Wrestling with Charles Dickens

• Simon Gray discusses the difficulty of writing a play about Charles Dickens in The Guardian.

Like I say -- nothing that's worthwhile is ever easy.

I had never before in my writing life accepted money for work not yet done. I'd like to think that this behaviour came from some sort of principle, a high-minded belief that inspiration would be poisoned by commerce. But then why have I always been so envious of fellow playwrights who not only accept commissions but ask for them, and, when they've got them, announce them to all who care to listen, and many who don't? Perhaps it's because I know that's what real playwrights do: even Shakespeare accepted commissions, though as far as I can make out they were mainly from himself.

The fact is, I have difficulty in thinking of myself as a playwright. On those official forms where you have to put down your occupation, I clung to "lecturer" for years after I'd retired. Now I write "writer" in a loose sort of way, with a little gap between the i and the t, connected by a squiggle. Wri~ter.

I can't write when I'm afraid to write. When I force myself I become self-conscious, which is worse than not writing, as it makes me feel ashamed, and bogus. On the other hand, not writing makes me feel stolen from - but by whom or what? Time, perhaps. I decided to give up on the play for a while, get stuck into something else.

Deflating plagiarism (and Stoppard)

• Robert McCrum pops plagiarism-accusation bubbles in The Guardian.

A lot of good sense here:

One person's 'homage' is another's 'copyright infringement'. The question of originality in literature is complicated. Until the mid-18th century English writers did not hesitate to borrow from each other's work. Good writers, if they are honest, will acknowledge that when they come across a good thing in someone else's work, either consciously or unconsciously they store it away.

If writers are pickpockets, then Shakespeare is our Fagin, always a 'snapper-up of unconsidered trifles'. Shakespeare did not confine himself to individual lines or phrases. Apart from A Midsummer Night's Dream, his plots were appropriated from other, often classical, sources.

...It was the Romantics, for whom originality of expression was central to literary authenticity, who made plagiarism literature's capital offence. This hasn't stopped all kinds of conscious and unconscious borrowing. No one put it better than the American critic James Atlas, defending novelist David Leavitt against the charge of plagiarising Stephen Spender's World Within World. 'Literature,' Atlas said, 'is theft.' TS Eliot said: 'Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.'

One caveat, though. McCrum makes the same mistake that a seemingly large number of English critics do -- namely by assigning all the credit for the screenplay of Shakespeare in Love to Tom Stoppard. These writers need to do their homework: the story did not originate from Stoppard but from Marc Norman, the credited co-writer, who spent years trying to get it made. Stoppard was one of many script doctors who contributed to the script as it passed through several different studios, directors and stars. Due to the WGA's byzantine credit rules, Stoppard's contribution was considered substantial enough to award him credit for the final film. Norman did all right, though, by it all -- in addition to the Oscar that he shared with Stoppard for the screenplay, he took another home as well (Best Picture), due to his co-producer credit.

The authority of a story

• E. L. Doctorow writes about "the history of fiction" at The Atlantic Monthly (via Powell's).

An interesting read:

Homer was Homer, a bard of the late Bronze Age. In the Bronze Age stories were the primary means of storing and transmitting knowledge: they were the public memory; they preserved the past, instructed the young, and created communal identity. So we're prepared to make allowances. We do that also with those other writers of the era, the writers and redactors of the Hebrew Bible. For them as for Homer, there was nothing like a purely factual discourse; there was no learned observation of the natural world that was not religious belief, no history that was not legend, no practical information that did not resound as heightened language. The world was perceived as enchanted.

In the Iliad there are many gods; in the Bible, the one God to whom the biblical writers cede authorship. But under many gods or one God, the stories told during this time were presumed to be true by the fact of being told. The very act of telling a story carried a presumption of truth.

We make allowances for Shakespeare, too, but for the reason that he is Shakespeare. By the time of the Elizabethan Age religious inspiration was becoming distinct from scientific fact, truth was something to be proven by observation and experiment, and the aesthetic event was a self-conscious production. Reality was one thing, fantasy another. God was institutionalized, and in a world deprived of enchantment by rationalism and empirical knowledge, stories were no longer the primary means of knowing. Storytellers were recognized as mortal, however immortal some of them would come to be, and a story might be believed, but not simply because it was being told.

Today it is only children who believe that stories, by the fact of their being told, are true. Children and fundamentalists. And that is the measure of the 2,000-year decline in the story's authority.

No one expects the Himalayan Inquisition!

• Michael Palin's travel book Himalaya is now required reading for British high-schoolers.

The members of Monty Python considered themselves writers first and performers thereafter, which is why this new edict is not only unsurprising but, in my opinion, a smart move. Alas, some kids will probably reject it outright, not because they don't like it, but because it's required... education is a double-edged sword sometimes.

• Barnes and Noble is now buying your used books.

Conversational Reading beat me to this, but it bears repeating. The price quotes aren't all that high (surprise, surprise), and they're more interested in recent bestsellers; they're flat-out not accepting westerns, sci-fi, romance or out-of-print books. Still, if that stack of potboilers from John Grisham or Michael Crichton is bugging you, here's a good way to get rid of them.

• Shakespeare is on the Sotheby's auction block this July.

According to the AP, the copy of the complete First Folio edition that will be auctioned is "in prime condition and still in its 17th century calf leather binding." Estimates for the sale are going as high as $6 million, estimates which, I'll bet, will probably turn out to be conservative.

The thick tome with its heavy, yellowing pages and portrait of England's leading playwright on the front is not only unique for its completeness and condition.

It contains detailed notes in the margins made, it is believed, by contemporary scholars and giving an insight into the understanding and interpretation of the wordsmith's masterworks soon after his own era.