How well I remember the sweetness of it. I was sit­ ting on a plane, reading a copy of The Spectator. Taki Theodoracopulos had written one of his “High Life” columns taking off after the sodomites of the Big Bagel (as he thoughtfully described the gorgeous mosaic of gay life in Manhattan). It was a spirited piece, made no less so by my growing conviction that I had read it before. By the time the plane landed, I had attained the “Gotcha” moment that is the Nirvana of the vengeful reader. It took me only an hour to get a fax of the “original article” (by Norman Podhoretz in the New York Post a few weeks previously), compare the sen­ tences word for word, and fire off an extremely contented and self-righteous letter to the editor of The Spectator. I knew that he would have no choice but to print it, and Taki and I were not get­ ting on very well at the time, so it was one of the most chore-free pieces of un­ paid writing that I have ever done. Dear reader, mark the sequel. Not many years later I wrote a strangely neglected book on the sculpture of the Parthenon. Reviewing this learned yet passionate text, *The Spectator’*s critic was good enough to notice a paragraph of mine about the arrangement of certain ancient stones. With a maddening loftiness, he com­ pared it to another paragraph, written by quite another author in quite an­ other book, and found it disconcertingly similar. Well, I mean to say, that was an entirely different matter. Once again I found myself writing (and once again, revoltingly, without any suggestion of payment) a letter to the editor of this irresponsible magazine. The case was quite clear and the misunderstanding laughably self­evident to any serious reader. Both I and Mr. William St. Clair—this was the name of the other author—had obviously drawn on the same original eyewitness de­ scription of the Acrop­ olis. What could be more natural than that both of us, committed scholars in our different ways, should have summarized the same source in much the same fashion? I need hardly say that that was the end of the story, except that I still wake up whimpering about it. Plagiarism. A nasty little word. In the world of classical antiquity (not that I have any great desire to bring that up all over again) the word plagiarius, which to Cicero meant manstealer or kidnapper, was used by Martial to denote a literary thief. Ever since, the crime has haunted writers of all calibers. Only a few weeks ago, Julian Barnes received a rather tepid review in The Times Literary Supplement of his new short-story collection, Cross Channel. The reviewer compared its style unfavorably with a “resonant image” in Barnes’s earlier novel Flaubert’s Parrot: “A pier is a disappointed bridge.” Then came one of those fearful letters, pointing out (doubtless to the discomfiture also of the reviewer, who hadn’t noticed it) that the line was from James Joyce’s Ulysses. So the question is: Did Barnes pick up this happy phrase subliminally, did he “annex” it for his own purposes, or did he simply assume that any litterate reader would spot the reference? I should say that this isone of the public questions most dreaded by writers of fiction, the other being the eqully knowing one about how much of their work is “autobiographical.”

An enterprising editor could probably appoint a special correspondent to cover plagiarism, and see the poor guy or gal worked nearly to death. Think only of monitoring Ruth Shalit, whose secret until recently was that she filched sentences from writers—such as Fred barnes and David Broder—whom she could be reasonably sure nobody else was bothering to read. Clever, but, as events have proved, not quite clever enough. *The New Yorker’*s February appreciation of Joseph Brodsky said that he had had a heart attack coming surely as next Christmas, a memorable line appropriated (honestly enough I thought) from Philip Larkin’s All What Jazz. Arianna Stassinopoulous Huffington, author of Picasso: Creator and Destroyer, put herself memorably in the debt of Ms. Lydia Gasman, who seems to have written an earlier study of Picasso which the divine Arianna did not acquire by transcendental means. And while we are on the subject of My Sweet Lord—a favored Huffington invocation—we find that not even the world of music is immune. George Harrison had to pay a tidy sum to the Chiffons, whose 1963 smash “ldquo;He’s So Fine” was ruled by a court to be the melodic ancestor of Geroge’s 1971 chartbuster. Experts have been retained on all sides to debate whether Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber ran out of inspiration and went with good old Puccini for some moments in The Phantom of the Opera. Many people believe that they could easily hold down a job on the plagirism desk. But if you think you know what plagirism is, you are making a very large claim—the claim that you know originality when you see it. Apart from being the small change, and occasionally the major currency, of arguments within the worlds of letters and journalism, what we call plagiarism is a subject with deep roots in our literature and huge implications for the crafts of writing and speaking. Let me start with a relatively shattering example: I looked at the man; I saw him plain; Like a dead weed, gray and wan, Or a breath of dust. I looked again— And man and dog were one, Like the wisps of a graying dawn … This comes from a poem called “Waste Land,” published in 1913. With the addition of a definite article to the title, T.S. Eliot published a rather more famous verse effort in 1922. Eliot’s poem which it would be