Sifting Through Information

Last Wednesday, November 30, 2005, the New York Press, an alternative free paper, published an article about "The downfall of Brad Vice." The article was written by author Robert Clark Young, who had previously commented on the University of Georgia Press’ decision to pulp Brad Vice’s short story collection, and the accusations of plagiarism that surrounded that decision, in the comments section of a couple of blog posts over at www.storySouth.com.

Mr. Young argues that "One of the many problems with plagiarists is that their behavior, like that of other people who steal, often tends to be compulsive," in his article. He believes he has found the smoking gun that is case number two for author Brad Vice, and that a duplication proves that Vice is a plagiarist and not one who could possibly have made a mistake with his story "Tuscaloosa Knights." The question for readers of this article? How credible are both Mr. Young, and the case he brings forward?

First off, the case he brings forward. This second example that Mr. Young has discovered really doesn’t hold much water. He points out how some lines about screwworms in Vice’s short story "Report from Junction," are similar to lines from Jim Dent’s "The Junction Boys."

The examples he lists are as follows:

1.

Dent: They often were victims of screwworms, a parasitic blowfly that would lay eggs in the sores of the living animals.

Vice: Screwworms are the larvae of blue-bellied blowflies, which lay their eggs in the wounded flesh of living animals.

2.

Dent: The screwworms attached themselves to the animal’s vital organs and sucked out the life.

Vice: [T]hey will screw themselves into the vital organs and suck the life right out.

The full sentence is actually: Some of the worms have probably already burrowed deep into the calf’s body, and soon they will screw themselves into its vital organs and suck the life right out of it.

3.

Dent: They sometimes would screw themselves into the brain and then exit through the eyeballs.

Vice: [T]he maggots will most likely screw themselves into its brain … before they exit back through its eyes.

The full sentence is actually: In fact, with worms already on the calf’s head, the maggots will most likely screw themselves into its brain and drive it completely mad before they exit back through its eyes.

4.

Dent: He kicked the gelding and rode up on a ghastly sight.

Vice: Kurt kicked the gelding and charged up to a gruesome sight.

The first three examples are descriptions of scientific facts about screwworms. There can only be so many different ways to describe how screwworms bore into a creature, do harm to the creature, and exit. As to the fourth example, Vice was writing a story about Bear Bryant having taking over the Texas A&M football team and about a high school senior named Dennis Goehring (in Brad’s dissertation, the character was named Dennis Schaffer. It was changed to Kurt Schaffer by the time the story was published) – the incident Vice writes of stems from Goehring’s life, a fact that makes it likely that there would be similarities with his and Dent’s work about some of the specifics.

In an email, C. Michael Curtis, Senior Editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and editor of "Report from Junction" as it appeared in The Atlantic Monthly V. 290 n. 1 (July-August 2002), let me know that he was aware of the Dent book "… and decided to postpone its publication until we had worked with Vice to prevent easily-avoided overlap in some particular details. The story of Bear Bryant’s first A&M football team seemed to us well-known and not the property of Mr. Dent or anyone else. Further, the heart of the story we believed, then and now, to be the invention of Brad Vice, even though elements of its drama is placed in the familiar setting, as above."

Going back to Mr. Young’s original idea that plagiarists repeat their efforts – if you remove this second case, I believe you can go back to at least considering the fact that Vice actually may have made a horrible mistake with his intentions in regards to "Tuscaloosa Knights." It doesn’t mean you believe Vice should be off the hook, just that Mr. Young may not have nailed the coffin as tightly as he believes.

There seem to be other reasons to re-consider Mr. Young’s article in general. Jason Sanford at www.storySouth.com has detailed his own reasons for believing the article to be one of poor journalism, specifically noting that Mr. Young makes a large issue of pointing out how plagiarism is typically an offense found in the first draft, and gives a link to Vice’s dissertation – the first draft versions available to the reading public. However, when Mr. Young gives his examples of Vice’s "plagiarisms" as shown above, the examples come from the final University of Georgia manuscript version, not the dissertation.

