DAVID MAMET AND POETIC LANGUAGE IN DRAMA 

 

     I set out to have a conversation about the Europe­an sources of his work with David Mamet, a friend, neigh­bor, and thirty years ago a student and then shortly after­wards a col­league of mine at Goddard College, in Vermont. 

     "That's easy," he said. "They are Pinter, Beckett and Kleist."  I assume Chekhov went without saying, and like Kleist in translation only, where the impact on his language would be second hand.

     "Give me some time to read, and then we'll talk about them."  I said.

     "You are not going to examine me about them, are you?"  He said, as an uneasy ironic joke.  I remembered that Teach was the name of his most bullying, opinionated, ominous, contradictory and repellent character, and that the would-be teachers and mentors in his plays are a deluded, self-serving and problematic bunch, nevertheless we proceeded with our talk.  What we wound up with was simply a conver­sation between friends, but constrained by my wavering need to follow an assigned topic.

Q.  What struck me with Kleist, Beckett and Pinter is that they all write a kind of poetic theater, but it's a poetry of real speech, ordinary speech.  This seems to me your connection with their work.

 

DM.   Their work just strikes me as good.  Any theoretical basis for my work is ex post facto.

 

Q.  What theoretical basis has emerged in retrospect?

 

DM.  The most important thing is to write for an audience.  I want to delineate things as truthfully as I know how.  I always figured that the event itself was interesting.  I didn't have to be interesting.   If I found it interesting, if I could delineate it as I saw it or as I found it, that would be interesting enough.  My job was to tell the truth.

 

Q.  I wonder what writers learn from other writers?

 

DM.  Maybe how good it's possible to be....I think thematic considerations are not that important to me.  It's poetical considerations.

 

This is wonderfully suggestive as an artistic credo, but it offers little as an analysis of influence. 

     Here are some contexts for what's been said.  The first is personal history.  As an under­graduate he was conspic­uously brilliant and savagely funny--I feel I learned a lot about comedy and comedians, their passionate indignation and the complexity and depth of laughter, from observing his humor.  He was a part of a tight group that lived and breathed poetry, a number of whom have gone on to serious careers as poets, like Norman Dubie, Jane Shore and Roger Weinga­rten.  But it was clear from the start that his interest was theater, and two years after he graduated he came back to teach it.  In his second year, we taught a course together called "Shakespeare as Poet and Playwright,"  with me  talking about theme and poetic technique and David analyz­ing scenes according to the objec­tives of the characters, and the dramatic rhythm, the "beats,"  Stanislavsky's books in hand.  In those years his education and his teaching were dual, both poetry and drama alongside of one another.

     Another context concerns the poetic and theatrical tradition in the English language.  In an essay on Hamlet a few years ago[1] I demonstrated how all of what I call the art speech, the lyric (as opposed to the dramat­ic) poetry, songs, the courtly language, is paro­died and ridi­culed in the play because they are opposed to true communi­ca­tion.  And that conversely, how within the "true mediums" of blank verse and of prose, which provide the language of real commu­nica­tion, lyric forms are buried:  a sonnet struc­ture, a litany, an im­promptu, epigrams, elegies, formal medita­tions, and so forth.  I concluded with the speculation that since the English lyric tradition is the only one to have a dramatic poet as its dominating influen­tial figure, lyric poetry in the English language is the only such tradi­tion to have a self-cor­recting revolution roughly every century that tries to bring the language of the lyric back to the conservative norm of the dramatic conventions, namely, the language that people use in speaking to one another, real speech, the language of ordinary men, etc.  I speak of the lyric revolutions, each a century apart, associated with Dryden, with Wordsworth, and again with Frost, Pound and the modernists at the beginning of our century.

