It’s All Old Hat
David Mamet, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch
Broadside Books, 240pp, £20.00, ISBN 9780063158993
reviewed by Miles Beard
The first problem one encounters with David Mamet’s new essay collection, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch is figuring out what in the hell he’s talking about. What begins to reveal itself, however, is that this question is answered more easily by asking a subtly different one: who in the hell is he talking to?
By his own self-mythologising, Mamet is still a humble newspaperman who, despite the judgement of his critics, somehow foraged a path to becoming a world-renowned playwright and screenwriter. Never mind that he was nominated for the Pulitzer twice (winning once) and was nominated for an Oscar twice as well: in his estimation he remains ‘blacklisted’. Strange, then, that American Buffalo was revived on Broadway just this past April, starring two A-List Hollywood actors. Or that his newest play The Christopher Boy’s Communion was adapted for BBC Radio 4 last year. Even the existence of this very book would seem to belie the lack of cultural cachet he claims to endure now.
Here’s where the question of audience comes in. I’m not really supposed to be reading this book. I know that the awards dried up; that those recent stagings didn’t receive great reviews; that Recessional was published by a HarperCollins imprint dedicated to ‘right-of-centre thought and opinion’ when he used to be able to rely upon literary stalwarts like Vintage and Faber. But I don’t feel sorry for him and I don’t see myself at all in his story. He might find this odd as I am a white man, the only subset of society these essays seem to target, though he also has a particular animus towards universities, so he’d probably just blame it on my bastardised education.
The story Mamet wants to tell is as myopic as it is banal. If I tell you that he thinks the election was ‘stolen’ from Donald Trump and that the real virus of 2020 was ‘government penalty’, you’re already well equipped to divine his opinion on pretty much every other issue of the day. Yet the level of misdirection and mischaracterisation he espouses is staggering nonetheless. To Mamet, Trump was the victim of a neo-‘auto-da-fé’ to dissuade anyone from running on his platform again; mask mandates were installed to ‘function as a religious symbol, like the burka’. What to make of Biden’s draconian immigration and asylum policy, virtually unchanged from Trump’s? Of every state in the US ending its general mask requirement, if it ever even had one? But this is beside the point and it’s illustrative why I’m so unsuitable as a reader. The only purpose is grievance, the only method obfuscation.
How else to judge an interpretive history of the last 50 years that manages to be pro-Vietnam War, pro-bomb, pro-police brutality (with accompanying footnote suggesting China unleashed COVID on purpose) all in the space of three pages? Or that on one page he can refer to ‘the national hysteria of “The N-Word”’ and on the other offhandedly mention ‘the oppressor reimagines himself as the entitled victim’, without any discernible trace of irony? If you aren’t already red-pilled into believing that a confluence of socio-political forces are, by design, denying you your sense of pride in your (white) race, your (masculine) gender, or your (straight) sexuality, there’s not going to be much for you amidst all the grandiose backslapping and lachrymose commiserations.
And it should go without saying that I find none of this particularly triggering — it’s all old hat and too intentionally inflammatory. Rather, it’s baffling, and a little dispiriting as well. In one essay, as Mamet began a characteristic discursion from early American history to the hanging of the fascist William Joyce for treason in London in 1946, I found myself in a state of unusual curiosity. Mamet was reciting a few interesting points from Joyce’s case I hadn’t heard before, about how Joyce was never a British citizen and therefore couldn’t in fact commit treason. But where was this all going? Was Mamet, a Jewish man fiercely attuned to anti-Semitism, going to make an impassioned defence of Joyce’s right to make his incendiary radio broadcasts, even as a Jewish man fiercely attuned to anti-Semitism? Ha. No. He was merely segueing into a diatribe about the NFL player Colin Kaepernick in order to allege that there’s something hypocritical about Kaepernick kneeling during national anthem but not refusing half of his salary. (I couldn’t possibly explain how any of this relates.)
The truth is that I ordered Recessional specially from the US for what I sometimes refer to as my own anti-edification. As with the Spectator subscription I renew whenever it comes with a net-profit John Lewis voucher (or demi bottle of champagne if we’re feeling fancy) I hoped to be moderately entertained and mildly challenged by someone who I assumed to at least keep up with the basic machinations of government. And I suppose it was like that, in a way, if every article was written by Rod Liddle who’d happened to recently ingest a thesaurus. (What, truly, is the writerly utility of casually dropping terms like hegira, solon, and envoi except to flatter your audience by giving the impression that you believe that they’ll understand what you’ve written because those terms are of course common to them as well?)
It was only at the book’s end that I really reckoned with what I’d put myself through. Given the author’s ego, I’d perversely been looking forward to his acknowledgements, which I assumed would manage to be both meagre and self-aggrandising. I wasn’t wrong there, but for the first time (not even the copyright page had noted this) the source of the rot was exhumed: ‘Much of the material appeared previously in National Review.’ Oh, for fuck’s sake, I thought. That explains the obsequious, nonsensical Ben Shapiro blurb on the cover. The book’s noticeable slightness, padded, even, by a thoroughly unnecessary index. Each essay’s uncontextualised in media res setting. The unmistakably digital sense of impermanence in the writing as each overly verbose passage seems to have been casted off with abandon, only for an editor to politely suggest a footnote might be helpful here or there long after the fact.
I wondered why I had bothered to read it, though it was only with this information, at the end, on the very last page, that I could appreciate how little effort he had put into writing it. I didn’t necessarily arrive at any profound answer of what drives his blatantly reactionary politics (I honestly believe he doesn’t know himself) but there is something key here which, for me, became unlocked: the echo chamber is a poor metaphor because it implies that anyone could hear the same message were they to only listen. The truth is that some messages are so deliberately written to exclude that no amount of effort can make you any closer to understanding their speaker, and, much of the time, that’s the point.
