At once is lost the pride of awful state,
The golden canopy, the glittering plate,
The regal palace, the luxurious board,
The liveried army, and the menial lord.
Mamet’s flow is rhythm, I say to them. Meter. We are similarly borne, compelled, rushed forward by William Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter (í-amb: from the Greek, “iambos”: a metrical foot of two syllables, the first unaccented and the second accented, Ex. “to stríve + and nót + forbeár”). Each matches the two-stroke “lub-lub” of our hearts.
The meter is: Iamb, iamb, iamb, iamb, iamb. And repeat.
I pick up another book. From the close of Julius Caesar, I tell them.
This IS not BRU tus, FRIEND; but, I as SURE you,
A PRIZE no LESS in WORTH. Keep THIS man SAFE,
Give HIM all KINDness: I had RA ther HAVE
Such men my friends than enemies. Go on,
And see whe’r Brutus be alive or dead;
Elitism personified. And here is Mamet, no pentameter in sight, only twenty-seven iambs jammed back to back in a single, opalescent, perverse, sickening unraveling string:
“But all I ever ask (and I would say this to her face) is only she remembers who is who and not to go around with her or Gracie either with this attitude: The Past is Past, and this is Now, and so Fuck You.”
As if, said David Levy, we were listening to him through a stethoscope.
Exactly. And, I say to them—and this is truly wonderful—one can combine rhythm with yet another tool: syntax. Mamet takes syntax, twists it inside out, and uses it to reveal the interior of a mind. The character Teach enters. Page 142, I say. (They all flip to the page. So this is what it’s like for Howard at UCLA, he speaks a word and books fly open obediently. Now that’s fun.) Teach is furious at a lesbian who has insulted him for eating a piece of toast off his plate. A critic described it as “hearing a syntax that reels backward like his fearful scrambled mind”:
“Only (and I tell you this, Don). Only, and I’m not, I don’t think, casting anything on anyone, from the mouth of a Southern bulldyke asshole ingrate of a vicious nowhere cunt can this trash come.”
Mamet himself commented, “The beauty of the fugue comes from the descant.” (I put down my notebook and pick up the card on which I’ve jotted the note. Descant, I read quickly, noun, Latin dis-+ cantus song. “Music played at the same time as the main tune, but higher.”) Now. Words are aesthetic of themselves, but the auditory key to the music of this social class is not the notes (the words) in the piece but the counterpoint. I’m speaking personally now, all right? I simply believe that any human being of any class who can speak this beautifully, who displays the full range of human emotions, who suffers and bleeds and laughs and dreams, including the losers, including the formally uneducated, is self-evidently a three-dimensional person. Including the sociopaths.
A snob, incidentally, I tell them, is interested in a person because they are of high class. An elitist is interested in a person because they are interesting. That’s the difference. At least in my view. Mamet, at his best, is interested in those who are interesting. And that’s where he opens our eyes.
They are not UCLA freshmen, and I do not, happily, report to a dean, so I say to them, Here is one of Howard’s favorites. A guy walks out of a theater on 42nd at Times Square and stumbles over a bum.
The bum says, “Spare a buck?”
“Neither a borrower nor a lender be!” snaps the man. “William Shakespeare.”
“Fuck you!” says the bum. “David Mamet.”
THE NEXT WEDNESDAY, DAVID LEVY took a meeting with Lizzy Weiss on the Sony lot and was critical (extremely, according to Bob Balaban, who heard about it immediately afterward) of Lizzy’s fourth draft.
Critical of what, exactly, her agent asked her.
Of her meter.
Your meter? her agent said to her. He thought perhaps it was bad cell phone reception.
Her meter was off, apparently. And so, she sobbed, was the entire project, potentially. (Wait. Your meter? said her agent to the phone.)
According to Chris Silbermann, who was actually in the meeting, David, who suddenly felt that his position as producer should touch on this, had simply raised the question of executing greater care with the rise and fall of the words. Iambic accents. Lizzy began by doubting that this would translate to the screen (an action-adventure). “Hello, it’s a Rob Cohen movie!?” someone kept saying, where the hell this fucking sudden interest?