Sanford also notes that while actively searching for examples that prove Vice a plagiarist, Mr. Young ignores something that might help one believe that Vice never intended on hiding the fact that he was well aware of his usage of Carl Carmer’s work – his dissertation (that again, Mr. Young refers to, and so, is aware of) has an epigraph from Carmer just before the "Tuscaloosa Knights" story.

Lastly, nowhere in Mr. Young’s article does he mention that he has attended the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. This is possibly the most egregious of Mr. Young’s efforts as he spends just under half of his article blasting both the Conference itself, and many of those who are involved with it, either as instructors or visitors – just so long as they have anything to do with Brad Vice.

It is Mr. Young’s contention that the reason Brad Vice has made it to the level he has (however you’d like to consider that) is through his involvement with Sewanee. He notes that during the 12 day long conference, many of the South’s leading writers will gather and decide many things. In fact there is a list Mr. Young has come up with:

which attendees should be considered for future scholarships to the conference

which writers should receive letters of recommendation to graduate programs

which new novelists should receive blurbs

which attendees should be nominated to New Stories from the South

what attendees have manuscripts that should be considered for the Flannary O’Connor Award in Short Fiction.

I cannot state for a fact that this list was built with the accomplishments of Brad Vice in mind, but he did receive scholarships to Sewanee; he did go to a graduate program that had at least two professorial connections to Sewanee; his book was blurbed by Barry Hannah, a pretty big wig over at Sewanee, among others; he’s seen two stories in the New Stories from the South; and he was awarded the Flannery O’Connor Award in Short Fiction (which was subsequently withdrawn by the University of Georgia Press).

However, that first story that appeared in New Stories from the South, "Mojo Farmer" did so in 1997 – the year before Brad even showed up at Sewanee according to Mr. Young’s article. Of course, this fact is only important if you believe that this cabal of writers actually has some input on New Stories from the South. My understanding, from having read many of her introductions, was that Shannon Ravenel read copious amounts of literary journals and sent along a selection of stories as finalists to whomever the Guest Editor was each particular year. And I have always read that the University of Georgia Press had a standard method of submitting your manuscript of short stories to the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction contest.

This section of Mr. Young’s article makes it quite clear – if not for Brad Vice’s activities at Sewanee, and the, as Mr. Young puts it, "coloring one another’s Easter eggs and then filling one another’s baskets," he never would have made it this far in his literary career.

Mr. Young also points out that Brad Vice, in the acknowledgements of his dissertation gives thanks to "the entire faculty and staff of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference past and present," and notes that he singles out Hannah, Erin McGraw, Josip Novakovich, Tim Parrish, Allen Wier, Pinckney Benedict, Claire Messud and others.

A look at that section of the dissertation notes that Vice acknowledges many, many people. Specifically looking at writers, teachers and other literary folks – Vice breaks them into two categories:

Friends and Teachers:

Tim Parrish, Ted Solotaroff, Allen Wier, Kent Nelson, Josip Novakovich, Erin McGraw, Andrew Hudgins, Tom LeClair, Jim Schiff, John Drury, Don Bogen, Will Allison, Dick, Lois, and Gilda Rosenthal; and

"the Entire faculty and staff of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference past and present (especially Wyatt Prunty, Pinckney Benedict, Barry Hannah, Claire Messud, Cheri Peters, Phil Stephens, Greg Williamson, Danny Anderson, Leah Stewart, Leigh Ann Couch, Liz Van Hoose and Ron Briggs.)"

This may be semantics, but the way that Mr. Young states it, I would assume that the names Erin McGraw, Josip Novakovich, Tim Parrish, and Allen Wier would all certainly appear in that second grouping due to their affiliations with the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

The important thing for Mr. Young however, was not where in his acknowledgements that Brad Vice thanked these folks, but the fact that his name can be linked to theirs somewhere in the literary world beyond Sewanee – the whole Easter egg thing.

