Respecting Plagiarism: Tradition, Guilt, and Malcolm Lowry’s “Pelagiarist Pen”

Abstract

RESPECTING PLAGIARISM: TRADITION, GUILT, AND MALCOLM LOWRY’S “PELAGIARIST PEN” S H E R R ILL E. G R A C E University of British Columbia Who can say how many pseudostylic shamiana, how few or how many of the most venerated public impostures, how very many piously forged palimpsests slipped in the first place by this morbid process from his pelagiarist pen? (Joyce 181-82)1 I Frankly, I think I have no gift for writing. I started by being a plagiarist. Then I became a drunkard. Then I became a hard worker, as one might say, a novelist. Now I am a drunkard again. But what I always wanted to be, was a poet. (Lowry, “Haitian Notebook” )2 I t is no exaggeration to describe Malcolm Lowry as obsessed with, haunted by, yet thoroughly devoted to, the idea of plagiarism. The irresistible temp­ tation to plagiarize, the terror of being discovered, the complex mixture of shame and fascination associated in his mind with his predilection for and sensitivity to the words of another writer, are everywhere apparent in his work, from his earliest surviving letters and fiction to his mature fiction, his poetry, and his late correspondence. To recognize these facts, however, is only to begin what should be a careful consideration of the parameters, mo­ tivation, and final result, of Lowry’s life-long preoccupation with language and with a developing poetics that had as its central characteristic his belief in a shared inheritance of words— a belief nonetheless sincerely held despite the discomfort, guilt, and insecurity it caused him. To the direct question — was Lowry a plagiarist? — I would answer no. But was he afraid of being charged with plagiarism and found guilty? Was he ever so accused? Was he at times uncertain about the status of his own authorship and originality? To all these questions the answer is: yes. Surprisingly little study has been made of plagiarism or the plagiarist, but a great deal has been written about theories of textuality and discourse, and these theories provide crucial insight into the nature of plagiarism and the domain of the word. I will turn to a theoretical discussion of the problem E n g l i s h S t u d i e s i n C a n a d a , x v i i i , 4, December 1992 later. In order to understand Lowry’s position, and his ambivalent feeling (never amounting to a conviction) that no one could claim exclusive owner­ ship of language, it is first essential to assemble the evidence, to trace some key influences, to uncover his developing philosophy of language and his po­ etics from his many comments on the subject. For this evidence I will turn primarily to his letters, because I know them well and because Lowry reveals himself in them. Moreover, for reasons that I hope will become clear, I see no theoretical need to make an absolute distinction between Lowry’s letters and his fictions. Lowry’s susceptibility to the published words of other writers is evident in some of his earliest surviving letters. At age seventeen, as a public school boy, Lowry was already reading voraciously, writing his own fiction, and fiction­ alizing his own life as a writer. Perhaps none of these activities is especially remarkable, for, after all, what young writer does not read and attempt to emulate and imitate what he or she finds appealing? With Lowry, however, the period of apprenticeship seems to have been peculiarly profound, longlasting , and complex. Beginning with Richard Connell, an American writer who is now totally forgotten, and moving on to other writers who are bet­ ter known, such as Nordahl Grieg and Conrad Aiken, Lowry’s identification with a particular writer and that writer’s work left crucial marks on his psy­ che, on his choice of subject matter for his fiction and poetry, and on his style and poetics. This phenomenon of identification is not entirely encompassed by what Lowry himself described as his “aggregate daemon,” although there is a certain overlap, of course, between the “daemon” and his identifications ( “Thoughts to be Erased from my Destiny,” Collected Poetry 218). That “ag...