Anne Rosenbaum, said David simply, and explained.
Lizzy left the meeting, called her agent, who called Howard, who called me. I said yes, OK, although I’d never met her she could attend the next book club (I covered the receiver and told Denise that we’d be twelve now), though I said she’d have to start the next book immediately.
“Oh, I’m sure she will,” murmured Howard.
Actually, the more I looked at Lizzy’s specific point, the more different it seemed to me from the question of Mamet’s rhythms. Our next evening, I decided to bring up what irritated me and get it out of my system. I chose Houseman’s meter, I told them, because some things he does drive me insane. I picked up “To an Athlete Dying Young” (they passed around the photocopies), and I said, Right, look here:
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears
I realize I’m belaboring this, and Houseman’s sudden shoving of the rhythm into reverse gear is not the end of the world for his poetry, but he does it everywhere. Here one is led to expect the “Af,” the first syllable of the second line, to be the up-beat like the “And” of the previous line, but it isn’t; “And” is up and “si” is down but the “Af” is down and “ter” is up, and you find yourself head over heels, with the irritated sensation one gets when an unexpected German verb pops up at the end of the sentence like a demented gopher and makes you rethink the whole goddamn thing.
But wait. There’s worse. Could you? Line 42.
“Uh,” says the person I’ve pointed at, someone from Weed Road Productions I don’t really know, “where…?”
Runners whom.
“Oh.” He finds it.
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.
Now what, I ask you, are we to make of this, I say to them.
“It’s completely wrong,” murmurs Eric Roth.
It is, I say.
“The first line is dah-dúm,” Eric says, “but Houseman wants you to read it”—he frowns at it; like many writers, he heard about Lizzie’s situation, so he’s focusing—“I mean, the the is so weird—”
How would you do it?
I notice that it doesn’t even occur to him to be fazed at the idea of reengineering A. E. Houseman. It’s just another rewrite. Eric scowls for a second, calmly, everyone watching him, but they do this on location burning $450,000 a day with the DP breathing down their necks. “OK. How about
Runners whom renown outran
The name, it died before the man.
Ah! You see, rhythmically that scans, I say, delighted. Now, I want to be—
“Wait.”
The name would die before the man.
Even better, I say. We all brighten and look around at one another. Now, I want to be clear, I say, that in some writing—less overtly classical, perhaps—a bit of this gear shifting is actually bracing. It works marvelously for Dylan Thomas (the single-page photocopy? that I handed out earlier? does everyone have it?), who starts out all satin and smoothness and then snatches the carpet from under us, all but holds a gun to our heads to make us—quite intentionally—say “ass-embled” and “to hear” and then, just below that, gleefully pushes us into a hole after the “Prisoners of wishes” phrase, willfully setting rhythmic stones (“In the jails”) in our path to make sure we trip about them. It’s all on purpose. I nod at Noah Baumbach. Read, please:
There was a saviour
Rarer than radium
Commoner than water, crueler than truth.
Children kept from the sun
Assembled at his tongue
To hear the golden note turn in a groove,
Prisoners of wishes locked in their eyes
In the jails and studies of his keyless smiles.
The last line a minefield of arrhythmic beauty. We all sat back and, after a moment, exhaled and looked at one another with glistening eyes. One of them made a note to himself. You notice, I said, each syllable, because of what he’s set before it, obligatorily a crisp, precise component machined to a zero tolerance, separate pistons functioning seamlessly in the turning verbal engine block. It actually transcends iambs.
You’d have to shoot it as a period piece, someone grumbles.
So shoot a period piece! retorts someone else.
I was about to reply when a producer of particularly commercial blockbuster-type stuff said that this kind of rhythm could be “used great” in action-adventure. A development executive cleared her throat, shot him a withering glance, and looked away. He raised his shoulders: “What?” Apparently everyone knew everything about the dynamic between them except for me.
