Alexander Theroux Answers Charge of Plagiarism in Primary Colors - San Diego Reader

Alexander Theroux answers charge of plagiarism in Primary Colors | San Diego Reader 31.07.
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Alexander
Theroux
answers
charge of
plagiarism
in
Primary I received the alarming telephone call early one morning in Coronado,
where I was living at the time and writing some articles for the San
Colors
Diego Reader, that the New York Times was ready to release the story
the very next day.
Hateful, hurtful
and hellish was accused of plagiarism in an article in the New York
Author Publish
I Times on March 3, 1995. It was an ignominious moment
in my life, to be sure, although the accusation, which
Alexander Date
Theroux June 1, was literally true but morally not — since intention was not
1995 involved — had a dirty provenance, to my mind, not only
because it was a nonstory (it was given a “kicker” on the
front page of that august paper!) but because I have had
ongoing problems for several years with that newspaper,
https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/1995/jun/01/hateful-hurtful-and-hellish/ Страница 1 из 21
Alexander Theroux answers charge of plagiarism in Primary Colors | San Diego Reader 31.07.20, 12:24
Feature Stories more specifically a particular person there, a former editor

of the Times Book Review by the name of Rebecca Sinkler,
more about whom anon. My accuser, a woman from
Connecticut named Cynthia Kiss, is, with her husband, a
so-called Friend of Yale, a college where I taught literature
from 1987 to 1990 and which institution for various real
and worthwhile reasons I lampooned in several poems in
my book. The Lollipop Trollops, in 1993.
Mar. 3 story in the N.Y. Times, where a reader claimed “a chill went
down [her] spine.”
As Mrs. Kiss read my book, The Primary Colors, and found

as she turned the pages several sentences, unattributed
quotations, from another book she had also been reading
at the time, Guy Murchie’s Song of the Sky (1954), a book
on flight and aviation, she claimed “a chill went down [her]
spine.” (It makes me wonder what expression she would
use when seeing, say, starving children in Somalia or
Dacca.) She had discovered in my work of nonfiction of
about 80,000 words and upwards of a thousand or more
disparate quotations — from film, literature, science,
religion, cooking, painting, botany, song, etc., all
scrupulously attributed — fewer than 150 words that were
taken only from Murchie but unacknowledged. In other
words, she had found in a book that cited thousands of
authors a comparative handful of words without

attribution taken from one author only. What was judged a
crime, a distinction that means something to me if to no
one else, was in fact an inadvertence, born of haste, loose
note-taking, and the passage of time.
The 150 words (out of 80,000) from Song of the Sky.
I received the alarming telephone call early one morning in

Coronado, where I was living at the time and writing some
articles for the San Diego Reader, that the New York Times
was ready to release the story the very next day and that
if I wanted “to add anything” — I had not seen the story or
heard the charges or viewed the offending passages or
could even frankly surmise the fault — I must immediately
call the newspaper. I did so and spoke with the 31-year-
old woman doing the story, listened to what she had to
say, and tried to put things into perspective. She was
unsympathetic, typing as I spoke and clearly hoping to get
a few facts straight, such as my age. It was too late to stop
anything from being printed or of dissuading her of her
article. She had virtually finished the story, had already
called Murchie, reported the offense, and asked him if he
was going to sue me (he said he was, or his brother was, or

his wife was, something like that). I found out, in any case,
that the story was about to break and that nothing I had to
say could change that and that Murchie’s lawyer had
already demanded that every single copy of The Primary
Colors be recalled. May I suggest without fear of
contradiction that the 88-year-old Murchie had never
heard of, never mind read, The Primary Colors? The
reporter at the New York Times, nevertheless, having
recorded his outrage — after having set it up — had seen
to it that (a) he be apprised of the fault, (b) he could sue
me for it, and (c) he be quoted on public record as
intending to sue me for it.
Only a fool could not see the devastating result of such

charges to a writer, not only the loss of one’s reputation,
which is the worst — even to such a dog as sententious
Iago, who wore his ill-repute like a badge — but an almost
door-slamming end to trust, credibility, reliance, never
mind any negotiations born of those, and who can even
deny hope? I went to Tijuana that morning and spent the
day there, preoccupied and muttering and with my hands
in my pockets walking the narrow streets (I was almost
struck and killed by a car, twice) like a poor lost Geoffrey
Firmin, Malcolm Lowry’s dipsomaniacal consul. I had
explanations. But who would listen? And why? I mentally
pieced out the occasion and circumstances by my
mistake and badly wanted at least to try to give the
context of my crime — to someone, to anyone. Without
context Sergeant York was a killer and Hiroshima the heart
of hell. No, I had an explanation.
But first a word about my writing life. I have rarely written a

