Literary thieves I have known

NEW YORK, May 9 (UPI) -- I picked up a paper in West Texas one time and read one of my own articles. The only problem was, it didn't have my name on it. It had another guy's name on it, with his picture.

I don't mean that he stole an idea or a few phrases or quoted me without attribution. He just took the whole article and turned it into his column for the day.

You know what I did?

Nothing.

Partly it was the picture. I was a 22-year-old reporter and the thief was well past retirement age. I had served my newspaper apprenticeship with dozens of crusty old ink-stained alcoholics who couldn't remember the names of their children, much less follow the congressional budget debate.

At the time, it was considered part of a newspaper's social-welfare responsibility to let these colorful geezers serve out their terms, usually working an editing slot and writing as little as possible, with the sanguine hope they wouldn't set a glue-pot on fire with their chain-smoking or pass out during a print run and be mangled by the presses.

I figured this was one of those guys, and I had an odd affection for him. I wondered if he'd even bothered to retype the column or if he'd just removed my byline and pasted it onto a stringer page.

Several years later, the power equation was reversed. A famous nationally syndicated columnist, now deceased, so we'll leave him in peace, ripped off several jokes I had published both in column and book form. Because he was rich, successful and famous, and I was not, I was a little stung by that -- but also, in an odd way, flattered. So this time I decided to ... do nothing again.

Plagiarism is overrated as a crime. The ideas and words and expressions are out there. Once you write them, you sort of let them float into the ether, and the ones that have any lasting value will remain. If somebody swipes your stuff, and you really care all that much about it, you can point to the copyright date for easy comparisons. But let's not start getting all righteous about how "original" we are.

Yes, I know, plagiarism is a bad thing to do when you're a student. I went to Vanderbilt University, where we had a student-run Star Chamber called the Honor Council. This body met in secret and dealt out punishments to cheaters and plagiarists. A single instance of plagiarism normally meant expulsion or at the least a year's suspension. But then I always thought that students passing judgment on fellow students was something like the justice dealt out in the French Revolution. Twenty-year-olds don't tend to know the meaning of mercy.

And yes, I know it's also a bad thing to do when you're a famous author taking advantage of the grunts who did more work than you did. Among other things, it makes you look lazy. But I still don't think it's that big a deal. Copyright laws were invented not to limit authors but to limit printers who were fond of taking entire books they didn't own and running off several thousand pirated copies.

In the 19th century, before we had international copyright agreements, everything Charles Dickens wrote was simply stolen by American publishers and sold without a single dime going back to London.

The whole brouhaha about the plagiarism of Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose -- you knew I was going there, right? -- comes down, finally, to quotation marks. Both of them actually did name the books they took passages from. They just failed to use quote marks around passages that were paraphrased or, in a few instances, ransacked for language.

First of all, I would tend to excuse both of them on the grounds of being damn good writers. As T.S. Eliot put it, "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal."

You may be asking yourself: Why didn't I just steal T.S. Eliot's quote just now? Maybe I should have. Maybe I would have gotten away with it. But besides being a famous quote, it's written by a famous person, so it makes the quote better to say somebody else said it first. If an obscure writer had said the same thing, I probably would not have cited the source -- for a simple reason. Try this on for size:

As the minor 18th century Belgian bibliophile Francois Rasmussen once said, "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal."

Doesn't exactly sing, does it?

Most people who really do know how to write have tended to regard the entire history of the printed word as their personal research file. It's well known, for example, that Shakespeare took entire passages from Plutarch and simply dressed them up in better language.

What's less well known is that he took them from North's translation of Plutarch that was still in print. By modern standards, Shakespeare was not only a plagiarist but a plagiarist who could easily be found out. The only thing that allowed him to get away with it was that he was a better writer than both North and Plutarch.

And I would make a similar argument for the two writers being vilified for their knavery. Stephen Ambrose has written 35 books in 40 years, several of them best-sellers, and I submit that you could give lesser writers all of the source books he used and say "steal at will" and they still couldn't match his storytelling ability. It's not about the information. It's about what he does with it.

Doris Kearns Goodwin is a tougher case, because she's a Harvard professor and so she's limited by the strict rules of academic citation. That means her colleagues regard every word written as a precise scientific datum that requires mind-numbingly extensive verification.

She did verify the source, even in her most notorious book, "The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys," currently being shredded so a new edition can be released with quotation marks intact. The book is 900 pages long and has 3,500 footnotes, so if she cut a few corners, it doesn't really invalidate the substance of the book and it certainly doesn't warrant all the vilification -- being kicked off PBS, removed from the Pulitzer committee, uninvited as a commencement speaker, possible removal from the Harvard Board of Overseers --- that she's currently going through.

If you want to pick on somebody, choose Michael Bellesiles, the Emory University professor who wrote the book about guns in early America. Apparently he either slanted, inflated or falsified entirely the statistics about how many guns existed in the young country to make an anti-gun political statement. Now that's a serious charge.

Ambrose and Goodwin were saying, "Hey, this is good information, this is interesting, I think I'll use it, other people should know about it." Bellesiles was saying, "I can't find information on this, so I'll fake it." It's not the same crime.

The truth is, copyright in all its forms is entering a period of decline anyway. Blame the world wide Web, where everything gets posted, recycled, parsed, deconstructed and bandied about until the original source material is either unrecognizable or impossible to trace. Within 15 minutes of my finishing this column, it will be available for linking, quoting, reprinting, or, yes, stealing, without a whole lot we can do about it.

And I would rather be linked, quoted, reprinted and robbed than to just vanish into the black void of cyberspace.

This unregulated stock market of words is, in my opinion, a good thing. Vast oceans of ideas, flowing freely between countries, equally available to the obscure and the famous, is what will eventually bring the real storytellers to the surface. Because it's not about the words and the ideas --- it's about the strange mystical connection between the writer and the reader. The words are just the clay.

Or as Edmund Wilson said, "In a sense, one can never read the book that the author originally wrote, and one can never read the same book twice." (Preface to "The Triple Thinkers," if you're checking my references.)

Or as Charles P. Curtis said, "Books are like rivers. 'You cannot bathe in the same river twice, for new waters are ever flowing in upon you,' Heraclitus said."

If you're keeping score, that was an attribution to Heraclitus told through an attribution to Charles P. Curtis, who was a Harvard professor of government and sociology who wrote several minor books in the 1940s and '50s. I'd give you the actual book and page number, but you know what? I don't work at Harvard and I don't feel like it. I kind of like the idea of stealing something from Harvard right about now.

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Joe Bob Briggs writes a number of columns for UPI and may be contacted at [email protected] or through his website at joebobbriggs.com. Snail mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, TX 75221.