Thomas Mallon loves coincidences, loves the odd and unsettling tricks of a capricious fate. He’s a sucker for the unlikely connection, the eerie symmetry.
So maybe he won’t mind trying this one on for size:
Mallon’s new book, “Mrs. Paine’s Garage and the Murder of John F. Kennedy” (2002), is about a woman on the innocent fringes of the JFK assassination. Kennedy’s family was the subject of “The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys,” Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 1987 book that is now the focus of researchers who charge that Goodwin plagiarized portions of it — and Mallon, as it happens, is regarded by many as the nation’s foremost authority on plagiarism, as his 1989 book on the topic, “Stolen Words,” recently was reissued in paperback.
Got that?
All you really need to get is this: Mallon can’t seem to shed the label of “plagiarism expert,” even though he has published several highly regarded novels, such as “Henry and Clara” (1994) and “Dewey Defeats Truman” (1997). He has also produced a first-rate collection of literary essays, “In Fact” (2001), and now “Mrs. Paine’s Garage,” a non-fiction work about the persistent “What if?” of history, the radiant heat of fate that keeps life’s kettle at a constant low boil. Despite his achievements, Mallon lately has been hit with a blizzard of requests for interviews on the subject of plagiarism, which he thought he had finished with more than a dozen years ago.
Mallon, you might say, has moved on, while society just can’t seem to.
“I got on everybody’s Rolodex under ‘plagiarism’ and I’ve never gotten off,” he said ruefully during a recent visit to Chicago. “A Newsweek reporter called me the other day and said, ‘Sorry, Tom, but you’re the go-to guy on this.’ “
Producers for “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” have kept in touch with Mallon during his promotional tour for “Mrs. Paine’s Garage,” eager for his on-air expertise as plagiarism charges have developed against Goodwin, historian Stephen Ambrose and, last week, explorer and cartographer Bradford Washburn.
Part of his allure arises from the fact that Mallon, 50, who taught literature for 12 years at Vassar College and until recently served as literary editor and columnist for GQ magazine, is a camera-ready raconteur. He’s witty and genial. He knows a great deal about a great many things but never sounds as if he’s lecturing. He also looks like a college professor is supposed to look: compact and dapper, with a tufted thatch of silver hair and a pair of round spectacles that shield bright, attentive eyes.
But the other part, as Mallon admits, is that plagiarism still vexes us something awful. “The thinking on the subject remains painfully underdeveloped. Some people get away scot-free and for other people, it kills the career and the taint lingers with them forever.” The ambiguity and confusion that hover around plagiarism–is it an immoral crime or just a dumb mistake?–make it a topic that many prefer to avoid thinking about, much less opining about in public.
“What always happens is, once the [particular] story’s over the subject seems to recede and then a year later, there’s another incident–and you find in the intervening years that there’s been no cultural progress made,” he said. “There’s always a new ripple, but the same basic questions about the offense get asked again and again and again.”
And that’s been the case throughout history, Mallon reports in “Stolen Words.” We can’t make up our minds just how serious a lapse plagiarism really is. “The confusion comes from an aura of naughtiness, a haze that shakes like a giggle: people think of plagiarism as a youthful scrape, something they got caught doing at school,” wrote Mallon, adding, “We often, and mistakenly, see plagiarism as a crime of degree, an excess of something legitimate, `imitation’ or `research’ that got out of hand.”
Had Goodwin and Ambrose swiped parked cars instead of paragraphs, we’d have no problem dealing with them; had they filched silverware instead of sentences, assessing punishment would be easy. But Goodwin, who used work from three books without proper attribution in “The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys,” and Ambrose, who used work from other authors in at least six of his books, with no indication to readers that the work was borrowed, said they never intended to steal.
Washburn, who wrote “The Dishonorable Dr. Cook” (2001), was accused by historian Robert M. Bryce of passing off large parts of Bryce’s “Cook & Peary: The Polar Controversy Resolved” (1997), as his own, does not recollect having read Bryce’s work, he told The Washington Post.
A new phenomenon
The plagiarism muddle is relatively new, Mallon said. Until the 17th Century, swiping words and ideas was “more a matter for laughter than litigation.” Everybody copied everybody else. Only when authorship itself became professionalized, only when books and articles began to be things one produced for money, like candles and bread, did the idea of stealing someone’s words start to seem like a crime.
Yet “crime” may be too harsh a word. Copyright law really doesn’t cover plagiarism, Mallon explained.
“It’s a blunt instrument. It is there not to prevent people from doing these artful little pastiches, but to prevent wholesale reprintings of unauthorized editions. All you can really do [against plagiarism] is apply a certain kind of sanction, or shaming, within the world in which the person works.”
