From: James Diedrick
Category: Amis
Date: 7/29/99
Time: 10:30:02 AM
Remote Name: 147.124.221.202
True, there is some repetition in the Jarma Amis/Larkin dissertation, but what a stunning (and comically inspired) demonstration of Amis's "idiom-magpie" tendencies!
Back in 1980, when Amis wrote about Jacob Epstein's novel *Wild Oats* (which plagiarized mightily from *The Rachel Papers*), he had this to say about imitation/allusion/"word theft":
"These 'echoes' in the early pages of Epstein's book didn't bother me much. I am something of an idiom-magpie myself--to a reprehensible extent, perhaps. That bit about 'wiry wings,' for instance [an oldster in *The Rachel Papers* has 'two grey-coloured wiry wings on either side of his else hair-free head'], was stolen by me from Dickens: Podsnap in *Our Mutual Friend* has 'two little light-coloured wiry wings, one on either side of his else bald head.'
I once lifted a whole paragraph of mesmeric jargon from J.G. Ballard's *The Drowned World,* and was reproved by the publisher via an alert Ballard fan. In fact, I had belatedly got verbal permission from Mr. Ballard, who is a friend and colleague. But the lapse was evidence of laziness, and a kind of moral torpor.
'Immature poetts imitate; mature poets steal,' said Eliot, who by this reckoning was very mature indeed. Allusion can enrich a writer's work; it is a way of paying homage and of claiming a sense of tradition. But no book should be dependent on any other book. This dependency is of course hard to measure. The boundary between influence and plagirism will always be vague."
To read the entire Jarma excavation, and related responses, start with this url:
http://academic.albion.edu/jdiedrick/larkinamis.htm
which continues onto this url:
http://academic.albion.edu/jdiedrick/larkinamis2.htm