Stolen Words
Mallon, Thomas
BOOK REVIEWS Writer? 'M reader moved to emulation." —Saul Bellow Jorge Luis Borges dreamed of a Uni- versal Library from which every thinkable book could be shown to have been plagiarized; it...
...Epstein: "He could feel, playing across his face, a look of queasy hope...
...Their attitudes were . . . rooted in the very spirit they appeared to reject...
...You might write, oh, "With crimson lustre tint the pallid flood...
...A ll of which I go into because I fear Mr...
...Each time they, yes, rejected the Sokolow typescript, but asserted no reason and also took no action...
...Not at all, though they do write from a common center and could spell one another during sick leaves...
...It's even funnier when Eliot refers "A noise of horns and motors" to "A noise of horns and hunting," from Day's Parliament of Bees, which he can feel sure not one reader in a thousand has heard of, even though Day does afford glimpses of a lady's "naked skin...
...That's what Sokolow (correctly) presumed on...
...so common was the idiom, the great poet felt secure in subcontracting it...
...Humans don't write guidebooks, committees do...
...Sokolow stole from more people than Nissenbaum...
...Would Texas take Utah to the Supreme Court should their statutes against murder prove almost identically worded...
...Eight words in twelve identical...
...40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1990 If I were Martin Amis I'd feel violated, yes...
...Why didn't the cobra bite the lawyer...
...We'd have plagiarism should Tom on a lazy afternoon turn to something of Ellen's for sentence structure and sequence, changing a few words now and then to keep things Wickerized...
...And how much would he need to change before we'd swung beyond the orbit of proof...
...A modern instance: Did the B-707 plagiarize the DC-8...
...As he did...
...Does a deluxe Holiday Inn like the one near JFK airport infringe on the Conrad Hilton "look and feel...
...But alas, there's Sterne, lifting paragraphs from Robert Burton...
...There is (and there's got to be) a presumption of trust...
...Epstein blamed careless note-consulting...
...Though his Library of Babel is a good deal too big for practicable production, one might still argue that the English language contains, potentially, all that can be said in English, including the sentence you are reading now...
...Fear of just egg-on-the-face...
...Still, did any written language, pre-1922, contain "Mkgnao," James Joyce's transcription of what a hungry cat said...
...18.95 Hugh Kenner THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1990 39 tory Department needed was "a good New York Jew" and proceeded to crash his way tenurewards with the aid of an unpublished dissertation by a man at Amherst named Nissenbaum...
...Does it really happen...
...The eighteenth century, however, eschewed gorgeous words like that, words that might carry some individual's stamp...
...That's especially true if we keep up with political commentary...
...In Coleridge: The Damaged Archangel, Norman Fruman thinks not...
...Then I'd note that Epstein's novel contains a teacher who feels violated by plagiarized term papers...
...What does really happen is a lot of flak when a Jacob Epstein in Wild Oats (1979) lifts not a plot but just sentences from a novel by Martin Amis...
...They may rest serene in the conviction that any fool can tell a Holiday Inn from a Hilton...
...Question: Why revise it...
...Cats aside, though, what can be said about plagiarism...
...Those come (at $5.50 a page) from outfits that advertise in the likes of the New York Times Book Review, not to mention Rolling Stone...
...Look and feel...
...Oregon officials apologized and said they would revise their guidebook...
...We've all read books very like books we've read before...
...Likewise, translations of Homer into rhymed couplets were meant to get any English dabbler airborne, and when someone arrived at an especially neat phrasing it got taken up by his successors with no talk of plagiary...
...No, that's not from Mallon...
...And by '83 "he was working at the National Endowment for the Humanities" . . . "monitoring the grants awarded to university professors for the pursuit of their research...
...Let those phrases not be joined by "tint" and there'd be no problem...
...Anybody at all might feel free to use "crimson lustre," anybody else "pallid flood...
...Yet since Homer the richness of literature has lain in allusiveness: in its evocations of what Eliot called "that vanished mind of which our mind is a continuation...
...Plagiarism...
...though at Hilton, as far as I know, they've not thought to summon the lawyers...
...Stanford issued a release saying Oregon officials had conceded that the plagiarism section and other parts of its handbook were identical with the Stanford guidebook...
