Perhaps not surprisingly, Bill Bryson and his publisher have not bothered to slap a plagiarism suit on Bristow-Bovey, even though The Naked Bachelor does have passages that are shamelessly similar to Bryson’s hilarious Notes from a Big Country.
Nor have any of the current editors for whom Bristow-Bovey is a columnist fired him. Is he too valuable an asset?
In the light of which, there’s a feeling that journalists have tended to overplay the furore that followed the Saturday Star article in which spunky young Independent Group intern Rob Boffard accused Bristow-Bovey of plagiarism, with the cartoon illustration comparing him to Jayson Blair, The New York Times plagiarist reporter.
Some people even question the ethics of writing about a colleague.
Why? Plagiarism is a subject close to any writer’s heart, though David Bullard’s ”Hansie Cronje of Journalism” jibe was rather overstating it.
”Obviously the allegations are serious and aren’t what you want associated with your newspaper,” says Chris Whitfield, editor of the Cape Times, which runs a weekly Bristow-Bovey column (one of which caused Bristow-Bovey’s dismissal from Style magazine several months ago, when he recycled it for his monthly Style column). ”But we’re not taking any hasty decisions. Although the issue is serious, I’m also of the view that the most strident criticism is coming from his rivals, the other columnists.”
Gus Silber heads the Mondi Magazine Awards judging panel that will decide later on in the year whether Bristow-Bovey will be retained as a judge. He rates the Saturday Star‘s Jayson Blair comparison unfair. ”I fail to see any tangible connection between Darrel Bristow-Bovey and the journalist who almost brought The New York Times to its knees. The cartoonist was clearly drawing his own conclusions.” And in Silber’s view, the media has overreacted. ”I suspect there’s very little genuine public interest in the issue. Journalists tend to have an inflated view of their own importance in the greater scheme of things.”
Perhaps, but Bristow-Bovey was not your ordinary journalist. He’d become a mini celeb. Don’t under-estimate the part played in his rise by those life-size naked cut-outs, in an apron and a chef’s cap, that were a vital part of the launch of his Naked Bachelor book earlier this year. The bookshops were full of them, and even people who’d never heard of him or read his columns — in The Sunday Independent, Business Day, Cape Times, Style, SL, 15 and Ozone magazine — suddenly became aware that South Africa had its own tongue-in-cheek answer to Jamie the Naked Chef.
Naturally the higher you fly, the keener people are to see you crash, especially if they’re less talented and you’re perceived as arrogant — an image Bristow-Bovey has made no attempts to dispel. Fact is, his most popular columns have always been his most viciously acerbic. You can’t be both funny and nice.
”I sense he sometimes employs an arrogant exterior like a shield to protect the sensitive writer inside,” says journalist and author Sue Grant-Marshall, also a Mondi Awards judge. ”One thing’s for sure, he’s a brilliant stand-up comic. If he ever decides to give up writing he could have a career on the stage.”
Comedian or not, in the eyes of the oracle, the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, Bristow-Bovey perfectly fits the definition of a plagiarist. Not only is he guilty of ”the taking and using as one’s own of the thoughts, writings or inventions of another” but, as the dictionary warns by quoting William Hazlitt, ”once detected in borrowing, he will be suspected of plagiarism ever after”.
He’s in interesting company. Shakespeare blatantly pinched speeches all over the place for his plays. Some of his best Antony and Cleopatra bits came from Plutarch, according to American writer Anne Fadiman, who discovered (in Thomas Mallon’s Stolen Words, and Alexander Lindey’s Plagiarism and Originality) that not only was Virgil a brazen plagiarist, but also Milton, Benjamin Disraeli, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Edgar Allan Poe. British novelist Martin Amis was not long ago accused of plagiarising Dickens, while a recent issue of Time points out that the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s Grammy-winning album Love and Theft look as if they’re lifted from the work of a little known Japanese writer called Junichi Saga.
Of course creative people are inevitably magpies. They pounce upon images that intrigue and dazzle, and carry these nuggets away to be stored for future use. Often in the process they transmute them into a work that’s even brighter and shinier, something Bristow-Bovey appears to have done with PJ O’Rourke’s Bachelor’s Home Companion. Again the similarity between several passages in this book and The Naked Bachelor is striking. Bristow-Bovey’s version however, in his own words, is longer and funnier.
So where do you draw the line? Certainly, with the arrival of the cut-and-paste era of the Internet, the whole issue of what constitutes plagiarism has gone a bit blurry at the edges. As Sapa, for example, knows to its detriment, news reporters routinely lift stories from each other, almost word for word. If anyone minds, there’s little they can do about it.
”Do people understand what plagiarism is?” Grant-Marshall speculates. ”If so, why do they simply ‘forget’ about acknowledging the source? I wrote a magazine feature, Be Positive SA, which struck such a chord that someone e-mailed it around the world but never thought of crediting me or the magazine. For months afterwards it came back to me from different parts of the globe. It had become public property.”
Silber, who also knows what it feels like to be plagiarised, says: ”I think we have to accept that we live in a culture that is constantly cross-referencing and feeding on itself, so we should not be too surprised when we get that sneaky, creepy feeling of déjàvu at the movies, the theatre, or while browsing the magazine stands at the CNA.”
Pieter Dirk Uys based one of his plays almost entirely on two Silber articles in the mid-Eighties. ”I was very flattered at the time,” says Silber. ”He was at his peak as a satirist and he never hid the fact that much of his material was borrowed at will from other media. He was kind enough to invite me to the show, and personally thanked me for ‘all my help’ when I bumped into him in the foyer.”
When Bristow-Bovey is faced one of these days with his own ideas on the stage or buried in some bright-eyed young journalist’s copy — if it hasn’t happened already — will he be as accommodating?
Hilary Prendini Toffoli is a freelance journalist.