WHAT IS THE ATMOSPHERE OF A CONVENTION – national or international – on the morning of the third day?
Not what one would call vibrant, reader; not what one would call euphoric. There has been too much talking, both serious and frivolous, and too much smoking, whether passive or active. Some have not yet accustomed or resigned themselves to the hotel’s mattresses and cuisine; some are beginning to feel the first prickings of impatience towards certain colleagues, a secret feeling distantly related to homicidal fury; and some (a minority, fortunately) can be found staring at a door-handle or table-corner with the glazed eyes of one no longer able to suppress the fatal question: ‘What in hell am I doing here?’
And last night, nobody was able to leave the U&O. Sumptuous dinners had been planned in picturesque Roman trattorias, to be followed by picturesque Roman folkdancing on the Oppian Hill. But just as they were about to leave, the . . . what do we call them? completers? completists? completionists? found themselves confronting a hostile mob that had invaded the garden and was blocking the entrance-hall.
Who were these trouble-makers being kept under the uncertain rein of a few puzzled policemen? The papers this morning describe them as Byronic integralists and fanatical Mitteleuropeans, all demonstrating with loudspeakers, banners, leaflets, and even bonfires, against the exclusion of their favourite works from the convention. COMPLETE DON JUAN! the banners read; HOW DOES THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES END? FINISH AMERIKA!
There was no violence, although a group of Kafkian extremists did try – without success – to break into the U&O via a service door. From our group, the Carabinieri colonel went out to parley. He managed to negotiate a compromise: the demonstrators would remain outside the building, the convention-members inside.
‘What kind of compromise do you call that?’ came a cry from all sides. A scholar from Fribourg made a detailed comparison with the siege of the Castle of Sant’Angelo as fancifully described by Cellini. Meanwhile the rage of the dissidents without began to infect people within, causing dramatic revolts among the different work-groups.
‘Puccini’s music makes me sick!’ proclaimed a Danish musicologist, to general consternation. The clamour and the chaos reached their peak when a Latinist from Pirna (formerly East Germany) proposed that they complete the Satyricon or reconstruct the comedies of Plautus ‘rather than Livy’s History of Rome, which is far too long as it is’.
These iconoclastic pronouncements (there were even some, reader, for whom Leoncavallo, the ‘Unfinished Symphony’, and ‘’O Sole Mio’ were all much of a muchness) received more coverage in the press than they deserved. But they served to draw attention away from the Drood group, and thus prevented the reporters and photographers, whose interest in completeness could not compare with their thirst for scandal and gossip, from sinking their teeth into a story far juicier.
After the session, despite Dr Wilmot’s request that the matter be tabled for the time being, several of our investigators surrounded Poirot and the preposterous impostor Popeau, bombarding them both with questions. The embarrassing truth gradually emerged: Popeau was preposterous perhaps, but no imposter; no, it was Poirot – or his absent-minded (cunning?) creator – who had usurped the other’s name and credentials, making only the slightest modifications.fn1
But we are not here to do the media’s job for them, reader. Therefore we will dwell neither on the illustrious plagiarist’s ignominy nor on his humble victim’s triumph. Instead, we will summarise the discussion that ensued, which the chairman, with his usual tact, managed to divert from the specific case, directing it to the subject of plagiarism in general.
WILMOT: There is, after all, a kind of plagiarism that is totally unconscious: a name, an idea, a situation, the starting point for a plot, which a writer forgets that he has absorbed from another writer, and which years later he may use as his own in perfectly good faith.
LATINIST FROM JUAN-LES-PINS, who, disgusted by the treachery of his colleague from Pirna, has come to join the Drood group: Among the ancients there was, of course, no such thing as copyright, and nothing to compare with the literary market of today, so the question didn’t even arise. Consequently there is nothing in Latin that corresponds to our meaning of the word plagiarism. The term plagiarius (from the Greek plágios, ‘oblique, sly’) was applied to a man who harboured runaway slaves or who reduced a free man to a condition of servility.
WOLFE: Today, however, copyright is an essential part of the Rights of Man! Any violation of it means royalties lost or stolen, money that ends up in another writer’s pocket.
HOLMES: But these are petty quarrels, unworthy of gentlemen. Borrowings and exchanges, themes and characters that cross from work to work, have always been part and parcel of the literary game.
WILMOT: An example of which can be found in the character Grewgious, the immortal solicitor whom Stevenson was to borrow and develop in Jekyll and Hyde, but who in turn was derived from a character in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.
LOREDANA: You know so much, Dr Wilmot!
MARLOWE AND ARCHER, in low voices: You’ll find us even better-equipped, doll . . .
LOREDANA, aside: They’re just jealous.
WILMOT, spurred on by the woman’s admiration: There’s more. In yet another novel, Stevenson used the idea of a wicked uncle planning to kill his nephew by making him fall from an ancient tower on a stormy night.
MARLOWE AND ARCHER, low and mocking: You know so much, Dr Wilmot!
LOREDANA, through gritted teeth: Peasants!
