Well have I got words for you!
But, first, I'll tell you what I've been up to:
I've been thinking about my essay
I've been writing a few little bits here and there
(musings disguised and short stories
my first tentative attempts at plays)
And I've been playing a bit of squash
Helping the missus find a car
Doing my Saturday Sunday afternoon
refereeing session
My Sunday night football
(third hat-trick in four games
team's fourth straight win since I joined;
they won none in thirteen before that)
And then I woke up at 2a.m. this morning to finally start my essay
Had to be in at 12
I think I just about finished it
Would you like a read?
It's probably mediocre and dull...
Using ‘Something Borrowed’ by Malcolm Gladwell as a stimulus, discuss how far ‘Frozen’ by Bryony Lavery plagiarises Gladwell and defames Dorothy Lewis.
How could Lavery have avoided controversy while still completing the play and allowing it to be produced?
Plagiarism: Sin or Symptom?
So the story begins in 1998, when Bryony Lavery pens ‘Frozen’, a three-character play about a psychiatrist, a serial killer, and the mother of one of his victims. It premières at The Birmingham Rep and within six years has reached Broadway, where it garners widespread critical acclaim and is nominated for four Tony awards. Broadway is also where Lavery’s problems begin.
Lavery’s play, it is discovered, is not all her own work. True, she has acknowledged the inspiration of Marian Partington, on whom she based the character of the mother, Nancy, after reading a 1996 article in The Guardian, ‘Salvaging the Sacred’. Also, she has talked extensively of the “fusion” (Gardner
In ‘Damaged’, Gladwell wrote:
“The difference between a crime of evil and a crime of illness is the difference between a sin and a symptom.”
In ‘Frozen’, not once, but twice, the same line appears without any addition, modification, or edit whatsoever. Also:
It is the function of the cortex – and, in particular, those parts of the cortex beneath the forehead, known as the frontal lobes – to modify the impulses that surge up from within the brain, to provide judgment, to organize behaviour and decision-making, to learn and adhere to rules of everyday life. It is the dominance of the cortex and the frontal lobes, in other words, that is responsible for making us human. | The function of the cortex and, in particular, those parts of the cortex beneath the forehead known as the frontal lobes is to modulate the impulses that surge up from within the brain. The cortex and the frontal lobes are there to provide judgement, to organise behaviour and decision-making, to learn and stick to rules of everyday life. Ladies and gentleman...they are responsible for making us human. |
Gladwell, in Damaged | Agnetha in Frozen, Act Twelve |
I just don’t believe people are born evil. To my mind, that is mindless. Forensic psychiatrists tend to buy into the notion of evil. I felt that that’s no explanation. The deed itself is bizarre, grotesque. But it’s not evil. To my mind, evil bespeaks conscious control over something. Serial murderers are not in that category. They are driven by forces beyond their control. | Most forensic scientists tend to buy into the notion of evil. I don’t. I can’t. I find no evidence that people are born evil. To be evil is, dictionary definition, ‘to be morally depraved.’ To my mind, that bespeaks having conscious control over something. The serial murderers I have tested are not in that category. Their deeds themselves are bizarre, grotesque, life-destroying, but not evil. They are driven by forces beyond their control. |
Lewis, in Damaged | Agnetha, in Frozen, Act Twenty-Four |
Clearly, whether or not Lavery plagiarised is beyond debate. But what is subject for investigation are the issues around her plagiarism, as well as plagiarism in general, and how it was that she avoided both a charge of copyright infringement – the legal extension of plagiarism – and the devastating stain on her career that one might perhaps expect.
Plagiarism is defined as “taking someone else’s work and passing it off as one’s own” and, with particular regard to writing, “literary theft.” (OED, 2006). While not a criminal offence in itself, charges of plagiarism have been enough to bring whole careers to abrupt and shameful halts. It is a moral crime that causes outrage in artistic circles: the stealing of another’s intellectual property for the purpose of advancing one’s own career and reputation. When Doris Kearns Goodwin was found to have plagiarised several other authors in her 2002 biography ‘The Fitzgeralds and The Kennedys’ she was forced to resign her position as Pulitzer Prize judge and contributor to a prime-time current affairs show, as well as make financial restitution after bring threatened with a suit for “serious copyright infringement. Four years later, Harvard graduate and teenage novelist Kaavya Viswanathan lost a $500,000 publishing contract when it was revealed that dozens of paragraphs from her book ‘How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life’ had been lifted from as many as five earlier works. All unsold copies of her novel were recalled and destroyed, a lucrative film deal with Dreamworks annulled, and, almost before it began, her career as a writer was over. Lavery, on the other hand, survived. But how?
