David Mamet tells me he’s like the character in one of the greatest comedies ever written, Moliere’s “The Bourgeois Gentleman,” who declares: “Good heavens! For more than 40 years I have been speaking prose without knowing it.” Mamet says he made a similar discovery a few years ago: He is a conservative and has been for decades without knowing it.
The self-mocking comparison to Moliere’s “bourgeois gentleman” is a mark of the modesty with which America’s most celebrated and successful serious playwright discusses his latest book — a white-hot work of non-fiction called “The Secret Knowledge” that is both an account of his discovery and an explication of the views he now espouses with a discoverer’s intensity.
“I get obsessed,” he says — and by way of explanation goes into a hilarious riff about how he torments his wife, the actress and singer Rebecca Pidgeon, with hours-long explorations of the hidden sexual messages in Dr. Seuss’ “Green Eggs and Ham.”
It was the same, he says, after several years of digging deeply into the wellspring of conservative ideas that generated the new book. “Are we done now?” Pidgeon asked plaintively when he finished it.
But it was, in fact, Pidgeon’s own discovery of Judaism, to which she converted at the time of their marriage in 1991, and her own profound commitment to it (she is one of the Hebrew readers of the Torah in their Los Angeles synagogue on the High Holy Days) that began his journey to “The Secret Knowledge.”
In a sense, the book is a sequel to Mamet’s first polemic, “The Wicked Son,” a 2006 study of “anti-Semitism, self-hatred and the Jews.” But where “The Wicked Son” is a wounded cry, “The Secret Knowledge” is a work of liberation.
“Jesus I love this country,” says a president of the United States about to lose his re-election bid in the last line of his hilarious 2009 play, “November.” Mamet, who knows a great deal about the darker recesses of the human heart, has freed himself here to express unambiguous love — love of country, love of tradition, love of his own people and (most exciting in terms of the book itself) the love of a good day’s work.
Though he may have mocked himself with the Moliere quote, Mamet is indeed an unapologetic “bourgeois gentleman” who believes there is nothing more profound than people working, together or separately, to produce something.
“We do things differently here,” he writes of the United States. “We were and are a country of workers and, as such, get along so well that we became the preeminent power in the world. This came about not through a ‘lust for power,’ not through colonialism or ‘exploitation,’ but as a result of our ethos and cohesion.”
His own personal industry is astonishing. He has not only written several dozen plays (perhaps most famously “Glengarry Glen Ross”) but also three novels and several works of nonfiction about the arts — and has directed 10 movies (an 11th is on the way for HBO on the Phil Spector murder case with Al Pacino).
What he loathes is the middleman, the bureaucrat — the person whose entire profit comes from skimming off the labor of others. It is only a failure to understand the independent value of work that leads people to believe it is acceptable to use the law to redistribute the earnings of a productive laborer and transfer them to someone else in the name of fairness and equity.
And yet, with all this newfound fervor for a set of ideas anathematic to the American creative community, Mamet insists he will not use the stage or cinema as a bully pulpit for them: To do so would be “immoral.”
He asks an audience to do something very difficult, he says — to sit before his work and suspend disbelief. That is an act of trust. To breach it by attempting to teach them is an act of bad faith.
This surprising, and genuinely moving, explanation of an artist’s responsibility to his audience is given added weight by an anecdote in “The Secret Knowledge”: Mamet tells of teaching a seminar on “dramatic structure” at a university. “I suggested,” he writes, “that the heroine of the story we were constructing be kidnapped by some Arab terrorists.”
This occasioned an uproar. One student decided to lecture America’s leading dramatist that “it was not only the responsibility of the dramatist to refrain from stereotyping, but to use every aspect of the drama to enforce upon the public a humanitarian view of the world.” He was particularly concerned that homosexuals “should be seen kissing on the stage whenever possible.”
Mamet asked the student whether homosexuals were human; the student answered that of course they were. He asked if they had the same rights as any other human, to which the answer was, of course, yes. “Well then,” Mamet told him, “if one of those is the right to entertainment, might we not study how to entertain them, by learning how to structure a play?”
The answer was no, and so the ideologue in question lost the chance to learn something from a master in order to protect his own close-minded orthodoxy.
What audience, I ask Mamet, does he wish for “The Secret Knowledge”?
“Everyone,” he says — “and Jimmy Carter.”
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