer’s soul, and though Eliot wins out in the fine final pages, too often, Ouida and Marie hold sway, which is a pity. By giving into them, and wasting too much prose on overheated sex melodrama, Argiri loses the chance to write a great novel, as well as to make a strong case for the canonical validity of the historical novel as a genre.