...Remember Charles van Doren cheating on "The $64,000 Question...
...And, Eureka!—a rhyme for "blood...
...And there's heavy irony when Eliot diligently refers "The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne" to Antony and Cleopatra, 111190, while omitting to ascribe "Those are pearls that were his eyes" to anyone (for, come on, readers must know something, if only a tag from The Tempest...
...And, unforgettably idiosyncratic, that glowing "incarnadine" is surely stamped as his word...
...No human need feel violated...
...Each time he told them the facts...
...I find this word but once," wrote Johnson of "incarnadine," proceeding (as was his duty) to cite Shakespeare, with whose canon he sometimes felt stuck...
...Surely...
...Mallon scamps it...
...T. S. Eliot once said he'd appended the Notes to The Waste Land to spike the guns of such critics as had earlier accused him of plagiarism...
...As it did...
...They employ, both, the everyone-knows-this presumption, that what someone (e.g., myself) labored to establish is, since mylabors, safely in the public domain, though with traces of my wording somehow gummed all over it...
...With lawyers grimacing all around this kraal, I'll name no instances, though I've two in mind...
...literary adoption of the thoughts or works of another...
...Other Coleridgeans think otherwise...
...Well, did STC assume, likewise, a reader who'd spot their provenance and nod approvingly...
...Earlier, Shakespeare had aimed differently: No, this my hand may rather The multitudinous seas incamadine, Making the green, one red...
...The eighteenth century, he'll have us know, was the age that discovered Literary Property...
...Sokolow: "Yet it would be completely misleading to see Thomas and his wife Mary as nineteenth-century critics of Victorian sexuality who glorified sexual intercourse Their defense of sexuality was rooted in the very spirit which it appeared to reject...
...He seems to have assumed no one would notice...
...2) The Little Tailor (3) The Man Who Learned Better (4) "If This Goes On . ." Use any of those—Romeo and Juliet, Beowulf, Candide, 1984—and (in theory) expect a Look and Feel suit...
...Thus: Nissenbaum: "But, for all that, it would be misleading to see the Nicholses as a kind of nineteenth-century anticipation of Masters and Johnson...
...If it's adequately legalistic, leave it alone...
...He simply said he'd resign...
...By necessity, the two designs converged...
...I'm teasing you with the unthinkable just to suggest how slippery Thomas Mallon's subject is...
...Coleridge's copious lifts from German philosophers...
...I'd feel nervous if they weren't...
...Both were shaped to get 100-plus passengers economically airborne on four jet engines...
...Law," a domain of safety where there's no such thing as plagiarism, because (see above) there's nothing but...
...They adduce either allusion, or else an unconscious precision of verbal memory, that overrode what STC meant for paraphrase...
...He decides not to turn the perpetrators in ("Who the hell am I to set myself up as some moral paragon...
...It's arguable...
...As "Falcon Crest's" creator, Earl Hamner, put it, "TV is very imitative of itself...
...Amis: "I could feel, gradually playing on my features, aiook of queasy hope...
...Professional courtesy...
...And even when a publication (The Eighteenth Century) felt driven to apology for a plagiarism-ridden Sokolow piece, it "of course" did not "condone such practices" but it never once named Sokolow...
...No way...
...Sterne's "plagiaries," recognized, become allusions, like the tags in The Waste Land...
...He charges Coleridge with just cutting corners—stealing...
...That meant, not only could you no longer spell your name five different ways, you could not, either, write "the multitudinous seas incarnadine...
...Pound used "incarnadine" twice, splendidly, in his 52nd Canto, and did Shakespeare's heirs exist and bring suit they'd but demean them-selves and their ancestor...
...She also said "Mrkgnao" and even "Mrkrgnao," though the closest her owner could come was "Miaow...
...He's done admirably with a topic that, as he says, is nigh impossible to pin down...
...Sterne —it's an outside chance—might have assumed his lifts would be spotted and dubbed witty allusions...
...On the other hand, though, Anita Kornfield thought the look and feel of her novel Vintage had been snatched by CBS for the TV series "Falcon Crest," and the court said no, it hadn't...
...No, "works" is correct...
