It's a matter of good manners, Mr McEwan

Discourteous? Ian McEwan
13 April 2012

It is a remarkable roll-call of writers; Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, John Updike, Thomas Keneally, Zadie Smith, Rose Tremain, Kazuo Ishiguro and even the famously reclusive Thomas Pynchon have all signed up to a campaign that must be unprecedented in the history of publishing.

They have joined the most extraordinary rearguard action to defend the author Ian McEwan over my revelation in this newspaper two weeks ago that he had copied passages from the wartime autobiography of the late romantic novelist Lucilla Andrews.

The heavyweight literary figures - assembled by McEwan's editor, Dan Franklin, and several of whom share the same publisher - have rallied to defend their fellow author against the charge of plagiarism in his Booker-shortlisted novel Atonement. It is an allegation that I particularly specified was not being made by anybody.

At no time have I questioned the right of an author to use contemporary accounts as the basis for fiction, nor have I suggested that the use of Miss Andrews' sparkling original material in her memoir No Time For Romance in any way diminishes Ian McEwan's own fine novel.

And while Mr McEwan has properly included a brief acknowledgement to Lucilla Andrews in the afterword of his novel, what he has failed to answer is why he did not contact her as a matter of simple courtesy and professional etiquette.

He should have told her of the use to which he had been able to put her recollections of the life of a wartime nurse - including his use, in a number of instances that I provided, of her precise words.

In the meantime, I have been accused personally, in newspapers and on the radio, of a "malicious, hysterical and largely baseless" attack on Mr McEwan, who won the Booker Prize for an earlier novel, Amsterdam.

I am also attacked for having chosen to write for The Mail on Sunday (which, as it happens, I do on a regular basis) because it might be antipathetic to the sort of fiction written by Mr McEwan, and accused of being motivated by envy and a desire for self-promotion.

The story has gone around the world and is being closely followed in America, particularly in the New York Times, where there is no echo whatever of the snobbish elitism that infects the British literary establishment, whose members have combined to condemn my story and attack my supposed motives without examining the original sources.

One of my British critics, the academic and author John Sutherland, scornfully disdained my account on both Radio 4's arts programme Front Row and on The Guardian newspaper's website, while wrongly suggesting that the period detail -about Dunkirk and the London Blitz - was about the First World War.

The reality is that I had known about the similarity between the two books for several years but drew attention to the link only when I wrote an obituary of Lucilla Andrews for The Guardian after her death at 86 in October.

She was the author of 35 novels and had an unusually interesting life story. I had met her because she was the mother of my late friend Veronica Crichton, who died four years ago.

I knew that Mr McEwan had used her book, published in 1977, as extensive source material for Atonement because I am the godmother of the Oxford academic Natasha Alden, who has been writing a thesis on war fiction and who has, incidentally, behaved throughout with blameless academic rigour.

She did not seek to publicise this issue, nor did she leak her thesis to me. She did write one article last week but that was to defend my argument in the original report.

Natasha was looking at the sources used by authors to write about wars that were fought by their parents' generation and knew of my friendship with the Crichton family. Miss Andrews learned from Natasha only last year of the help she had been able to provide Mr McEwan. She was amused by the news.

She was a lovely, funny woman described by one of her closest friends as "wise, considerate and kind". Before she died, she had been planning to let Mr McEwan know that she had recently heard about the valuable help she had given him.

She had discussed this with her agent, Vanessa Holt, and with her brother, Dr John Andrews, who lives in Canada, to whom she spoke every week on the telephone.

Last night Dr Andrews said that with the making of the film of Atonement, starring Keira Knightley, he wants his sister's contribution recognised.

"I bet this new film is going to be even more based on Lucy's work than the book and I want the film-makers to put her name in the credits", he said.

"And if the book is reissued to coincide with the film, I hope Mr McEwan acknowledges her this time in the front of the book, not just a little line buried at the back."

Since my disclosure of this story, Mr McEwan has suggested erroneously that he has openly and repeatedly acknowledged Miss Andrews' contribution since his book was published. He has also made several references to the gracious tribute that he paid to her on the Radio 4 Today programme after her death.

