[In the following review, Kenner argues that Mallon neglects to address several pertinent issues in Stolen Words: Forays into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism, but notes that Mallon did an admirable job with the subject despite such omissions.]

Writer? “A reader moved to emulation.”

—Saul Bellow

Jorge Luis Borges dreamed of a Universal Library from which every thinkable book could be shown to have been plagiarized; it would simply contain, printed and bound, all possible sequencings of characters, not forgetting some hundreds of pages of just “z.” 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. Still, did any written language, pre-1922, contain “Mkgnao,” James Joyce's transcription of what a hungry cat said? (She also said “Mrkgnao” and even “Mrkrgnao,” though the closest her owner could comes was “Miaow.” Cats are fluent in Cat; humans aren't.)

Cats aside, though, what can be said about plagiarism? We've all read books very like books we've read before. That's especially true if we keep up with political commentary. Yet do Tom Wicker's columns plagiarize Ellen Goodman's? Not at all, though they do write from a common center and could spell one another during sick leaves. 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?)

I'm teasing you with the unthinkable just to suggest how slippery Thomas Mallon's subject is [in Stolen Words: Forays into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism]. Generalizations on plagiarism he's found “more perilously porous than those of most others.” The best Sam Johnson's great Dictionary of 1755 could manage was “Theft; literary adoption of the thoughts or works of another.” Thinking “works” might be a misprint for “words,” I checked Mallon's quotation back to the source. No, “works” is correct. Johnson was shrewd in seeing how words, even sequences of words, may be Public Domain.

That was especially true in the eighteenth century, when writers were vying to shape a common idiom. Earlier, Shakespeare had aimed differently:

No, this my hand may rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green, one red. …

And, unforgettably idiosyncratic, that glowing “incarnadine” is surely stamped as his word? Well, Longfellow did venture to use it in 1845, and in 1872 it even turns up in somebody's History of Columbus, Ohio. But when epigones borrow it we still sense Shakespeare's weight. Plagiarism? Better, quasi-allusion.

The eighteenth century, however, eschewed gorgeous words like that, words that might carry some individual's stamp. “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. For from Dryden's time through Johnson's what they were aiming at was an idiom of interchangeable parts, shaped toward maximum general effectiveness. A modern instance: Did the B-707 plagiarize the DC-8? Most of us can't tell them apart save by noting that the latter sports fewer windows more widely spaced. Both were shaped to get 100-plus passengers economically airborne on four jet engines. By necessity, the two designs converged. 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.

Moreover, Pope's Odyssey was only partly by Pope; so common was the idiom, the great poet felt secure in subcontracting it. (Imagine Eliot subcontracting chunks of Murder in the Cathedral!) And, in that age of censorship, Who had Written the Anonymous What was the buzzing coffee-house topic. (Johnson even doubted if Swift had written A Tale of a Tub.)

All of which I go into because I fear Mr. Mallon scamps it. The eighteenth century, he'll have us know, was the age that discovered Literary Property. As it did. For it was the century when capitalism's printers were coming into dominance (and from them stemmed the concept of verbal “property”). But it was also the century that sought to regularize not only spelling but idiom (and, yes, how print does regularize). That meant, not only could you no longer spell your name five different ways, you could not, either, write “the multitudinous seas incarnadine.” You might write, oh, “With crimson lustre tint the pallid flood.” (And, Eureka!—a rhyme for “blood!”)

Anybody at all might feel free to use “crimson lustre,” anybody else “pallid flood.” Let those phrases not be joined by “tint” and there'd be no problem. Or let “tint” join them, and lo—perhaps—your line! Canonized!

But alas, there's Sterne, lifting paragraphs from Robert Burton; alas, too, there's Coleridge a generation later, lifting from Schelling and Schlegel. Sterne—it's an outside chance—might have assumed his lifts would be spotted and dubbed witty allusions. Coleridge, though—well, Coleridge. What knowledge, what commonality, can a writer assume? Also, at what moment in time?

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. And there's heavy irony when Eliot diligently refers “The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne” to Antony and Cleopatra, II.i.190, 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). 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.” And it's a weakness in the web Thomas Mallon weaves that he never mentions The Waste Land.

