February 28, 2002

MAKING BOOKS

History Is an Art, Not a Toaster

By MARTIN ARNOLD

he mea culpas being offered lately by two popular historians caught plagiarizing are lame. They would have it essentially that, oops, mistakes were made because of the marketplace need for quantity and speed. An excuse? Not at all. An explanation? Well, barely.

Books are the products of artisans and artists, and this doesn't allow for them to be mass-produced at their creation like toasters that some assembly line puts together out of these and those parts gathered from here and there. If writers do want to try to run a factory, fine just as long as they use their own raw materials.

Recently Stephen E. Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin, both best-selling authors of some admirable books, have been caught lifting material from other people's books, kidnapping the work of others. So far they have gotten off easy, as nearly as can be determined. There has been some criticism in print but mostly not too harsh. Booksellers haven't stripped their shelves of these books, customers aren't demanding their money back, the authors' publisher seems more annoyed than angry, and no television producers or movie makers are suggesting blackballing them. Both have brilliantly practiced the new art of crisis management admit wrongdoing immediately, apologize and rectify.

The concept behind writing a history is not very complicated. It is original research and other carefully reviewed scholarship filtered through one person's mind. Eric Foner, professor of history at Columbia, put it this way "Historians don't have to reinvent the wheel every time, but there's a difference between building on other people's scholarship and simply borrowing their writing." Perhaps his next book, "Who Owns History?" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), scheduled for publication in April, will explain the difference to those who don't seem to know.

Maybe there's nothing to explain, and money and celebrity says it all. The public gorges on Mr. Ambrose's books. The more popular they become, the more they are bought and therefore the more books he writes, eight since 1997. No one says stop or hits the switch, and so the conveyor belts keep going. A commercial novelist can do one book a year. A historian, even a popular one, no way.

For Mr. Ambrose, with so much to do, naturally a careless slip occurs. People shrug. But they shouldn't a writer of Mr. Ambrose's reputation should read every sentence before he ships a manuscript to his publisher, and he certainly should be able to recognize his own sentences when he sees them. His plagiarism was discovered with last year's publication of his best seller "The Wild Blue" (Simon & Schuster), an account of the men who bombed Germany late in World War II. Passages were lifted like clouds rising on thermals from Thomas Childers's "Wings of the Morning" (Addison-Wesley, 1995). The excuses were speedy compilations, editing oversights, the ability of computers to cut and paste. It was as if the modern techniques of composition were alive and had run amok, and the author had no control.

For Ms. Goodwin, there was borrowing, from perhaps as many as six other books, of scores of quotations or close paraphrases for her book "The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys" (Simon & Schuster, 1987). For her, somehow, it wasn't technology's fault but its near opposite taking notes in longhand. She looked at them and couldn't always distinguish between her words and thoughts and those from others. Nor did her three full-time and one part-time research assistants help her. Indeed, they were part of the problem, the hidden workers on her assembly line, so many that one doesn't know whose history is being read. Everyone knows college history professors get research help from graduate students, but the students don't write or organize the works. (Sometimes the student doesn't get enough rightful credit, but that's the stuff of another column.)

David Nasaw, a history professor at the City University Graduate Center and the author of "The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst" (Houghton Mifflin, 2000), said, "That's what drives us nuts, all those full-time assistants working for someone at one time." He added"Writing history is not an art but a craft. It requires interpretation and 50 sources and integrating and assembling this material into a story told by an individual voice."

"I would never imagine in a zillion years having a research assistant take notes for me, and neither would any historian I know," Professor Nasaw said. "They find material for me to check." Plagiarism as a mistake in transcription? Very careless. He said"If I have made a mistake in a transcription, by the time I've written the seventh paragraph I would have recognized it."

Professor Foner said"I think there is a problem relying on other people to do your research and your writing, and some of these people have passed their own work on to researchers." Professor Foner sees no difference in method between the academic and the popular historian. "It's abiding by standards that are easily available," he said. "You can't publish a large book every year. Trying to do too much too fast and sloppiness is a lack of attention to your own methodology, and researchers and staff can't do it for you."

"No one wants to string together quotations," he said. "Writing is putting things into your own words. That's what we try to explain to college freshmen."

Not a new idea. One can't know absolutely for sure about Macaulay or Gibbon, but they didn't have researchers. Parkman traveled the Oregon Trail and didn't just read about it or send somebody else to make the journey. As for today's popular historians, no one would waste a moment checking Robert A. Caro, who invests years in researching and writing each of his books.

Of course, for the very busy and popular writer, if they want, there is a way to do what they do without changing and without a hint of deception. They can imitate some of the great painting masters. If we can enjoy a work attributed to the School of Rubens, why can't we be comfortable with a book by the School of Ambrose or the School of Goodwin?