You Can't Erase the Past: The Words Has a Story to Tell

Hollywood seems to enjoy making films about a writers and why shouldn't they? Every film begins with a screenplay and we, as writers, are perpetually told to write about what we know. 

Some of my fave writer flicks would include Midnight in Paris, Adaptation, The Player  The End of the Tour and Stranger Than Fiction. The Word is now on that list. It's about words, what they mean and what it means to claim them as your own when they are not. In other words, it's a story about plagiarism, though like all great stories it is much more than that. 

Bradley Cooper is a frustrated young writer who, like a half million of us, can't find a publisher for his novel. By some miracle, the love of his life finds a satchel when they are in Paris on their Honeymoon. It looks like "just the thing" for a writer. (I have received such things from my wife who is better at gifting than I.) Inside the satchel is an unpublished manuscript, that she was unaware of. When he reads it, he's blown away by the power of the prose. Because it has no "owner" he retypes and submits it, claiming these words as his. own.

There are shades of Jack London's Martin Eden here, because once he is famous the publishing houses will publish anything that flows off his fingertips. But it's another story as well. How does one come clean after becoming famous via a lie? He approaches his agent to set the record straight, but then what?  

Dennis Quaid, Bradley Cooper and Jeremy Irons are the lead characters who bring this story to life, but the writer who wrote the screenplay has to be acknowledged here. There are so many great lines. Here's some dialogue from the film that I found thought-provoking as the story built to its layered crescendo.

* * *

"His child was dying and there was nothing he could do."

* * * 

"I thought you should know the story behind the story."

* * * 

"We all make our choices in life, the hard thing to do is live with them."

* * * 

"You can't just make things right. Things are just things."

* * * 

"For all those years, I thought about her every day. Broken, because of what I did to her. Then all of a sudden there she was. She seemed happy. Well, if I was to tell you that realization didn't cause me pain I'd be lying, but in some ways it helped me to turn the corner, to pick up again without looking back all the time."

* * * 

"I've done all I can the best that I can. That's all you can ask of a person."

* * *

"My tragedy is that I loved words more than I loved the woman who inspired me to write." 

* * *

"We all make choices in life. The hard thing is to live with them."  

* * *

"What do you really want?"

* * *

This is what it comes down to for any of us. What do you really want?

Scott Warmuth Sheds Light On Some of the Games Dylan Plays

"Art is anything you can get away with." ~Marshall McLuhan

I find it interesting that nearly everyone who hears the above quote attributes it to Andy Wahol. Evidently he must have gotten away with it, for no one recalls him ever giving credit to the original source.

In recent years Dylan has been accused of borrowing without giving credit. Many of his fans defend him, assuring us that he is an artist above the rabble of such accusations. Sean Wilentz defends him in his Bob Dylan in America, but there are others who just refuse to let it go. One of these seems to be Scott Warmuth who has now made a very visual presentation on Pinterest detailing the extent of Dylan's original source material.

At this point I am curious where the lines are to be drawn regarding a borrowed turn of phrase and true plagiarism. Here are a couple examples from my own fiction.

Thirty years ago I wrote a story based on a New Testament incident from the book of Acts in which I was trying to decide how to describe a character. I looked in a variety of books to see how faces are described, much like a high school art student might imitate a Picasso or a Matisse. From one of the stories in Outline of Great Books edited by Sir J.A. Hammerton, I lifted a phrase describing someone's eyes. Even though I'd done this but once, it seemed improper for some reason, for instead of describing what I'd observed myself or imagined, I took something I had not created and later felt guilty about it.

And yet, in a different way I never felt guilty about another kind of borrowing I've done. Sometimes when I am writing I am also watching movies on my iMac. And occasionally, not often but I've done this, I take portions of lines from the film and work them into my story. I like word games, and it just seems like the words are there, or a set of words, they just flick off my fingertips into the seams of my blog entry or story and they fee like they belong.

In one of my stories titled "A Poem About Truth" I copied word for word the first paragraph of a 600 page book about General Erwin Rommel. After flipping a sentence into it, I used it as a springboard to create something entirely other. It was a game.

In another very short story titled Harry Gold I assembled complete sentences from a variety of sources -- Under the Volcano, a Hemingway story and several others -- to form a narrative that is essentially, if only briefly, an entertainment. When sharing it here in 2011 I observed, "I think it interesting how a sentence, placed in a new context connotes new meanings through the reconfigured relationship." (I now wish I could find my documentation of where all those sentences originated.)

Unmasked and Not So Anonymous

But Warmuth's portrait of Dylan is on a totally other scale. For more than ten years Warmuth has been gathering data to make his case. An article in the New Haven Review cohesively lays it out in an article titled Bob Charlatan: Deconstructing Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One.

