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- [00:00]
Shiloh Brooks
I'm Shiloh Brooks. I'm a professor and CEO. And I believe reading good books makes us better men. Today I'm sitting down with David Mamet. David is a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, author and screenwriter. Main street, published in 1920, changed David's life. Today I'm asking him why. This is old school. David Mamet, welcome to old school.
- [00:35]
David Mamet
Thank you.
- [00:35]
Shiloh Brooks
Thanks for being here. I think you once said that your alma mater is the Chicago Public Library. Tell me about that. What does that mean? That your alma mater is the Chicago Public Library.
- [00:47]
David Mamet
Well, it means this, that I always loved reading. And as a kid, I read very early and read incessantly. So when I went to the Chicago Public Schools back in all the teachers had been born when Victoria was the queen. That's quite a long time ago. And they gave me these books called Dick and Jane. Do you guys know about Dick and Jane? There are these two characters, Dick and Jane. Oh, Dick, see Jane, run, Jane. Jane, see spot, spot, run, spot, run, blah, blah, blah. So I couldn't be bothered reading them. So they said that I was retarded and put me in a class called remedial reading. And so I had to go to this remedial reading class, but I didn't do that either. And I always wondered about the adjective remedial thinking. That was a special kind of reading that obviously I was so fucking stupid that I didn't know about. And so that further, as if I needed more impetus, turned me off from school. But I always read. And what I would do as a kid was cut school because A, I either didn't understand it or it bored the pants off of me and go and hang out in the reading room of the Chicago Public Library. Don on Randolph. And the stacks were open, so I would just go into the fiction stacks and pick up a book at random and read a few pages and say yes, or read a few pages and say no. And be able to pick out a book from browsing, which unfortunately doesn't exist anymore and say, oh, this is pretty damn good. And then I would read that book and then I would read every other book by that author. And then if there were an introduction. P.S. as you know, as an educator, always read the introduction last, right? The introduction would mention some other author, so I would try that author out and see if I liked it. So that's what I did with my, with my life. Instead of going to school.
- [02:49]
Shiloh Brooks
You browsed to find books. That's not an experience that people have too much anymore. Usually when you want a book, you call it up on Amazon and you order it, but you're saying you discovered things on the shelves that you didn't even know existed just by walking down the aisles?
- [03:04]
David Mamet
Yes. And it's unfortunate that this doesn't exist anymore because browsing and all the bookstores are gone. Most of them gives you the opportunity to try something for a couple of lines and say, yes, no, yes, no. And if you have to find something online and buy it and the thing's no damn good, all you can do is give it to your nephew on Christmas, you know, but it doesn't lead you to anything else. Right. Browsing allowed one to engage the attention with no downside of cost of, I bought this stupid fucking book and now I have to read it.
- [03:41]
Shiloh Brooks
When I asked you to pick a book to discuss with me today, you picked Main street by Sinclair Lewis. And so I'd like to talk about. How did you find Main Street? Was that at the library? How old were you? When did you first read it? What impression did it have on you?
- [03:57]
David Mamet
Well, I did find it first. I think it was one of the. My Memory is one of the first books I took out of the fiction. I think it was 808.13, the fiction book. The Main Street Looks like a Good Book. And I took it down. I was probably 10 and started reading it. And. And that led me to other Midwestern authors because later on in school we were subjected to Scott Fitzgerald and later on to J.D. salinger, neither of whom were very good writers. And it just. A, it didn't interest me, and B, it didn't speak to the experience of someone who grew up in Chicago. And C, unlike Sinclair Lewis, they weren't calling a spade a spade. That was very writerly. It's in the tradition of Thomas Wolfe, for example. It sounds like writing. So the people at the New York Times or the New York Review of Books or the blah, blah, blah, or, you know, or Menken and Nathan and so forth could say, this is really writing. And so you go back and you read some of the commentary about these writers, and they're all over the moon because the writers made the critics feel good. Because the critics, like all critics, recognized some sort of uber ability which was to speak to the form, and they mistook it for talent.
- [05:27]
Shiloh Brooks
So I wanted to talk about that and talk about Sinclair Lewis and Main Street. We should, once we've talked about the book a little bit, come back to what you just said about him as a writer. But for people who don't know what Main street is about. Can you give a kind of summary or an account of that book for somebody who's never read it before?
- [05:48]
David Mamet
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's written in 1920 about growing up in a little town called Sauk Center, Minnesota, I guess, and in Minneapolis, and he calls it Gopher Prairie. And there's this young woman who wants to. She marries a doctor. She's from Minneapolis, I believe, and she's very jumped up. She wants to improve things in the world. She unfortunately went to college and she took degree in library science. Good for her. And now she marries this doctor and she goes to Gopher Prairie. And he loves hunting and fishing and having a drink with the boys and being a doctor. And all she sees around her is squalor and philistinism. Right. And the people don't read. And the people are trying to imitate Chicago fashions, which are imitating New York fashions, which are imitating Paris. And she's constantly unhappy with her life. Right. And eventually she leaves and leaves her husband and goes to Washington and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I think that was one of the first books that I took down and I discovered the Midwestern writers. And this is a long time ago, it's maybe 65 years ago. I discovered them on the shelves of the Chicago Public Library in Sinclair Lewis and Willa Cather were out of print. They were absolutely out of print. Nobody had heard of them. And then interregnum. So I started reading them and then branched out into Frank Norris and then from Frank Norris into Jack London. And I fell in love with the Chicago writers, including the lesser known ones like Frank Norris and. And Robert Herrick and Henry Fuller. And they were talking about the actual streets in which I grew up. And I read Sister Carrie, of course, and Sister Carrie was talking about this woman looking for work in Chicago and being poor, not of a job and so forth. And I'd had those experiences and it was my introduction to literature was the literature was. Was actually guys and women writing about a life that I recognized rather than a life that they imagined and called it writing. For example, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. And I mentioned Salinger.