word of the eight books, five hundred articles, two or three
hundred poems, and countless book reviews I’ve

published over the years that has not come from
snatched time. I have earned my living as a college
professor. I took my Ph.D. in English at the University of
Virginia in 1968 and over the next 20 years taught at
Harvard, Phillips Andover, MIT, and Yale, as well as having
lectured at various Massachusetts prisons. I have never
had the luxury of being a best-selling or even close to
best-selling author, though I believe I can make the
modest claim of having loyal readers and of being a
critical success with my quirky, elaborate prose style. I
have to seek out and solicit my own assignments. I have
never found an agent willing to send out my articles,
stories, essays, or poems to magazines. Most agents
refuse to do this anymore, as they claim it’s not a
moneymaking proposition. So over the last two decades I
have been teaching full-time, writing fiction, nonfiction,
poetry, book reviews, and at the same time have had
personally to scare up any and all writing assignments
myself. I have never once in my entire life had an agent
place an article for me, secure for me a magazine
assignment, or land me a book review. In my desk,
manuscripts pile up. Publishers want novels, not
collections of poems, not essays, not books of fables. They
want identifiable genres. They want money.
What I write depends a good deal, of course, on when I

write and why. I often have to drop what I am doing of a
strong creative vein to do a piece of a commercial stripe,
as of course most writers do, but is it irrelevant that I also
have to clean my house, mow four acres of grass, fix my
own car, do my own typing, cook, and constantly seek to
delimit my expenses and vacations in order to save
money to work, lest otherwise I have to return to teaching
and find myself too tired to write?
Given a fate that, for weal or woe, has more or less

determined the way (and speed with which) I write — I left
teaching in 1991 — I have been almost always working on
two or three book-length manuscripts at the same time,
mixed genres usually, no end of articles — I also try to work
on a poem every day — and to that end keep notebooks.
My collected essays, more than a hundred of them, a
manuscript awaiting publication, I add to almost daily, and
in consequence my desk at home is filled with notebooks,
sheets of thoughts, ideas, and scribbles, and multiple
notes earmarked for but often still awaiting being penciled
into various manuscripts. A book on Amelia Earhart, for
instance, I have been writing, compiling, and researching
for the last several years, and it was to this thick notebook,
filled with text, notes, drawings, and observations on that
pilot that I committed, sometime around 1989, several very
brief passages from Murchie.
Around the same time, I was writing for the magazine Art &
Antiques an article on the color blue, the popularity of
which with many readers when published led me to
believe that others on color should follow. My book, The
Primary Colors, in fact grew out of this project. In the
intervening years, while I simultaneously worked on several
other manuscripts, poring over notes and books for this
and that, I’m sure I noticed sometime about 1992 certain
remarks on color, Murchie’s, recorded in my Earhart notes,
took them for my own, and cobbled them into The Primary
Colors, to which in the period before final galleys, and
much to the great grief of my editor at Henry Holt, I made
repeated additions and emendations, and this to a book
whose uniqueness, frankly, is its pastiche and
encyclopedic style.
It crossed my mind more than once not only in writing but

conceiving The Primary Colors to add an index and
append the many notes I had of the multiple works I had
read, but I dismissed the notion first of all because in a
work of literary nonfiction it seemed inartistic — “A perfect
work,” as Mérimée told Delacroix, “should not require
notes” — but also because it seemed more honest to cite
all sources in the body of the book, incorporating them in
the running text, giving credit specifically where credit
was due.
There is nothing to defend — nor boast of — in

