That passage is especially powerful because the soldiers who scarfed down the stew were absolutely famished. The best food writing is associated not with decadent repletion but with hunger. Hemingway was practically starving when he ate his potato salad; Tom Jones had fasted for twenty-four hours when he indulged in his three pounds of roast beef, preparatory to indulging in Mrs. Waters. When Coleridge was a student at Christ’s Hospital, where the food resembled John Lanchester’s mucus soup, he liked to retreat to a sunny corner and dream of plum cake. Did he bring along Le cuisinier royal et bourgeois? Of course not. Wisely, he chose Robinson Crusoe, one of the finest hungry books in history.
In fact, my very favorite food literature does not even describe real meals. It describes meals that were imagined —voracious reveries by people who were hundreds of miles from the nearest larder. Accounts of Arctic and Antarctic expeditions are crammed with such figmental menus. In 1883, on Adolphus Greely’s ill-fated scientific expedition to Ellesmere Island, Lieutenant James B. Lockwood kept a list of the dishes he missed most: turkey stuffed with oysters, Boston pilot bread, oatmeal muffins, corn fritters. “Chewed up a foot of a fox this evening raw,” he wrote in his journal. “It was altogether bone and gristle.” He followed that entry with: “Pie of orange and coconut.” On Ernest Shackleton’s 1914—17 Antarctic expedition, Dr. James McIlroy conducted a poll of the twenty-two men who were stranded on Elephant Island, asking each what he would choose if he were permitted a single dish. The sweet-cravers outnumbered the savory-cravers by a large margin. A sampling:
Clark Devonshire dumpling with cream
James Syrup pudding
McIlroy Marmalade pudding with Devonshire cream
Rickenson Blackberry and apple tart with cream
Wild Apple pudding and cream
Hussey Porridge, sugar, and cream
Green Apple dumpling
Greenstreet Christmas pudding
Kerr Dough and syrup
Macklin Scrambled eggs on toast
Bakewell Baked pork and beans
Cheetham Pork, apple sauce, potatoes, and turnips
As a member of civilized society, the closest I’ve come to these cravings has been during my pregnancies, when the siren call of gluttony has been both irresistible and permissible. One night, when I was pregnant with Henry, I lay in bed thinking, for some reason, about Treasure Island . I realized that from the entire book there was only one sentence I remembered verbatim, something that Ben Gunn, who has been marooned for three years, says to Jim Hawkins: “Many’s the long night I’ve dreamed of cheese —toasted, mostly.” I repeated the last two words over and over, like a mantra. “Toasted, mostly. Toasted, mostly. Toasted, mostly.” Then I found myself drifting toward the kitchen as if in a somnambulist’s trance. I opened the refrigerator. In one of the drawers there was a lump of cheddar. I dropped it in a Teflon pan, turned up the flame, and bashed the cheese with a large spoon. This wasn’t cooking, unless you call what a Neanderthal did to his haunch of woolly mammoth over a bonfire cooking. When the cheese was reduced to a molten glob, I ate it from the pan. Was it good? I don’t know. It went down too fast.
Since then, I have wondered whether this in utero experience, which resulted in a terrible stomachache, was responsible for two of my son’s most salient characteristics. He loves books. He hates cheese.
NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN1
The editor and baseball savant Dan Okrent, who is also an excellent cook,2 once brought a ham larded with pistachios, garlic, and raisins to a potluck lunch. The cookbook editor Judith Jones, who happened to be a guest, enjoyed it so much that she asked Dan for the recipe, which he provided verbatim from a book by James Beard. (“I thought she wanted to cook it,” he explained later. “Not publish it.”) When American Food, by Judith’s husband, Evan Jones, appeared a few years later, there, on page 224, was the recipe, titled “Dan Okrent’s Stuffed Fresh Ham.” Dan subsequently spotted James Beard at a cocktail party, screwed his courage to the sticking-place,3 and apologized profusely. “Oh, that’s all right,” said Beard. “I stole the recipe from another cookbook.”4
In the incestuous world of cookbookery, there seems to be no such thing as plagiarism. Add a sprig of rosemary and the recipe is yours.5 In literature—or so goes the conventional wisdom—the rules are a bit stiffer. If you harbor a distaste for quotation marks, if you “forget” that the eloquent passage you copied into your journal was really written by Flaubert, if you delude yourself into believing that a sprig of verbal rosemary constitutes a transfer of ownership, then you are, as Benjamin Disraeli put it in a famously holier-than-thou6 phrase, “a burglar of others’ intellect.”7
Like most writers, I have long been fascinated by the sea-change8 through which an aggregation of words, common property when scattered throughout a dictionary, is transformed into a stealable asset. Neal Bowers, a poet whose work has been repeatedly plagiarized by an out-ofwork schoolteacher named David Jones, has written, “The intangible nature of language begins to haunt me, and I wonder how it’s possible for anyone to own words. Exactly what have I been deprived of?”9 In other words, after your words—unlike your VCR—are stolen, you still own them. Or do you?