- [08:10]
Shiloh Brooks
I mean, it's a long novel, first of all. And you mentioned that the novel's main character is, in a certain sense, of this woman. Her name is Carol Kennicott and she comes from St. Paul and she's a librarian and she's very intelligent. And she comes to Gopher Prairie, which is this rural backwoods nowhere land. And as you said, is kind of appalled by everybody there. But the interesting thing to me about this book, you know, when you said you wanted to do Main street. This book is 600 pages long. I read it in a week. I've been doing nothing but Main Street. Thanks to David Bammit for a whole week. Let's talk about the town of Gopher Prairie real quick. Because you mentioned it was based on a town. Maybe the town that Lewis was from. The town seems to me to itself be a character in the title of the book. Main Street. It's the main street of a rural town, you know, in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. What is Gopher Prairie? Who are these people? Can you take our listeners into that town for a minute?
- [09:10]
David Mamet
Sure. I was very fortunate to live for many, many years in a very small town in Vermont. 3,000 people and had a one room schoolhouse. It was a dairy town. It's called Cabot. Vermont is where the Cabot cheese comes from. And the dairy farmers still brought their milk in cans and even some hand milking. And I loved that town. I was so lucky to be able as an expat from Metropolis to go and live in the end of the rural America in Vermont. And I was crazy about it. I just loved everything about it. And the people were so gracious. And so I mentioned Main street to you. My two other choices were World Book, which really changed my life. Cause that's how I spent my time in the evenings. And the Bible, which is a little bit on the nose, but that changed my life too. A pretty good book. But I went back and I reread Main street and it's not a good book. It's that I, you know, I reread Aerosmith and I reread Dodsworth and Babbitt and et cetera and Man Trap and Cass Timberlane. He's just not a very good writer. He's almost a good writer, but he's not better than that. And the reason is that he imagines a setting in. In which to stage his preconceptions. And in effect, finally, Carol Kennecott, who's the supposedly who is the heroine of the book, is a philistine. She's the philistine that she can't see what she's looking at. For example, if you live in rural Vermont, as I did from the 60s on, the people were taciturn, but they were taciturn because they were courteous and because they came from the Scots Irish tradition. And they were hysterically funny. But you wouldn't know it right until you took a Step back. And they were all working for a living. So everybody in Gopher Prairie is working for a living. And she says, but how can they live with these Victorian doilies on their sideboard? And my answer is, who cares, right? They'd actually carved a living out of the prairie. These were the people that Sinclair Lewis is, in the guise of Carol Kennecott actually looking down on. And so I say, hell, I'll vote with them every day. So I went back and I reread all of the Sinclair Lewis books. As I say, I realized he's actually not a very good writer. He. He's kind of the Midwestern equivalent of Scott Fitzgerald. He's writing books about people that he imagines would behave in certain ways in order to put forward his view of the world. It's not political, but it's a sociological agenda.
- [12:19]
Shiloh Brooks
So let's talk about that with Carol. So Carol comes to Main street and she is very well educated. And she gets there and she thinks, look at all of these country bumpkins.
- [12:30]
David Mamet
And.
- [12:31]
Shiloh Brooks
And this is what you're talking about when you say that Sinclair Lewis is in a way projecting Main Street. It's a kind of farce. It's a kind of critique in a certain way. But in your view, not an honest critique. Because these people have redeeming features. And I wanted to ask you about that because I didn't know how to take this book as a whole. You've got this woman who comes there and she wants to improve it. And she thinks these people are backwards. They don't have high taste in literature. She starts a drama society. She tries to change their architecture, get this place more beautiful. Who are you people? Your food should be more sophisticated. We should have more sophisticated parties. Our schools need to be better. And she sets about this kind of. This project of improvement which seems to be resisted by the people. In some cases, they take it with good nature, but they think she's a little bit crazy. So anyway, I wonder if you might talk a little bit more about what is precisely Lewis's critique of these people.
- [13:35]
David Mamet
You know, as I reread these books, I was thinking, I understand this form. I've seen it before. What's it like? And I realized that his books are romance novels. They're written like romance novels. Not that they're necessarily romantic, but. But they take the same thing as a romance novel. Someone's going to fall in love. Someone. Everybody's assigned a characteristic in a romance novel, right? There's no depth to them. This person is the good looking swine and this person is the confused young woman, and this person is the older woman who takes care of her. And this person is the guy who she's rejected, who she eventually hands out. It's a romance novel. So that's basically what he's. What he's writing. That he's writing books without any talent, which is to say without inspiration, that you're never gonna hear anything new out of him. You're gonna read stagings of his preconceptions, for example. She says she wants to improve. It's a very liberal view that for some reason she. Cause she has a degree in library science and because she read five books, that she is going to improve the architecture of Gopher Prairie. Well, who's gonna pay for it? That she's gonna uplift their social status for whom?
- [15:02]
Shiloh Brooks
Yeah, she's a woman. She's an idealistic woman in this way. And it becomes a problem. I mean, what do you think this book is saying about women? I mean, because she comes there, she marries this guy, she resists having a child, she eventually has a child.