trite to describe as the birth pang of poetic modernism, contained the imperishable line “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” It also speaks of “the brown fog of a winter dawn.” See above. That’s what Robert Ian Scott, a Canadian scholar, has done. He has found a number of other “resemblances.” Aside from the title and the imagery, there is the matter of Eliot’s access to the earlier poem. Madison Cawein was a Cincinnati pool-hall cashier who died one year after his “Waste Land” was published. It was printed in a Chicago magazine of which Ezra Pound-Eliot’s friend and mentor-was European editor. Eliot had submitted a poem of his own to this very magazine. Moreover, in the self­ same issue in which Cawein’s “Waste Land” appeared, there was also an essay by Pound on poetry in London, which it is highly unlikely that Eliot would not have wanted to read. Hold whatever thought you have for a moment. Here is a quotation from Dr. Martin Luther King: In the course of its development western civilization has shifted from a colonial naivete of the frontier to the far­ reaching machination of nationalism and from an agrarian pattern of occupation to the industrial one. This comes from a seminary essay King wrote entitled “The Sources of Fundamentalism.” It compares with reasonable smoothness to an earlier text, which instructs the curious reader that: In the course of its development western civilization has shifted from a colonial naivete of the frontier to the far­ reaching machinations of nationalism and from an agrarian pattern of occupation to the industrial one. The missing s in the King version could even have been a misprint. Moving right along, we come to the great Scottish bard Hugh MacDiarmid. Here is his much-admired poem Perfect, published in 1939. I found a pigeon’s skull on the mach air, All the bones pure white and dry, and chalky, But perfect, Without a crack or a flaw anywhere. At the back, rising out of the beak, Were twin domes like bubbles of thin bone, Almost transparent, where the brain had been That fixed the tilt of the wings. And here is a passage from a book, The Blue Bed, by the Welsh writer Glyn Jones, published two years previously: On her palm lay the small frail skull of a seagull, white, and complete as a pebble. It was lovely, all the bones pure white and dry, and chalky, but perfect without a crack or a flaw anywhere. At the back, rising out of the beak were twin domes like bubbles of thin bones, almost trans­ parent, where the brain had been that fixed the tilt of the wings … These all look like pretty damning, not to say open-and-shut, cases. Reputations in politics and journalism have been drastically compromised for much less. (Think of poor Senator Joe Biden caught lifting a speech from the born loser Neil Kinnock.) But a second look discloses a lot of ambiguity. Take Eliot first. Did he derive “a handful of dust” from Madison Cawein? Or did he steal it instead from Charlotte Mew, who in a poem written in 1916 spoke of “a handful of forgotten dust”? Or did he per­ haps purloin the said handful from Virgil, Horace, Ovid, John Donne, Walter de la Mare, Alfred Tennyson, or Joseph Con­ rad, each of whom had employed the same phrase or something very close to it? And where had they taken it from? One might also want to make the point that Eliot’s verse’ is much more beautiful and powerful: And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust. Contrast that to the Cawein stanza above. What, then, about Dr. King? His various academic dissertations have been found to be honeycombed with other people’s property, and he seems to have had some very indulgent professors in college. It has even been alleged that part of the peroration of the “I Have a Dream” speech—the part about “from every mountainside, let freedom ring”—is lifted from, of all things, an address to the 1952 Republican convention by a black minister named Archibald Carey. But, of course, that line comes from “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” which King quoted more or less completely. And do you know how the closing passage of King’s speech was sup­ posed to have begun? If he’d followed the typed script provided by a virtual committee of do-gooders King would have said, “And so today, let us go back to our communities as members of the international association for the advancement of creative dissatisfaction.” With the whole world watching, King realized that it wouldn’t do, threw away the text in mid­ stream, called on all he’d ever read, including the prophets Amos and Isaiah, and changed everything for the better­ and for good. He may have done a lot of borrowing in his life, but he synthesized the borrowings into something higher. MacDiarmid isn’t such an easy case. He didn’t dare advance the defense made by some friendly critics, such as Edwin Morgan, who argued that deft rearrangement of prose was itself a form of poetry. He took refuge instead in an old stratagem: “I either automatically memorized it and subsequently thought it my own, or wrote it into one of my notebooks with the same result.” When that didn’t work and he continued to be teased in print, he resorted to the argument from authority: “As Mr. T. S. Eliot said: ’Minor poets borrow, major poets steal.’” Actually, MacDiarmid got even that wrong. What Eliot had said was that “immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” And Eliot may well have knocked that off from Coleridge, who had observed after a lifetime of cormorant­ like theft that “the Eighth Commandment was not made for bards.”