Going through the list:

Erin McGraw was a faculty advisor for Vice, and she has blurbed his work. Reading Mr. Young’s article, I’m still not sure how her own eggs have been colored.

Josip Novakovich was a fiction fellow at Sewanee, and the head of the advisory committee for Vice’s dissertation. Brad praised Novakovich highly in a review he wrote for an e-zine, Wordgun. I suppose approving of Vice’s dissertation is where the coloring occurred for Brad here.

Tim Parrish was a student of Allen Wier’s at the same time as Vice and is a friend of his. Vice reviewed one of Parrish’s works, comparing him to Carver and Dubus. Vice also uses Allen Wier as the name of a journalist in the short story, "Report from Junction."

Pinckney Benedict has been a Sewanee writer and Vice wrote the Benedict entry in The Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vice also wrote a piece on author Claire Messud, another Sewanee writer, in a Writer’s Digest back in September 2000. I’m not quite sure what any of these last four authors has done for Brad – sure he thanks them in his acknowledgements, but without some specific point (say for example, in the UGA Press version of the book where Vice thanks Shannon Ravenel – I assume it is for including the story in two New Stories from the South anthologies), when I see a list of authors in an acknowledgements section, I generally assume they were friends who supported, and maybe even critiqued the author in question. Weak pastel coloring at best.

The big name on the list that Mr. Young makes the biggest point of the tit for tat nature of literary writers scratching the backs of each other? Barry Hannah. Mr. Young points out that while "most reviewers" were negative towards Hannah’s 2001 novel, Yonder Stands Your Orphan, Vice raved about it in the San Francisco Chronicle (7/8/2001).

A quick google search of "Barry Hannah Yonder Reviews" yields plenty of results. The first seven reviews that I found were all positive. Granted, neither of Mr. Young’s examples (New York Times or The Baltimore Sun) popped up for me in the first few pages of results, but the following did:

The Review of Contemporary Fiction – written by Brian Evenson – June 2002

"But plot and focus are hardly the chief reasons why Hannah should be read."

Powell’s – Review a Day (originally in Esquire) – written by Sven Birkets – 6/27/01

"…Hannah, too, has written an apocalyptic ballad, a work of such gut-churning American gothic surreal-realism (or whatever you want to call it) that it has to be compared not just to Flannary O’Connor, but to Dylan of the great early mid-period, circa ‘Highway 61 Revisited’."

BookReporter.com – written by Joe Hartlaub

"Love of language however, will be enough to keep most going."

Rain Taxi Online – written by Brian Beatty

" … the rewards include authentic literary art and a folk wisdom that is as valuable as it is simple and true."

Portland Phoenix – Year in Review 2001

"…beauty and the absolute control of his prose."

City Beat – Written by Richard Hunt – January 2002

"He’s wicked in his delights, twisting and greasy, bent on vengeance, high on the language."

Boston Phoenix – written by Julia Hanna – July 2001

"…Wonderfully baroque orgy of fornication, degredation, …" (Though, Ms. Hanna did suggest that his earlier story collection, Airships, would be a much better entry to Hannah’s work)

Quite the beating from the critics. What else did Brad do to help entice Hannah into writing a blurb for his story collection? He praised the hell out of him in an interview with Matt Kunz – he of the Mississippi Writers and Musicians website (a Starksville, MS high school web project).

To be as up front as possible, some of the names within this post might ring familiar to those who know me. Erin McGraw – I’ve reviewed her works very positively, and have consistently listed either her, or her book, The Baby Tree, as one that should absolutely be read by more people than currently have. Pinckney Benedict – while I’ve not reviewed any of this trio of books (all published prior to my online activities), he has participated in a live E-Panel and I’ve consistently mentioned his individual stories when appearing in literary journals. Both are members of the Emerging Writers Network. As for Brad Vice – my dealings with Brad consist of emailing him and asking if he’d do an interview back when I received a galley from University of Georgia Press, and his saying yes. Before I got around to that interview, the pulping had occurred.