Ironically, some of the greatest defenders of accused plagiarists have been writers themselves. When Ian McEwan was accused of plagiarising the memoirs of Lucilla Andrews for his novel ‘Atonement’ many prominent authors, including Martin Amis and Margaret Atwood, signed up to a campaign to support him. Likewise, when Helen Keller was found to have subconsciously copied extensively from an earlier work for her short story ‘The Frost King’ – the issue of cryptomnesia, or “accidental plagiarism,” has featured in the lives and work of such luminaries as Friedrich Nietzsche, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Harrison, and Umberto Eco, among many others – she found a distant ally in Mark Twain, who wrote her in a letter:
How unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that “plagiarism” farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The bulk of all human utterances is plagiarism. No doubt we are constantly littering our literature with disconnected sentences borrowed from books at some unremembered time and now imagined to be our own. In 1866 I read Dr. Holmes’s poems, in the Sandwich Islands . A year and a half later I stole his dedication, without knowing it, and used it to dedicate my ‘Innocents Abroad’ with. Ten years afterward I was talking with Dr. Holmes about it. He was not an ignorant ass--no, not he; he was not a collection of decayed human turnips, like your “Plagiarism Court.”
(Twain, 2011, L.401)
Those who most understand the process of writing, it seems, are those who most understand the issue of plagiarism, and who in turn are most likely to forgive. To that end, Lavery found her salvation hailing from possibly the most unlikely source of all: the pen of Malcolm Gladwell.
While Gladwell was initially offended by Lavery’s ‘borrowing’ – in a strongly-worded fax to Lavery he wrote that her lifting of material without approval was equivalent to theft (Gladwell, 2004) – and made public his intention to support Dorothy Lewis in a lawsuit (Dolnick, 2004) after reading Frozen he came to change his mind. Lavery’s play, he wrote, was
“breathtaking…instead of feeling that my words had been taken from me, I felt that they had become part of some grander cause. [Lavery] was writing a play about something entirely new and she used my descriptions of Lewis’s work and the outline of Lewis’s life as a building block in making that plausible. Isn’t that the way creativity is supposed to work?”
(Gladwell, 2004)
Gladwell felt that Lavery had taken what he had written – some of which he himself described as “boilerplate description…reworked [from] something I read in a textbook” – and “used it as she constructed a work of art” (Gladwell, 2004). In essence, she had breathed new creative life into his words, and expressed them to the world in such a significantly innovative way, as to transcend all accusations of plagiarism. Through the notably philosophical generosity of the one she had sinned against, Lavery was saved.
We can presume, however, that none of Gladwell’s epiphanies around the nature of plagiarism came as welcome news to Dorothy Otnow Lewis, who required his support in her legal case against Lavery: she had asked him to assign to her the copyright of his article and, while at first acquiescing, he later changed his mind. Lewis had been considerably more vocal in expressing how she felt about having her words and events from her life transplanted into a play:
“She stole my life. I was absolutely staggered. I felt I’d been robbed and violated. Can you imagine what it is like to find that a character is not just like you, it is you? It made me very angry.”
(Thorpe, 2004; Gladwell, 2004; Dolnick, 2004)
Lewis asked her lawyer “to pursue several legal remedies, including receiving credit in all advertisements and programs for the play, a public announcement of [her] biographical contributions to the character, and a monetary settlement, including a share of any future film or television sales” (McKinley, 2004). Lewis also made accusations that Lavery had lifted “a great deal of material” from her book ‘Guilty by Reason of Insanity’ (Przymusinski, 2004) – even going so far as to say “she stole my book” (Thorpe, 2004) – though evidence for this appears somewhat tenuous, based as it is around three non-derivative anecdotes:
‘Guilty by Reason of Insanity’ | ‘Frozen’ |
One of the murderers Lewis had written about had once said, “it was one of those days.” | Ralph, in Act Three, says, “it’s one of those days.” |
Lewis wrote about biting her sister’s stomach as a child. | Agnetha fantasises about “sinking [her] teeth into [an air stewardess’s] neck…and biting out her throat.” (Act Six) |
Lewis writes about “rushing out of the house with a black carry-on and two black pocketbooks.” | At the end of Act One, stage directions read, “[Agnetha] picks up her travel documents, bag, etc.” |
It is hardly, it would appear, enough to support a case of copyright infringement. Furthermore, what Lewis didn’t realise at the time of her accusations was that ‘Frozen’ was already written, rehearsed, and but two weeks away from its première performance by the time Lewis’s book had been released: hardly enough time for Lavery to plunder its pages and rework her script. And, one imagines, had she somehow landed a copy earlier – through pre-publication, for instance – she would have done rather more with it than the aforementioned triumvirate of similarities. Without Gladwell’s assigning of his article to her, Lewis had no case to make, and while current published editions of ‘Frozen’ cite ‘Damaged’ as a source of inspiration, the only mention of ‘Guilty by Reason of Insanity’ is as a direction to readers and viewers who wish to develop their interest in the subject.
