Home is the hunter: David Mamet

David Mamet’s reputations precede him. There’s the reluctant interviewee – tough, prickly, hates small talk, doesn’t suffer fools gladly, doesn’t suffer them at all. And there’s the great writer – “With Sam Shepard and Arthur Miller, he is one of the three greatest living American playwrights,” says Patrick Marber, who directed The Old Neighborhood at the Royal Court in 1998 and is currently on tour in Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow, written in the late 80s. “Mamet brought a language to the stage that hadn’t quite been there before, but he also brought with that language the classical beauty in his work. He’s a classical writer.”

“Everyone knows he’s a great writer, but he’s a great storyteller too,” says William H Macy, who is playing Teach in the current Donmar Warehouse production of American Buffalo. “When he first wrote Buffalo, what made me feel so proud was that he was writing in an American idiom and had found the beauty in it; it’s just gorgeous – the metre and the rhythm, the music in this stuff – and he was the first writer who captured it.”

Over the past quarter-century, since American Buffalo made Mamet famous at the age of 28, the torrent of plays and – since the early 80s – movies, has been unstoppable. “He goes into the men’s room and comes out with a script,” as one of his film collaborators puts it.

The plays Glengarry Glen Ross, which won him a Pulitzer prize, Edmond, Speed-the-Plow, the controversial Oleanna, The Cryptogram (a highly personal play about a young boy losing his innocence in the face of domestic trauma) and The Old Neighborhood have made him the hottest ticket on Broadway and in London’s West End. Screenplays for The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Verdict, The Untouchables, Hoffa, The Edge and Wag The Dog have established him as an A-list Hollywood screenwriter, and he has had success as a writer-director with House of Games, Homicide, The Spanish Prisoner and, last year, The Winslow Boy.

His productivity is extraordinary: plays, movies, five collections of essays, books on acting and directing, poetry, children’s books. Monday sees the publication of a new novel, Wilson, and his latest book of essays, Jafsie And John Henry; Mamet recently did a screenplay for the film of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal (“it was pretty good but the studio didn’t think so and fired me”); a new movie of his own called State And Main is in post-production; and he has finished the script for another movie to be shot in the autumn. How many Mamets are there?

We have breakfast at Henrietta’s Table near Harvard Square, close to his office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The restaurant’s motto is “fresh and honest”, which might serve for Mamet too. For the photograph, he sets his jaw and adopts what looks like a grimace. “Smile”, says the photographer, “this is a happy occasion.”

“I am smiling,” says Mamet.

The journalist Minty Clinch once described Mamet as looking like a bulldog guarding its gate: you approach at your peril. The late Michael VerMeulen, former editor of GQ – a friend from Mamet’s early theatre days in Chicago in the mid-70s – called him the “Great Satan” of the interview, and truly he despises the form. “It’s inherently a corrupt transaction,” he says.

Mamet will pronounce in general terms on art – he argues that the artist is responding to repression in society but, unlike the propagandist, expounds no theory, offers no solution. What he will not do is attempt to examine his own work. “I’m paid to write things, not read them,” he says pithily.

He is not rude; indeed he is quite formal and punctilious in observing the pleasantries. But he is contemptuous of “the interview”, the journalistic attempt to corner the artistic impulse. He is also averse to talking about his private life. “I don’t think your readers will want to know about my private life. That’s just gossip.” (This in response to an innocent question about whether he spends more time at his lovely house in a suburb of Boston or his even lovelier 100-acre farm in Vermont.)

His new novel, said his wife, the Scottish actress Rebecca Pidgeon, was impenetrable; his agent, Andrew Wylie, said it was unpublishable. It is set hundreds of years into the future, when mankind has decamped to Mars. A computer crash has wiped out all knowledge of the past and a smug academic is trying to recreate it from fragmented sources, adding dodgy hypotheses to others’ doctored histories. It is tragedy rendered as comedy, a very Mametian device; it is funny, provocative, and rather too self-conscious, the batteries of footnotes enumerating cod sources dimming after a while.

Look for logic in the book and you are doomed to disappointment. “Treat it as a modern-day Tristram Shandy,” says his editor at Faber hopefully. “His plays and films are accessible but in fiction he is a hardline modernist.” The point of the book seems to be that scholarship is limited, truth partial and the past a barely audible Chinese whisper.

