All Such Filthy Cheatsrnby Theodore PappasrnWhen Vice Admiral Bobby Ray Inman announced onrnJanuary 18 his decision not to pursue confirmation asrnSecretary of Defense, he repeated Robert Massie’s old chargernthat William Safire is a plagiarist, saying this “does not, in myrnjudgment, put [Safire] in a position to frame moral judgmentrnon any of us, in or out of public service.” The battle that ensuedrnbetween Safire and Inman on the one hand and betweenrnSafire and Massie on the other dragged on for months and includedrnad hominem attacks launched from Nightline, thernNation, and the New York Times. And though the real issue wasrnnot whether Safire is a plagiarist—but whether he hadrnaided and abetted one by distributing an unpublishedrnmanuscript by Massie to another writer who ravaged it for anrnarticle in Esquire—this high-profile caterwauling made onernthing clear: plagiarism has become one of the nagging issues ofrnour day.rn”If you pillage someone else’s memoir for your source material,rnit tends to indicate a thinness of literary imagination,”rnsaid an anonymous New York editor to the Washington Post.rnWhat this Valachi of Grub Street was too cowardly to say is thatrnplagiarists are often untalented louts, and that the lout inrnquestion was the ballyhooed young novelist David Leavitt.rnLast September Bernard Knox pointed out in the WashingtonrnPost Book World that Leavitt’s new novel. While England Sleeps,rnreproduces the story of the failed homosexual affair that Britishrnpoet Stephen Spender recounts in World Within World, hisrn1951 autobiography. Leavitt stole the basic story and then embellishedrnit with lurid detail. “I don’t see why [Leavitt] shouldrnunload all his sexual fantasies onto me in my youth,” complainedrnSpender, who now is married. Spender sued Leavitt forrncopyright infringement and for breach of his “moral right” torncontrol use of his writings, a “right” stemming from a new andrncontroversial copyright law in Britain. As a result of the lawsuit.rnViking Press canceled Leavitt’s book in February in bothrnBritain, where the suit was filed and the book still warehoused,rnand the United States, where the novel had already reachedrnbookstores and libraries. The American paperback edition ofrnthe book, scheduled for this fall, has also been canceled. “ThernTheodore Pappas is the managing editor o/^Chronicles.rndisowning of a newly published novel is extremely unusual,”rnreported the Washington Post. “For a writer like the 32-yearoldrnLeavitt, who has often been east as a spokesman for hisrngeneration, it is unprecedented.”rnWhen Baudelaire wondered “how a man of honor couldrntake a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust,” hernmust have had something like the Washington Post in mind.rnFor a publisher’s disavowal of an author at the eleventh hourrnmay be unusual, but this fiasco with Leavitt is hardly “unprecedented.”rnJacob Epstein, whose father is editorial directorrnof Random House and whose mother is coeditor of the NewrnYork Review of Books, was the literary elite’s Boy Wonder ofrn1979, and it was much to their chagrin to learn in late 1980 thatrnthe protege on whom they had bestowed lavish praise had actuallyrnplagiarized his Great American Novel, Wild Oats (whichrnironically deals with plagiarism), from a novel by Martin Amisrnpublished in 1974, The Rachel Papers. Unsurprisingly, Epsteinrnwas allowed to slink quietly away, reportedly to a career inrnthat land of tinsel where creativity and originality are notrnrequisites for success—Hollywood.rn”Leavitt’s aura has been damaged, to state the obvious,” concludedrnthe anonymous editor to the Post. More obvious still isrnthat the day of the talented reprobate has long since passed.rnThere have always been decadent writers in the West, but thernones we once praised and hailed as artists had more in commonrnwith the model citizens of the most civilized nations thanrnwith the poseurs, hucksters, and voyeurists of today for whomrnhigh culture is the AIDS quilt and performance art. Sade,rnWilde, Lawrence, and Gide never needed to plagiarize salaciousrnscenes from the works of others: if personal experiencernwith depravity proved an insufficient wellspring, they werernskilled enough to render it fictionally on their own. Withrn”spokesmen” like David Leavitt and Jacob Epstein, what theirrngeneration needs is a Milli Vanilli Award in Creative Writing.rnAnother blow to the literati occurred in April, when BallantinernBooks announced that Indrani Aikath-Gyaltsen, thern”promising” novelist who committed suicide late last year,rnhad plagiarized her widely acclaimed novel Cranes’ Morningrnfrom Elizabeth Goudge’s 1956 novel The Rosemary Tree.rnAikath-Gyaltsen, who was born in India but educated in thernSEPTEMBER 1994/23rnrnrn