Bowers says you don’t—or at least not in the same way. As he puts it, with justifiably ruddy temper,10 “Who steals such words steals breath and pulse and consciousness.”11 It must have been particularly galling when another poet told Bowers that by altering the line breaks, the plagiarist had actually improved the poems, as if plagiarism were merely a form of editing.12 It has long been a commonplace, iterated with special conviction by plagiarists, that if you upgrade the original, your genius exempts you from the penalties that would be exacted from the roll of common men.13 Virgil, well known for his sticky fingers, was once observed perusing a volume of Quintus Ennius. When asked, pointedly, what he was doing, he replied, “Plucking pearls from Ennius’ dunghill.”14 Posterity may have vindicated his rummagings, since two millennia later, everyone remembers Virgil, and poor Ennius has been consigned to the dunghill of oblivion.15
The “poet” who plagiarized Bowers was an impostor; in order to be published, his only recourse was theft. But Virgil surely didn’t need to steal from Ennius—or from Pisander or Apollonius.16 Nor did Shakespeare really need to swipe several speeches in Antony and Cleopatra from Plutarch, or 4,144 of the 6,033 lines in Parts I, II, and III of Henry VI, either verbatim or in paraphrase, from other authors.17 Milton didn’t need to crib from Masenius,18 Sterne from Burton,19 or Poe from Benjamin Morrell.20 Nor did Coleridge need to stick huge gobs of Schlegel and Schelling in his Biographia Literaria,21 a theft exposed after his death by Thomas De Quincey, who was himself a plagiarist—in fact, one at least twenty times as larcenous as Coleridge.22
Contemplating the fact that most plagiarists don’t need to steal—and also that they steal over and over again, often in such obvious ways you’d swear they wanted to get caught—I observed to my husband last month23 that of all forms of theft, kleptomania was the one plagiarism most closely resembled. Unfortunately, I later discovered that this brilliant aperçu had already been apperceived by at least four other writers.24 When I encountered the word kleptomaniac in Alexander Lindey’s Plagiarism and Originality , I had the feeling, for a split second, that Lindey had stolen the idea from me, even though his book was written the year before I was born.25 In any case, as Lindey notes, the kleptomaniacal plagiarist is compelled to steal. It’s clear, for example, that Senator Joe Biden (or his ghostwriters), who borrowed parts of his speeches from Neil Kinnock, Robert Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey, among others, couldn’t not plagiarize. Biden even plagiarized his apology for plagiarizing from The Grapes of Wrath.26
The more I’ve read about plagiarism, the more I’ve come to think that literature is one big recycling bin.27 The sixty-four-dollar question28 is, how terrible is that? Before the Romantic period, in which originality became the summum bonum,29 plagiarism was rife but viewed with far greater indulgence than it
is now.30 Fielding, for example, although he believed it was immoral to steal from his peers, wrote, “The antients may be considered a rich common, where every person who hath the smallest tenement in Parnassus hath a free right to fatten his muse.”31 Even today, victims of plagiarism, including Neal Bowers,32 are often told that they can always write another poem, or that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.33
I take issue with these placable attitudes because I know, from an experience within my own family, how much plagiarism can hurt. In 1988, I happened on a New York Times34 article that charged John Hersey with incorporating entire paragraphs from Laurence Bergreen’s biography of James Agee into his own New Yorker essay on the same subject. Hersey had done a little rewriting, but Bergreen shone through in every phrase. When I read the article, I got a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach, because Hersey had once plagiarized from my mother.