- [15:14]
David Mamet
She.
- [15:14]
Shiloh Brooks
She feels cloistered away in the house doing housework and these sorts of things. She eventually leaves him to go to Washington and become a working woman. What do you think this book is saying about the plight of women in America kind of in the 20s?
- [15:30]
David Mamet
I have no idea. But she's not an idealist in my book. She's a busybody. So writing in the same period, if you read the works of Willa Cather or a little bit later of Mary Sandoz, they're writing about actual women. And so the question is, what do you want to do about it? You want to be an opera singer? You want to break the prairie? Go do it. You're going to have difficulties. Oh, welcome to the world. Right. People are going to perhaps have prejudices against you because you're a woman. Well, telling them to improve their architecture is not going to improve anybody's life. Going to improve her life. So she's supercilious and she's a busybody because she never stops to think about whom do I want to help? What's going to be the cost? What happens if I fail? And how do I gauge my success? She wants to turn everything into, in effect, Colonial Williamsburg. And I was reminded of something that Thomas Sowell said. He said someone was bitching because they had this nice neighborhood. And he says. The guy says. The bitch says, my neighborhood is ruined because this guy built a house in a style which is inappropriate to this neighborhood. And Tom Sowell says, it's not your neighborhood, it's your house. It's not your neighborhood. So it's not her neighborhood, it's her house. She signed up for it. She married the guy. If she wanted to spend more time checking it out, she could have gone to Gopher Prairie and looked around, said, it's not for me. So I don't, you know, I got my own prejudice. I'm so happy with them, I don't need to read somebody else's.
- [17:13]
Shiloh Brooks
Yeah, I mean, do you think. I mean, so you said she comes there to beautify the place in a way, to edify the citizens. And I grant your point that this is a naive hope that she's in her 20s, she hasn't lived, she doesn't fully understand the ways of the world. She seems to also, by the way, have some socialist leanings and have a certain kind of socialist utopian streak in her. I only want to defend one thing in her, and that is her. I wonder if her desire to make people better and have them read better books is not defensible. Now, this is, of course, the books podcast, but I think that this woman loves the beautiful. She loves beautiful architecture. She loves beautiful words, poetry and literature. It's not. It's what she does when she comes there and has contempt for these people is wrong. This makes sense to me. But is there not something noble about having some admiration for, even if it's naive and youthful, the kind of rich and robust possibilities of human creativity, that good books are good things, good architecture is good things, these things make our lives better. Is that wholly false?
- [18:26]
David Mamet
No, again, that's called liberalism. That's saying, because I have an idea about what's beautiful, someone else has to change their behavior. Right. What she lacks. And again, she's not naive, she's discourteous. She's absolutely discourteous because she should say, this is my choice. I'm living here. What can I, you know, if I want? How about rather than trying to change the lives of others, I change my own life? Because she's obviously dissatisfied. And every page of the book, whatever happens to her, she's dissatisfied. And she always blames it on others. She blames it on Sauk City. She blames it on Kennecott. She blames it on the people there who don't understand that they need a library that's clothed in marble. The other thing is her idea of what's beautiful. She adopts that as the final norm, not realizing, because she's very arrogant, that other people Have a different idea of what's beautiful, Right. In effect, if Carol Kennecott actually existed and you went back and looked at the things that she admired at that point in 1920, you or I might look at her today and say she's out of her mind. Those things aren't beautiful. You want to read Ruskin, shoot me in the head. Not literally.
- [19:49]
Shiloh Brooks
You know, you're a defender of the people of Main street, which I empathize with that she comes in there riding high on her horse and, you know, seems to have these discourteous, as you put it, naive, as I put it, ideas. There is some intolerance on Main Street America in this book. In other words, these people seem. There are a few characters. There's a character named Miles Bjornston who's. Who's a kind of man of. Again, of socialist leanings, but who's relatively learned and who is all but, you know, banished from the town. There's a. A young boy, Eric, who comes in who's very good looking and has aspirations to be a tailor and is sort of beautiful. He doesn't seem to fit in. There's a teacher named Fern who comes to the town who is a bit of a wild woman. And she is not really tolerated and is ejected from the town. Carol herself, the people are skeptical of. So I, too, sympathize with the people of Main Street. But at the same time, is there not something intolerant about them too, and relatively dark about them? There's a gossip with this woman who's a great gossip, and they sort of say bad things about each other behind their back. And I just wonder if Lewis is not trying to bring out the kind of dark side of the idealized American small prairie town with the white picket fences.
- [21:10]
David Mamet
You know, I wish if I could go back in time, I'd go back to Carol Kennecott. I told her to mind her own business. The book is. It's not dishonest. It's just. It's really not inspired by what I would call an inspiring view of the town, which is. These are people trying to get through their lives. The way that they act is really none of my business. The only thing I can change in life is my own behavior, including my thoughts. I can't change my thoughts, but I can change my behavior having looked at them so she could look at her thoughts. I just don't like the book. The difference between a really good writer and the less good writer is that the less good writer is writing about other people, which is what Sinclair Lewis is doing. He just doesn't have any. He doesn't have any. He has a viewpoint and he's staging. You know, it's like they used to do in the theater. If you were directing a play in the theater, they built you a model of the set and you had little pieces of cardboard representing the different characters. And you moved them around to see their relationship so that when you got to the theater, you'd already have the play blocked. That was completely useless. Because what you're doing when you're blocking a play is you're really feeling more than looking at the actual interaction between actual human beings. Right. Which has a little bit of something to do with their spatial relationship, but has a lot more to do with their actual objectives, which cardboard figures don't have. So similarly, the characters in Sinclair Lewis books are basically cardboard figures to whom he's ascribing ex cathedra attitudes, which he's then ruling on from the purpose of himself in the person of himself and his representative of Carol Kennecott.
