In a way, it’s a weird crime. You can almost count on being caught. These days, with Google and other search engines at the fingertips of every sedentary Sherlock Holmes, with industrious bloggers beavering away in their basements, getting by with literary larceny is unlikely.
So why do they do it? Why, once again, are we enmeshed in a mini-epidemic of wholesale borrowings and half-baked autobiographies that are more fantasy than fact? Why, when the Internet has made fact-checking into a sporting event — you can play along at home, folks! — do some writers continue to cheat, to filch, to fake, to steal, to swipe, to lie?
It is far too easy — and far from accurate — to say, “Duh. They do it for the money.” Tim Goeglein, the White House adviser caught plagiarizing parts of the dozens of columns he contributed to a Ft. Wayne, Ind., newspaper, wasn’t paid a penny for his ramblings.
Is it desperation? Panic? Hubris? Stupidity? Shortsightedness? An honest misunderstanding of the rules of the game? After all, hip-hop artists often sample other musical works in their songs; film directors regularly reproduce the scenes of directors whose works they admire.
But when writers do it, it is called something else: thievery. And it cripples careers, shreds reputations and periodically forces the publishing industry to wince, squirm, sigh deeply and re-examine its relationship with writers who don’t know — or blithely ignore — the difference between right and wrong.
“There is definitely a psychological component to plagiarism,” says Thomas Mallon, novelist and author of “Stolen Words: Forays Into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism,” the definitive 1989 account of plagiarism’s crooked history. “Plagiarism does sometimes occur because of carelessness or deadline pressures — but there is also a compulsive element to it, just as there is with memoir fabrication.”
Susan Shapiro Barash, author of the newly published “Little White Lies, Deep Dark Secrets: The Truth About Why Women Lie,” says some people “come to believe their own lies. It’s wishful thinking. They have chosen to lie to themselves. And in our culture, there’s a pressure on people to succeed and get ahead the best they can.”
On the eve of a national tour last week to promote a putative memoir titled “Love and Consequences” (Riverhead), Margaret B. Jones was outed as a white woman who hailed from Sherman Oaks, Calif., — not, as she claimed in the book, a woman of Native American heritage who grew up amid the grit and menace of South-Central Los Angeles. The publisher has recalled copies of “Love and Consequences.”
Jones’ downfall came when her sister read a profile of the author in The New York Times — a detail that makes Nancy Nall wonder aloud, “How much fun will Thanksgiving be at that house this year?”
Getting away with it
But the real question, Nall notes, is simpler: “How in the world did she think she’d get away with this?”
Nall, proprietor of a feisty blog called www.nancynall.com, has special credentials for commenting on the issue. (Full disclosure: Nall is a friend and former colleague of mine.) The Detroit-based writer and editor is the person who alerted the world to Goeglein’s sticky fingers when, intrigued by a reference in one of his columns, she discovered he had lifted intact large chunks of work from other people. The newspaper that published his columns checked his entire oeuvre, and it turns out that Goeglein’s thefts were frequent and fulsome. On Feb. 29, he resigned his post as special assistant to President Bush in the Office of Public Liaison.
Goeglein, according to a White House spokesman quoted in The Washington Post, “is offering no excuses and he agrees it was wrong.”
But that raises the question: Why did he do it in the first place?
“I’m increasingly convinced that he did this out of some deep need to be thought an intellectual,” Nall muses. What triggered her suspicions, after all, was his quotation of an obscure thinker with an unusual name; it turns out Goeglein had plagiarized a Dartmouth College publication.
Pressure, too, may have been a factor in Goeglein’s nearly 20-year pattern of pilfering, Nall speculates. “In the past year, he picked up the pace of his submissions from roughly quarterly to roughly monthly. Note, also, how dangerously close to the line he was skating — some of those pieces he stole had only been published a few weeks before.” Nall believes this may indicate not arrogance or obtuseness on Goeglein’s part, but the fact that he secretly wanted to be caught. “Certainly, when he started doing this, the Internet wasn’t much of a factor. But by the end, he had to know the ice was growing thin.”
Enter the Internet
The Internet: It has been a “double-edged sword” in the world of literary thievery, Mallon notes. “The advent of Google has made detection much easier. But on the other side, the Internet has also undermined the concept of ownership of words.”
The current crop of faked memoirs and fib-filled autobiographies may emanate from the complications of the Internet era, Mallon says. “As George Orwell noted, people write as an assertion of the ego. And when people fabricate memoirs, it’s an homage to the fact that writers still have stature in the culture.” Ironically, though, “the Web has made authorship a much less exclusive club. You can self-publish now so easily.”
And we may only be at the threshold of the Internet’s effect on literary originality, Mallon warns. “We’re not that far into it, and we just don’t know. It’s still very unsettled.”
Don De Grazia knows all about the tricky tango that is danced all night long, every night, by the novel and the memoir. The acclaimed 1998 novel, “American Skin,” by the Columbia College Chicago professor is subtitled “A Novel,” but because it has echoes from De Grazia’s own life, readers often get confused.
“I was having some beers with some old friends of mine who had read ‘Skin,’ and one of them said, ‘I still remember that time you cut your thumb on that meat cutter.'” That is a detail in De Grazia’s novel — but it never happened to him.
“I said, ‘I didn’t cut my thumb on any meat cutter.’ They looked at me like I was an idiot. ‘Yes, you did; you absolutely did. I remember the bandage around your hand and the blood soaking through.’
“I laughed and confessed to them that it was based on a story my grandpa told me about cutting his thumb on a meat cutter when he was a kid. But later that night, I started thinking, ‘Did I cut my thumb on a meat cutter?’ Now I have no idea whether it happened or not.”
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Everyone’s doing it …
A string of recent accusations about filched literature ? plagiarism, swiped life stories, flat-out lying in autobiographies ? is once again puzzling the populace, just as it did when James Frey’s pseudo-memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,? took an overly credulous Oprah Winfrey down a peg:
* The White House announced that aide Tim Goeglein admitted he plagiarized portions of the freelance newspaper columns he has written for more than two decades. He resigned.
* Misha Defonseca, author of “Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years” (1997), admitted that she fabricated the tale and that she is not Jewish.
*Riverhead Books recalled copies of “Love and Consequences” after the revelation that author Margaret B. Jones is not, as the so-called memoir claims, a mixed-race woman who grew up in the shadow of a Los Angeles street gang, but rather a white woman raised in a comfortable suburb who had made up the dramatic tale.
* The Food Network fired celebrity chef Robert Irvine for claiming in his book “Mission: Cook!” that he baked the cake for the wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana.
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jikeller@tribune.com
*Is lying always a sin? Some moral theologians say God occasionally gives us a pass.
See chicagotribune.com/seeker
