Last week’s Sunday Times ran an excellent piece, researched and written by Celean Jacobson, which told the story of how some fine descriptive writing by the Wits University academic, Lindsay Bremner, appeared almost verbatim in the novel People Like Ourselves by Pamela Jooste. With the article were several examples of nearly identical passages, first published in the Sunday Times Lifestyle supplement, shortly afterwards faithfully reproduced in Jooste’s novel.
Reading the story, my first reaction was one of heartfelt pity for poor Darrel Bristow-Bovey, toppled so summarily from his hard-earned status as South Africa’s leading-edge plagiarist. Toppled by a woman, what’s more, if of slightly worthier gravitas as a writer. After all, Jooste hasn’t confined herself to writing spine-chilling accounts of how deeply she suffered watching the cruelties of apartheid take place, she’s also been a judge and nominee in the Sunday Times Literary Awards. The closest Bristow-Bovey got to literary immortality was to be a judge for the Mondi awards and then have to sit there watching his girlfriend win.
What is also engaging is how differently Bristow-Bovey and Jooste responded to the revelation of their lootings. When accused of shoplifting great chunks of Bill Bryson’s work, Bristow-Bovey chose to spray his testosterone around. He began by offering a grave warning to the student journalist who uncovered his grimy little scam and then wrote about it in the Saturday Star. ”Do you think it’s wise for someone like yourself, someone just starting off in the profession, to pick on an established columnist like me?” Bristow-Bovey asked the young student.
When this didn’t go down too well, Bristow-Bovey quickly switched from playing with his balls to a sort of deeply bewildered conceit. His plagiarism was not intentional, he muttered, merely a product of his astonishing photographic memory. The newspapers employing him took more or less the same view, passing everything off as a bit an innocent jape. Then someone came up with further proof of the efficiency of Darrel’s Leica-like memory; at which stage, and with great reluctance, the editors stopped using him.
For a while, that is. A few months later, after the worst of the ethical heat had died down, Bristow-Bovey was back with a bang in a paper that had fired him only a few months previously. Sic transit in gloria mundi?
The next interesting comparison between the two merry thieves is in the responses of their publishers. In Bristow-Bovey’s corner was Steve Connolly (Steve 1), literary director of Struik publishers. In Jooste’s is Stephen Johnson (Steve 2), of Random House, a publisher specialising in post-apartheid weepies written by guilt-ridden white women as they emerge from years of suppressed conscience. People Like Ourselves is a standard bromide of this genre.
Two more ardent defenders the two plagiarists could not have wished for. Steve 1 wrote molten letters to the press in defence of ”his” Darrel, calling his looting no more than a peccadillo. On nationwide radio he offered vigorous rationalisation of Bristow-Bovey’s professionalism. Steve 2 hasn’t yet had a chance at the radio but he certainly gave of his best chivalry to the Sunday Times: ”Pamela is our author and I feel responsible. The woman is a professional and a person of enormous integrity.”
What with all the clanking of his armour, I couldn’t quite hear Steve 2’s subtext. Then it struck me what he really meant by those encomia. He could only have been referring to Jooste’s integrity, not as an author, but as a plagiarist. She had had the honesty to copy much of Bremner’s material without changing so much as a very occasional word of it. Bristow-Bovey, on the other hand, tried to camouflage his pilfering by means of tiny alterations, cunningly inserted here and there. A seemingly minor thing, but of great importance among accomplished plagiarists. The Third Law of Professional Plagiarism states: ”If it’s worth stealing, it’s worth stealing accurately. On no account tinker. If it’s a word-for-word copy you can always say leaving out the quotation marks and accreditation was just your silly error. And never forget to say you’re sorry” — just like Jooste’s doing.
Where Bristow-Bovey chose hostility as his defence, Jooste has gone for the Third Law combined with the ”suffocate them in crocodile treacle” method. ”Oh Lawdy me, I guess I musta made a lil’ ol’ entirely unintentional mistake there and I truly do want to take this opportunity to apologise in all humility to anyone I might have hurt by my silly ol’ mistake”. I’d go for Bristow-Bovey’s antagonism any time, rather than this vomit-inducing menu of deep-fried sincerity.
Best of all was the response from Jooste’s attorney, un-named in the Sunday Times article, which is not surprising. Who’d want to own up publicly to the authorship of a load of such vexatious crap? According to this attorney, the outright lifting, verbatim, unacknowledged, of about 400 words of someone else’s descriptive writing is ”wallpapering of a very minor nature when seen in the context of the novel”. Where did this attorney qualify, one wonders: The Disneyland Academy of Wallpaper Law?
Still, don’t be depressed, Pamela. With this sort of literary theft under your belt, you qualify for a top columnist’s job at the Sunday Independent.