The threat posed by the “information age” is a theme that surfaces repeatedly in his new collection of essays. “I can envision no device more capable of spreading ignorance and illiteracy than the computer,” he writes. “It is, I think, like the atom bomb, a naturally evolved engine of oblivion, a sign, like the Tower of Babel, that civilisation has run its course.” (Mamet continues to write on a typewriter; his office does not have e-mail; “it’s Victorian here”, says his assistant.)

Mamet is, however, loath to agree that the arguments forcefully put in the essays are given fictional flesh in Wilson: “It’s just a bunch of stuff that I think is funny”, is his summing up of the novel. “James Joyce,” he adds, “when asked what Finnegans Wake was about, said it’s just about a bunch of Micks. I don’t want to look for themes. It’s like saying to Mark Rothko, ‘I get it, you’re trying to make a paint chart – a little bit of orange, a little bit of yellow…’ “

There is a good deal of pessimism in the essays: in “LA Homes” he refers to “the roadside crash which is our culture”; in “Why Don’t You Write With A Computer” he says “television’s mindless and interminable banality has made us stupid – unable to recognise, let alone understand, the simplest human interactions”. He comes on as grouchy, preachy, sometimes fogeyish in his dismissal of our foolishness and triviality.

Is he happy? “It’s in my nature to be weak and complaining once in a while, and when that happens I try to remember to kick myself, or my wife remembers to kick me and says ‘what, are you crazy?’ Writing is so much better than working for a living, better than scrubbing floors.”

And he should know: when he was struggling to build a theatrical career in his early twenties, he took cleaning jobs, was a waiter, drove a taxi, worked in a junk shop (cue American Buffalo) and a real estate office (ditto Glengarry Glen Ross). Those plays depict masculine, intensely competitive worlds and the marginalisation of women in his plays has not been lost on critics. In Sexual Perversity In Chicago, men and women engage in mutually uncomprehending warfare, power games fuelled by fear and fast talk. In Speed-the-Plow, a close, joshing male friendship is threatened by the arrival of a strange, idealistic, faintly sinister woman.

“Men have a lot to learn from women,” Mamet says in an essay called, simply, “Women” (which he says he wrote “for a dare”). Men are the puppydogs of the universe. Men will waste their time in pursuit of the utterly useless simply because their peers are all doing it. Women will not. They are legitimately goal-oriented, and their goals, for the most part, are simple: love, security, money, prestige. These are good, direct, meaningful goals, especially as opposed to the more male objectives of glory, acceptance, and being well-liked. Women don’t give a tinker’s damn about being well-liked, which means they don’t know how to compromise.”

There are some dangerous sallies on the sex war in Mamet’s essays. “In husband-and-wife arguments, or, as they are generally known, ‘marriage’, the ultimate response the man feels is, of course, physical violence,” he says in “True Stories of Bitches”. (Bitchiness, which he raises to the status of an art form, is not gender-specific.)

When Oleanna was premiered, sensationally, in 1992 at Harvard University – the home of American liberalism – Mamet admitted, it was “like doing The Diary Of Anne Frank at Dachau”. The play concerns a young female student who, by falsely accusing her tutor of rape, destroys his career. The play hit every hot button – gender wars, political correctness, patriarchal power, academic freedom, male violence, feminist myopia – and audience reactions were almost unprecedented. Men tended to side with the tutor, women with the student.

Mamet, true to form, refused to explain the play, though he did insist it was not inspired by the contemporaneous Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill sexual harassment case. Some refused to accept his claimed neutrality. “Mr Mamet has never been known for being particularly sensitive to women’s issues,” wrote one American critic. “Nor does he write particularly sympathetic female characters. But with Oleanna he has surely written his most misogynistic script yet.”

Mary McCann, who played the part of Carol in New York, defends him from feminist obloquy. “The play isn’t about a woman who’s a villain and sets a man up. David thinks both characters are absolutely honest. We are so conditioned to having things neatly wrapped up that when it doesn’t happen, people are outraged. Doing Oleanna, I was amazed at how different people’s interpretations of what they saw were. There was outrage on all sides.”

It is true that Mamet’s world – with its late-night poker, guns, knives, games-playing, japes and quotidian male stupidities – is fuelled by testosterone. “Mamet’s is a man’s world and any woman in it has to recognise that,” says Macy, referring principally to his fictional world. That doesn’t mean that he automatically sides with men; he simply knows them and feels for their impotent swagger.