     The conservative norms of both genres (not all lyric and drama) are quite distinct.  That is, speech in drama should sound as if those words are being spoken for the first time, as acting teachers always say, unless they are formulaic speech of some sort, like a sermon or public address.  It should seem spontane­ous and direct and its pattern­ing should not call atten­tion to itself.  It should be people speaking to one another, responsive or unrespon­sive as the dramatic occasion demands and entirely driven by purpose.  The conservative norm of the lyric, on the other hand, can be richly and very deliber­ately patterned, it can be highly musi­cal, rhythmic, have little relationship to common speech, can be elaborate, formal, styl­ized, and so forth.  Its point of departure is the song.  As opposed to being heard by another person on stage or by the audience at large, lyric language can be overheard, entirely personal, the poet speaking or singing to himself or herself.  Above all, the lyric must be self-con­tained.   This pressure is so strong, that when poets are uncer­tain about it, they call their work "a fragment" or make some such disavowal.[2]  (A small number of poets have expanded this notion of self-sufficiency to the book of lyrics as an interwoven unit, however within it the individual poem still remains the unit of composi­tion.)

     When these two modes meet in dramatic poetry in the English language tradition, the dominant direction has always been toward the dramatic and away from the lyric.  Lyrics get sung on stage, not spoken.[3]  One can not imagine Blake's "Sick Rose" spoken on stage, where speech to roses is severely proscribed, though one can still sing to one.  The flexibility of rhythm in English blank verse lends itself to representing speech with relatively less sense of artifice than the more rigid meters and regular rhymes of the alexandrine in classi­cal French drama.  Yet blank verse is still stylization and still poetry, and this is true of free verse as well.  They both seek to operate in the tension between the deliberate rhythmic organi­zation of lyric poetry and the spontaneity of realistic dialogue, which any good listen­er knows has its own rhythms.  This tension is inherent in all dramatic poetry.  The domi­nant poetic form in twentieth century Modernist English and American poetry is free verse, unmeter­ed and unrhymed, which is excellent­ly adapted to representing real speech.  It lends itself well to dramatic poetry for this reason, but its comparative ease lowers the tension, the strain against the sense of artificiali­ty that we find in the lyric.  The result is that poetic drama past the mid-century is significantly different from the lyric drama written in the first half of the century by major poets like  Yeats and Lorca, Eliot and Brecht.  But their struggle with the reality of theater prepared the way for major change.  What is lyrical in Beckett, Pinter and Mamet, for example, occurs with little sense of strain against the highly formal and patterned song forms.  It is "the lyrical" of freer verse forms.

     Penthesilea is Kleist's most famous play.  It's verse is very often narrative, not dramatic, as battles are reported from the safe distance of the stage, and the realistic dialogues are spattered with highly artificial Classical interjections like "Oh, Artemis" and "Defend her, oh ye Gods."  That archaic "ye" is the translator's fault, desperate for an unstressed syllable.   What is interesting in the play is the myth-revising murder­ous love story, the fatal infatuation between Achil­les and Penthes­ilea, and the orgy of rage in which she kills him in battle after he throws aside his weapons and bares his breast to her.  The central disaster of the play is accomplished with materials that could have made the play a sexual or romantic comedy, and there­for its confusion of the conquests of love and violence is all the more horrifying.

     The blank verse of The Broken Jug that seems so effortlessly conversational, is the sort that might recommend the play to Mamet, but its Falstaffian scoundrel and the salvation of its innocent lovers seem too stylized, and more like materials that he could admire for their own sake than use for his purposes.  The same distinction would hold with Prince Fredrick of Homburg.  The verse is impressive but not in translation, which is the only way it would be avail­able to him.  The story of the noble general redeemed by love and honor is a remote subject, even handled with Kleist's origi­nality.  It is perhaps Kleist's greatness and originality and the conversational vigor of his blank verse, and the general sense of a vast psychological under­ground (that we find most readily in his fiction), more than any theme or subject or technique that recommends him most to Mamet.  Pinter and Beckett are closer to home, both in lan­guage and in subjects, with Beckett at the lyric pole and Pinter at the dramatic, though Pinter, as we shall see, is not without tradi­tional lyricism.