However, an internet search on Google shows that there are 255,000 references mentioning Ian McEwan and Atonement before Lucilla Andrews' death but that she was not mentioned once. It is only since my obituary of her and as a result of my comparing both books for my subsequent article in The Mail on Sunday, that there have been about 1,000 references linking the two names.

A more sophisticated search of a definitive internet index of printed material shows not a single reference linking the two authors before her death.

A further irony, unknown to Mr McEwan, is that I was responsible for his appearance on the Today programme. As a guest myself on a number of occasions, I drew the attention of the editor to my obituary of Lucilla Andrews before it was broadcast and suggested it would be interesting to interview him.

He spoke about the sorts of detail provided by Miss Andrews' account of life as a wartime nurse and agreed that her book "certainly was" a great spur to the imagination for a novelist.

But oddly enough, since he has asserted the frequency with which he has openly acknowledged his debt to the earlier book and reportedly had never lost an opportunity on speaking engagements to mention it, he got the title wrong - calling it No Time For Love.

As one of the few people around who has read both books - a limited list that I suspect does not include any of the famous authors mentioned above, nor the elitist arts correspondents who have attacked the original story - I was greatly impressed by both and surprised by how much Mr McEwan draws on the original and how his character Briony seems to assume the personality of Lucilla.

He has used her specific experiences and translated them into Briony's life. As well as the occasions where he uses her precise words, including her conversations with other nursing staff and patients - she records with acute accuracy the now dated language of working-class soldiers and officers - there are numerous episodes common to both books, sometimes over several pages.

The description of the dying soldier lasts four pages in the earlier book and six in Atonement. The episode where the nurse removes shrapnel from the flesh of a survivor from Dunkirk is two paragraphs in Miss Andrews' book and two pages long in Mr McEwan's.

It is possible to compare their use of the same words on a number of occasions, as I reported initially, but it is primarily the atmosphere and routine of a wartime hospital in both books that is so startlingly similar.

There are recurring references, for example, to the order and discipline and to the duties of a trainee nurse to keep beds straight, lockers dusted, ashtrays emptied and floors polished.

There are descriptions of "bumpering", (buffing) floors with huge dusters too big for many young nurses to wield, of burnishing doorknobs and buffing the brass, or carbolising the bedsteads and washing their hands over and over again.

There are vignettes involving the difficulties of carrying stretchers on a staircase, of the ferocious authority of the qualified nursing sisters and of the scenes in the nurses' dormitories when the exhausted practitioners at last get to bed.

All of these minutiae of Miss Andrews are clearly invaluable research information and Ian McEwan's use of such a vivid contemporary account is understandable. The publishing lawyer Nicola Solomon, who is a partner at Finers Stephens Innocent, believes it raises a moral question and that there is a "huge grey area", particularly because of the increasing use of "faction" by authors.

She says: "You're not saying: "Is it a copyright infringement?" You're saying: "Is it fair?" It's a moral question. Are you just painting background? That's not unusual in fiction.

"But these are questions of etiquette and manners and so on, which aren't clear and need sorting.

"It's a reasonably new area and there aren't any guidelines. It may not be problematic but I do think it's an area where authors need to have some sort of guidelines."

Miss Solomon, who had not looked at the detail in this case, believes there are different obligations placed on authors depending on whether they are writing fact or fiction. "If you are writing a factual work, you are expected to do the research yourself.

"But if you are writing something fictional, then it is understood that you can take things from other books to make your matrix." She added that any judgment would have to be on whether the amount of copying was appropriate.

The famous authors who have sprung to opine in this instance were all united in defending the novelist's intrinsic right to borrow from existing published work.

Dan Franklin, publishing director of Jonathan Cape, in the Random House group, told the New York Times that he had originally asked several authors to submit statements and that "the effort had snowballed, with others joining in spontaneously".

Although I have asked Mr Franklin how he phrased his request, he has not replied to my enquiry. But from the nature of their indignant responses, it seems evident that he asked his authors to consider whether the copying in this instance amounted to plagiarism. The only question I have raised has been about manners.

Ian McEwan told me while I was writing my initial story that he regretted not meeting Lucilla Andrews. "I would have loved to talk to her about her experiences", he said.

She was alive for five years after his book was published, so it is a shame that he didn't. She would have loved meeting him too.

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