- [23:14]
Shiloh Brooks
There's a character in this book who, if there is such a character, and I know you think, you know, some of these characters lack complexity. I want to kind of defend Lewis, or at least try experimentally to do so, because her husband, Dr. Will Kennecott, you know, she falls in love with him. They have a pretty healthy initial romance. It turns sour. They end up sleeping around on each other. But there's this beautiful scene in the novel where she doesn't really know what he does. She's got contempt for him, his clothing, his tobacco, his house. And so she's sort of at an all time low with respect to admiration of her husband. She goes with him out to a farmer's house who is sick, and he performs surgery and she has to help. It's in the middle of the night, it's cold, snowing. And she has to hold the anesthesia while he puts it in this guy and begins, I believe, to amputate his arm. And she's overwhelmed by his generosity. All of a sudden she sees him as a kind of person who's a hero who's going out to in the cold and saving these poor people and not charging them. He says to the people, you don't have to pay me till the crop comes in so that you can save your money and we'll go ahead and patch up your husband. And she begins to fall back in love with him. And so I wonder if there's not. I mean, I grant you that Lewis has these kind of One dimensional characters. But there does seem to be at least a part of this book where Lewis calls the reader to admire something noble in the prairie doctor. The selfless kind of, you know, he's simple, but he's a man of great spirit. He's a man of magnanimity. So I'm now just trying to get your reaction to my defense of Lewis as something of a more complex writer than what you say.
- [25:02]
David Mamet
Yeah, maybe yes and maybe no. But I don't want any writer to draw my attention to anything. I'm perfectly capable of drawing my own attention to the things I want to draw my own attention to. So I agree with you. That's a lovely scene. But it's not the job of a writer to be fair and balanced, right? It's the job of a good writer to write what he or she sees. And if they had some inspiration, you can call it talent, all the better. So this is an. It's kind of the reverse of the metal of a Norman Rockwell view. That's what Main street is. And the best thing I ever heard about literature, I heard in the sophomore English class in high school. Somebody asked the teacher, what's good taste? He said, good taste is what I like.
- [25:50]
Shiloh Brooks
Do you have a view of immigration in Main Street? This is a topic now of some sensitivity. One of the things that occurred to me in reading Main street was that the immigrants who are shunned are Scandinavian people. They're Swedish people. That's a wholly different world today. But they seem not willing to tolerate immigrants. And this is taking place at the beginning of the outbreak of the First World War, late nineteen teens, early nineteen twenties. It seems to be set. I wasn't quite sure what to make of that in this novel. And I wonder if you had any thoughts about that.
- [26:25]
David Mamet
Well, I'm so fucking sick of people talking, as you are too, about racism and what's racism and what's not racism. And we're a nation of immigrants. And I was reading a very good history of the town of Deadwood and it's talking about how when the whites first came into Deadwood, they were fighting the Sioux and there were all these treaties with the Sioux and the treaties were violated. That's what treaties are for, as we know. And the guy made to me an interesting comment and he said that just that interestingly, subsequently the Sioux had taken the land from the Crows, right? Which of course there's no land which didn't originally belong to someone else. So he takes a view, Sinclair Lewis, an outsider's view. If you will a majoritarian view of the Swedes and the Swedish immigrants, whereas Willa Cather takes exactly the opposite view and says that they're heroes. So it depends on who you're talking to. But I see enough commercials. I have to watch a lot of commercials because they happen between the downs in football. So I don't need more commercials for anything. Especially right thinking in literature. I'd like someone to tell me something I don't know. That people are prejudiced, all of us, and that we're sinful and forgetful and idealistic and all of these things. I know all that stuff. I've been around a long, long, long time. So I don't need someone to point that out to me. I'd like to say someone who's. I don't want to read somebody who sees things a little bit differently than what I do. So I can say, oh, God, A. That's interesting. But before that, I got to say one other thing. You know what that is? That's well written. Because if it's not well written, I'm not going to read it. People send me books all the time, as I'm sure they do to you. And I hate all of them because they hate the books that I sent to them because our test tastes are different. But I always want to give them a break. And I'll say, I'll give you a break. I'll give you a break. I see where you're going. And the point at which I throw the book away is when I find myself rewriting it, right? Because I do that for a living. I don't want to talk to somebody else's book in my head. So something has to be for me to read. It has to be well written. And the best writing that I found is how to manuals, because there's no bullshit, right? Here's. Here's how you change the tire, right? Here's how you land the plane. Here's how you make fudge. Here's how you do this. Here's how you do the next thing. So then if I want information, that's what I'll read.
- [29:11]
Shiloh Brooks
So do you. You know, you. When I asked you to pick a book that changed your life, you mentioned Main Street. It seems to me like you don't like Main street all that much. You just talked about books and a lot of them you don't like. And this sort of thing. Do you think people should read Main Street? And if not, why did it change your life?
- [29:31]
David Mamet
Changed my life. Cause as I said, it Was the first book I put down from. Pulled down from the shelf. But my thinking about life is rather different at 78 than it was at 11. Right. And if it's not, there'd be something awfully wrong with me. So did Main street age? No, Main books don't age. Cause they're written and there they are. People age. Right. And civilizations change. Your question was, do I think people should read Main Street? Yeah.
