ARKANSAS: Three Novellas.<i> By David Leavitt</i> .<i> Houghton Mifflin: 198 pp., $22.95</i>

When David Leavitt published his first short story in the New Yorker in 1982 while still a Yale undergraduate, he could be characterized as a “bridge homosexual” in much the same way that Harry Belafonte once referred to himself as a “bridge Negro”: Leavitt presented homosexuality in a way that was palatable even to straight readers. “Territory,” a meticulously crafted examination of the tensions that erupt when Neil, 23, brings home his male lover for the first time, was the first openly gay story in the magazine. Although Neil’s mother is unnerved by her son’s sexuality (despite her presidency of the local chapter of the Coalition of Parents of Lesbians and Gays), it’s unlikely that many liberal readers would be. However, any parent confronted with a child’s sexuality--straight or gay--could understand her discomfort. Leavitt’s achievement was the universality he teased from the specific and the complexity of emotions he captured on paper.

“Territory” and the other graceful tales of families in distress that make up Leavitt’s first collection, “Family Dancing,” which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner Prize in 1984, had no difficulty entering the mainstream. Likewise, his first novel, “The Lost Language of Cranes,” about a father and son who come out simultaneously, and his second novel, published in 1989, “Equal Affections,” about a mother dying of cancer. “In a Place I’ve Never Been,” Leavitt’s second collection of stories, published in 1990, Leavitt’s characters, like himself, were starting to grow up. Marriage was now something that didn’t involve just parents. Yes, many of the characters were openly gay, but the sex wasn’t graphic, and their issues--family dynamics, divorce, cancer and relationships--spoke to all readers, regardless of sexual orientation.

With his new collection of novellas, “Arkansas,” Leavitt is burning bridges that he initially torched--unintentionally--with his last novel. “While England Sleeps,” published in 1993, marks the Great Divide--almost a gulch--in Leavitt’s career. Set in England and Spain in the 1930s, it is a love story that raises issues of loyalty, responsibility and guilt. Although the action occurs decades before Leavitt’s birth in 1961, the book, a blend of fact and fiction, was for some (including its principal, unacknowledged source, Stephen Spender) startlingly contemporary in its graphic fleshing out of homosexual relationships. It was the first of Leavitt’s books to get him in real trouble.

The problem was that Leavitt’s characters, story and even words bore too close a resemblance to certain passages in Spender’s 1951 memoir, “World Within World.” An astute Washington Post reviewer, Bernard Knox, noted these resemblances and Spender felt his life was being plagiarized. He sued Leavitt and his publisher, Viking Penguin, for copyright infringement. The result was that the first edition of “While England Sleeps” was pulped, Leavitt was vilified by the press and, in 1995, a second edition with 17 mainly minor revisions was issued by a different publisher, Houghton Mifflin. Read as a trilogy, Spender’s memoir and the two versions of Leavitt’s novel create an illuminating lesson in the germination of fiction.

It is curious that the closest Leavitt comes to acknowledging his debt to Spender is to concede in his disingenuous and somewhat bitter preface to the second edition, “ . . . the fact remains that if this man hadn’t lived the life, I never would have written the novel.” But he refrains from citing the man or his memoir by name--coyness or legal prudence?--and defends himself with an analogy to musical variations on a theme and the partial confession, “I forgot that to eavesdrop on a historical text is a different thing than to eavesdrop on a conversation (which writers do all the time).”

Now, with “Arkansas,” Leavitt drops the circumspection and writes like someone who has nothing to lose. The book gets its title from a quote attributed to Oscar Wilde, one of Leavitt’s heroes: “I should like to flee like a wounded hart into Arkansas.” Leavitt seeks to expunge the pain of his last novel’s aftermath by addressing the subjects of exile and hurt and healing. He does so with varying degrees of success.

The first novella, “The Term Paper Artist,” is confessional, audacious and outrageous, yet another combustible mix offact and fiction, with plenty of sex to fuel the pyre. While certainly not the most sensitive or beautiful fiction Leavitt has created, “The Term Paper Artist” is gutsy and entertaining, Leavitt’s fascinatingly visceral way of airing his personal grievances so he can get on with his work. If “While England Sleeps” was flammable, “The Term Paper Artist” is surely incendiary. Before publication, it caused an uproar when Esquire Editor in Chief Edward Kosner pulled it from the magazine’s April issue, citing “a taste question.” Esquire’s fiction editor, Will Blythe, resigned in protest, while Leavitt and his agent, Andrew Wylie, seethed and Houghton-Mifflin pushed up the publication date by a month.

Leavitt knows how to grab the reader’s attention and raise hackles right from the opening lines:

“I was in trouble. An English poet (now dead) had sued me over a novel I had written because it was based in part on an episode from his life. Worse, my publishers in the United States and England had capitulated to this poet, pulling the novel out of bookstores and pulping several thousand copies.

“Why should I have been surprised? My publishers were once Salman Rushdie’s publishers too.”

“The Term Paper Artist” is about a “wounded hart” and blocked writer named David Leavitt who retreats to his father’s house in Glendale. In his quest to rediscover the joys of literature, he ends up doing his “best work,” writing highly literate term papers for cute, straight male UCLA undergraduates in exchange for (mainly oral) sex. (As if this weren’t damning enough, one of these undergraduate clients is named Tony Younger, after Spender’s lover on whom Leavitt modeled his ticket collector in “While England Sleeps.”)