It had happened more than forty years earlier. My mother and her first husband, Melville Jacoby, were Far East correspondents for Time during World War II. After the Japanese occupation of Manila in January of 1942, they spent three months with General Douglas MacArthur’s troops on Corregidor and Bataan before escaping to Australia, where Mel was killed in an accident on an American air base. During those three months, my mother and Mel filed frequent, dispatches to Time. They planned to base a book of their own on this material, but their dispatches instead became, without their permission, the nearly verbatim basis for about half of Hersey’s best-selling Men on Bataan. Hersey must have had a troubled conscience, because he apparently arranged for Time to pay my mother and Mel $450, and—this is the most bizarre twist of all, something I didn’t believe until my mother read it to me over the phone35—he dedicated the book to “Melville Jacoby, his wife Annalee,” and two other journalists, “partly so they won’t charge me with grand larceny.”36
As soon as I read the Times article, I telephoned Larry Bergreen, with whom I’d gone to college, and told him about Men on Bataan. He told me that several other people, including an emeritus professor at the University of Chi cago, had already called to report that, over the years, Her sey had lifted their words as well.37 Hersey, whom Larry had always admired as a “voice of conscience,” turned out to have all the marks of the compulsive plagiarist: he borrowed repeatedly, he left extravagantly obvious clues, and —what a gifted writer he was!—he didn’t need to do it.
My mother told me, “I think Hersey was ruined by the Time Inc. method of writing from correspondents’ files. He just got so used to running other people’s work through his typewriter and calling it his own that he started to think the whole written world was raw material.”
Larry Bergreen’s stolen words had, at least, been published under his own name. My mother never had that satisfaction. The only time she ever saw her dispatches in print was inside a cover that said BY JOHN HERSEY. But she wrote them. And, even though Hersey is dead and this story has long been forgotten by everyone outside our family, you can’t take that away from her.38
THE CATALOGICAL IMPERATIVE
On the cover of a recent Nordstrom catalogue—don’t ask me why—there is a photograph of a billy goat. He is standing on a burlap bag in the back of a pickup truck, eating a red carnation that he has just plucked from a green plastic flowerpot. The goat looks pleased with his meal, but the omnivorous glint in his eye suggests that if no carnations were available, he would be willing to settle for the burlap bag, the plastic flowerpot, or even the pickup truck.
I know that glint, because that’s how I feel about reading. I’d rather have a book, but in a pinch I’ll settle for a set of Water Pik instructions. I have spent many a lonely night in small-town motel rooms consoled by the Yellow Pages. Once, long ago, I bested a desperate bout of insomnia by studying the only piece of written material in my apartment that I had not already read at least twice: my roommate’s 1974 Toyota Corolla manual. Under the circumstances (addiction, withdrawal, craving, panic), the section on the manual gearshift was as beautiful to me as Dante’s vision of the Sempiternal Rose in canto XXXI of the Paradiso.
There is only one form of non-literature, however, that I would sometimes prefer to the Paradiso. It is—I realize that I am about to deal my image a blow from which it may never recover—the mail-order catalogue. In fact, I consumed the aforementioned Nordstrom catalogue from cover to cover, even though it was downhill after the goat.
I hasten to mention that I have never actually solicited a catalogue. Although it is tempting to conclude that our mailbox hatches them by spontaneous generation, I know they are really the offspring of promiscuous mailing lists, which copulate in secret and for money. One of the pleasures, or horrors, of the direct-mail business is that you never know to whom your name will be pandered. My friend Ross Baughman, a photographer who once accompanied a group of American mercenaries to Nicaragua, inquired before the trip about a mail-order night-vision scope that would allow him to take pictures during midnight commando raids without using a flash. Ever since, he has been deluged with catalogues for pamphlets on how to make rifle silencers out of old car mufflers and napalm out of laundry detergent.