But the public often doesn’t see the harm. At a recent lecture in St. Louis, Ambrose drew a laugh from the crowd when he said, “Someone said to me, `You have to be some kind of fool to plagiarize somebody and then put a footnote on it,’ ” although it was the lack of footnotes that got Ambrose into trouble. A wire service reporter found few in the audience willing to condemn the historian.
Teachers often face that challenge regarding plagiarism, said Mike Raftery, an English teacher at Marian Catholic High School in Chicago Heights: how to persuade students that it’s theft, not a harmless shortcut on the night before a paper is due.
“Kids need to be concerned that plagiarism is a serious matter and that colleges will take it seriously,” said Raftery, who has taught for 38 years. “But most of the time, they’re [students] not intending to do it.”
What’s made plagiarism more tempting than ever, he said, is the Internet, that roiling cornucopia of phrases and ideas seemingly ripe for the plucking–without having to bother with a pesky little task such as acknowledging where you got the stuff.
Angela Adams, who teaches composition at Loyola University-Chicago, concurred. “Students are accustomed to thinking about printed matter as having an author–but not [material on] the Web. I deal much more with unintentional plagiarism, not intentional plagiarism.”
Relying on the Internet
Mallon, who wrote an addendum to the current edition of “Stolen Words” about the Internet’s impact on plagiarism, said conversations with former colleagues at Vassar bore that out. Most plagiarism cases now result from material found on the Internet rather than traditional published sources. “But detection is easier, too,” he added.
Some authors grow a trifle irritated when an old work keeps popping up just as they’re trying to talk about a new one. Mallon, however, understands the appeal–if that’s the right word–of plagiarism, its habit of surfacing again and again in a culture that still doesn’t know quite how to handle it.
The same quality adheres to the Kennedy assassination, another topic that just won’t go away, to which Mallon has added a new twist. His slim, tautly written book is “a kind of literary curiosity, a curio–part history, part what-might-have-been,” he said.
Mallon who lives in Westport, Conn., but maintains an apartment in New York, spent many hours interviewing Ruth Paine, the woman who befriended Lee Harvey Oswald, his pregnant wife, Marina, and their infant child a few months before Oswald assassinated the president. The murder weapon was stored in Paine’s garage, unbeknownst to her.
On the margins of history
The book’s title character is a gentle, well-intentioned woman who was unaccountably swept up in one of the most cataclysmic events of the last century, a woman who hovers at the margins of history–not because of what she did, but because of where she happened to be on that November day in Dallas. Fate, bad luck, coincidence–whatever one wants to call it, it connected Paine with a president’s death.
“I do believe Oswald killed the president,” Mallon said. “I believe the odds are overwhelming that he acted alone. I think there are conspiracies–Watergate was a conspiracy–and I’m not naive about this. But–however floridly you want to characterize it–the hand of fate does operate. The mysteries in the world are mysteries to me.”
What drew him to Paine’s story–the wisps and swirls of chance and ambiguity that wind around a legendary event such as the assassination–are some of the same elements that keep Mallon tethered to the plagiarism topic: The sense that, like it or not, we are sometimes connected to things we think we’ve left behind.
Culture is coincidence as much as it is volition, a matter of magical confluence as well as strategic intention. And thus a writer, who wanted to talk about one of the more original works on the Kennedy assassination ever published, found himself chatting, once again, about plagiarism.
“The ironies of life,” Mallon said, “just spring up at you.”
Mallon’s musings
Here are excerpts of Thomas Mallon’s works:
From “Stolen Words” (1989):
“Some of the trouble comes from the way in which our enduring, Aristotelian notions of what literature is involve the admirable business of imitation. . . . To some extent every writer’s desk top is like a Ouija board, his pen pushed across it by whatever literary ghost he’s just entertained. Why should it be otherwise? . . . There was a time when the guiding spirits of the literary dead were deliberately conjured, a time before ancestor worship gave way to that form of youth-enthrallment known as originality. And it was no short period of time, either; it amounts to most of literary history.”
From “Mrs. Paine’s Garage and the Murder of John F. Kennedy” (2002):
“Like most politically aware people, Ruth Paine, upon first hearing the news, believed that the shooting of John F. Kennedy had been committed by a right-wing extremist. She belonged as well to a smaller group who instantly sensed that their own lives would be altered by the deed, and to a much smaller category still, a handful of people she didn’t yet know she had joined, ones whose lives had just been stopped, like watches in a bomb blast.”