So, Lavery has managed to avoid two allegations of copyright infringement, but what of the third charge: that of defamation?
“Dorothy Lewis says that one of the things that hurt her most about ‘Frozen’ was that Agnetha turns out to have had an affair with her collaborator, David Nabkus. Lewis feared that people would think she had had an affair with her [real life] collaborator, Jonathan Pincus. ‘If everything up to that point is true, then the affair becomes true in the mind,’ Lewis told me. ‘That’s slander.’”
(Gladwell, 2004)
For a charge of slander, libel or defamation to be sustained, several criteria must be met, the most important of which are that “the accused has degraded the reputation of the complainant in the eyes of right-thinking persons” and that “the complainant is readily identifiable in the work in question.” (Lyons
“These are not real people; they are characters that I have imagined with feelings that I have imagined (Gardner
While Agnetha may share Lewis’s job, her work, and even speak some of her words, the rest of her – her temperament, her personality, her manner of expression, her very thoughts and emotions and, in Lewis’s own words, her “essence” (Gladwell, 2004) – are entirely the creation of Bryony Lavery. In this, again, she receives backing from Gladwell:
“Lavery has every right to create an affair for Agnetha, because Agnetha is not Dorothy Lewis. She is a fictional character, drawn from Lewis’s life but endowed with a completely imaginary set of circumstances and actions.”
(Gladwell, 2004)
In the event, Lavery, though scarred, has emerged from this rather well – especially when we look at the fate that befell Viswanathan, Goodwin, and even Helen Keller, who as a 12-year-old was subjected to a trial before a panel of teachers and left so traumatised by the incident that she never again attempted a work of fiction. She has written further successful plays, been contrite in interviews – including one with Gladwell, in which she took him flowers, cried, and said, “I’m sorry” (Gladwell, 2004) – and vowed never to repeat her mistake:
“I felt so guilty – and I still do – that I hadn’t taken care of other people’s words well enough. I’ve changed the way I write. I make sure that I’ve left any research that I’ve done a very long way behind. What happened has made me much more careful and that’s a good thing. I think, writing Frozen, I was immensely naive and very stupid.”
(Gardner
And so, one hopes, all suspicions of plagiarism in the works of Bryony Lavery are well and truly behind her: she knows what to do now, having been taught by this experience, and given the chance to live it all again there are no doubt many things she would do differently. Such as:
- Credit her sources. Lavery managed this on a multitude of occasions with regard to Partington and Wyre, yet Gladwell and Lewis were never mentioned. Some playwrights, such as Naomi Wallace and Sarah Ruhl, even go so far as to include citations and bibliographies with their work.
- Rewrite rather than copy. While the difference between plagiarism and paraphrasing is, on the whole, a matter of technicalities and [logistics], by our current value standards it does not violate ethical code. In fact, if we are to believe Twain, it’s all we are doing anyway.
- Contact significant contributors before the play is written: had she asked Gladwell to quote his article – “even liberally” – prior to production, he would, he says, “have been delighted to oblige” (Gladwell, 2004). What Lewis’s response would have been, we can only guess at – though she did say she “wouldn’t have cared if [Lavery had done] a play about a shrink who’s interested in the frontal lobe and the limbic system. I see things week after week on television…using material Jonathan and I brought to light and it’s wonderful” (Gladwell, 2004). The problem was in using “her life” – therefore…
- If she plans again to use the life of a living other as the basis for her work – and that other is readily identifiable and potentially defamed – she should either disguise her inspiration beyond recognition, or seek approval of her work before the project is finalised.
- Though rarely applied in the production of theatre, television and film makers practise ‘negative checking’ in order to establish that fictional characters and real people cannot be confused. Though it would be hard to imagine the words, “Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental” prefacing ‘Frozen.’
- With the benefit of hindsight, excluding the revelation of the affair between Agnetha and her colleague David would perhaps have saved Lavery some trouble. Certainly, Lewis didn’t like it, and it appears to have fuelled her hurt and ire more than any charge of plagiarism. Plus, artistically speaking, it could be argued that this disclosure is superfluous to the message of the play and even detracts from its climax. Hard to imagine Lavery agreeing with that opinion, though. (Post-furore, Lavery did modify Agnetha’s part in Frozen to a small degree, removing a scene in which she kisses Ralph on the cheek, based on a similar kiss Dorothy Lewis shared with Ted Bundy as related in ‘Damaged.’)