     But Beckett is more self-consciously the lyric poet of the modern stage, a  poet of a varied, stylized language with tightly controlled rhythm, aided by his "pauses," and elaborately varied repetition.  This is clear in the climactic speech of Endgame, with its mixture of the coarse and the exalted, the everyday in mocking juxtaposition to the oracular tone, espe­cially the semi-quotation from Baudelaire's Recueillement ("Tu réclamais le Soir; il descend.")  It is a manner more deeply connected to The Waste Land and the modernist lyric,  than to dramatic models.

Hamm:

Old endgame lost of old, play and lose and have done with losing.

(Pause.  More animated.)

Let me see.

(Pause.)

Ah yes!

(He tries to move the chair, using the gaff as before.  Enter Clov, dressed for the road.  Panama hat, tweed coat, raincoat over his arm, umbrella, bag.  He halts by the door and stands there, impassive and motionless, his eyes fixed on Hamm, till the end.  Hamm gives up.)

Good.

(Pause.)

Discard.

(He throws away the gaff, makes to throw away the dog.  Thinks better of it.)

Take it easy.

(Pause.)

And now?

(Pause.)

Raise hat.

(He raises his toque.)

Peace to our ...arses.

(Pause.)

And put on again.

(He puts on his toque.)

Deuce.

(Pause.  He takes off his glasses.)

Wipe.

(He takes out his handkerchief, and without unfolding it, wipes his glasses.)

And put on again.

(He puts on his glasses, puts the handkerchief in his pock­et.)

We're coming.  A few more squirms like that and I'll call.

(Pause.)

A little poetry.

(Pause.)

You prayed--

(Pause.  He corrects himself.)

You CRIED for night; it comes--

(He repeats, chanting.)

You cried for night; it falls: now cry in darkness.

(Pause.)

Nicely put, that.

(Pause.)

And now?

(Pause.)

Moments for nothing, now as always, time was never and time is over, reckoning closed and story ended.

(Pause.  Narrative tone.)

If he could have his child with him...

(Pause.)

It was the moment I was waiting for.

(Pause.)

You don't want to abandon him?  You want him to bloom while you are withering?  Be there to solace your last million last moments? 

(Pause.) 

He doesn't realize all he knows is hunger, and cold, and death to crown it all.  But you!  You ought to know what the earth is like nowadays.  Oh I put him before his responsi­bilities!

(Pause.  Normal tone.)

Well, there we are, there I am, that's enough.

 

     This is clearly poetry for the theater, in the modernist mode of mocking its own eloquence, mixing the allusive and the direct, moving beyond its resonant climaxes with ironic comedy.  It is composed out of ordinary lan­guage, cliches and witty phrases ("last million last mo­ments" where the gaiety is at odds with the despair--which is the essential Beckett device), and the omni­present conductor regulat­ing the tempo and details.  It is clear from Beckett's general use of language that he pushes strongly toward the lyrical, and this is the direction of his influence, but his language is so very stylized that, like Hopkins or Joyce, he seems the end of a line of development, not a beginning: a very direct influence would seem embarrass­ingly deriva­tive, and can not serve a strong playwright like Mamet as a precise model.

     As opposed to Mamet's sparse stage directions, Beckett's are elabo­rate and precise.  He demands complete con­trol of what we hear and see, and the Beckett Trust allows little variation in perfor­mance, the attitude of a solitary and not a collaborative art, the art of of the poet, not the playwright.  Yet there is another differ­ence from Mamet's work of much greater importance: Beckett's method is committed to poetic speech with a slight coun­tervailing pull of realistic dialogue to serve as ironic counter­point, and he is committed likewise to overtly symbol­ic gestures where natur­alistic action serves only as ironic absurd­ist comedy.   This is true of his work, even when the symbol is designed to be elusive or equivocal or mean­ingless, as in Godot.­[4]  Mamet's work is built out of the dialec­tical tension between these linked opposites.  This tension keeps us aware of pattern and significance without letting them domi­nate our sense of a real world.  Action accumulates symbolic signifi­cance in his work, it is never assigned to it.  And speech resonates with poetry without self-consciously employing it.

