David Leavitt’s first collection of stories, Family Dancing, was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner Prize. He is also the author of The Lost Language of Cranes, which was made into a film by the BBC; Equal Affections; A Place I’ve Never Been; While England Sleeps, which was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize, The Page Turner and Martin Bauman. With Mark Mitchell he is co-editor of The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories and Pages Passed From Hand to Hand: The Hidden Tradition of Homosexual Literature in English from 1748 to 1914, and co-author of Italian Pleasures.

A recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and a fellowship from the National Endowment from the Arts, David Leavitt lives in Italy.

‘Shrewd and entertaining’

Daily Telegraph

‘This is classic Leavitt – writing with subtlety, maturity and compassion about the complexity and fragility of human relationships’

Los Angeles Times

‘Funny and sexy’

Time Out (on ‘The Term Paper Artist’)

‘A genuinely funny and poignant read’

Arena (on ‘The Term Paper Artist’)

‘ “Saturn Street” is Arkansas’s finest achievement … The poignancy and peculiarity of lust and love in the face of terminal illness is conveyed with considerable subtlety’

Claire Messud, The Times

‘ “Saturn Street” has the fluency of structure and taut economy of language which can take a local situation – in this case, the gay experience of mortality – make its relevance universal, achieving a kind of magic’

Michael Bracewell, Observer

Also by David Leavitt

FAMILY DANCING

THE LOST LANGUAGE OF CRANES

EQUAL AFFECTIONS

A PLACE I’VE NEVER BEEN

WHILE ENGLAND SLEEPS

THE PAGE TURNER

ITALIAN PLEASURES

(with Mark Mitchell)

PAGES PASSED FROM HAND TO HAND

(with Mark Mitchell)

MARTIN BAUMAN

Copyright

Published by Abacus

ISBN: 978-0-349-14123-7

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 1997 David Leavitt

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

Abacus

Little, Brown Book Group

100 Victoria Embankment

London, EC4Y 0DY

www.littlebrown.co.uk

www.hachette.co.uk

FOR

MARK MITCHELL

AUTHOR’S NOTE

For information concerning Lords Henry and Arthur Somerset, as well as Jack the Ripper, I am indebted to the following sources: Prince Eddy and the Homosexual Underground by Theo Aronson (John Murray, 1994), The Cleveland Street Scandal by H. Montgomery Hyde (W. H. Allen, 1976), The Cleveland Street Affair by Colin Simpson, Lewis Chester, and David Leitch (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), and The Complete Jack the Ripper by Donald Rumbelow (W. H. Allen, 1976).

“I should like to flee
like a wounded hart
into Arkansas.”

attributed to Oscar Wilde,
near the end of his life

The Term Paper Artist