by Anne Fadiman
The center of this book is my family. I hope that when my children are older, Henry will forgive me for revealing that he ate part of Goodnight Moon and Susannah will recover from my disclosure that she thought Rabbit at Rest was a story about a sleepy bunny. Of the many satisfactions of parenthood, few have been keener than watching my children’s faces when they open a new book for the first time.
My husband, George Howe Colt, and I courted each other with books and married each other’s libraries as well as each other’s selves. How lucky I was with both! George gave every word of Ex Libris his close and wise editorial attention, inspired much of it, and, most important, whether in the Grand Canyon or in our book-filled loft in New York City, lived it with me. What he once wrote to me in an inscription I here write back to him, with still-deepening love: “This is your book, too. As my life, too, is also yours.”
I began my relationship with books as a member of Fadiman U., the insufferable foursome who never missed a round of College Bowl and still proofread menus together. If I were to rank life’s pleasures, talking about books with my brother and my parents would be close to the top. Kim not only figures prominently in many of these essays, but also read every word in draft and made many excellent suggestions. My mother and father, to whom Ex Libris is dedicated, read tens of thousands of pages aloud to me when I was a child, transmitting with every syllable their own passion for books. Because they are both writers, it would have been easy for them to squash my literary hopes under the weight of their unmatchable achievements, but somehow they managed to do the opposite. Without them, I would be neither a reader nor a writer, and I thank them for these and many other gifts.
Notes
1 Ecclesiastes 1:9: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be … and there is no new thing under the sun.” Cf. Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères (1688): “We come too late to say anything which has not been said already.”La Bruyère probably stole his line from Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621): “We can say nothing but what hath been said.” Burton probably stole his line from Terence’s Eunuchus (161 R.C.): “Nothing is said that has not been said before.” I stole the idea of comparing these four lines from a footnote in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.
2 Actually, I’ve never eaten anything Dan Okrent has cooked, but my friend Kathy Holub went to a dinner party at his home in 1994 and gave the pork loin high marks. I later found out that it had been cooked by Dan’s wife, Becky. However, several people have assured me that Dan could have cooked it.
3 Macbeth (1606) 1.7.59.
4 The anecdote was stolen from Dan Okrent on October 31, 1996. The idea of using it in the first paragraph of this essay was stolen from my husband, George, who conceived it on November 11, 1996, while he was filling a Tupperware bowl with leftover spaghetti. The spaghetti recipe was from Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker’s Joy of Cooking (1972), with emendations by George’s mother.
5 I stole this line from Dan Okrent. However, I made it mine by changing “teaspoon” to “sprig.”
6 Isaiah 65:5: “I am holier than thou.”
7 I burglarized Disraeli’s quote from the intellect of Thomas Mallon (Stolen Words, 1989). As both Mallon and Alexander Lindey (Plagiarism and Originality, 1952) note, Disraeli’s highmindedness might have rung truer had he himself not plagiarized his funeral oration for the Duke of Wellington from Louis Adolphe Thiers’s funeral oration for General Saint-Cyr.
8 The Tempest (1611-12), 1.2.394.
9 Neal Bowers, “A Loss for Words,” The American Scholar (Autumn 1994). David Jones is not named in this article; he is referred to merely as “my plagiarist,” which strikes me as having a peculiar ring of proprietary intimacy, on the order of “my secretary” or “my podiatrist.” Jones is identified in Bowers’s book, Words for the Taking (1997).
10 Wallace Stevens, “The Motive for Metaphor” (1947), line 17. I think, though I’m not sure, that Stevens was talking about the temper of steel rather than of human beings, but one of the convenient things about pilfering someone else’s words is that you don’t have to worry about their original meaning.
11 Bowers, “A Loss for Words.”
12 Ibid.
13 Henry IV, Part I (1596-97), 3.1.43.
14 I plucked this pearl from Lindey, op. cit., and upgraded it by adding the phrase “sticky fingers,” which I found in Roget’s Thesaurus under the heading “Theft.”
