Questions and answers
William Keen
JAFSIE AND JOHN HENRY: ESSAYS ON HOLLYWOOD, BAD BOYS AND SIX HOURS OF PERFECT POKER by David Mamet Faber, £9.99, pp.171 WILSON: A CONSIDERATION OF THE SOURCES by David Mamet Faber, £9.99, pp. 337 Acentral tension informs David Mamet's new book of essays, Jafsie and John Henry. On the one hand, there is Mamet's devouring intellectual and verbal appetite. On the other hand, there is his worship of the anti-intellectual; the simple pleasures of hunting, of home life; the beauty of functional things — knives, bath- tubs, the Aga, the 88-inch wheel-base Land-Rover.
These twin impulses are well rehearsed in the language itself. Mamet is consum- mately articulate, almost too articulate at times. He is in love with words — particu- larly precise, technical vocabulary — and sometimes his orotundity gets the better of him: `So the double-encrypted wish-dream in the Noach story is the memory of the desire to renounce/forget murder.' Ideas like this whirl away into their own vortices of verbiage. They are offset by brief, axiomatic pronouncements. One-sentence paragraphs abound. Great essayists are neither patronising nor falsely modest. They make the reader feel as capable of the thoughts as them- selves; or that the thoughts are so delight- ful or compelling, they just have to be shared. Mamet's pronouncements seem to be delivered from the big chair, or behind the lectern. He suddenly asks: Q. Do things make us happy?
A. I don't know.
, It's an interesting question, but seeing A. I don't know' in print gives the impres- sion that he is affecting at the same time both authority and humility. Which begs Q.I Cake or eat? and Q.2 Who asked you anyway?
'Things' are a recurring concern, and to what extent they carry their own history with them: 'I like a knife to stain. I like it to show wear. I like them to have a story— that, after all, is the joy of collecting, to understand the story. One of the joys of use is to add to it.'
'Wear' is seen as the stamp of authentici- ty. An essay about moving house looks at the specific associations of memory with the specific geography of his old home. At the same time, What he fears and resents in his new home is the lack of that kind of 'wear'. How do events attach themselves to objects, and by what alchemy does that arouse an emotional response? Mamet plays heavy vibrato for his first car, a 1967 Karmann Ghia, or for 'Greg's kitchen table'. Even just 'a quart of milk and a package of Milano cookies' assume a talismanic status. In several essays, he searches for the ways in which actual objects and actual experiences might have formed him. This search is always inconclu- sive, and the fact that it is fixes those objects and those experiences in a mythic light.
Another keynote of the essays is the rela- tionship between the individual conscience and society. He has explored this central democratic theme brilliantly in his dramat- ic work. He also fights with vigour, and persuasively, against the computer, the television and the age of information. It is this Luddite sympathy, perhaps, which has inspired his new novel, Wilson: A Consider- ation of the Sources. This hypothesises a future age when the collective memory of the 21st century has been lost through an Internet crash, and then reconstructed from the downloaded memories of ex- president Wilson's wife. In the form of a collection of half-told stories, sketches, poems and academic analyses, featuring a cast of cartoon-like characters, it is a gothic voyage into meaninglessness and impene- trability. Through language, language is defeated — at least, as far as I can make out, for, if its intention is impenetrability, boy, does it deliver. There are some good jokes, particularly among the interminable footnotes. But there seems to be a problem of conception here. If a large part of the book is an excellent pastiche of the fastidi- ousness and myopia of some academics, the reader is subjected to that fastidious- ness and myopia at first hand, and at great length.
The extraordinary pyrotechnics of lan- guage only serve to throw the book's wilful obscurity into relief. Since it is hard to dis- cern even the dimmest vestige of plot or character, it becomes heavy going indeed.
Q. Is it any good, this book?
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