...For it was the century when capitalism's printers were coming into dominance (and from them stemmed the concept of verbal "property...
...The best Sam Johnson's great Dictionary of 1755 could manage was "Theft...
...it would simply contain, printed and bound, all possible sequencings of characters, not forgetting some hundreds of pages of just "z...
...Standard procedure for several years, says Mallon, was to "reply to words [Sokolow] had stolen with words that were minced...
...Canonized...
...But it was also the century that sought to regularize not only spelling but idiom (and, yes, how print does regularize...
...alas, too, there's Coleridge a generation later, lifting from Schelling and Schlegel...
...Nissenbaum even had the disheartening experience of being three times asked, by three university presses, to appraise what Sokolow had plagiarized from him...
...Cats are fluent in Cat...
...Imagine Eliot subcontracting chunks of Murder in the Cathedral...
...Generalizations on plagiarism he's found "more perilously porous than those of most others...
...And it's a weakness in the web Thomas Mallon weaves that he never mentions The Waste Land...
...humans aren't...
...Yet do Tom Wicker's columns plagiarize Ellen Goodman's...
...What knowledge, what commonality, can a writer assume...
...Thinking "works" might be a misprint for "words," I checked Mallon's quotation back to the source...
...Coleridge, though—well, Coleridge...
...And Sokolow's Lubbock record now contains no negative vote about tenure...
...But when epigones borrow it we still sense Shakespeare's weight...
...I've been stung myself by the general-indebtedness footnote that proceeds to subsume whole paragraphs of barely altered lifts...
...Robert A. Heinlein, for instance, once stated that there are only four plots: (1) Boy Meets Girl...
...Fear of lawsuits...
...He may have reflected that bearers of noted names can feel special pressures...
...Likely...
...One of his techniques was to supply one footnote, suggesting a general indebtedness, then lift from a published source whole bunches of unascribed words...
...As, at bottom, let's face it, is all storytelling...
...Johnson even doubted if Swift had written A Tale of a Mb...
...M anon is at his strongest with a clear-cut academic case, about a man named Jayme ("Jay") Aaron Sokolow, now forty-four, who concurred with an outside reviewer's judgment that what Texas Tech (Lubbock)'s HisSTOP, THIEVES...
...Better, quasi-allusion...
...and Martin Amis likewise didn't sue...
...But that is literature...
...Well, Longfellow did venture to use it in 1845, and in 1872 it even turns up in somebody's History of Columbus, Ohio...
...That was especially true in the eighteenth century, when writers were vying Hugh Kenner, professor of English at the Johns Hopkins University, is most recently the author of A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers (Knopf), The Mechanic Muse (Oxford), and Mazes (North Point...
...But then, I'm not a committee...
...Recently, Apple Computer has been dragging Microsoft through the courts, claiming that the "look and feel" of sundry Apple programs is infringed...
...Or let "tint" join them, and lo—perhaps—your line...
...STOLEN WORDS: FORAYS INTO THE ORIGINS AND RAVAGES OF PLAGIARISM Thomas Mallon/Ticknor & Fields/300 pp...
...Lubbock folk who knew a published source by heart didn't notice For people haven't time to read incoming hirees' dissertations...
...The only thing TV's "Falcon Crest" had plagiarized, it seemed, was TV...
...Also, at what moment in time...
...Most of us can't tell them apart save by noting that the latter sports fewer windows more widely spaced...
...For from Dryden's time through Johnson's what they were aiming at was an idiom of interchangeableparts, shaped toward maximum general effectiveness...
...He then rose to Executive Story Editorship of TV's "L.A...
...Johnson was shrewd in seeing how words, even sequences of words, may be Public Domain...
...And, in that age of censorship, Who had Written the Anonymous What was the buzzing coffee-house topic...
...Moreover, Pope's Odyssey was only partly by Pope...
...to shape a common idiom...
...I hope I've not sounded negative 1. about Mallon...
...On the other hand, there's, well—oh, . .. New York Times, 6 June, 1980: Stanford University said .today it had learned that its teaching assistant's handbook section on plagiarism had been plagiarized by the University of Oregon...
...He was right...
Vol. 23 • February 1990 • No. 2
