Before Pastrygate: Creative rivalries fuelled by plagiarism are nothing new

Until last week I didn’t know Nagi Maehashi could get mad. I’ve been a fan of Nagi’s vibrant and affable cookery for years. Yes, I’m obliged to declare that she writes recipes for this masthead. But I found her stuff delicious long before she started doing that.

To judge from the photos in her cookbooks, Dinner and Tonight, Nagi is never unhappy. She’s always smiling at a minimum, if not beaming. She has a dog called Dozer who always seems to be smiling too.

Last week, however, Nagi’s world was sullied by an unprecedented whiff of beef. On her website, RecipeTin Eats, Nagi levelled a serious allegation against another celebrity chef, Brooke Bellamy, author of the cookbook Bake with Brooki. According to Nagi, two recipes in that book – one for caramel slice and one for baklava – were stolen from RecipeTin Eats.

Feuds over allegations of plagiarism have a long history in creative industries.

“Profiting from plagiarised recipes is unethical,” Nagi wrote, “and it’s a slap in the face to every author who puts in the hard work to create original content.”

For her part, Bellamy denies plagiarising either recipe. But to “prevent further aggravation,” she has promised to remove them both from future editions of her book.

More allegations of plagiarism have followed, including a claim that Brooki purloined her recipe for Portuguese tarts from the late Bill Granger. This masthead does not suggest that any of the allegations are true, only that they have been made.

Anyway, you sense this affair isn’t yet done. For the moment I suggest we call it “Pastrygate”, reserving the option to go with “Sticky Dategate” if Brooki is ever accused of plagiarising a pudding.

The word plagiarist comes from the Latin plagiarius, meaning kidnapper. When we call someone a plagiarist, we’re not just accusing them of theft. We’re saying they’ve made off with someone else’s cherished offspring.

All artists, good and bad, are influenced by the work of their forerunners. Good artists absorb the work of their mentors, then try to outdo them.

Shakespeare himself was accused of plagiarism, when his career was just taking off. In a scurrilous pamphlet published in 1592, the poet Robert Greene called the young Bard an “upstart crow, beautified with our feathers.”

If Greene meant that Shakespeare made a habit of swiping phrases from other poets, he was wrong. The greatest phrasemaker in the history of English hardly needed to pilfer his language from the likes of Greene.

Shakespeare did, however, routinely lift the plots of his plays from earlier sources. But that was standard practice in the Elizabethan theatre. In those days there were no intellectual property laws. Needing to mount new productions at a breakneck pace, playwrights were constantly recycling old plots.

Hamlet was a retread of an earlier play, which had been staged more than ten years before the appearance of Shakespeare’s masterpiece. The older play was a revenge potboiler which scholars call the Ur-Hamlet. The text of this work is lost to history, and nobody knows for sure who wrote it. Some say its author was Thomas Kyd. Others think it was written by the young Shakespeare himself.

Nagi Maehashi aka RecipeTin Eats (left) and Brooke Bellamy of Brooki Bakehouse.Credit: Rob Palmer; supplied

“The boundary between influence and plagiarism will always be vague,” Martin Amis wrote in 1980, after an American novelist named Jacob Epstein was caught with his fingers in the till. Epstein’s debut novel, Wild Oats, was riddled with phrases that had been flagrantly looted from Amis’s 1973 book The Rachel Papers.

“Epstein wasn’t influenced by The Rachel Papers,” Amis wrote. “He had it flattened out beside his typewriter.”

In the 1960s, the comedian Peter Cook was similarly incensed when his Cambridge contemporary David Frost became rich and famous – way more rich and famous than Cook – by filching Cook’s material. At Cambridge the pair had been friends. Cook had once saved Frost’s life in a swimming pool.

But when Frost started using Cook’s stuff without permission, Cook called him “the bubonic plagiarist”, and said his biggest regret in life was that he’d saved Frost from drowning.

In the 1990s, the great American comedian Bill Hicks delivered a comeback for the ages, after the less great but more famous Denis Leary was accused of copying Hicks’s signature routines.

“I have a scoop for you,” Hicks said, when a reporter asked him about the suspicious similarities between his stuff and Leary’s. “I stole his act. I camouflaged it with punchlines, and to really throw people off, I did it before he did.”

All artists, good and bad, are influenced by the work of their forerunners. Good artists absorb the work of their mentors, then try to outdo them. The critic Harold Bloom coined a phrase for this process. He called it “the anxiety of influence.” True artists don’t want their stuff to be exactly the same as the stuff that influenced them. They want it to be better.

For songwriters, a different kind of anxiety prevails. When the muse drops a ready-made tune on them out of nowhere, how can they be sure they haven’t unconsciously swiped it from someone else?

Paul McCartney came up with the melody of Yesterday in a dream. The tune was so perfect that McCartney feared he must have heard it somewhere before. For weeks he went around playing it to everyone he knew, asking them if they recognised it.

George Harrison should have taken similar precautions before recording his song My Sweet Lord. Only after it became a monster hit did people notice that Harrison’s tune was a palpable ripoff of the Chiffons’ 1963 song He’s So Fine.

The publishers of He’s So Fine sued, and Harrison had to fork over a large chunk of his royalties. The judge ruled that Harrison had plagiarised the song unconsciously, not deliberately. But a subconscious ripoff is still a ripoff. Harrison stopped writing songs for a while afterwards, fearing that his unconscious would play the same trick on him again.

As for conscious plagiarists, you wonder how they sleep at night. If the immorality of their actions doesn’t bother them, aren’t they at least terrified of being caught? Or do they, at some level, want to get busted?

“The psychology of plagiarism is fascinatingly perverse,” Martin Amis observed, at the time of the Wild Oats scandal. “It risks, or invites, a deep shame and there must be something of the death wish in it.”

In London in the 1890s, the painter James Whistler managed to convince himself that every other wit in town, including Oscar Wilde, was stealing his bon mots. “I wish I had said that,” Wilde said to Whistler once, after Whistler got off a pretty good zinger at a party. To which Whistler replied, “You will, Oscar, you will.”

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