inexactitude, and most certainly in a matter regarding an
Ivy League professor, who, nevertheless, and if my
observations and experience matter, probably falls victim
to such foibles more than anyone else. The plagiarist is a
thief, no question. What should be weighed is the
intention, the circumstances, and the degree, and these
are invariably related. I got into a mess of this kind before
in the late ’80s when, three years after I wrote and
submitted but never sold (so never formally finished or
fully looked at) an article on Edward Hopper to an art
magazine, the editor, without consulting or notifying me, or
bothering to send me galleys, proceeded to publish the
raw piece from which he — in the process of editing,
emending, and shortening — had silently in the text
removed the name of a critic, Gail Levin, whose work I had
cited. The editor had pulled her name from the body of
the material, relegating it with mention of her book to a
sidebar, while at the same time injudiciously leaving in the
more than several quotations I had used of hers. Nowhere
in the text was she given credit. Despite a published
apology to Ms. Levin in the magazine, run at my request,
and the concomitant offer to her of my stipend ($2500),
Levin immediately sued both the magazine and me. My
apology meant nothing to Levin, the magazine kept the fee
I had tendered to her, and, although she rejected that sum
in hopes of making a larger killing, she ultimately had to
settle for only $2500, whereafter to no one’s surprise,
certainly not mine, she bitterly popped up again to
animadvert against me in the Murchie matter. This was the
occasion of a second article on me in March 1995 in the
Times, three days after the first one, leading me to assert,
not that I haven’t long ago given up hope for anything like
fairness from that paper, that I have a legitimate reason for
doing so.
It is a thorny matter, attribution. The marches of one

border often touch another. What in relation to it is there
of shape, style, depth? What is summation, what debt?
And what of degree? Puccini’s Tosca inspired Andrew
Lloyd Webber’s melody, “Where in the World Have You
Been Hiding," from The Phantom of the Opera. E.Y. Harburg
took his melody “Over the Rainbow” from Mascagni’s
Cavalleria Rusticana. Paul Simon’s music for his “An
American Song” was taken from a Catholic hymn. George
Harrison borrowed “My Sweet Lord” from the Chiffons’
upbeat “He’s So Fine.” Bing Crosby’s theme song, “When
the Blue of the Night (Meets the Gold of the Day),”
recorded on November 23, 1931, bears a distinct
resemblance to the melody of “Tit-Willow” from Gilbert
and Sullivan’s The Mikado, a particular song Der Bingle

grew up singing. The songs “The Eyes of Texas” and “I’ve
Been Working on the Railroad” have the same melody. “The
Hucklebuck” was only another version of Charlie Parker’s
signature song, “Now’s the Time." “Night Train” was a
straight steal from Duke Ellington’s “Happy-Go-Lucky
Local.” “Why shouldn’t Porgy and Bess be grand?” Ellington
once asked jazz critic Edward Murrow. “It was taken from
some of the best and some of the worst. Gershwin surely
didn’t discriminate. He borrowed from everyone from Liszt
to Dickie Wells’s kazoo band.” He turned to the piano,
began playing, and said, “Hear this? These are passages
from Rhapsody in Blue. Well, here is where they came from
— the Negro song, ‘Where Has My Easy Rider Gone?' "
What about Andy Warhol’s prints of Marilyn Monroe? The

iconographic subject of the “Assumption” that so
fascinated Renaissance painters? Or Coleridge and his use
of whole pages of Kant in the Biographia Literaria? The
unacknowledged sources in Edward Everett’s Gettysburg
Oration? Or Maeterlinck and Marais with his insect book?
Or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s use of his wife’s Zelda’s letters in
his stories? Or the facile adaption in Kismet of Borodin’s
Polovetzian Dances? Are these examples of influence?
Plagiarism? Emulation? Borrowing? Aren’t they all different
in matters of degree and kind?
When he was a grad student at Boston University, Dr.

Martin Luther King, a man still internationally identified by
his honorific, plagiarized virtually the whole of his doctoral
dissertation, a matter for which, one would have thought,
his degree should have been revoked. Who would deny it
was a corrupt act? Can the same be said of Herman
Melville who appropriated for Billy Budd the original idea
(and very similar language) of the “Handsome Sailor” from

Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast (1835),
which he read as a young man? I have not a doubt that it
was an unconscious act, born of who knows what
affection, admiration, zeal, call it what you will. There is
pilfering and plagiarism, borrowing, blundering, bullshitting,
and no end of using, reusing, and abusing. Madame
Blavatsky was the champion. But there is no end to it
Charles Olson insightfully wrote in his odd book. Call Me
Ishmael, “Melville’s reading is a gauge of him, at all points
of his life. He was a skald and knew how to appropriate the
work of others. He read to write. Highborn stealth. Edward
Dahlberg calls originality the act of a cutpurse Autolycus
who makes his thefts as invisible as possible. Melville’s
books batten on other men’s books.” He read to write. It is
a wise observation. We teach what we learn. We pass on
what we receive. We tend to spout what we suck in to
savor. I know I read more than 300 books in order to write
The Primary Colors and have no doubt that I looked into a
couple of hundred more. It is often difficult to recall where
something was read and often just as difficult later to
remember whether something is or is not your own
thoughts or words. Writing is battle, and there is a point in
the midst of the heated agon, where, like Achilles,
undaunted if a trifle mad, you swing at anything. I am a fool
for the Word.
I awaken on peaks, insist on dreams coming true, and

usually find every voice in me speaking all at once. I am as
various in my dales as the Mississippi, working from songs
in my head, memory, friends’ tips, snatched conversation,
squibs, old notebooks, a lifetime of reading (sometimes
three books a night, as I have insomnia), quotations of
which I often can never find the source, dreams, my
Encyclopedia Britannica, dictionaries, and so forth. I have

quoted to myself enough passages from Dante, Othello,
The Changeling, The Dunciad, Swift and Yeats, skip-rope
rhymes, Lord Byron, Burma-Shave jingles, “Lycidas,” Proust,
Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Great Expectations to have
tried to make them mine, as in a certain weird and
existential sense they are. The surest sign of wonder is
exaggeration. And who would deny the excesses of war —
or love — are perilous?
Only the other day I was citing Guy Davenport’s mention

of “green feathers” as a description of gifts given to Cortes
by Montezuma as recorded in Albrecht Dürer’s diary, 27
August 1520, when he saw them in Brussels displayed by
Charles V, who was then on his way to Aix-la-Chapelle to
be crowned Holy Roman Emperor! I wonder if Mary Tabor,
the tweenie to whom I spoke in the hopes of dissuading
her from writing the damning March piece in the New York
Times on The Primary Colors — and who in her rush to
judgment confessed to having bothered to read exactly
nothing else of mine — has any idea what in the way of
difficulty goes in a writer’s life.
Speaking of Melville, he referred in a letter to his father-in-

law to his novels Redburn and White-Jacket as “two jobs
which I have done for money — being forced to it as other
men are to sawing wood.” I know the “two job” syndrome.
It was my own problem, the ludicrous, if mitigating,
circumstances of taking notes on the run, driving to Yale,
in my case, year after year facing a three-hour commute
each way from my house on Cape Cod to the university,
teaching two courses a week each semester to 70 or so
students, allowing office hours, with no end of reading and
grading assignments, to say nothing of being paid through
a bean blower. I can’t tell you how many times I took notes
by the side of the road or scribbled them on my hand, not
having had the good sense in the course of my teaching
career to forego the lark of writing fiction, nonfiction, and
poetry, a matter on academic faculties — ask a poet or
novelist sometime — that almost always incurs both the
wrath and envy of scholars, a group of fussy and
competitive nancies who invariably choose to find
creative work antithetical to scholarly. “A good writer does
what is necessary to get the right word,” as R.M. Koster,
author of The Dissertation, once observed, and leading my
dual life I tried to cope, as on I wrote. But haste breeds
imps. And glitches are usually the result. Inaccuracy rarely
fails to surface in consequence, the sin for which penance,
as bad as any prig at Yale, contritely has to be made.
To return to the matter of plagiarism. Ordinarily, a graceful

reader who comes across such parallel texts would first
contact the author for an explanation, especially when the
matter is clearly an exception to the book and not the rule.
Mrs. Kiss never wrote to me or called, but, with the
encouragement of another writer. Burton Somebody Or
Other — from Yale — who insisted she list the offending
passages and send them to the New York Times Book
Review, she did so. An irony intrudes. I myself had written
to the very same editor of that supplement, Rebecca
Sinkler, two years before on another matter, looking for
work. I explained that I wanted to review books and
enclosed, along with my résumé, three or four sample
reviews. The reviews might have come from any of the
many newspapers or magazines I have reviewed for, the
Washington Post, National Review, Chicago Tribune,
Philadelphia Inquirer, Review of Contemporary Fiction, the
Boston Globe, Harvard Magazine. Sinkler never bothered to
answer my letter. May I boastfully assert, in the light of the