- [29:58]
Shiloh Brooks
Today? I mean, is it.
- [29:59]
David Mamet
No, no, no, no. I think that their book should be limited to what interests them, only superseded by things that I've written.
- [30:11]
Shiloh Brooks
Let me ask you, if they limit their books to what interests them, wouldn't they be in a way lacking that curiosity which precisely you possess, that led you to the richness of your literary life? Pulling books down off the shelf.
- [30:26]
David Mamet
Well, here's the thing. If people are curious, it's curiosity that interests them. If they aren't curious, what difference does it make? They're gonna listen to some idiot professor give them a book of all the books that I was told to read in high school, looking back, were garbage. And that's one of the things that turned me off of school. So when the high school sophomore said, what's good taste? Good taste is what you like, that was a great permission. Why should I be forced, even by my own good wishes, to read trash? You know, time is too precious.
- [31:09]
Shiloh Brooks
You said Fitzgerald is not a good writer. And you said Salinger is not a good writer. So could you articulate with some precision what it is about the. And I assume that's what you're talking about. Maybe it's not that you read in high school. You know, people read Steinbeck, people, people, you know, Hemingway, these sorts of people. I don't know if you think Hemingway is trash, but can you articulate what it is about? And you, and you, and Sinclair Lewis too, you've said is a bad writer. And of course he was very commercially successful. I understand Main street sold 2 million copies. Interestingly, he won the Nobel Prize when Fitzgerald didn't, of course, Hemingway did. But we can talk about their critical reception and that stuff later. I'm interested in get you to say, what is it that these, these so called great American novels, the Fitzgeralds, the Salingers, the Lewis are trash. In what does their demerit consist?
- [31:58]
David Mamet
Well, listen, hyperbole is my stock in trade. It's also my middle name. My grandfather was Greek and he had a goat named hyperbole, so that's my middle name. So to say that they're trash, perhaps they aren't trash. But also, Steinbeck is just not a good writer. And Tos Passos is a wretched writer, and Hemingway was a genius. So the question is, what constitutes good writing? And again, good writing is what I like. So I'll ask you a question. Who's your favorite actor?
- [32:35]
Shiloh Brooks
I tend to like the range of parts that someone like Christian Bale plays.
- [32:39]
David Mamet
Okay? So you don't even have to name names. Everyone has an idea. That's my favorite actor. I love this guy. It's my favorite actress. I love that girl. And who's an actor? And actors I don't like so much, right? If pressed, the interrogatee would say, well, here's why. But finally, at the end of the day, you just like them better. There's something in them that appeals to your sensibility, right? There are a lot of people can play Chopin, right? And a lot of people would like the people who play it with great feeling and interpretation, you know? On the other hand, there are people who play Chopin with no interpretation, but are just gonna play the stupid fucking movie. And to me, they're geniuses. People who don't interpret the material.
- [33:24]
Shiloh Brooks
But then. So it seems like one of the things you're trying to do is divorce aesthetics, namely, artistic taste, from any standard. So you're saying what you like is what you like, which is a kind of aesthetic relativism. And you like what you like, and I like what I like. But doesn't that make any aesthetic standard impossible?
- [33:47]
David Mamet
No, it makes it personal.
- [33:49]
Shiloh Brooks
I mean, objective, aesthetic standard, such that we as a culture could say, Shakespeare is simply great drama, period, you know?
- [34:00]
David Mamet
Yeah, well, some people wouldn't say that. I mean, look at. Shakespeare was the greatest person who ever wrote the English language, right? But there are people who say that he didn't write it. So this is an example of me of a superior view that everyone has his or her own idea of what they like. So if you say, like Carol Kennecott. No, no, there must be an objective standard. If I don't like that objective standard, where am I A. And who are you to tell me what to like? Right? I don't like kale. I mean, there are other people who like kale. I don't want the Department of Health and Human Services to tell me that I'm an idiot for not liking kale or an idiot for not liking Salinger.
- [34:48]
Shiloh Brooks
Yeah, but it seems to me, though, in asserting that there are no, say, objective standards of literary merit or dramatic merit, that it's all about taste, you yourself assert an objective standard, namely the universal standard that the rule is it's all about taste. You see what I mean? And so in a way, we haven't gotten away from the problem.
- [35:09]
David Mamet
Listen, at some point, and I'm just reading Karl Popper, who's a great philosopher and psychiatrist and sociologist, and he says that the liberal view is always one of endless regression. It's one of the liberal view says, well, wait a second, there's got to be an objective standard. I say, well, okay, we're going to regress. Now what is objective? Well, objective is I'll take a survey of the 500 most qualified people in the world and I will say, well, this is an objective standard. Well, what's well qualified? Well, the people who have gone to the highest universities of blah, blah. Well, why are they the highest universities? So at some point, as Karl Popper says, you gotta say there's a way things are. And we aren't going to be able to define especially an aesthetical principle back into nothingness. Because finally what you're talking about is gentle fascism. Someone's going to tell, like that's what schools do. They say, this is good, that's bad, right? Well, people told me that catch you in the Y was good. I don't like it. So if there's an actual objective standard, A, and it's getting put over by these jumped up people to call teachers onto the defenseless, call students. So what am I being told? I'm being told I'm wrong. I'm being told I'm stupid. Which is what Carol Kennecott is saying to the people there. You are just wrong. Don't you see that the bank should, that we need a city hall? Don't you see that? How stupid are you not to have standards? But they're saying, well, A, who are you? And B, are you going to pay for it? And C, who's going to determine what the standard of architecture should be? So Carol Kennecott's answer, It's me. So that's the same thing as a kind of a curatorship view of the arts, right? Now, I've been doing this for a long time and I founded a bunch of theater companies and did a lot of work and a certain amount of work in the not for profit theaters. And became clear about 30 years ago it was easy to do it with the for profit theaters, right? Because the for profit theaters were trying to get the asses in the seats, period. I can get the asses in the seats. Everybody made money. I couldn't. It Failed what the not for profit theaters are doing because of government subsidies and because of subscribership. We're putting forward an agenda and saying, in effect, we think this is good for you. We think you're going to like it. And if you don't like it, you're wrong. Because this has been a, this has been approved. Right? Yeah.
