to use other writers’ plots, says one biographer.
Wars, a non-academic study in which author Ron Rosenbaum doesn’t write about Shakespeare, as one might expect, but about the legendary scholars who have written about Shakespeare, yet another genius who pilfered and tweaked material from historians who preceded him. Jack London was as big a thief as Shakespeare, though he got into more trouble than the Bard. Copyright law posed more of a problem for writers in 1900 than in 1600. All his life London borrowed from his favorite authors and his literary role models, some of them famous, such as Rudyard Kipling. Not surprisingly he was labeled the “Kipling of the Arctic.” Other writers whose work he looted were less well-known, such as Egerton Young, the author of My Dogs in the Northland, published in 1902, one year prior to the appearance of London’s own shaggy-dog story, The Call of the Wild. When copyright issues arose, London usually won; he had the money to defend
himself in court and knew how to manipulate the media. Andrew Sinclair, author of Jack: A Biography of Jack London says, “Jack certainly thought that he had the right to use other people’s plots in the same way as he used other people’s political ideas.” Jack London never drew clear lines to divide fact from fantasy or to separate imitation from originality. He also recognized that copying could be the sincerest form of flattery, and that young talented writers improved by mimicking veteran authors. Ever since the Renaissance—and perhaps before—new writers have cannibalized old writers, and the literature of the present day has fed on the literature of the past. As the Irish playwright Oscar Wilde astutely noted, “Talent borrows, genius steals.” He surely had himself in mind, and maybe Jack London too. If he were alive today, Wilde would recognize Bob Dylan as yet another genius and literary thief. In his own defense, Dylan might borrow from Jack London, who said, “I think the
Warmuth knows the Dylan discography backward and forward. “I’m a Blonde on Blonde baby,” he says. “The first album I heard was Desire, when I was 10. My parents had it.” Blonde on Blonde is, as he knows, as tangled as any Dylan album. On the 12th cut, “4th Time Around,” Dylan offers his take on “Norwegian Wood,” Lennon’s homage to Dylan. Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz describes the tune as “Bob Dylan impersonating John Lennon impersonating Dylan.” For more than 60 years, Dylan fans have been scratching their heads and trying to figure him out, even when he seems obvious. When squares and traditionalists complained they couldn’t understand his 1963 ballad “Blowing in the Wind,” Dylan explained tongue-in-cheek, “There ain’t too much I can say about this song except that the answer is blowing in the wind.” Everybody and anybody who was hip in 1963 knew exactly what he meant. The only Americans who didn’t understand belonged on the far side of the generation gap. “Something is happening here,” Dylan sings in “Ballad of a Thin Man,” one of the most memorable tracks on Highway 61 Revisited, his sixth studio album, recorded the same year as the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when he went electric. All Dylan fans know the line that follows it: “But you don’t know what’s happening here, do you, Mr. Jones.” Like his mentor, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, Dylan wanted his fans to dig deeply into his work. Then, too, in the spirit of poet Walt Whitman, he crafted songs about himself, about America and about ordinary Americans. To his own voice he’s added the voices of the famous, the notorious and the anonymous, hoping listeners would turn up the volume, tune into the words and identify pilfered phrases, images and sounds. What he’s done is what singers often do: “cover” the work of others. Jack London “covered” other writers too, though London fans and scholars are often embarrassed by them. ) 20
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LITERARY LARCENRY? Jack London believed he had the right
whole subject of plagiarism is absurd. I can conceive of no more laughable spectacle than that of a human standing up on his hind legs and yowling plagiarism. No man with a vivid imagination needs to plagiarize.” According to musicologist Greil Marcus, Dylan fans—more than the fans of any other ’60s band, including the Beatles, the Stones and the Grateful Dead—assume that his songs are richly encoded and that it’s their mission in life to dig out the hidden messages and decode them. What’s perhaps more significant is that Dylan’s elliptical writings have given birth to the tribe of “Dylanologists,” including the very first, A. J. Weberman, and the very best, Scott Warmuth. In New York in the 1970s, Weberman claimed that he sorted through Dylan’s garbage and found a motherload of confidential stuff. Maybe he did. Maybe he just talked trash. Scholars have poked holes in the stories about his adventures in dumpsterland. He did, however, coin, or at least popularize, the words “garbology” and “Dylanology.” A pioneer in the field, Weberman published the infamous Dylan to English Dictionary and argued that many of Dylan’s songs were about and specifically written for him. Warmuth, the dean of Dylanologists, and Kinney, student of Dylanology, seem like fictional characters who have wandered from a Jack London tale: twins and doubles who genuinely admire one another. Keen critics of pop culture, both were shaped by the kinds of college classes that train students to discover influences and then provide credit where credit is due. Many of us were. Still, they both gave up on dreary footnotes and hoary bibliographies ages ago. A liberal arts major in college, Warmuth was born in 1966, 90 years after London, an illegitimate kid traumatized by the circumstances of his own birth, arrived in the world, and 25 years after Abram and Beatrice Zimmerman, descendants of Russian Jews, named their infant son Robert Allen.