If anything, I’ve bitten a bit of the hand that feeds me by posting a question as to whether or not UGA Press reacted a bit hastily, even questioning whether or not a recent online issue had them a bit gun-shy.

Each reader, as they pick up details, must make their own determination about Brad Vice’s abilities and intentions. Personally, I think he made a huge error in not fighting for the epigraph to appear in his collection, and for not having an acknowledgements page that mentioned both Carmer, Dent, and any other Bear Bryant source books he may have read while writing his stories. I’m still not sure the University of Georgia Press needed to pulp this book so quickly, but I understand that the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction is a huge deal to them, and is not something they want tainted in any shape or form. What Mr. Young has given each reader is another bit of information to possibly help them form their own opinions.

Again, it is up to each reader to make a determination as to the credibility of Mr. Young’s article. Based on the above details, I’m going to take this piece the New York Press felt fine to run with a grain of salt about as big as my head.

Comments

[Richard]

I agree with everything you say, Dan, and admire the amount of time you spent on this -- though I must say, it seems to me that it's like using a nuclear weapon to kill someone who himself has used a semiautomatic rifle to kill a butterfly.

[Kassia]

I've been following this story with the interest of someone who feels that urge to say something but also feels like so much of puzzle is missing. In this case, each time, I've given the issue a pass. Sure, plagiarists tend toward recidivism, but what does that mean really.

Your analysis raises a serious question -- when a sentence is redacted, it's easier to draw a straight line between works. The cited passages have a different feel in their entirety.

[steven gillis]

thanks for presenting this piece, dan. I had not been aware of this particular incident though such has come to light all to frequently of late among authors. (Why is it Susan Sontag not only got to slide on her obvious plagerism on her last novel, but her work was awarded many prizes?) If Brad Vice did as claimed, then shame on him and he should be dealt with severely. If such is simply a witch hunt - for whatever reason - then these false claims must also be addressed in order to restore Mr. Vice's rep. There is no worse sin for a writer to commit than plagerism. I feel all but obligated now to take a look at what has been written on this matter and see whatever truth there is to draw. Thanks again Dan, for presenting this material. Steve

[Leah Stewart]

I should say for the record that I'm a friend of Brad's, and was a Sewanee staffer for 10 summers, and that Brad and I share an agent, whom we both met at Sewanee. So I'm one of the Sewanee insiders Young so despises.

I was at Sewanee in 2001, when Young attended as a fellow, and I was in his workshop, co-taught by Barry Hannah and Margot Livesey. I don't even begin to recognize the version of Sewanee Young paints, and I can't help but feel that that description, and his vendetta against Brad Vice, are colored by the fact that his work was poorly received at the conference, both in the workshop and at the reading he gave. Clearly he chose to see this reception as part of a conspiracy, a conspiracy led by Barry Hannah, a conspiracy of which Brad is an integral part. Thus the description of Barry as an ailing Godfather and Brad as his consigliere. I have no idea what he means by the latter (as far as I know, Brad is not Barry's "adviser"). As for the former assertion, Barry is incredibly generous to young writers, and it's infuriating to see Young pervert that generosity into a power trip. He seems to be accusing Barry of responding to sycophancy with various rewards. In actual fact, Barry pulls no punches in his criticism, as I can attest; if you're on the receiving end of it, perhaps it's easier to imagine that it's because you're not his "consigliere," not because he found fault with your work.