Mallon 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 History 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. 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. … Their attitudes were … rooted in the very spirit they appeared to reject.”

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.”

Nissenbaum even had the disheartening experience of being three times asked, by three university presses, to appraise what Sokolow had plagiarized from him. Each time he told them the facts. Each time they, yes, rejected the Sokolow typescript, but asserted no reason and also took no action. Standard procedure for several years, says Mallon, was to “reply to words [Sokolow] had stolen with words that were minced.”

Sokolow stole from more people than Nissenbaum. One of his techniques was to supply one footnote, suggesting a general indebtedness, then lift from a published source whole bunches of unascribed words. He seems to have assumed no one would notice. He was right. Lubbock folk who knew a published source by heart didn't notice. For people haven't time to read incoming hirees' dissertations. There is (and there's got to be) a presumption of trust. That's what Sokolow (correctly) presumed on.

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.

Fear of lawsuits? Likely. (“Why didn't the cobra bite the lawyer? Professional courtesy.” No, that's not from Mallon.) Fear of just egg-on-the-face? Surely. And Sokolow's Lubbock record now contains no negative vote about tenure. He simply said he'd resign. As he did. 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.”

I've been stung myself by the general-indebtedness footnote that proceeds to subsume whole paragraphs of barely altered lifts. With lawyers grimacing all around this kraal, I'll name no instances, though I've two in mind. They employ, both, the everyone-knows-this presumption, that what someone (e.g., myself) labored to establish is, since my labors, safely in the public domain, though with traces of my wording somehow gummed all over it.

I hope I've not sounded negative about Mallon. He's done admirably with a topic that, as he says, is nigh impossible to pin down. Sterne's “plagiaries,” recognized, become allusions, like the tags in The Waste Land. Coleridge's copious lifts from German philosophers? Well, did STC assume, likewise, a reader who'd spot their provenance and nod approvingly? In Coleridge: The Damaged Archangel, Norman Fruman thinks not. He charges Coleridge with just cutting corners—stealing. Other Coleridgeans think otherwise. They adduce either allusion, or else an unconscious precision of verbal memory, that overrode what STC meant for paraphrase.

Recently, Apple Computer has been dragging Microsoft through the courts, claiming that the “look and feel” of sundry Apple programs is infringed. Look and feel! Does a deluxe Holiday Inn like the one near JFK airport infringe on the Conrad Hilton “look and feel”? It's arguable; though at Hilton, as far as I know, they've not thought to summon the lawyers. They may rest serene in the conviction that any fool can tell a Holiday Inn from a Hilton. 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. The only thing TV's Falcon Crest had plagiarized, it seemed, was TV. As Falcon Crest's creator, Earl Hamner, put it, “TV is very imitative of itself.”

As, at bottom, let's face it, is all storytelling. Robert A. Heinlein, for instance, once stated that there are only four plots:

(1) Boy Meets Girl.

(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. Does it really happen? No way.

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. (Amis: “I could feel, gradually playing on my features, a look of queasy hope.” Epstein: “He could feel, playing across his face, a look of queasy hope.” Eight words in twelve identical.) Epstein blamed careless note-consulting. He then rose to Executive Story Editorship of TV's L.A. Law, a domain of safety where there's no such thing as plagiarism, because (see above) there's nothing but.

If I were Martin Amis I'd feel violated, yes. Then I'd note that Epstein's novel contains a teacher who feels violated by plagiarized term papers. 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. He decides not to turn the perpetrators in (“Who the hell am I to set myself up as some moral paragon?”), and Martin Amis likewise didn't sue. He may have reflected that bearers of noted names can feel special pressures. Remember Charles van Doren cheating on The ＄64,000 Question?

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.” Pound used “incarnadine” twice, splendidly, in his 52nd Canto, and did Shakespeare's heirs exist and bring suit they'd but demean themselves and their ancestor. But that is literature. On the other hand, there's, well—oh, …

Question: Why revise it? No human need feel violated. Humans don't write guidebooks, committees do. If it's adequately legalistic, leave it alone. Would Texas take Utah to the Supreme Court should their statutes against murder prove almost identically worded? I'd feel nervous if they weren't. But then, I'm not a committee.