The first time I met David Mamet he was wearing a red shirt and black braces and playing honky-tonk piano. I had expected no less. He was in London to promote a novel, had spoken in interviews about the new play he was working on, the film he’d just finished, the children’s books he’d recently written and illustrated, and the research he was undertaking into Jewish mysticism. He had to be playing the honky-tonk piano when I met him.
Had they put a piano in the green room of the Southbank Centre especially for him? He was a big star; they would give him what he wanted. Myself, I asked politely for a sparkling mineral water but said still would do if that was all they could lay their hands on. We were due to go onstage together, to talk about writing, being funny, being Jewish, being men. At the eleventh hour, though it had loomed large in the transatlantic briefing, he decided he didn’t want to talk about being Jewish. He wasn’t, he said, a performing monkey. I wished I had the courage to say the same, but as the chairman was more interested in the Jewish part than any other, there’d have been nowhere to go had I too refused to play the monkey. So there we were, onstage in front of a packed house of Mamet fans, with me throwing my hands about, making jokes about my Manchester upbringing, anti-Semitism yes and no, Cambridge, Dr Leavis and Talmudic exegesis, and Mamet sitting silent.
He grew interested in Leavis whom he claimed never to have heard of, so I gave him a short seminar on the subject. Occasionally he jotted something down. The word ‘cretin’ maybe. Afterwards we signed a few books. No one seemed to have minded. Simply seeing Mamet was apparently enough.
As for me, I was completely smitten with the man. I knew his prose works better than his plays – a number of his essays and a powerful novel about the lynching of a Jew in Georgia in 1915. He was as bolshie as they come. Bristling with principles, some loopy perhaps, but others of a sort we would all bristle with if we had the balls. And he played honky-tonky piano. I wanted him for my father.
I saw him one more time for lunch, when we argued over Dickens. He couldn’t be doing with the comic names. I reminded him of the morality-play tradition Dickens partly inherited. He reckoned the problem was the English. We thought things were funny that weren’t. I told him the Americans thought things weren’t funny that were. I felt him going off me. We promised to correspond but of course didn’t.
I haven’t seen anything he’s done recently, though word that his views have been growing ever more extreme has reached me. I set no store by that. He’s a writer, not a politician – a writer ought to be contrary and in a samey sort of world any contrariety looks extreme. I don’t doubt, either, that he plays with seeing how far he can go: it’s a way of showing that strictly speaking a writer should have no views – views are not what art’s about – but since you ask, and if all you really want to hear is the same left-leaning, liberal-humane mishmash of pre-prepared attitudinising, get ready to be disappointed. I also know that ‘extreme’ is code for being over-supportive of Israel.
Mamet has been forgiven many things for his art – the bolshiness, the macho posing, the gun-toting backwoodsman politics, but being over-supportive of Israel strains the loyalty of even his most ardent fans. Odd, isn’t it, that while we in the arts pride ourselves on disparities of understanding, of thinking the unthinkable, of going, intellectually, where no one has gone before, we elect certain subjects to be sacrosanct (though we don’t believe in the sacred), inviolable (though we rate violation to be the artist’s first vocation), unsusceptible to difference (though difference is the prime justification for what we do). When it comes to Israel, we must all think the same.
In an interview with the Financial Times last week, Mamet prodded away at the prevailing pieties, attacking Obama and praising Sarah Palin (how’s that for going where you don’t expect an artist to go), dismissing global warming, heading dangerously, if anything, to a too-predictable jettisoning of pinko commonplace. Not that it matters: he’s an artist and no one’s going to vote for him. But while his interviewer took all this on with good grace, he stumbled before what Mamet had to say about anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. The great no-no of our times is to say that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism by another name. In fact very few people argue that it is, but in a sophistical twist which itself perfectly illustrates the meaning of the word chutzpah, the anti-Zionist paints himself a victim of a crime that has not been committed. Where once he argued that he was not necessarily an anti-Semite, he now insists he cannot possibly be an anti-Semite precisely for the reason that disreputable people say he is. We are but a hair’s breadth from seeing it argued that anti-Zionist is ipso facto an expression of love for Jews.
Asked the question – is the one necessarily the other? – Mamet pauses, bites the air, and then, emitting a ‘grunt of relief … throws caution to the wind’. It’s a dramatic description and should be interpreted as drama. Why the preliminary caution? And why the relief? Because Mamet, like the rest of us, lives in a moral world inundated by sophistries of the sort I have just described. And for once, the joy of it, the joy of letting his interlocutor have it with both barrels. That the interlocutor should dare to say he considers Mamet’s calling anti-Zionism by its worst name ‘offensive’, and this after Mamet has delivered a broadside against British anti-Semitism, is a measure of how deeply the conventional wisdom is embedded. If Mamet is even only infinitesimally right about the ‘ineradicable taint of anti-Semitism in the British’ and ‘the anti-Semitic filth’ he finds in the work of many contemporary British novelists and playwrights, it is not for his interviewer to be ‘offended’. Offended where, pray? Offended how? You want to turn the tables on those you offend? Purloin his offence.
That said, while I can think of a few routinely anti-Semitic British playwrights, I must say I’m not sure who the filthy British novelists are. For all I know he might mean me. Americans can read one in the wrong spirit. But that doesn’t matter. Here is someone speaking against the murderous orthodoxy of the times. Agreement is the last thing he’s angling for.