scorn and obloquy subsequently brought to my literary
crime and the front-page notoriety given to both me and
my book, that I am therefore a relatively well-known
writer? It would be hard to prove in this instance. Sinkler
never responded to me. She sent not a postcard. She sent
— and said — nothing.
And so she ignored me?
Well, yes and no. Rebecca Sinkler, it appears, always

studiously ignored me when she could help me but never
failed to give me attention when it would hurt. Consider
The Primary Colors. It was published on September 1, 1994,
and reviewed that very same week — to raves, let me
bumptiously but truthfully add — by virtually every major
newspaper in the country, in most and many instances on
the front page, as with the Los Angeles Times, a matter of
timing that is often the sine qua non of a book’s life, never
mind being crucial to its success. Despite the countless
pleas (phone calls, letters) by my editor at Henry Holt to
Sinkler that the book be reviewed, she lamely sat on it until
Christmas week, at which time, given a brilliant review, it
was nevertheless tucked inconsequentially into the bushy
pages of that fat issue, four long and useless months after
it could have helped, and the book sank like a stone. It
should be noted on this score that in the New York Times
Book Review, a book is very often reviewed, almost always
helpful, before publication. So Sinkler, batting a thousand,
met both my request to review and my book with glad
insouciance and with Aristarchean silence.
But she wasn’t asleep. At one point during that fall of 1994
an earnest reader sent a letter to the Book Review
indicating that in one essay in The Primary Colors I had

given the wrong identifying wing numbers to the plane on
Amelia Earhart’s 1932 flight as well as referred, mistakenly,
to German flying ace Baron Von Richtofen’s triplane as a
monoplane. This letter, documenting quibbles culled from
a 300-page book in which there are more than forty-
seven facts on any given page and yet legitimately made
(and gratefully received, I want to add) — was not only
immediately run on the “Letters" page of the Book Review
but, to be certain it was not overlooked, boxed center-
page front in a highlighted Rouault-black border, along
with an accompanying derisive cartoon!
And then on April 12, 1995, after mentioning this entire

mess and all my suspicions to a friend of mine, Steven
Moore, an editor at Dalkey Archive Press, I received from
him the following letter, which I quote entirely:
Dalkey Archive Press
Fairchild Hall ISU
Normal, Illinois 61761
“Dear Alex,
Thanks for your letter. As it happens, I was talking to

someone only last week about this ridiculous affair, and he
gave me some further information that you may want to
use if and when you want to publish anything about this
matter. (The information was given to me in confidence, so
I can’t reveal my source, but you can attribute it to ‘a well-
informed publishing industry insider.’)
“You’re right about Rebecca Sinkler having it in for you
(though my informant didn’t know why): there’s usually

very little communication between the Times Book Review
and the Times news department, so when Sinkler received
Kiss’s letter, it was highly unusual for her to pass it along to
them, instead of merely publishing it in the Book Review's
letters section (or just ignoring it — my informant says the
Times Book Review gets letters like that all the time, most
of which are ignored). So she handed it over to the news
department, saying something like, ‘This is important and I
think you should go after it.’ (This was one of her parting
shots; she’s no longer there, as you probably know.) As
bad luck would have it, the Times had just hired a new
person to cover the publishing industry, so when Mary
Tabor got the letter from Sinkler, she saw this as her big
chance to show her new employers what she was made of.
That’s why it was blown out of proportion, because this
cub reporter wanted to make a splash for herself — not
because the story itself was important.
“Regarding Sinkler’s lack of response to your offer to

review for them: I remember that when you first said that
you wanted to write more book reviews, I wrote to [book
reviewer Michael] Dirda at the [Washington] Post and
Sinkler on your behalf. Oddly enough, she acknowledged
my letter, thanking me for the recommendation and saying
she’d consider the matter. I wonder why me and not you.
Perhaps because (I cringe to say it) I’m in the same
business’ as she is, and you’re not, hence it was
professional courtesy. (Though that professional courtesy
certainly hasn’t translated into coverage of Dalkey’s books;
that paper still ignores most everything we publish.)
“My thoughts have been with you during this whole thing.
It must be an awful distraction from your work, as if you
didn’t have enough distractions and problems. Two people

