Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (13 page)

In the incestuous world of cookbookery, there seems to be no such thing as plagiarism. Add a sprig of rosemary and the recipe is yours.
⁵
In literature—or so goes the conventional wisdom—the rules are a bit stiffer. If you harbor a distaste for quotation marks, if you “forget” that the eloquent passage you copied into your journal was really written by Flaubert, if you delude yourself into believing that a sprig of verbal rosemary constitutes a transfer of ownership, then you are, as Benjamin Disraeli put it in a famously holier-than-thou
⁶
phrase, “a burglar of others’ intellect.”
⁷

Like most writers, I have long been fascinated by the sea-change
⁸
through which an aggregation of words, common property when scattered throughout a dictionary, is transformed into a stealable asset. Neal Bowers, a poet whose work has been repeatedly plagiarized by an out-of-work schoolteacher named David Jones, has written, “The intangible nature of language begins to haunt me, and I wonder how it’s possible for anyone to own words. Exactly what have I been deprived of?”
⁹
In other words, after your words—unlike your VCR—are stolen, you still own them. Or do you?

Bowers says you don’t—or at least not in the same way. As he puts it, with justifiably ruddy temper,
¹⁰
“Who steals such words steals breath and pulse and consciousness.”
¹¹
It must have been particularly galling when another poet told Bowers that by altering the line breaks, the plagiarist had actually
improved
the poems, as if plagiarism were merely a form of editing.
¹²
It has long been a commonplace, iterated with special conviction by plagiarists, that if you upgrade the original, your genius exempts you from the penalties that would be exacted from the roll of common men.
¹³
Virgil, well known for his sticky fingers, was once observed perusing a volume of Quintus Ennius. When asked, pointedly, what he was doing, he replied, “Plucking pearls from Ennius’ dunghill.”
¹⁴
Posterity may have vindicated his rummagings, since two millennia later, everyone remembers Virgil, and poor Ennius has been consigned to the dunghill of oblivion.
¹⁵

The “poet” who plagiarized Bowers was an impostor; in order to be published, his only recourse was theft. But Virgil surely didn’t need to steal from Ennius—or from Pisander or Apollonius.
¹⁶
Nor did Shakespeare really need to swipe several speeches in
Antony and Cleopatra
from Plutarch, or 4,144 of the 6,033 lines in Parts I, II, and III of
Henry VI
, either verbatim or in paraphrase, from other authors.
¹⁷
Milton didn’t need to crib from Masenius,
¹⁸
Sterne from Burton,
¹⁹
or Poe from Benjamin Morrell.
²⁰
Nor did Coleridge need to stick huge gobs of Schlegel and Schelling in his
Biographia Literaria,
²¹
a theft exposed after his death by Thomas De Quincey, who was himself a plagiarist—in fact, one at least twenty times as larcenous as Coleridge.
²²

Contemplating the fact that most plagiarists don’t need to steal—and also that they steal over and over again, often in such obvious ways you’d swear they wanted to get caught—I observed to my husband last month
²³
that of all forms of theft, kleptomania was the one plagiarism most closely resembled. Unfortunately, I later discovered that this brilliant aperçu had already been apperceived by at least four other writers.
²⁴
When I encountered the word
kleptomaniac
in Alexander Lindey’s
Plagiarism and Originality
, I had the feeling, for a split second, that Lindey had stolen the idea from
me
, even though his book was written the year before I was born.
²⁵
In any case, as Lindey notes, the kleptomaniacal plagiarist is
compelled
to steal. It’s clear, for example, that Senator Joe Biden (or his ghostwriters), who borrowed parts of his speeches from Neil Kinnock, Robert Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey, among others, couldn’t
not
plagiarize. Biden even plagiarized his apology for plagiarizing from
The Grapes of Wrath.
²⁶

The more I’ve read about plagiarism, the more I’ve come to think that literature is one big recycling bin.
²⁷
The sixty-four-dollar question
²⁸
is, how terrible is that? Before the Romantic period, in which originality became the
summum bonum,
²⁹
plagiarism was rife but viewed with far greater indulgence than it is now.
³⁰
Fielding, for example, although he believed it was immoral to steal from his peers, wrote, “The antients may be considered a rich common, where every person who hath the smallest tenement in Parnassus hath a free right to fatten his muse.”
³¹
Even today, victims of plagiarism, including Neal Bowers,
³²
are often told that they can always write another poem, or that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
³³

I take issue with these placable attitudes because I know, from an experience within my own family, how much plagiarism can hurt. In 1988, I happened on a
New York Times
³⁴
article that charged John Hersey with incorporating entire paragraphs from Laurence Bergreen’s biography of James Agee into his own
New Yorker
essay on the same subject. Hersey had done a little rewriting, but Bergreen shone through in every phrase. When I read the article, I got a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach, because Hersey had once plagiarized from my mother.