15 Lindey said something similar about Shakespeare and the poets he plagiarized.
16 Lindey, op. cit.
17 I swiped these examples from Lindey, op. cit., because I needed to. The arithmetic was done by the eighteenth-century British scholar Edmond Malone.
18 Lindey notes that he borrowed his evidence from Voltaire.
19 Thomas Mallon, op. cit., and Lindey, op. cit. Mallon and Lindey both note that among the passages Sterne plagiarized from Burton was a vehement denunciation of plagiarism. According to Mallon, Sterne also plagiarized from himself. He thriftily recycled several love letters he had written to his wife and, years later, sent them to his mistress.
20 Peter Shaw, “Plagiary,” The American Scholar (Summer 1992). Shaw notes that Poe damned plagiarism as “a sickening spectacle” and falsely accused other writers of committing it.
21 Mallon, op. cit., and Shaw, op. cit. Both cite Norman Fruman’s 1971 study, Coleridge: The Damaged Archangel. (Fruman’s title was taken from an 1816 letter from Charles Lamb to William Wordsworth.)
22 Walter Jackson Bate, Coleridge (1973), quoted in Mallon, op. cit.
23 I can’t pinpoint the date, but I know it was a Thursday, because we were unloading the dishwasher just before watching E.R I cite George as a witness in order to prove that although my idea turned out to be unoriginal, I truly believed I was the first to think it.
24 Alexander Lindey, Peter Shaw, K. R. St. Onge, and Thomas Mallon.
25 Cf. Robert Merton: “Anticipatory plagiarism occurs when someone steals your original idea and publishes it a hundred years before you were born.” I am unable to provide a citation because my source is a yellow Post-it handed to me by my brother in Captiva, Florida, in November 1996.
26 Everything I’ve said about Biden is from Mallon, op. cit. Among Mallon’s other examples of Chinese-box plagiarism is Jacob Epstein’s plagiarism of a description of a character’s balding head from a passage that Martin Amis had previously plagiarized from Dickens. Mallon also notes that the University of Oregon plagiarized the section on plagiarism in its student handbook from the section on plagiarism in Stanford’s teaching-assistant handbook.
27 Cf. Alexander Pope, “Couplets on Wit” (1776), v: “Now wits gain praise by copying other wits / As one Hog lives on what another shits.”
28 From a radio quiz show first aired in 1941. The reference was suggested by George on November 14, 1996, as he was doing his back exercises on our living room floor.
29 Cicero, De Offciis (44 B.C.), 1.2.
30 This idea comes from Shaw, op. cit., and Harold Ogden White, Plagiarism and Imitation During the English Renaissance (1965).
31 Fielding, Tom Jones (1749), book 12, ch. 1.
32 Bowers, op. cit.
33 Charles Caleb Colton, Lacon (1820-22).
34 William H. Honan, “Hersey Apologizes to a Writer over an Article on Agee,” The New York Times (July 22, 1988).
35 Annalee Jaroby Eadiman, conversation with author, November 4. 1996.
36 John Hersev, Men on Bataan (1942),
37 Laurence Bergreen, conversation with author, summer 1988. We talked again on November 5, 1996.
38 Ira Gershwin, “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” Shall We Dace (1937).
Copyright © 1998 by Anne Fadiman
All rights reserved
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
19 Union Square West, New York 10003
Published in 1998 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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eISBN 9781429929424
First eBook Edition : May 2011
First paperback edition, 2000
The essays in this book originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Civilization magazine.
Endpaper design by Jonathan D. Lippincott
Endpaper art composed by Fausta Tamburino from book pages
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Endpaper bookplate is an adaptation of a bookplate by Rockwell
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Fadiman, Anne, 1953—
Ex libris : confessions of a common reader / Anne Fadiman.
—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-374-14860-0 (alk. paper)
1. Fadiman, Anne, 1953——Books and reading. I. Title. PN4874.F33 1998 814’.54—dc21
98-21109
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-374-52722-8
Paperback ISBN-10: 0-374-52722-9