Mamet likes to cast himself as undisciplined – he says he writes across so many genres because he is easily bored – but that may be dissimulation. His five-year-old daughter Clara is learning the violin by the Suzuki method, and he subscribes to Shinichi Suzuki’s singlemindedness. “If we get used to acting on every idea we have, our life becomes extremely full,” Mamet says. “If we replace the thought with the action, there’s a recognition that the thought is meritless.”

He loves to work – “he has to be building something”, says Macy. He adores the camaraderie and collective effort of the theatre and the film set. “He walks in on the first day and knows everyone’s name on the set,” says film editor Barbara Tulliver. “He appreciates people who do their job well.”

“He’s a master storyteller,” she says. “When he writes something he edits it down so there is no fat.” He adopts the same approach with actors. “He’s a bit like Mussolini as a director,” says Macy, who has known Mamet since Goddard College in the late 60s, where Mamet studied and later taught acting. “His phrase is ‘take it easy, you don’t gotta do that’, and it’s frustrating sometimes, sometimes enraging. David will take away and take away, and what happens with many actors is that they basically give up. You’ve got to do what he says, but you can’t give up.

“His view is that everything you need is on the page. A writer is not trying to trick his actors, he’s not keeping back any vital information. So many actors have this attitude; ‘it’s a puzzle and we must solve this puzzle’. Dave’s attitude is; ‘this is not a puzzle, I’m telling you everything I know’.”

There is something rabbinical about Mamet, especially now that his beard is flecked with grey. The young foursquare theatrical lion of countless 80s photographs is being replaced by an older, more reflec tive figure. The temperature is around zero on this day in Boston, and he keeps his black beret on and the collar of his polo-neck sweater well up; he seems to have a slight crick in the neck.

At 52, he is not old – still moves fast, still devours work and hearty breakfasts, can go 10 rounds with anyone – but the process of ageing seems to fascinate him. “Looking At Fifty” is the title of the first essay in the new collection, and the theme runs through the entire book. Essays, especially when they have previously appeared in magazines, can have a disparate feel to them, but this really is a book, given unity by the fact that they have all been written in the past five years, when Mamet has been making a mid-life reckoning, searching, as he says in the introduction, for a “new model”.

The essays are charming, wistful, funny, wise, the reflections of a man who has both read and lived, who can manage Homer and Hollywood. He writes plainly yet philosophically; his vision is both deep and wide; he makes you laugh hard and think harder. If Mamet in person is a studied act in negation, Mamet in his essays is a delightful and instructive read.

He is master storyteller, able to pace a narrative to perfection; a lyrical writer too, capable of simple, direct, lovely prose; a careful observer;. a lover of language; a terrific wit: “They say the definition of ambivalence is watching your mother-in-law drive over a cliff in your new Cadillac”; and a master of the bitter Jewish joke: “My people don’t travel well – for the past thousand years we usually moved only because someone was trying to kill us.” He is an object fetishist too – the Karmann Ghia sports car, the IBM Selectric typewriter, turtle-neck sweaters, guns, knives, caps, even that famously functional, sharply defining crew-cut – and an obsessive collector of most of the above.

Above all, he is what all great writers are – a searcher for the real, an exposer of the artificial or corrupt, a truth-teller. The closing words of his pithy and provocative book on acting, True And False: Heresy And Common Sense For The Actor, could be taken as an epigraph for his entire literary under taking: “What is true, what is false, what is finally important? It is not a sign of ignorance not to know the answers. But there is great merit in facing the questions.”

Mamet loathes artifice and is constantly comparing the earthy reality of Chicago with the Hollywood dreamworld. He venerates “outdoors people” – he is a keen hunter, but says his eyesight is too bad ever to hit anything – and hymns “their reverence for knowledge and their understanding that knowledge lies not in the self but in the world around them”. He is simultaneously in awe of the world and fearful for its future: that produces a jangling tension in his writing. He unites opposites: then and now, optimism and pessimism, lyricism and aggression, beauty and ugliness. The way he writes about crooks and shysters is tinged with sympathy, finding music in the language of the streets.

