London, Oct. 27--Jacob Epstein, responding to charges that he had plagiarized from Martin Amis's "The Rachel Papers" for his first novel, "Wild Oats," has apologized, admitting that he had indeed copied passages and images from Mr. Amis, and from other writers, as well.
Mr. Epstein's book was published last year, Mr. Amis's in 1973. "I did not realize until June 1979," Mr. Epstein wrote in yesterday's Observer, "when I returned to New York for the publication of 'Wild Oats' and one evening got down from a closet a carton of old papers and notebooks, that certain phrases and images in my novel, which I had through were original, or had been adapted from other sources into my own language, come verbatim, or nearly verbatim from "The Rachel Papers."
"I do not know any good way to apologize for this, nor the way to explain to you how my respect for your writing became something so lacking in respect." He then went on to explain how he had, out of admiration and the desire "to see how writers got things to work," copied passages from Mr. Amis's novel, as well as from books by Nabokov, Turgenev, Goethe and others.
After several rewrites and homogenizations, Mr. Epstein said, he assumed he was now working with virtually original wording, "I believed I had synthesized so many disparate elements into my story that, in the synthesis, I'd made everything my own."
When he made the discovery in June 1979, Mr. Epstein said, he went to his editor at Little, Brown and inquired about revisions, and that, although this was not possible for the first printing, he made 13 deletions for the second United States edition published last fall.
Further, he says he asked the British publisher to work from the revision and that his letter went astray:
"I was very upset that it had been offset from the early plates, not from the revised ones. I wrote to the Alison Press at once, and my agent also contacted them to find out if publication could be held back, the revisions sent for and somehow pasted in. It would have been enormously expensive."
Mr. Amis, who has read the revised edition, said in an interview today:
"There aren't 13 bits, there are 50 odd bits from my book. Looking at his revisions, he had lost track of what he'd taken from me. How do you rewrite a novel and leave word-for-word passages?"
Mr. Epstein ended by saying, "There is nothing
more that I can say, except that I regret what has happened."
©Telegraph Group Limited
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