A good rule of thumb for young plagiarists starting out in life might well be the one set down by George Moore. “Taking something from one man and making it worse is plagiarism.” To “making it worse” one could add “or leav­ ing it exactly the same.” Nexis and various computer systems may be making the problem more acute, but nobody who either their own writing or their own plagiarism seriously can afford to go about the place saying that they “find” they have written something composed by somebody else. When Princess Michael of Kent, one of the Queen’s dimmer relatives, was shown to have nicked some material word for word for her biography of Empress Eugenie, she got a spokesman to tell the press, “It seems that, when she read her notes a long time after making them, she forgot that she had written down actual phrases from one of the books she was using.” Seems, madam! Nay, it is; I know not “seems.” We have a certain respect for the professionalism of the forger and the counterfeiter. For kleptomaniacs we entertain no such feeling, but rather resentment at their sloppiness-and the suspicion that in some pathetic way they hope, or need, to get caught. “Great literature,” wrote Robert Benchley, “must spring from an upheaval in the author’s soul. If that upheaval is not present, then it must come from the works of any other author which happen to be handy and easily adapted.” Matching this, Dorothy Parker remarked after some time on the West Coast that the only ism that Hollywood cared aboutwas plagiarism. Where would most of our culture be without borrowing, adaptation, and derivatives? Cineasts even have a fancy word for lifting, hommage. Why else would we require the copyright industry? Originality is a quality so rarely met with in humans that when it does occur it is often disputed. Sir Isaac Newton, for example, took great credit for pro­ pounding a law of planetary motion. This was to the outrage of his rival Robert Hooke, who maintained that Newton had drawn on his work as well as that of others. At that date—1678—the modern world of the scholarly journal and the patent was not yet formed. New­ ton made no direct admission, but did tactfully say that “if I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” This is commonly known as Newton’s Aphorism, though it had appeared as recently as 1651 in a collection of proverbs by George Herbert. According to the magisterial Robert K. Merton in his labyrinthine book On the Shoulders of Giants, other claimants to the coinage of the phrase include Bernard of Chartres in about 1126, John of Salisbury, Henri de Mondeville, and Robert Burton (he of the Anatomy of Melancholy). And this is to cite only some medieval and postmedieval candidates, since the remark was probably first made in classical times. Among later imitators were Coleridge—as usual—John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Engels, Frank Harris, and Sigmund Freud, all of whom in their different ways had a right to it, and some of whom (though not Mill, who had read everything and had a conscience) may have believed that they were uttering it for the first time. Thus Newton’s most subtle and guarded admission of a possible “debt” is itself one of the phrases most frequently “borrowed.” A decade ago, watching Ronald Reagan give his famous speech on the night of the Challenger calamity, and wanting as ever to resist his sentimental appeal, I became convinced that I had heard his closing lines somewhere. If you remember, he spoke of the dead astronauts as having “slipped the surly bonds of earth,” to “touch the face of God.” The White House declined to help me in my search for the origins of this couplet. I finally discovered that the words came from a sonnet, “High Flight,” by John Gillespie Magee Jr., which was read out as the regular closedown on Washington’s Channel 9 TV station.