(the informant above and an author of ours) wondered if
you would commit suicide over this — seriously! — but I
just laughed at them, telling them you’re made of tougher
stuff than that.
Love always,
Steven [signed]”
It was, all of it, vindictive. It was petty. It was biased. It was

inordinately cruel. It was picayune. It was vile. It was venal.
It is the kind of thing that the prats, prancing indefinites,
and lackeys at the Times Book Review would surely let
happen to anyone — aren’t there errors of fact in every
book that was ever published? — except their pets, who
are in point of fact known to every editor in the whole
publishing world and elsewhere, not only in the immediate
area of New York City. I should point out that the Times
story was picked up with relish by a hack reporter and
parochial at the Boston Globe, one M.R. Montgomery, who
had done an inept and belittling “profile” on me the
previous summer, riddled with mistakes, half-truths,
negative slants, and outright bias, who was on the
telephone to Holt the very next morning, I was told by my
editor at Holt, “lustfully ready” to spread the story. It was
hateful and hurtful and a hellish thing to do in every
direction. And in its scheming unkindness and lust for
gossip and characteristic want of fair play it was
deliberate.
Yet while all of it is hurtful to my reputation, as it stands, it

will be read one day not only as a sign — a symptom — of
the times but as a classic example of the exocannibalism
it is and next to which my books, outliving such calumnies

and gross exaggerations, will in their own right and their
own lights shine. Gratuitous meanness is the spirit of the
age, and plagiarism is one of the elect sins that thrills the
soul of the gratuitously mean.
And so Kiss having sent her letter to Sinkler and Sinkler

handing it over to Tabor and Tabor writing the article —
Clotho to Lachesis to Atropos — with not a one of them in
their mad boomist zeal to decorticate a reputation (to any
observer a characteristic of this vile and illiterate age) ever
bothering to learn or care to know how it happened — it is
left for me not so much to defend as try to explain what
vicissitudes in a writing life can lead to such an error.
There is an interior logic to even foolishness and stupidity
that should absolve what can too easily look like a
deliberate fault. I only hope in the light of my explanation
that I am not alone in comprehending the whys and
wherefores of that fault and that by stating it I am able to
some degree to save it from a guile it never had. I ask of
the reader only that understanding. If I have succeeded in
that, I feel it absolution enough, only adding with the
Psalmist as a gentle reminder of the universal need for
prayer, “O Lord, if you mark iniquities, who shall stand?”
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Alexander Theroux answers charge of plagiarism in Primary Colors | San Diego Reader 31.07.

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Feature Stories more specifically a particular person there, a former editor

As Mrs. Kiss read my book, The Primary Colors, and found

authors a comparative handful of words without

The 150 words (out of 80,000) from Song of the Sky.

I received the alarming telephone call early one morning in

was going to sue me (he said he was, or his brother was, or

Only a fool could not see the devastating result of such

But first a word about my writing life. I have rarely written a

hundred poems, and countless book reviews I’ve

What I write depends a good deal, of course, on when I

and find myself too tired to write?

Given a fate that, for weal or woe, has more or less

It crossed my mind more than once not only in writing but

There is nothing to defend — nor boast of — in

It is a thorny matter, attribution. The marches of one

and Sullivan’s The Mikado, a particular song Der Bingle

What about Andy Warhol’s prints of Marilyn Monroe? The

When he was a grad student at Boston University, Dr.

(and very similar language) of the “Handsome Sailor” from

I awaken on peaks, insist on dreams coming true, and

Encyclopedia Britannica, dictionaries, and so forth. I have

Only the other day I was citing Guy Davenport’s mention

Speaking of Melville, he referred in a letter to his father-in-

To return to the matter of plagiarism. Ordinarily, a graceful

answer my letter. May I boastfully assert, in the light of the

And so she ignored me?

Well, yes and no. Rebecca Sinkler, it appears, always

indicating that in one essay in The Primary Colors I had

And then on April 12, 1995, after mentioning this entire

Dalkey Archive Press

Fairchild Hall ISU

Normal, Illinois 61761

Thanks for your letter. As it happens, I was talking to

“You’re right about Rebecca Sinkler having it in for you

(though my informant didn’t know why): there’s usually

“Regarding Sinkler’s lack of response to your offer to

didn’t have enough distractions and problems. Two people

It was, all of it, vindictive. It was petty. It was biased. It was

Yet while all of it is hurtful to my reputation, as it stands, it

it is and next to which my books, outliving such calumnies

And so Kiss having sent her letter to Sinkler and Sinkler

Here's something you

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