There are a number of factual errors in Young's piece, which might be minor but which, in accretion, point to Young's sloppy reporting. Richard Bausch and Brad Vice were never at the conference at the same time, for example. The conference takes place in July, not in August. The cemetery in Sewanee is not a Confederate war cemetery. Many of the regular faculty members are not from the South (Margot Livesey, Claire Messud, Francine Prose, Diane Johnson, Alice McDermott, Mark Strand, and John Hollander among others). As Dan points out, faculty at Sewanee do not nominate for New Stories from the South, which has no nomination process that I know of, but for Best New American Voices. Not only do faculty members not meet to determine who will get scholarships to the conference the next year, they don't even make those decisions. Certainly they may be asked later for letters of recommendation. They choose whether or not to write such letters on a purely individual basis, just as they make decisions about blurbs, nominations, and so forth. Who else would you go to for a letter or a blurb, besides someone who's read your work?

I also want to mention that a few days ago I received an email from "Rodney King" with the subject heading "check out what your buddy Brad's been up to" and nothing but a link to the NY Press story. I have no idea whether this was generated by Young or someone who takes his part, but either way it suggests that this piece is less objective journalism than part of a smear campaign, motivated less by righteous indignation over accusations of plagiarism than by a feeling that Brad has unfairly gotten things that others have not, and now there's an opening to take him down (and the vast Sewanee conspiracy with him).

[David Milofsky]

This seems to be devolving into questions of Young's character/paranoia rather than simply looking at the record. Did Vice plagiarize or not? Whether or not Young is a fine fellow should have no bearing on that and neither should Vice's apparently fine connections. So, Dan, you're on top of this, what are the facts of the matter?

[Dan Wickett]

I think I stated what I believe. I think Vice at the very least screwed up big on the story Tuscaloosa Knights. I am not a man of letters, my degree is in Statistics, and do not know exactly what constitutes Fair Usage and all of that which when I read of it at sites like storySouth, I got more and more confused.

But, again, I think Vice screwed up quite a bit with that story in the way he allowed it to be published. That's the best case scenario.

In the case of Report to Junction - I'm going to agree with the editor of the story and state I don't find the similarities in the four examples given to be plagiarism.

I understand why UGA Press pulped the collection.

If Vice can properly explain to the MSU committee the surroundings to Tuscaloosa Knights, I think he should keep his job.

[David Milofsky]

What about Young's allegation that Vice also plagiarized his Phd thesis at Cincinnati? Anything new on that?

[Dan Wickett]

In regards to Tuscaloosa Knights - there is an epigraph from Carmer's work just before the story's title page. Again, I'm not versed enough in the legal jargon for plagiarism. It still seems to me that more of an acknowledgement should have been made.

The lines from Report from Junction were probably even less similar in the dissertation than they are in the final version.

[David Milofsky]

I'm conversant with the rules for plagiarism, having served on such committees for years. No doubt in my mind Vice is guilty of it, whether he included an epigram or not. This whole business of homage might work in cinematic circles, but academic rules regarding this kind of thing are pretty straightforward. Assuming that he actually borrowed significant amounts of the story from Carmer. The fact that Georgia cancelled pub tells you a lot. I'm pretty sure they understand what "fair use" means in the copyright law. This says little about Vice's intentions, however, or whether or not his university will give him a second chance. The argument that everyone would of course have recogized the story strikes me as being impossibly lame. I never heard of either Carmer or Vice until this blew up. But I'd hate to see a promising young writer and professor ruined over something like this, so I'm inclined to put a benign interpretation on the whole thing and say it was just an error in judgement. In that case, he should throw himself on the mercy of the court instead of making excuses. At least that's my view from long distance and reading your posts.

[Rachel Solomon]

As a longtime freelance writer, I have to side with Robert Clark Young on this. It is utterly inconceivable to me how somebody like Brad Vice could have conveniently "forgot" to cite Carl Carmer; even if the quotations Mr. Vice used were used as "homage," to obviate any scrutiny of his motives, he should have had the sense to cite the source.

He didn't. His book has been, in my opinion, fairly scrapped. UGA Press certainly doesn't have the funds to withstand a lawsuit.