Macy puts this perfectly: “He brought the language of the street on to the stage and on to film, but he didn’t bring it in its ugliness, he brought it in its beauty. It is a thrill to speak because of the music.” “He’s writing disjointed vernacular and you have to dig deep in order to learn it,” says Mark Strong, who is appearing in Speed-The-Plow. Marber is keen to free Mamet from his public persona – as a streetwise writer producing fast, hard-boiled dialogue laced with four-letter words. “He writes beautiful, lyrical speeches as well. He can write lyrical, poetic plays as well as the more regular, streety, vernacular plays, and I think Speed-the-Plow is a bit of both.”

Beauty and aggression characterise Mamet’s work, just as they characterised his childhood in Chicago in the 50s. “My childhood, like many people’s, was not a bundle of laughs. So what? I always skip that part of the biography,” he told John Lahr in 1997.

Not quite always: the essay “Five Mile Walk” in Jafsie And John Henry, is wonderfully evocative of a wayward, romantic, innocent childhood: “Now and then we would take the train into the city. We were interested in climbing and trespassing. We would climb the girders of a bridge. We would break into a building under construction and explore. We went to the museum, and spent a day walking the pediments, among the caryatids, 30 feet off the ground. When I was by myself I would spend the day in the city shoplifting.”

As a boy, Mamet was lonely, self-aware, alienated; he did poorly at school – he was endlessly told that he was not “living up to his potential” – and rebelled against the system, but he still read avidly, on his own terms. “I would haunt the library. I’d walk the stacks – the floor was made of glass bricks, and they fascinated me. I’d find a likely-looking novel and read it in the big room, and find another, and read that, until it was time to return home.”

His parents divorced when he was 11 – “we lived”, his sister Lynn told Lahr, “in an emotional hurricane” – and his mother quickly remarried. Mamet was very close to his father, Bernie, a quick-witted lawyer, whose linguistic exactitude his son inherited, but he disliked his stepfather, who had a violent temper. The aggression, verbal and physical, that punctuated his upbringing is echoed throughout Mamet’s work: close relationships are war zones, words artillery shells, life a battle. Occasionally, the smoke clears to give moments of peace, epiphanies when all things seem possible.

In his essay “The Rake”, which appears in the collection The Cabin, Mamet lays bare the pain of his teenage years: his stepfather shattering a glass table in a fit of temper and blaming the children; his mother cutting her hands collecting the shards; an occasion when his sister was kept home from a school play – in which she had the lead role – because she was too excited to eat her meal; worst of all, a terrible incident where Mamet, in a fit of rage, threw a rake at his sister and badly cut her lip. His mother demanded to know what had happened and refused to take her to hospital until they had told her. “So the family sat down to dinner, where my sister clutched a napkin to her face and the blood soaked the napkin and ran down on to her food, which she had to eat.”

At 15, Mamet grew tired of the war and went back to live with his father – “the intense relationship of David’s life”, according to the director Gregory Mosher, who directed many Mamet premieres. In a New Yorker profile of the writer, Lahr recounted how at Bernie’s funeral in 1991 Mamet insisted on burying his father himself, taking 40 minutes on a hot summer’s day to finish the task.

Mamet got involved with a theatre group in Chicago, then a centre of vibrant, pioneering drama, and immediately fell in love with the world. At 18, he went to Goddard College in Vermont, “a hippy school where you got credits for taking drugs”, according to his close friend Jonathan Katz. “He was there to get an education, so the rest of us found him a little disturbing.”

Mamet studied theatre and creative writing and, after graduating in 1969, taught acting in Vermont, co-founded the St Nicholas Theater Company in Chicago, and wrote Pinteresque sketches, the electrifying Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974) and American Buffalo (1975), which proved his breakthrough play and led him to leave for New York the following year.

Sexual Perversity in Chicago was later made into a movie, called About Last Night. Mamet’s screenplay was butchered and what eventually emerged was dross that left him feeling embittered. Speed-the-Plow can in part be read as an act of revenge. His dealings with Hollywood have always been slightly arm’s length; he has no home on the west coast and pokes fun at it in the essay LA Homes, as well as in his new movie State And Main, where a film crew takes over a US town.

How do the occupants of those lavish LA homes feel about this hi-falutin’ easterner’s jibes? “Hollywood is uninsultable,” says producer Art Linson, who worked with Mamet on The Untouchables. “It’s all about money. Hollywood will not feel insulted by him as long as he makes money. If you stop making money and then insult them, it can be very thin-skinned. If Tom Hanks had a few harsh words to say about Hollywood, they’d live with it. Mamet is still in credit, though not as much as Tom Hanks, naturally.”