- [38:16]
Shiloh Brooks
Yeah. I don't deny that kind of paternalistic, here's what's good, and you need to now take it and smile and enjoy and learn and that sort of thing. I don't like that either myself. But I wouldn't go as far as you go, which is to say that that must mean simply, and this is how I understand you, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, that must mean simply that we don't have any access to something that's objectively good and true, that Shakespeare in the order of rank is, is better than some Joe off the street. You know, I don't draw that conclusion from my agreement with you that the kind of paternalism and putting it over on you is, you know, obviously bad. You know, just ridiculous and disgusting.
- [38:57]
David Mamet
Well, we do, we do have an, we do have a standard which is objective as it can get. Which is. I like it. Right.
- [39:04]
Shiloh Brooks
Yeah.
- [39:04]
David Mamet
I could, you know, I, I, I write drama for a living. I could, I could talk to you for, for many, many days about Shakespeare. Right. And about iambic pentameter and about the Stonitzen. But at the end of the day, so what? Some people don't like Shakespeare. It's not the job of art to improve us. Right, Right. It's the job of dictators to improve us. Right. Because I was looking at football, and these guys have a thing on the back of their helmet that says, change or inspire Change or change the world. So my question, I was thinking about this in terms of Carol Kennecott because she wants to change the world, Right. She wants to change Gopher Prairie, which to her is the world, but she can't change a tire. This is not a specious analogy. The world is much more complicated than changing a tire. So what does that actually mean, to change the world? It means to make the world that God has unfortunately formed into a form and an operation. I disapprove of. I disapprove of God's bad taste to remake the world in my. Carol Kennecott's image. That's not the job of art. One can get people to say, yes, I agree with this play, because that's the kind of play that a person like me would agree with. Right. But that's very, very different than getting an audience to laugh or getting an audience to gasp or getting an audience to cry, which is the highest achievement of drama. To take them out of themselves, not to toss them back on their own ability to be critical.
- [40:57]
Shiloh Brooks
What do you think the relationship. Because you've mentioned art and its nature and politics and its nature, and, you know, the one is to get people to change. The other is to not to get people to change. There's another force in the room that I think, you know, we should. We should discuss, which is philosophy. That philosophy's purpose is to find the truth. And oftentimes it unites with art. So that art is to be some kind of beautiful expression of what's true. And therefore it has a kind of philosophic underpinning or undertone. The same would be true of politics, political philosophy. That we want that regime which is, according to reason, good, the best regime, not the worst regime. And so you get writers like Plato. I understand you at some points to be saying there's no objective standards. I'm tempted then to say you think that there's no such thing as truth. But that would mean that philosophy itself, as the pursuit of truth, has no real relationship to art or to politics. And so I want to get you to reflect on the place of the significance of philosophy as the pursuit of truth in the artistic or the political endeavor.
- [42:09]
David Mamet
Well, truth is a metaphysical concept, isn't it? The idea to reduce truth to practicality is to a large extent the purview of philosophy, which almost always gets into an infinite regression. How do we define this term? How do we define that term? But the practical expression in politics is morality, which is expressed objectively in laws. So that the liberal mind is, I have to do what's good, right? But the conservative or the restricted or constrained view is I don't even know what's good for me, right? I'm screwing the yoga instructor, you know, and my wife's a drunk, and my kids are trying to cut their genitals off. I don't know what's good for me.
- [43:05]
Shiloh Brooks
This is old school.
- [43:07]
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- [43:21]
Shiloh Brooks
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- [44:08]
David Mamet
Why would I want to do something that's. So the idea. The idea of the constrained view is I'm not going to do what's good, I'm going to do. I'm going to apply certain laws which I've decided are a objective expression of the potential ability of people to get along. And now I'm going to abide by those laws. Right. Are the laws imperfect? Yes. Are they traduced? Yes. Are human beings imperfect? Yes. But abiding by the laws, as flawed as they are, as flawed as I am, is better than saying, no, there can't be any laws because there's a much more important thing called truth. So I want to be very careful about talking about what's true. So art is not supposed. Listen, when we say art is true, what we mean is it's beautiful. What actually we mean at the end of the day is I like, speaks to me at this moment in time. Now, is there an eternal truth? You know, that thy eternal beauty shall not fade? The young lover, blah, blah, blah. Women around a Grecian maybe. At one point I found Rothko's paintings stupid. Now I find them interesting. People change over time. Civilizations change over time. And if you look at the list of the best sellers of 1920, with the exception of maybe one or two, they're completely forgotten and for good reason. So my question to you. Let me take it to a different level of extra. Of abstraction. You are by implication suggesting that there's an authority that could rule on what is absolutely true. So my question for you is, who elects that authority? And my next question for you is, when that authority, as it always will be, will be outdated by changes in civilization, what kind of M16s with a bayonet are you going to use to get that authority to go away and give up?