- Similarly, she might also have done more to modify and disguise the fictionalised version of Lewis’s colleague Johnathan Pincus , who reappears as the not-dissimilarly-named “David Nabkus.” Could she have made him a woman? A team? Omitted altogether what is really only a briefly visited and rather inconsequential character without adversely affecting the impetuous of the play? I think she could have. Likewise, looking at changing the basic details of a character – their gender, nationality, age or race – should be an effective way to not only hide the origins of one’s inspirations but also help protect them from any potential emotional hurt and real world difficulties that might arise from being portrayed on the stage or screen.
Bibliography
Eco, Umberto; et al, Interpretation and Overinterpretation, Cambridge University Press, 1992
Keller, Helen, The Story of My Life, The Echo Library, 2007, p.226
Keller, Helen, The Story of My Life, The Echo Library, 2007, p.226
Lavery, Bryony, Plays 1, Faber and Faber, 2007
McEwan, Ian, Atonement, Vintage, 2002
Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: The Last Phase, Volume 1, Issue 1, Navajivan, 1956 p.35
Reznek, Lawrie, Evil or Ill?: Justifying the Insanity Defence, Routledge, 1997
Stevenson, Robert Louis, The Art of Writing, BookSurge Classics, 2009, p.66
Twain, Mark, Innocents Abroad, Penguin Classics, 2003
Twain, Mark, Mark Twain’s Letter – Volume 5, Amazon Kindle edition, 2011
U.S. Census, April 1, 1930, State of Illinois , County of Cook , City of Chicago
Articles
Dolnick, Sam, Tony-Nominated Playwright Bryony Lavery Accused of Plagiarism, Associated Press, 25th September 2004
Gardner, Lyn, I Was Naïve and Stupid, The Guardian, 6th April 2006
Gardner, Lyn, In Cold Blood, The Guardian, 26th June 2002
Gladwell, Malcolm, Damaged, New Yorker, 24th February 1997
Gladwell, Malcolm, Damaged, New Yorker, 24th February 1997
Gladwell, Malcolm, Something Borrowed, New Yorker, 22nd November 2004
Goodman, Ellen, Sermons are Easy, Life is More Difficult, Boston Globe, 19th July 1997
Hoyle, Ben, Literary Lions Roar in Plagiarism Row, The Times, 9th December 2006
Hoyle, Ben, McEwan Hits Back at Call for Atonement, The Times, 27th November 2006
Hoyle, Ben, McEwan Hits Back at Call for Atonement, The Times, 27th November 2006
Juskalian, Russ, You Didn’t Plagiarise, Your Unconscious Did, Newsweek, 6th July 2009
Kellaway, Kate, Comedy of Terrors, The Observer, 23rd June 2002
Langdon, Julia, It’s a Matter of Good Manners, Mr McEwan, The Daily Mail, 9th December 2006.
McKinley, Jesse, ‘Playwright Created a Psychiatrist by Plagiarizing One,’ Accusers say, New York Times, 25th September 2004
Partington, Marian, Salvaging the Sacred, The Guardian, 18th May 1996
Przymusinski, Marcel, Professor alleges Tony-Nominated Play Steals From Her Life Story, 28th September 2004
Thorpe, Vanessa, ‘Author ‘Stole my Life,’ says Psychiatrist’, The Observer, 26th September 2004
Newsweek, Jul 7, 2009: You Didn’t Plagiarize, Your Unconscious Did
Radio
Front Row, BBC Radio 4, July 3rd 2002
Websites
BBC
BBC Radio 4 – Front Row
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/frontrow/frontrow_20020703.shtml
Playwright Accused of Plagiarism
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/3693538.stm
Malcolm Gladwell
The Guardian
Salvaging the Sacred
www.lexisnexis.com/uk/nexis/results/docview/docview.do?docLinkInd=true&risb=21_T13113536148&format=GNBFI&sort=BOOLEAN&startDocNo=1&resultsUrlKey=29_T13113536152&cisb=22_T13113536151&treeMax=true&treeWidth=0&csi=138620&docNo=6
Comedy of Terrors http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2002/jun/23/features.review27
Author stole my life, says psychiatrist
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/sep/26/arts.artsnews
I Was Naïve And Stupid
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2006/apr/06/theatre3
In Cold Blood
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2002/jun/26/artsfeatures
New York Times
Playwright created a psychiatrist…
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/25/theater/newsandfeatures/25frozen.html
Harvard Novelist Says Copying Was Unintentional
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/25/books/25book.html
Other press
Tony-Nominated Playwright Bryony Lavery Accused of Plagiarism
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1227134/posts
Professor alleges Tony-Nominated Play Steals From Her Life Story
http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2004/sep/28/professor-alleges-tony-nominated-play-steals-from
You Didn’t Plagiarize, Your Unconscious Did http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/07/06/you-didn-t-plagiarize-your-unconscious-did.html
Teen Author Denies Intentional Copying
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/12494858#12494858
A Historian and Her Sources
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/000/793ihurw.asp
