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By Newsweek Editors
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YOU PARROT MY OPINIONS," A sometime lover tells the hero of David Leavitt's new novel, "act as if you own me, tell my Berlin stories as yours--" "Excuse me, Nigel," Brian interrupts, "but I always give you credit." Last week the venerable British poet Stephen Spender accused Leavitt himself of similar misfeasances. He's sued to stop publication in the United Kingdom of Leavitt's "While England Sleeps" (it came out in the United States last month) calling it a ripoff of "World Within World," his 1948 autobiography. Before he stopped talking to the press, he called Leavitt "idle, slovenly and dishonest."
Before he stopped talking to the press, Leavitt readily admitted Spender's book was "a springboard" for his own. Reviewers have noted that Leavitt's plot--a writer following his lower-class lover to the Spanish Civil War--corresponds in detail to an episode in Spender's life. Leavitt said a lawyer for his publisher, Viking, talked him out of acknowledging Spender in the front of the book. It might not have mollified Spender anyhow; last year, says British author Hugh David, Spender tried to derail David's biography of the poet. "He regards himself as branded goods," David told NEWSWEEK. "And he holds the trademark."
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The novel does tip its hat to Spender: the phrase "even Stephen" gets a conspicuous "ph," and the "Berlin stories" passage breaches the subject of appropriation while appropriating Spender's contrite version of his break with Christopher Isherwood. ("I had lived vicariously his life in Berlin, and later in London I had taken up a proprietary attitude towards it," Spender wrote.) But without an upfront acknowledgment, such echoes--there are more--must have struck Spender as pilferage (or at least damnable cheek) rather than homage.
Spender's suit not only alleges that Leavitt plagiarized from "World Within World"--tough to prove, despite the echoes--but that he violated Spender's "moral right" not to have his work adapted in a way that prejudices or debases the original. This "right" derives from a 1989 British law with stunningly mischievous implications: applied with a heavy hand, it could outlaw the whole genre of parody. Viking-U.K. has delayed publication of "While England Sleeps" until the legal issues get resolved.
But the real issue may be the attitudinal divide between a forthrightly "out" 32-year-old American and an 84-year-old Briton who wrote gingerly in his autobiography of "adjusting my acceptance of my own nature to the generally held concept of the normal"--that is, getting married despite his sexual ambivalence. There's nothing gingerly about Leavitt's sex scenes--Spender calls them "pornographic"--and his hero, unlike Spender, doesn't marry. No court can decide whether Spender is an old prude or Leavitt a young pipsqueak. Only one thing's for sure: somebody's going to sell some books, even if not in the United Kingdom--and in the United States Spender's is out of print.
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