- [46:16]
Shiloh Brooks
Yeah, yeah. No, I don't no, no, not at all. I mean, I think you're. The point you just made is beautifully captured in. In a book we did, a show on, Plato's Republic. Namely, I would say to you, I suspect that some measure of truth can be known. Let's just say. And then you've asked me, well, if that could. If it could be known, who would rule? So, absolutely, it's not clear to me that because truth can be known, maybe it can. I'm arguing it can. You're arguing maybe it can't. But let's say that it can, because truth can be known. That it could be deployed in practice in a clean or fair way. In other words, what we might come to see as truth about justice, were we to try to implement that into the world, might require injustice, or it might be dirty. So what I'm now doing is trying to divide the enterprise of theory from that of practice and say, with respect to theory, maybe there are things that we can know. But unfortunately, when those good and knowable things, should they exist, are deployed and implemented into practical life, things become dirty. And so that's when you have to have the M16s. And that's a real problem. So I grant your point, and I think this is a subject of much really great political philosophy.
- [47:32]
David Mamet
Well, here's my question for you. When you say the things that we can know. Yeah. Who do you mean by we human beings? What do you mean? Okay, so there's a lot of human beings. So they aren't. Are all these human beings going to get together as a committee of the whole and vote on what's true? Okay.
- [47:52]
Shiloh Brooks
No, I don't think.
- [47:53]
David Mamet
Who's going to decide?
- [47:55]
Shiloh Brooks
Well, I have in mind here just the Socratic enterprise of a man, maybe a single man, seeking truth. And it may well be that the people around him think the opposite thing is true. But I have some hope that there's such a thing as a philosopher who can pursue what's knowable. It's not something we would vote on. It's something that one might know, but one might not be able to hope that it could be practiced and realized in the world.
- [48:22]
David Mamet
Well, I agree, too. I mean, we're coming to the time in a couple of days when there was such a philosopher and they killed him. Yeah. My question is, of course there's such a thing as truth. And of course, we try to live a life which is true, which is to say good. So the question is, what is good? And the answer is moral. How do we know what's moral? Well, the Western tradition would say you can find that it's in the Bible, right? And it comes down to what is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor. That's it. That's enough. That's going to keep everybody honest. But when you come up with your philosopher here and your philosopher there, they're going to have their own idea what's society going to do to those people, right? It's going to kill them. The people that it applauds society, human beings, being mob creatures, are generally going to be frauds. And the people, like Socrates and like Jesus Christ, the people that offend it, unlike Charlie Kirk, are risking their lives. So the question is, how do you. Because the real point is when we say there has to be this thing which is going to change the world, well, who's going to be in charge of that? Me or my myrmidons? The people who think like me. So good. It's great that there's Sinclair Lewis who says these people are a bunch of fucking bores. And it's great that there's Willa Cather who says that these people are heroes. And if you got a library, we can read both books and decide, P.S. we can read those books again 60 years later and decide differently. But I don't think. In fact, I am completely opposed to the idea it's the point of art, to better us. Because have you gone to an art museum lately? I have. It's garbage. It's complete garbage. So wait a second. So it's being. So that's the fiction of the curator, that the curator knows more than I do? No, he doesn't know more than I do. He just knows differently. And he or she wants to keep their job. So how do they keep their job? By sucking up to a bunch of people who. Who don't know better but have a bunch of bucks. And they say, I don't know better. But this guy's got a degree from the bumfuck school of artistic desecration. Let me give him $10 million and put up bundles of piss with an icon in them. Right?
- [51:07]
Shiloh Brooks
The word of the day is tendentious. Tendentious basically means bias. That you have a single point of view from which you communicate everything and no one's allowed to disagree. A single point of view is all you permit. An argument, almost like an ideologue. You permit zero dissent. Tendentious.
- [51:31]
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- [52:20]
Given that, you know, you think that all of the kind of goodness of art boils down to or is attributable to taste, you've written a lot of things and a lot of people have loved those things. Maybe they share you because they like.
- [52:36]
David Mamet
What it is that you think. I didn't say the goodness of art boils down to taste. What? I said that each individual has his or her own taste with which they are going to understand and appreciate art.
- [52:50]
Shiloh Brooks
Okay, so if each individual has his or her own taste, with which they're going to understand and appreciate art, can you tell us a little bit about your taste?
- [52:59]
David Mamet
Yeah. I love good writing. If something is well written, I can read it every few years. And I do. Right. That which is too good, what makes it good? Okay, well, that's the question. What makes it good is. So now we get into an infinite regression. It's good because it's well written. Well, how do I know it's well written? Because I like it. Well, why do I like it? Right. So if I am not permitted, which is the scholastic model, to stop me from exercising my understanding of my own taste, if I'm not permitted to exercise my own taste, I can get angry or I can get self loathing, right? If they say, well, how dare you, Mr. Teacher, say that I have to like this book and you're going to explain why. That's why I say you always have to read. If you read an introduction, any book, read it at the end, right? Determine your own. Because I've read a billion books. But when I read the introduction first, it always somehow, although I try to avoid it, influences my understanding of the book. My good friend Shel Silverstein was talking to me one day and I said, let's go get a cup of coffee. He said, let's get a cup of coffee. I said, I can't. I gotta do research for this project I'm writing. He said, never do research. When you do research, all you're doing is written reading something by somebody who didn't do research.