I cut in to say that in fact I agreed. And when she got a look of satisfaction on her face, No, no—I agreed with him (she raised her eyebrows), and completely. Consider that essentially William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was Lethal Weapon in iambic pentameter and that to my mind the violence of L.A. Confidential was drenched in the balletic quality of its noir-prose origins: “He could muscle the money out of her,” writes James Ellroy, “glom some pimp scuttlebutt, close out the Cathcart end, and ask Dud to send him down to Darktown.” It was the art of subcutaneous violence.
It gave me an idea, and I rejuggled the schedule in my mind and told them their assignment for the next session—it’s in the Library of America’s Hammett collection, I said; they broke out their devices to write it down—was “The Scorched Face,” which Claudia Roth Pierpont and I agree is a perfect short story.
THERE ARE THINGS THAT I would notice. But how does one, passing through the millions of touchpoints of one’s life—a look, a particular word, a missed lunch, the click of a seat belt—pick out those that preface an event. Clues to the future seem to me to be particularly opaque.
It is four years ago. He is in his home office on a cloudy, gray Saturday early afternoon. I come down the stairs and freeze, listening. Howard has a junior producer on the speakerphone. Shooting is going very badly, and the movie is generating serious overruns, and Howard is methodically, coolly flaying the man alive. Howard enumerates the studio’s points—this had been promised, that date had passed, they had been told such and such, fucking lies, you little prick. With every thrust, there is an inaudible gasp from the speakerphone. Howard’s back is to me. After three minutes I sit down on the carpeted steps, a ringside seat. I’m bringing him a FedEx package I’ve just signed for, and I watch, transfixed. The FedEx is another screenplay. Several hundred of them line the high shelves, neatly categorized, and I read their titles one by one as I sit there.
He stops for a moment, clicks over. It’s Jennifer. So-and-so’s rewrite just showed up at his office; should she messenger it to him? No, he says, just open it, put it on his desk, he’ll get it Monday. He clicks back and continues.
Howard hangs up, turns around. He sees my face, which is ashen. He is a little bit startled. Somewhere we can hear a lawn mower.
“I’m sorry,” he says, slightly on his guard.
I nod.
After a moment, he says, “Is that for me?” He gets up, approaches softly, takes it from me. He sighs heavily and sits down on the stairs next to me. His body does not touch mine.
“Someone has to,” he says. “They’ve burned through the entire fucking budget, and they’ve only got half the thing in the can.”
I nod. But I have never been afraid of him before.
“He’s stupid.” This he offers as a mitigating factor; he watches my face. He clarifies, “He’s not just young. He’s actually stupid. And arrogant.” His eyes drift over to the milky window, his mind still partly engaged in the conversation. He speaks poisonously to himself. I have never seen his face so ugly. He looks exactly like all of them when they go into this mode. “An arrogant little shit who cost us three million dollars yesterday for two very, very bad reasons.”
He swallows to keep down the anger sloshing in his lungs. We stare at all his screenplays.
I say to him, They all do that. (I mean the applied cruelty.) I just didn’t know you did it, too.
We sit on the steps, on the tasteful, putty-colored wool carpeting, looking at Howard’s clean, spacious home office, the walls painted a muted straw. “Don’t think you don’t know me, Anne,” Howard says. “You know who I am.”
Not entirely, I say. After a moment I add, But I suppose that’s OK, isn’t it.
I add, It just surprised me a bit, that’s all.
DENISE SHOPPED FOR FOOD TWO days before the Woolf. She stated that she didn’t want to prepare everything last minute, as she’d had to do with the Thackeray, when Double Features Films had suddenly asked if a small contingent could come. I’d begun cutting off the guest list one week before. It seemed a weekly event now, which given that they couldn’t possibly be finishing the books in seven days I found bizarre until I realized I now had in essence two alternating biweekly groups. Consuela began her setup outside at around 3:00 P.M., wiping down the big teak garden dinner table, bringing out linens and glassware and fighting back a few of my vines, dying of curiosity, and a small regiment of grasses staging an invasion. She noted that we needed a gardener. I agreed. Consuela had a not-indecent eye for table placement, I found. She and I had gone to Crate & Barrel for extra plates and silver because I wasn’t about to use paper. My job, which Denise and Consuela assigned me—it was the only one they felt me competent to perform—was buying and arranging the flowers, although as Peter Chernin pointed out, “Anne, you’re holding these things in a garden.”