As far as I know, plagiarism in the academy is the highest offense, short of sleeping with your own students. It is, therefore, within the bounds of academic jurisprudence that Mr. Vice's dissertation be examined, and to determine if and to what extent it contains plagiarized material.

There is something inherently tragic in all this: Mr. Vice was indeed given a lot of breaks, and at 31, already had a teaching career and a prize-winning collection of short stories that was probably going to attract a lot of attention.

Still, though I hate to see people glorying in another person's downfall, the fault clearly lies with Mr. Vice, and not with people like Mr. Young, who, though prone to some heavy rhetoric at times, nevertheless, presents the facts.

[David Milofsky]

Rachel has it exactly right except for the fact that in the academy plagiarism is probably considered more serious than sleeping with one's students, heinous as that would be. Plagiarism strikes at the heart of scholarly research and people routinely lose their jobs if it's proved. The bottom line is that Vice should have known this and acknowledged his sources. Young may be in this for personal reasons but if his information is accurate he's right and Vice is wrong. Remember no one liked Whitaker Chambers either.

[Dan Wickett]

Again David, I nod in your direction as to what is plagiarism and what is not - I don't know if you've only read the specific sentences from Report From Junction in my post, or elsewhere - what would you say about this second example?

I believe I know where you stand on the first issue - Tuscaloosa Knights. As I've stated before, I do not disagree with your opinion.

As to the dissertation, one of the advisors listed on the dissertation cover has copied the letter she has sent to MSU and the committee reviewing Vice over at storySouth (in Jason Sanford's Literary Lynching of Brad Vice post).

In this letter, she pretty cleary mentions having spoken to Brad at length back at the time that he was writing the stories about how he planned on embedding sections of Carmer's texts into the story.

I still believe I agree more with you in this instance, and that Vice should not have published the story as it stands without any acknowledgements, but can he possibly lose his PhD when an advisor puts in writing that it was known at the time what he was doing with that particular story?

As to Rachel's last line ( ... nevertheless, presents the facts.) and your second to last line (...if his information is accurate he's right and Vice is wrong.), well, I think my post and Leah Stewart's follow up allow you what I think of Mr. Young and the word facts.

[Dan Wickett]

And Don Imus loved Whittaker Chambers! You do mean the biography don't you?

[David Milofsky]

Actually, I was referring to the Chambers/Hiss case in which people sided with Hiss originally because he was aristocratic and had an Ivy League education. All assumed Chambers was lying because he was fat, had bad teeth and was gay. Turned out, however, that whether he was attractive or not he was telling the truth about the so-called Pumpkin papers or so says Allen Weinstein in his book. Pretty interesting about vice's dissertation advisor. If you're right, I agree that they can't really take away what they knowingly approved in the first place.

[P.M. Cormano]

I don't really understand the comparison of Young to Chambers . . . Chambers' grotesque appearance may have impacted the public's perpection of his honesty, but it surely had nothing to do with his ability or inclination to tell the truth . . . whereas Young's personal motives are clearly capable of influencing every aspect of his argument . . . and are thus a very relevant part of this discussion, especially given that his NY Press piece is, at the moment, the article of record on the subject.

I'm also bothered by the reduction of the plagiarism question to yes/no, as if there were no variance in degree . . . unless the plagiarist shows an intent to deceive, plagiarism is a crime of oversight (or carelessness), not theft. This distinction might be immaterial to an academic institution or court of law, but it is certainly pertinent to the public perception of the accused plagiarist . . . and the vicious ad hominem attacks on Vice, made by Young and others, portray him as an outright thief, a plagiarist in the first degree . . . despite evidence that shows that he made no effort to conceal the relationship of his work to Carmer's, and had, in fact, allowed his work to be published side by side with Carmer's earlier this year. Young, by the way, was doubtlessly aware of this last bit of information --- he was posting fervently on the Story South blog on which it appeared --- and chose not to include it in his article.