P. PETROVICH: But in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in my opinion, Stevenson borrows much more from the MED than an isolated character or a series of external circumstances. He takes the novel’s basic theme! The idea of an individual who, like all of us, is a mixture of good and evil, and whose personality is tragically split by drugs. The two halves, the good and evil, not only behave independently of each other, but do not even know what the other half is doing. In this sense, the MED could easily be called The Strange Case of Mr Jasper and the Wicked Man.
MAIGRET: I imagine that this explanation has been put forward by someone before us?
WILMOT: More than once, with variations. And, Inspector, this is why your question yesterday put me in some difficulty. I could not tell you how Jasper and the Opium-Addict, alias the Wicked Man, were and at the same time were not the same person, without anticipating the brilliant solution that Magistrate Petrovich has now come up with entirely on his own.
TOAD: That’s what you call a brilliant surprise? After all these promises of a surprise ending? If that’s it, I’m leaving; I’ll go and join the protestors outside!
LOREDANA: That would not be gentlemanly, Mr Toad. If you have a better idea, all you need do is put it forward, and I’m sure Dr Wilmot (gazing so fondly at Wilmot that Toad himself is left dumbfounded) will not fail to take it into consideration.
WILMOT: But tomorrow, I think. For the moment I would just like to mention that some of the Jekyll-type solutions are quite surprising in their own way, not to say quietly spectacular.
FATHER BROWN: You’re not going to tell us that the wicked Jasper turns out to be a foot shorter than the good Jasper, like Hyde?
WILMOT: No, everything remains on the psychological plane. For example, in the most recent of these solutions,fn2 Jasper finally returns to the crime in an opium-haze, and recounts it in detail, but without in the least suspecting that it was he who committed it.
TOAD: That would be more plagiarism. And plagiarism against a friend. Because the device was used by Wilkie Collins in The Moonstone, although the crime there was the theft of a diamond and not the murder of a rival.
WILMOT, clearing his throat: This is true. But another ‘Jekyllian,’ the American Edmund Wilson,fn3 found a way round this problem. According to him, Jasper did not plan the murder of his nephew and carry it out under the influence of opium, but in a state of auto-hypnosis. And his memory would return under the influence of Helena’s telehypnosis.
FATHER BROWN, also clearing his throat: I don’t see how this makes much difference. Indeed, I wonder whether direct plagiarism might not be better than indirect imitation. ‘Inferior poets imitate, mature ones steal,’ says T. S. Eliot, whom we have already quoted.
POIROT, cheered by this quotation: Parfaitement!
THE MAN IN BLACK:fn4 Up to a point, Poirot, up to a point. What do you think, Porfiry?
P. PETROVICH: As a Czarist magistrate, I am bound to condemn every crime against property, including literary property. On the other hand, it is also true that the artist ‘prend son bien où il le trouve’, as Molière declared in his self-defence. But there are limits.
POPEAU: I should hope so!
P. PETROVICH: Even in classical antiquity, which was extremely tolerant in this matter, a certain Ephorus, a pupil of Isocrates, was singled out for public censure when no fewer than three thousand lines in his works were discovered to have been copied directly from other authors.
WILMOT: But we mustn’t put the cart before the horse. Before we accuse Dickens of plagiarism, we should first consider other solutions. After all, the idea that Jasper suffered a personality split under the influence of opium or hypnosis is only one of two possibilities presented so far in the Drood case. In the other possibility, opium and hypnosis remain secondary elements, a red herring, since the villain is not Jasper.
TOAD: You have thrown me a life-line, Dr Wilmot! Tell me at once who this . . .
WILMOT, raising his hand: As I have already said, my dear friend, I do not wish to influence the normal course of the inquiry. Besides, it is getting late, the hotel is still besieged, and I would like to go to bed.
LOREDANA: Yes, let’s all turn in. A comfortable bed awaits everybody here – in a very low voice, intended only for the editor of The Dickensian, but not low enough to escape Poirot’s keen ears – and mine is on the second floor, No. 11, at the end of the second corridor and to the right. This, reader is a rough account of the events of yesterday evening at the U&O. This is what the members of our group – with the possible exception of two of them – pondered over during the night, or perhaps even dreamt about. And this gives you an indication of the spirit in which they faced the new day and the discussion of the first two chapters of the July number.
fn1 Created almost twenty years before Poirot by Mrs. Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes (1868-1948), Hercule Popeau rose to high rank in the French police. In 1918, after a brief period in counter-espionage, he reappeared as an Anglicised private detective in a series of melodramatic tales by the author (sister of the better-known Hilaire Belloc, but in her day famous enough in her own right; her novel The Lodger, of 1913, was made into a celebrated film by Hitchcock). Hercule Poirot, complete with pension, moustaches, and little grey cells, did not appear until 1920, in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Agatha Christie’s first detective novel.
fn2 Charles Forsyte, The Decoding of Edwin Drood, London, 1980.
fn3 E. Wilson, ‘The Two Scrooges’ (in The Wound and the Bow, 1939). Another authoritative ‘Jekyllian’ is J. B. Priestley, in his biography of Dickens (1961).
fn4 This participant is an extremely thin man, dressed entirely in black. During the work sessions, he always sits in the back row, never joining in the debate. In the breaks, too, he keeps to himself, wandering around the garden with a melancholy air, and stopping every so often to look disapprovingly at the rose-bushes (which are rather badly kept, to tell the truth).