Well, I said. I just thought it would be a nice touch.
He grinned at me. He considered something. “Who from Fox comes to your clubs?” And from then on Peter sent flowers with whoever came from the studio. Calla lilies and delphiniums and jonquils in fresh, crackling paper.
The unwritten rule was that they brought dessert. In typical industry fashion, like emerging nuclear powers, they rapidly escalated the desserts in intricacy and number and size and exoticism and, quite predictably, cost. The boxes they came in, covered in glinting gold filament wrapping or scented sheets of rare Indian cinnamon bark, irritated Denise. After several weeks of this I said to them, I am terminating this brinkmanship. The coordinator for each successive club will choose one of you to bring dessert, and it will be appropriate.
The Woolf dessert was appropriate in size (small), but it cost eight hundred dollars and came in four cream-colored bamboo boxes lined in silver paper and tied with raw Andalusian hemp. Some kind of chocolate-flecked foam. Denise grimly got out a sharp knife for the hemp. Consuela carried it out to us. We were just finishing a conversation about novelistic conventions and writers who broke them importantly. That was when Amy Slotnick asked me a question. What, in my opinion, was the single most important work of literature in the twentieth century?
They watched me carefully, sipping white wine. Two of them leaned on the large rocks with which I’d framed a lovely Latin American wisterialike vine I found two years ago.
I said that this hierarchization of literature—“the first most important work, the second”—is ludicrous, given art’s complexity, and yet it rivets all of us.
I paused. I actually do, I said, happen to have an answer, because something happened that decided it for me. It started when our friend Daniel Rose called.
Sam was eight at the time. Daniel had landed at LAX at 3:00 P.M., checked into the Ermitage, and called us. Hello, Daniel. “Hey, Anne, how are you. Howard there?” Howard: “Daniel! You in town?�
� Daniel had three tickets for the Bulls, floor seats. “Sammy,” Howard had hollered, “we’re going to the Forum!” Into the receiver he said snidely, “So we’re your latest philanthropic effort—I commend your choice.”
“Ya ain’t much,” retorted Daniel, “as charitable causes go.” Daniel funds his philanthropy through his real estate.
But when they returned much later that evening, their mood was somewhat dark, and Daniel was watching Sam intently. Some of the players, Howard explained, had gotten up to speak after the game—an antidrug message mated, naturally, to a product endorsement—and Howard and Daniel had both realized that Samuel was registering Black English. The boy had listened to them, and, after a long moment, had turned to Howard. “Why are they talking like that, Dad?” It had bothered him.
I was pouring Howard some coffee. The way they spoke, Sam?
He wriggled in his chair, eyes on the wall. “Yeah.”
What did you think about it?
Daniel, his head cocked slightly to one side, observed Sam vaguely kicking the air.
“I don’t know.”
Articulate it, Sam. Say what you’re thinking.
My son thought about it, and we ate cookies. “Well, it was, like—”
Don’t tell me what it was “like,” tell me what it was.
“Mom!”
Sam.
And then more cookies and then, gradually, with no “likes”: They were famous, he understood that. He knew their names. And they were rich, and they slid gorgeously through space with the sleek agility of cats, gleaming and graceful, but when they opened their mouths to articulate their ideas, the words squeezed with visible effort through the neural tubes. In their bodies they were athletes, but in their minds they limped. Sam was reacting, we understood, to the sudden realization that intellectually they were cripples. Then Howard picked him up to put him to bed. I made some fresh coffee for Daniel.
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