By his own self-mythologising, Mamet is still a humble newspaperman who, despite the judgement of his critics, somehow foraged a path to becoming a world-renowned playwright and screenwriter. Never mind that he was nominated for the Pulitzer twice (winning once) and was nominated for an Oscar twice as well: in his estimation he remains ‘blacklisted’. Strange, then, that American Buffalo was revived on Broadway just this past April, starring two A-List Hollywood actors. Or that his newest play The Christopher Boy’s Communion was adapted for BBC Radio 4 last year. Even the existence of this very book would seem to belie the lack of cultural cachet he claims to endure now.
Here’s where the question of audience comes in. I’m not really supposed to be reading this book. I know that the awards dried up; that those recent stagings didn’t receive great reviews; that Recessional was published by a HarperCollins imprint dedicated to ‘right-of-centre thought and opinion’ when he used to be able to rely upon literary stalwarts like Vintage and Faber. But I don’t feel sorry for him and I don’t see myself at all in his story. He might find this odd as I am a white man, the only subset of society these essays seem to target, though he also has a particular animus towards universities, so he’d probably just blame it on my bastardised education.
The story Mamet wants to tell is as myopic as it is banal. If I tell you that he thinks the election was ‘stolen’ from Donald Trump and that the real virus of 2020 was ‘government penalty’, you’re already well equipped to divine his opinion on pretty much every other issue of the day. Yet the level of misdirection and mischaracterisation he espouses is staggering nonetheless. To Mamet, Trump was the victim of a neo-‘auto-da-fé’ to dissuade anyone from running on his platform again; mask mandates were installed to ‘function as a religious symbol, like the burka’. What to make of Biden’s draconian immigration and asylum policy, virtually unchanged from Trump’s? Of every state in the US ending its general mask requirement, if it ever even had one? But this is beside the point and it’s illustrative why I’m so unsuitable as a reader. The only purpose is grievance, the only method obfuscation.
How else to judge an interpretive history of the last 50 years that manages to be pro-Vietnam War, pro-bomb, pro-police brutality (with accompanying footnote suggesting China unleashed COVID on purpose) all in the space of three pages? Or that on one page he can refer to ‘the national hysteria of “The N-Word”’ and on the other offhandedly mention ‘the oppressor reimagines himself as the entitled victim’, without any discernible trace of irony? If you aren’t already red-pilled into believing that a confluence of socio-political forces are, by design, denying you your sense of pride in your (white) race, your (masculine) gender, or your (straight) sexuality, there’s not going to be much for you amidst all the grandiose backslapping and lachrymose commiserations.
And it should go without saying that I find none of this particularly triggering — it’s all old hat and too intentionally inflammatory. Rather, it’s baffling, and a little dispiriting as well. In one essay, as Mamet began a characteristic discursion from early American history to the hanging of the fascist William Joyce for treason in London in 1946, I found myself in a state of unusual curiosity. Mamet was reciting a few interesting points from Joyce’s case I hadn’t heard before, about how Joyce was never a British citizen and therefore couldn’t in fact commit treason. But where was this all going? Was Mamet, a Jewish man fiercely attuned to anti-Semitism, going to make an impassioned defence of Joyce’s right to make his incendiary radio broadcasts, even as a Jewish man fiercely attuned to anti-Semitism? Ha. No. He was merely segueing into a diatribe about the NFL player Colin Kaepernick in order to allege that there’s something hypocritical about Kaepernick kneeling during national anthem but not refusing half of his salary. (I couldn’t possibly explain how any of this relates.)
The truth is that I ordered Recessional specially from the US for what I sometimes refer to as my own anti-edification. As with the Spectator subscription I renew whenever it comes with a net-profit John Lewis voucher (or demi bottle of champagne if we’re feeling fancy) I hoped to be moderately entertained and mildly challenged by someone who I assumed to at least keep up with the basic machinations of government. And I suppose it was like that, in a way, if every article was written by Rod Liddle who’d happened to recently ingest a thesaurus. (What, truly, is the writerly utility of casually dropping terms like hegira, solon, and envoi except to flatter your audience by giving the impression that you believe that they’ll understand what you’ve written because those terms are of course common to them as well?)
It was only at the book’s end that I really reckoned with what I’d put myself through. Given the author’s ego, I’d perversely been looking forward to his acknowledgements, which I assumed would manage to be both meagre and self-aggrandising. I wasn’t wrong there, but for the first time (not even the copyright page had noted this) the source of the rot was exhumed: ‘Much of the material appeared previously in National Review.’ Oh, for fuck’s sake, I thought. That explains the obsequious, nonsensical Ben Shapiro blurb on the cover. The book’s noticeable slightness, padded, even, by a thoroughly unnecessary index. Each essay’s uncontextualised in media res setting. The unmistakably digital sense of impermanence in the writing as each overly verbose passage seems to have been casted off with abandon, only for an editor to politely suggest a footnote might be helpful here or there long after the fact.
I wondered why I had bothered to read it, though it was only with this information, at the end, on the very last page, that I could appreciate how little effort he had put into writing it. I didn’t necessarily arrive at any profound answer of what drives his blatantly reactionary politics (I honestly believe he doesn’t know himself) but there is something key here which, for me, became unlocked: the echo chamber is a poor metaphor because it implies that anyone could hear the same message were they to only listen. The truth is that some messages are so deliberately written to exclude that no amount of effort can make you any closer to understanding their speaker, and, much of the time, that’s the point.