It had happened more than forty years earlier. My mother and her first husband, Melville Jacoby, were Far East correspondents for
Time
during World War II. After the Japanese occupation of Manila in January of 1942, they spent three months with General Douglas MacArthur’s troops on Corregidor and Bataan before escaping to Australia, where Mel was killed in an accident on an American air base. During those three months, my mother and Mel filed frequent dispatches to
Time
. They planned to base a book of their own on this material, but their dispatches instead became, without their permission, the nearly verbatim basis for about half of Hersey’s best-selling
Men on Bataan
. Hersey must have had a troubled conscience, because he apparently arranged for
Time
to pay my mother and Mel $450, and—this is the most bizarre twist of all, something I didn’t believe until my mother read it to me over the phone
³⁵
—he
dedicated
the book to “Melville Ja-coby, his wife Annalee,” and two other journalists, “partly so they won’t charge me with grand larceny.”
³⁶

As soon as I read the
Times
article, I telephoned Larry Bergreen, with whom I’d gone to college, and told him about
Men on Bataan
. He told me that several other people, including an emeritus professor at the University of Chicago, had already called to report that, over the years, Hersey had lifted their words as well.
³⁷
Hersey, whom Larry had always admired as a “voice of conscience,” turned out to have all the marks of the compulsive plagiarist: he borrowed repeatedly, he left extravagantly obvious clues, and—what a gifted writer he was!—he didn’t need to do it.

My mother told me, “I think Hersey was ruined by the Time Inc. method of writing from correspondents’ files. He just got so used to running other people’s work through his typewriter and calling it his own that he started to think the whole written world was raw material.”

Larry Bergreen’s stolen words had, at least, been published under his own name. My mother never had that satisfaction. The only time she ever saw her dispatches in print was inside a cover that said BY JOHN HERSEY. But she wrote them. And, even though Hersey is dead and this story has long been forgotten by everyone outside our family, you can’t take that away from her.
³⁸

 T
H E
 C
A T A L O G I G A L
 I
M P E R A T I V E
 

O
n the cover of a recent Nordstrom catalogue—don’t ask me why—there is a photograph of a billy goat. He is standing on a burlap bag in the back of a pickup truck, eating a red carnation that he has just plucked from a green plastic flowerpot. The goat looks pleased with his meal, but the omnivorous glint in his eye suggests that if no carnations were available, he would be willing to settle for the burlap bag, the plastic flowerpot, or even the pickup truck.

I know that glint, because that’s how I feel about reading. I’d rather have a book, but in a pinch I’ll settle for a set of Water Pik instructions. I have spent many a lonely night in small-town motel rooms consoled by the Yellow Pages. Once, long ago, I bested a desperate bout of insomnia by studying the only piece of written material in my apartment that I had not already read at least twice: my roommate’s 1974 Toyota Corolla manual. Under the circumstances (addiction, withdrawal, craving, panic), the section on the manual gearshift was as beautiful to me as Dante’s vision of the Sempiternal Rose in canto XXXI of the
Paradiso
.

There is only one form of non-literature, however, that I would sometimes
prefer
to the
Paradiso
. It is—I realize that I am about to deal my image a blow from which it may never recover—the mail-order catalogue. In fact, I consumed the aforementioned Nordstrom catalogue from cover to cover, even though it was downhill after the goat.

I hasten to mention that I have never actually solicited a catalogue. Although it is tempting to conclude that our mailbox hatches them by spontaneous generation, I know they are really the offspring of promiscuous mailing lists, which copulate in secret and for money. One of the pleasures, or horrors, of the direct-mail business is that you never know to whom your name will be pandered. My friend Ross Baughman, a photographer who once accompanied a group of American mercenaries to Nicaragua, inquired before the trip about a mail-order night-vision scope that would allow him to take pictures during midnight commando raids without using a flash. Ever since, he has been deluged with catalogues for pamphlets on how to make rifle silencers out of old car mufflers and napalm out of laundry detergent.

At least Ross can trace his direct-mail family tree. But why do I receive catalogues devoted exclusively to salsa, equestrian gear, electric grills, extra-large clothes, extra-small clothes, tours to sites at which UFO’s have landed, and resin reproductions of medieval gargoyles? Do these companies know something about me that I don’t know?

I have come to believe that the explanation turns on the fact that the address label often reads ANNE SADIMAN. (Over the phone,
F
sounds like
S
. All Fadimans have therefore learned to say, whenever we order anything, “
F
as in Frank.” However, at least a quarter of the time, people think we have said, “
S
as in Srank.”) Anne Fadiman is a middle-aged mother of two who possesses neither a microwave nor a CD player, let alone a deck on which to place an electric grill or a house to which such a deck might be attached. But
Anne Sadiman
—ah, she’s a horse of another color, and it’s almost certainly celery, blush, buff, ecru, kiwi, Java, thistle, grenadine, delft, pebble, cork, or cloud, to mention a few of her favorites from the J. Crew catalogue. Wearing her Ultimate Hat from TravelSmith, which has “been crushed by Land Rovers, dropped from airplanes, and lost in raging rapids,” Anne S. makes frequent trips to Lake Titicaca, the location (according to her Power Places Tours catalogue) of “one of the most powerful energy vortexes in the world.” She easily attracts men (since her body has been perfected by the Macarena Workout from Collage Videos) and ladybugs (since she buys three-packs of easy-to-use, disposable Ladybug Lures from Duncraft). Courtesy of her Audio-Forum language tapes, she speaks Yupik, Xhosa, and Twi “like a diplomat.” (Or better. Show me an American ambassador who is fluent in Twi and I’ll eat Anne Sadiman’s Ultimate Hat.) She’s fond of her $1-million Diamond-Studded Miracle Bra from Victoria’s Secret, but she’s equally partial to her twelve-point nickel-chrome moly steel crampons from Campmor. In fact, her husband gets particularly excited when she wears both of these items simultaneously.