At least Ross can trace his direct-mail family tree. But why do I receive catalogues devoted exclusively to salsa, equestrian gear, electric grills, extra-large clothes, extrasmall clothes, tours to sites at which UFO’s have landed, and resin reproductions of medieval gargoyles? Do these companies know something about me that I don’t know?
I have come to believe that the explanation turns on the fact that the address label often reads ANNE SADIMAN. (Over the phone, F sounds like S. All Fadimans have therefore learned to say, whenever we order anything, “F as in Frank.” However, at least a quarter of the time, people think we have said, “S as in Srank.”) Anne Fadiman is a middle-aged mother of two who possesses neither a microwave nor a CD player, let alone a deck on which to place an electric grill or a house to which such a deck might be attached. But Anne Sadiman—ah, she’s a horse of another color, and it’s almost certainly celery, blush, buff, ecru, kiwi, java, thistle, grenadine, delft, pebble, cork, or cloud, to mention a few of her favorites from the J. Crew catalogue. Wearing her Ultimate Hat from TravelSmith, which has “been crushed by Land Rovers, dropped from airplanes, and lost in raging rapids,” Anne S. makes frequent trips to Lake Titicaca, the location (according to her Power Places Tours catalogue) of “one of the most powerful energy vortexes in the world.” She easily attracts men (since her body has been perfected by the Macarena Workout from Collage Videos) and ladybugs (since she buys three-packs of easyto-use, disposable Ladybug Lures from Duncraft). Courtesy of her Audio-Forum language tapes, she speaks Yupik, Xhosa, and Twi “like a diplomat.” (Or better. Show me an American ambassador who is fluent in Twi and I’ll eat Anne Sadiman’s Ultimate Hat.) She’s fond of her $1-million Diamond-Studded Miracle Bra from Victoria’s Secret, but she’s equally partial to her twelve-point nickel-chrome moly steel crampons from Campmor. In fact, her husband gets particularly excited when she wears both of these items simultaneously.
Anne S.’s husband was unavailable for comment—he was on the phone with The Sharper Image, ordering her an Ultrasonic Wave Cleaner whose 42,000-wave-per-second piezo transducer will automatically bubble microdirt off her diamond bra—so I interviewed Anne F.’s husband instead. The question I posed was, “Why does your wife read mail-order catalogues?”
George looked me straight in the eye and said, “Because if something is addressed to you, it doesn’t occur to you that you could throw it out. You’re a bizarrely obedient person.” (This is true. It is hard for me to walk on a DONT WALK sign even if there are no cars for miles. However, while waiting, I get back at it by thinking, DON’T OMIT THE APOSTROPHE.) George confessed that when he knew I had a deadline, he had on occasion triaged half the mailbox—my catalogues!—directly into the trash can. I counter-confessed that I had decided to write this essay just so that whenever he caught me reading a catalogue, I could say I was doing research.
I think I read catalogues for the same reason George stuffs himself with hors d’oeuvres at cocktail parties: they’re free. How can he justify going out for sushi when all those lukewarm pigs-in-blankets are there for the taking? Similarly, how can I justify a stroll to the newsstand to pick up The New York Review of Books when Alsto’s Handy Helpers is right there in my mailbox, offering, among other memorable lucubrations, 103 words in praise of the Ro-Si Rotating Composter? I also read catalogues in order to further my education. Had it not been for Design Toscano Historical Reproductions for Home and Garden, I might never have learned that the three parts of a sixteenth-century close helmet are the visor, the ventail, and the beaver. Finally, I value catalogues for the privileged, and sometimes aesthetically stimulating, glimpses they afford of worlds from which I would otherwise be barred. Who could read the Garrett Wade tool catalogue without thinking, “This is a poem”? Not I. In fact, here it is. The following syllabically impeccable haiku consists entirely of items you can order by calling (800) 221-2942:
Joiner’s mash, jack plane.
Spitting froe? Bastard cut rasp!
Craftsman dozuki.
I hope you noted the Japanese touch in the final line, which refers, of course, to Item No. 49117.01, a saw whose blade “has a very smooth action with a very narrow kerf.” (I am currently composing a villanelle inspired by the word kerf.)