- [54:35]
Shiloh Brooks
You've done writing in a lot of different formats. I mean, you've written novels, of course, you've written screenplays, and you've written plays. I'm just curious about how that exercise of writing, if at all changes between those three different kind of formats. Because I've heard you say in other interviews that screenwriting and playwriting, it's not about the actor having access to the inner reflection of the character, that they should just sort of say the lines and let the audience make up their own minds. And that's the sentiment you've expressed today. But novels, it seems to me, have some difference in that regard, that there's a lot more room for the author to explore, as Sinclair Lewis does with Carol Kennicott, the inner life and psychology of the character. I don't know if you agree with that, but I know you've written in all three forms. And I just wanted to get you to say something about your experience writing each of those three forms and whether they're the same or different.
- [55:34]
David Mamet
Well, of course they're different. I mean, you know, a writer of fiction can be expatiatory, right? Here's what the character thought. Here's what the character thought. So it's an error of the English department to transfer this into drama and to say, well, I wonder what the character thought. Let's talk about what this dramatic character was thinking. But the dramatic character doesn't exist. It's a few words on the page, right? Sinclair Lewis gets to do that in a novel, as does Dreiser. But when a dramatist does that, the audience loses interest because that's not why they came to the theater. It's no different than here's something else. You watch football. Football is so great these days. After the wonderful plays or after the wins, people come up and they stick a microphone in the winner's face and say, what were you thinking when? What did you feel when? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The reason they say those completely fatuous things is they don't know what else to ask. They've just seen an act of magnificence or heroism or church chance or beauty that inspired them, and they want to bring something else to it. But there is no relationship between that reporter and the player. The actual ding, as such, or whatever the crowds say was the play. Right. The character Wasn't thinking anything. He was playing football. So that's what the best of drama is. And that's why people seem to like my plays. I took out all the narration, just took it out.
- [57:11]
Shiloh Brooks
Who is the most influential writer on you?
- [57:15]
David Mamet
Oh, that's an excellent question. I think it's probably Shakespeare and I.
- [57:19]
Shiloh Brooks
Can'T help but ask why. I know it's a lighting round.
- [57:22]
David Mamet
Well, I'm a very good writer. I can write many, many forms. I could imitate many, many forms. I could pastiche them. I could write most things of most writers that would pass for what they do and people wouldn't know. I could improve some of them. I can't do any of that with Shakespeare. As good as I may be, it's absolutely impossible for me to do anything other than look at his work with awe.
- [57:59]
Shiloh Brooks
That's very beautiful and well stated. You've mentioned a lot of writers that you don't like. Is there. So I had on here a question. Who's the writer you can't stand? Is there one that just. You really. I mean, you know, you got Shakespeare at the top. Who. Who is it that you really can't stand?
- [58:19]
David Mamet
Dickens.
- [58:20]
Shiloh Brooks
Dickens. And was there a book that you've read recently that's changed your mind about something?
- [58:28]
David Mamet
That's a very good question. Well, as I say, I'm reading this book by Karl Popper about that history has no meaning. And he's talking about the platonic view, right, that there is a final truth and that it should be. And it's the responsibility of the elites to live according to that truth and fuck the slaves. Which is basically the platonic view that Sinclair Lewis has in most of his writings. I read a book by a guy called Tenmouth Shore, S H O R e, written in 1905. Was it? Yes, about the Tranby Croft case, which was a great scandal in Victorian England. The Prince of Wales, then Edward, the Prince of Wales, was in a scandal where someone had been cheating at whist. And it became the crime of the century for that two years. Was the guy cheating? Was he not cheating? What was the prince doing there? So Tenmouth Shaw wrote a whole bunch of books about great Victorian trials. So I read that book. And then he read another book about the Count d', Orsay, who was a wonderful dandy. I think a late Regency dandy. So I enjoyed those books very much.
- [59:56]
Shiloh Brooks
Who's the best American playwright?
- [59:59]
David Mamet
I would say it's probably Hector MacArthur in the front page. I think that's my work to one side and Contemporary work to one side. I don't want to talk about my contemporaries. I think that's the best American play.
- [60:12]
Shiloh Brooks
I'm curious if you think America has produced a piece of writing which, in the pantheon of great writing, in which we might include Shakespeare, we might include, you know, Plato, whatever the case may be, is there a kind of an American artifact of writing which has ascended to that. To that level?
- [60:32]
David Mamet
Yes. Well, here's the thing. People used to say Chicago was the point at which America ceased to be Europe. And so there was a great over abolition of talent. Coming out of Chicago at the end of the 19th into the 20th century were the writers I most revere and reread, and especially among them, Theodore Dreiser, who. And the other thing of the. The other writer I really revere is John o', Hara, who spent his whole life, very, very successful life as a very wonderful writer and well thought up writing, bitching about how he wasn't admired as much as Hemingway. And I love Hemingway, who's also from Oak park, which is kind of from Chicago. But something was happening that American literature ceased to be European in Chicago with Dreiser and Frank Norris and Willa Catherine Nella Larson, and even with Bea Traven, who nobody reads anymore, who was one of the most wonderful writers of the 20th century. He wrote books about the mahogany foresters in Columbia. What hell, that was so. I love the Chicagoans and love the Midwesterners. I'm crazy about them.
- [61:59]
Shiloh Brooks
Well, look, thank you for the range and the breadth and the depth of this conversation. It has been wonderful having you on Old School. David, thank you so much.
- [62:08]
David Mamet
Yeah, you're welcome. Thank you for your patience. I appreciate it.