Perhaps capitalizing on the growing visual nature of internet content, Warmuth has assembled a Pinterest site with boards devoted to his quest to shed light on Dylan's borrowings and make them not so anonymous. One of the boards is titled A Bob Dylan Bookshelf. It's an extensive collection of sources that demonstrates am impressive degree of research on Warmuth's part. Authors in this collection include George Orwell, Michael Crichton, Willa Cather, William Burroughs, Alec Wilder, H.G. Wells, Carl Sandberg, Jim Bouton, Ovid, Homer, Joyce Carol Oates, Jack London, and on and on and on.

A second Pinterest board is titled A Tempest Commonplace, in which Warmuth gathers findings that may have influenced the songs on Dylan's last album of original work. The author/musician/disc jockey acknowledges the assistance of collaborators on this board.

Warmuth's third Pinterest board is not directly related to Dylan, and yet there is a connection. The board is titled The Wonder Pack of the Universe, and it consists of Svengali decks. Like Dylan, who once stated that if he could go back in time to any moment in history it would be to see Houdini's escape when he was dropped into the East River, Warmuth is evidently fascinated by magic.

The fourth Pinterest board managed by Warmuth explores Dylan's use of the works of Robert Louis Stevenson in Chronicles: Volume One, beginning with Stevenson's short story "The Story of a Lie."

What surprises me most is how unsurprising this seems. Dylan has always clothed himself in fictions, from the early days when he made up stories about his roots on through the charades of Hollywood and the Rolling Thunder Revue. And even if the man himself were a fiction (and some say Shakespeare was) this Minnesota-born storyteller has given a lot of people something very real through his music, songs and performances. And it's been good. 

Dylan No Stranger to Plagiarism Charges; They're In the Wind

My first 45 was "All Day and All of the Night" by the Kinks. The song was released the year our family moved from Cleveland to New Jersey, a year of many big events for me including my 12th birthday which included a trip to Manhattan with my dad to buy a reel-to-reel tape two-speed Estey tape recorder. I also got my first record player, and first records.

The Kinks were part of the British Invasion which was hot, in large part due to the Beatles and the Ed Sullivan Show. And disc jockeys like Cousin Brucie, on WABC, introduced us to everything that was climbing and flaming. The Kinks reached a top ten with that song.

By the time The Doors broke through a few years later I had a much nicer Lafayette stereo system and was collecting albums in earnest. Waiting for the Sun came out in the summer of '68 and was immediately added to my collection. I loved the sound. "Hello I Love You (Won't You Tell Me Your Name)" flew to number one. It had a catchy great sound and a catchy riff. It never entered my mind to connect it to my first 45, but Ray Davies who wrote it for the Kinks certainly. He sued in a high profile plagiarism case and won, after which he received all royalties from sales of the Doors' song.

George Harrison similarly stumbled stumbled when he released My Sweet Lord after the breakup of the Beatles. He evidently failed to notice that the tune which emerged in in his head had an earlier origin: "He’s So Fine," the Chiffons' 1963 hit.

In recent years critics have been taking Bob Dylan to the woodshed with charges plagiarism. He’s purportedly stolen tunes, lyrics and arrangements. I've half wondered if the nearly countless strands of sentences and phrases in the songs on Tempest and a deliberate "in your face" response to these critics. That is, "I read the news today, oh boy, and how many other lines can you find here that came from somewhere else?"

Lee Marshall's Bob Dylan: The Never Ending Star defends Dylan's use of other material by explaining how a lifetime of internalizing the history of folk and blues music, it's all inside him and part of him now. Or, to quote Alex Moore, "Bob Dylan is not plagiarizing, he’s just way better read than you are."

While reading Robert Shelton's Dylan bio No Direction Home this week I discovered that even in the beginning Dylan had to deal with charges of pilfering a song, in this case one of his most significant, Blowing in the Wind. After it hit the charts via Peter, Paul & Mary, a rumor began to circulate that Dylan had stolen the song. Shelton, who wrote for the Times, got a call from a Rutgers prof that Dylan bought the song from a kid in Millburn, NJ, named Lorre Wyatt. The prof offered details that when presented to Dylan only made him angry.

In 1963 the young Wyatt wrote a letter to Broadside (a periodical that covered music scene then) that dissed the professor's story, but that he had actually written a song called "Freedom Is Blowing in the Wind." Because the titles were similar, he had friends who felt he'd been ripped off.

Interestingly enough, the story doesn't end here. In 1974, Wyatt wrote a story for the New Times about this whole stolen song incident. In the '74 piece he confessed to having lied with regard to haveing written anything remotely like Blowing in the Wind. He ended by stating, "I'm just sorry it's taken me 11 years to say 'I'm sorry.'"

Thinking of the incredible events that unfolded from 1963 to '74, globally and in Dylan's amazing epoch of song production, it's easy to imagine that this little blip had been long forgotten.

Lesson: don't believe everything you read and hear.  

Meantime, life goes on all around you.

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