Linson says Mamet “has tended to write big movies and direct small ones. He has done mainstream movies and maverick projects – films that have made money and films that haven’t made money. He hasn’t directed a blockbuster yet, but then he hasn’t had any blockbuster budgets.”

Michael Hausman, who produced House Of Games, Things Change, and Homicide, makes a similar point: “He gets his price as a screenwriter but he doesn’t get his price as a screenwriter-director. His subject matter is not really Hollywood material when he’s writing for himself. People would probably only risk $10m-$20m on one of his films – a crazy amount in any other business but not in Hollywood – but for other people he can write big.”

Hausman offers a character assessment that is common among those who have worked with him: “He knows what he wants and he gets what he wants. He’s very good with actors and with crew members; he’s loyal to people and trusts you if you do your job. When you buy David, you buy his mouth, you buy his words. He’s not easy but he’s worth it – that’s how I would sum him up.”

Mamet married Rebecca Pidgeon in 1991. They had met when she appeared in Speed-The-Plow at the National Theatre in 1989. Mamet’s first marriage, to the feisty New York actress Lindsay Crouse, with whom he had two daughters, had broken down, and the relationship with Pidgeon has given him what Lahr called “a new mellowness”.

“She had a tremendous effect in anchoring him, in calming him down, in making him feel it’s OK to be scared, it’s OK to be upset, it’s OK to fail,” his sister Lynn has said. “I think she has allowed my brother to exhale for the first time in his life.”

“When I first saw Dave, when he came over to England to direct Speed-the-Plow, it was quite a shock for me,” Pidgeon said last year. “I was expecting an Arthur Miller, and there he was, with his little scarf tied nattily around his neck like some Parisian mime artist. He looked younger than I thought he was going to, and I couldn’t understand how such a young person could have written all this work. He is approachable, but a little intimidating at first. He has a reputation for being tough, but not with actors – with producers.

“When he is working at home, he has to have a lot of time alone, a lot of dreaming time. He is supportive, though. When I joined him there [in the US], I had to start all over again. That was scary, because I had left a thriving career. Being married to Dave turned out to be quite damaging to my career. People thought of me as some wife; my acting credits did not mean anything. But Dave really loves my acting, God bless him, and that helped.” Mamet and Pidgeon have two children – Clara and one-year-old Noah.

Mamet, in a rare excursion into personal territory, said: “Rebecca is a very honest and straightforward and self-confident actress. It is not that I am particularly idealistic about women, but Rebecca happens to be as admirable a person on stage as she is in life. My sister has said that my writing for women characters has improved, or changed, since I have been close to Rebecca, but you should remember that my sister also said President Roosevelt is alive and well and living in Argentina. I think the only thing that has changed about my writing over the years is my typing, which has got a lot worse.”

His refusal to align life with art is typical, and legitimate – artists reject such crude reductionism. But it is tempting to see his marriage to Pidgeon in 1991 and the death of his father in the same year as turning points. His latest essays are reflective and very personal; he turned to novel-writing – The Village (1994), The Old Religion (1997) and now Wilson; he has become both more religious and more overtly Jewish in outlook.

“He is deeply religious,” says Macy, “and his rabbi is one of his closest friends.” He lives in Newton, a suburb of Boston which has a large Jewish community. “I notice that the Boston Globe refers to him these days as the Newton writer,” says his friend Jonathan Wilson. “He seems to enjoy the sense of community. He has been happier in the past 10 years than previously.”

In an essay 15 years ago, Mamet wrote: “I have always felt that people look on me as an outcast. I have always felt like an outsider; and I am sure that the suspicion that I perceive is the suspicion that I provoke by my great longing to belong [his emphasis].

“As the children of immigrant Jews, we are spurred in our need to observe by the memory of old humiliations, of old indignities_ Trained not to assimilate, we have found useless the virtues of compromise with our environment… True to our past, we live and work with an inherited, observed, and accepted vision of personal futility, and of the beauty of the world.”

As a young man, Mamet tried – shades of Melville – to get a berth on a ship. His attempt to escape failed and he took shelter in the theatre, a surrogate home. Now he has a real home, an adored family, a close-knit community; perhaps at last he feels he belongs. Much of what he writes is deeply pessimistic – in Wilson he envisages a world without knowledge or wonder or truth – but his warnings show that he cares passionately. He chides us not from rage, but from love.

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