Lynne McTaggart on Doris Kearns Goodwin
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/000/817fdukv.asp
Sermons Are Easy, Life Is More Difficult
http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1997-07-19/news/9707210073_1_prom-parenthood-gloria-feldt
Other
George Harrison
http://cip.law.ucla.edu/cases/1970-1979/Pages/brightharrisongs.aspx
John Dorsey
http://www.springerlink.com/content/t12283773872433u/fulltext.pdf
And that's that. I feel a little bit disappointed in it, knowing there were several things I didn't say. I missed talking about Lavery's defence, which I had all laid out - something to do with her thinking it was "news"; and her mother died; and she lost her research folder - and I didn't really get into false memory syndrome and cryptomnesia, which was what I'd been planning all along. It also appears that I don't really have a conclusion - and there's a reason for all that: I ran out of time. Thing is, I thought I had like two hours and everything was going swimmingly and then - wham! - I got sucked in by the whole bibliography thing and it just took me ages and ages to sort out all my citations, find the web addresses, publishing dates, blah blah blah. I think I might do that first next time (no doubt I'll be last-minuting it again then) - although, all being well, that's about it for me as far as essays go this lifetime.
The other thing I wanted to talk about was possible sources for Gladwell's famous quote. Maybe it's a good job I did run out of time because that would've been at least another five hundred words and I was already pretty much bang on the three thousand word limit - without any effort whatsoever on my part, I might add: it all just flowed out and ended and added up to what it was quite naturally (not that I'm impressed with the content).
Anyways, thinking I might be able to wangle a few extra hours from my tutor I decided to write that part of it just in case, and that's what you'll find here (not that there's a cab in Hull's chance that anyone's still reading this):
Finally, there is the ‘smoking gun’ of the quote by Gladwell mentioned at the very top of this piece: “The difference between a crime of evil and a crime of illness is the difference between a sin and a symptom.” Lavery borrowed it and Gladwell nobly acquiesced for the sake of art and creativity – the humble hack seeing his words birthed with an energy and a life of their own – and yet, in this, his quest to stand above any notion of intellectual property (it should also be noted that he has written sympathetically in support of Kaavya Viswanathan, despite overwhelming evidence against her), he has perhaps done himself a disservice. “The difference between a crime of evil…” is already a line of art and poetry: a line so memorable and easy on the ear – and so succinct in summing up one of the main themes of the play – that it is by far and away the most quoted in critical reviews. One may go so far as to say it is the best line in the play – and perhaps it is little wonder that Bryony Lavery chose to cut-and-paste it whole rather than attempt a reworking. Gladwell absolutely had a case for copyright infringement and, perhaps, even, an excellent claim for a share in royalty payments, given its importance and contribution. And yet, as we have seen, he was also right in letting it pass to Lavery – in his own words, acknowledging that he “had a good, long ride with that line – and let it go.”
Gladwell also muses as to how that line may have formed in his own subconscious, correctly stating that Gandhi is quoted as saying, “secrecy is a sin and a symptom of violence” (Pyarelal, 1956, p.35), while it is not beyond the realm of possibility that he came into contact with a widely-read psychology journal that twice features the phrase “sin and symptom” (Dorsey, 1968) or a book on the insanity defence, in pre-publication at the time Gladwell was concocting his article, entitled “Evil or Ill?” (Reznek, 1997) Closer to home, he may want to consider this statement of Lewis quoted earlier in ‘Damaged’:
“Serial murderers are not...intrinsically evil...[they] simply suffer from a dysfunction of the brain, the way cardiac patients suffer from a dysfunction of the heart”
Or, in other words, “they are not necessary evil, they are ill.” But I am paraphrasing – how about this quote from Ellen Goodman, writing in the Boston Globe on young mothers who kill their babies?
“My friend does not want to hear me say that there is a difference between evil and illness.”
Yeah, probably a good job: it don't really say much. The Lavery defence, though, is nagging me - it wouldn't have taken much - and I do think the false memory/accidental plagiarism could've been groovy.
So all you crazy kids out there who google some words and find yourself here and want to nick my stuff - go right ahead! It ain't nothin' I ain't never not done myself.
Cheers!
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