However seamy and morally questionable Leavitt’s alter ego’s intellectual prostitution is, it’s a situation in which Leavitt’s character ironically recaptures the freedom and innocence he has described spinning soap opera plots while bouncing a rubber ball around his family’s pool as a boy. This is because it allows “all the gratitude of authorship, with none of the responsibility implicit in signing one’s name.” Leavitt’s novella is like a zany cross between David Denby’s recent account of his exhilarating return to the classics, “Great Books,” and Woody Allen’s classic, funny story “The Whore of Mensa,” in which, for a price, a Vassar student will discuss Proust, Melville or even (at extra cost) Symbolism.

It’s as if Leavitt were saying to his detractors, “Look, I can take it as well as dish it out.” He writes as candidly of his literary competitiveness as of his libido (his competitiveness rivals Nicholson Baker’s in his book “U&I;”) and is forthright about concerns about his damaged career: “Would I ever be allowed to forget what had happened with ‘While England Sleeps’? I wondered. Would the scandal that had attached itself to the novel’s publication--to quote a helpful journalist--’taint my aura’ forever?”

We might consider “The Term Paper Artist” a somewhat self-absorbed, whiny, literary memoir if it didn’t take the fictional leap into such deliberately wild territory. By using a character recognizable as himself in a plot that is clearly a fabrication, Leavitt playfully tweaks expectations and prevents self-righteousness from overwhelming the story. This autofiction--the insertion of the writer into his own fiction--has become something of a literary mini-trend, with Paul Theroux and Philip Roth both starring, by name, in their recent novels. Leavitt has his character discuss what he--and these other writers--are up to: “Writers often disguise their lives as fiction. The thing they almost never do is disguise fiction as their lives.”

Is Leavitt’s work pornographic? He doesn’t think so. In a recent interview with the New York Times, Leavitt commented, “My impression is simply that people get a lot jumpier when the material is homosexual.” He has more than once written of sex between men as “really a matter of exorcism, the expulsion of bedeviling lusts.” It is interesting that, although he has become more self-conscious in his writing since his legal ordeal, the area in which Leavitt has chosen to let go (and some, like Esquire editor Kosner, would say go over the top) is in his descriptions of sex. It was the literal fleshing out of Spender’s life in “While England Sleeps,” after all, to which the poet objected most strenuously. But Leavitt defends his sexual explicitness in his preface to the second edition of “While England Sleeps”: “I also believe--as D. H. Lawrence did--that to describe the touching of souls, we must also describe the touching of bodies. Otherwise we leave out, for the sake of propriety, the most essential aspect of human experience.”

Thus, what in “Equal Affections” or “A Place I’ve Never Been” might have been an oblique reference to “the great, cold clammy river of promiscuity,” the eyeless world of phone sex lines (wittily referred to as “Gaza” in “The Term Paper Artist”), pornographic videos and online “interactive pornography . . . that strange electronic gay bar of the mind,” in his new work becomes a more central focus. What I find most troubling about these encounters is that they are marked by a sad desperation and a disturbing detachment and anonymity rather than anything so romantic as a “touching of souls.” AIDS, too, which is a background concern in some of the earlier stories, now takes center stage. “Saturn Street,” the final and least satisfying novella in “Arkansas,” tells of another exiled “wounded hart” and blocked writer, Jerry Roth, in limbo in Los Angeles, recovering not from a devastating lawsuit but from the suicide of his lover of nearly 10 years. In between tuning in an abrasive radio psychotherapist, porn videos and phone sex, all of which becomes rather monotonous, he delivers lunches to homebound people with AIDS. This is how he meets and falls in love with the ailing Phil Featherstone, who looks back on a life of compulsive “fast-food sex” with disturbingly few regrets.

Of the three novellas in “Arkansas,” “The Wooden Anniversary” is the most moving and reassures us that Leavitt can move beyond his personal travails. It continues the saga of two of his most sympathetic characters, Nathan and Celia, who first appeared in the story “Dedicated” in “Family Dancing.” The former best friends from college are getting together for the first time in six years.

It’s an awkward reunion, fraught with their past dissatisfactions with each other. Their affection is now more liberally “marbled” with resentment than it was in their youth. Time, they feel, is no longer on their side and both are more desperate to snatch happiness wherever they can. Much has happened to them. Nathan’s ex-lover Martin, first mentioned in one of Leavitt’s very best stories, “A Place I’ve Never Been,” has died of AIDS, and Nathan is “world-weary and travel-worn.” Celia, on the other hand, has stopped playing Carrington to Nathan’s Lytton Strachey. She has taken control of her life by moving beyond Nathan’s reach--to Italy where she is about to celebrate her five-year (wooden) anniversary with Seth Rappaport. Her marriage has its problems, but she’s shed 75 pounds and opened a successful cooking school in Tuscany. The prose oozes with Leavitt’s love of Italy--where he lives part time. He has lavished upon it lovely images such as a street that winds “like a turban,” a sun that falls “like a gold coin into a child’s bank” and air that “had a buttery cast, as if the sun had melted.”

Forget the lawsuit. Forget the controversy over good taste. This is classic Leavitt--writing with subtlety, maturity and compassion about the complexity and fragility of human relationships.