     In an interview with Christo­pher Bigsby, Mamet said: 

"I'm trying to write dramatic poetry...I'm trying to capture primarily through the rhythm and secondarily through the connota­tion of the word the intention of the characters.  So when that is successful, what one ends up with is a play in free verse.  If people want to say it sounds just like the people on the bus, that's fine with me, because that's how the people on the bus sound to me."  [David Mamet, Methuen, 1985]

   


     Pinter is the closest to Mamet in time and background, and Mamet's comment above can apply to Pinter's practice with great precision.  One can readily hear the role that rhythm and repeti­tion play in this characteristic passage from The Caretaker.

ASTON.  Were you dreaming or something?

DAVIES.  Dreaming?

ASTON.  Yes.

DAVIES.  I don't dream.  I never dream.

ASTON.  No, nor have I.

DAVIES.  Nor me.

     Pause

 Why do you ask me that, then?

ASTON.  You were making noises.

DAVIES.  Who was?

ASTON.  You were.

    

This is closer to Mamet's language and poetic practice than either Beckett or Kleist.  Its subtle music is typical of Pinter's dialogues.  But Pinter has a taste for overtly symbolic action that Mamet does not share.  We find nothing in the younger playwright of the Kafkan theological nightmare that builds in The Birthday or the overt and heavy symbolic burden carried by the title in The Caretaker.  Mamet's nightmares are psychological and political.   Pinter's moments of political satire are brilliant and effective drama, but their setting is surreal and allegori­cal.  The following passage from Party Time is an example.  A massive police round-up is conducted off-stage during a party attended by its totalitarian directors:

              FRED

How's it going tonight?

 

              DOUGLAS

Like clockwork.  Look.  Let me tell you

something.  We want peace.  We want peace

and we're going to get it.

 

              FRED

Quite right.

 

              DOUGLAS

We want peace and we're going to get it.  But

we want peace to be cast iron.  No leaks.

No draughts.  Cast iron. Tight as a drum.

That's the kind of peace we want and that's

the kind of peace we're going to get.  A cast

iron peace.

He clenches his fist.

Like this.

 

               FRED

You know, I really admire people like you.

 

              DOUGLAS

So do I.

 

The line breaks are Pinter's and indicate his attention to a measured line, mostly five stresses, occasionally six, with a rhythmic punctuation of one and two stress lines ("Like this," and "Quite right" and "So do I.")  It's the current version of Webster­ian dramatic verse, a very free blank verse.

     In a more overtly lyrical mode, the final speech of Party Time, uses a more inward voice  by one of the "rounded-up," speaking to the audience in a classical soliloquy in which we hear modern dramatic poetry very deliberately employing the strategies of free verse:

              JIMMY

     Sometimes I hear things.  Then it is quiet.

 

I had a name.  It was Jimmy.  People called me

Jimmy.  That was my name.

 

Sometimes I hear things.  then everything is

quiet.  when everything is quiet I hear my

heart.

 

When terrible noises come I don't hear

anything.  Don't hear don't breathe am blind.

 

Then everything is quiet.  I hear a heartbeat.  It

is probably not my heartbeat.  It is probably

someone else's heartbeat.

 

What am I?

 

Sometimes a door bangs, I hear voices, then it

stops.  Everything stops.  It all stops.  It all

closes.  it closes down. It shuts.  It all shuts.  It

shuts down.  It shuts.  I see nothing at any time

any more.  I sit sucking the dark.

 

It's what I have.  The dark is in my mouth and

I suck it.  It's the only thing I have.  It's mine.

It's my own.  I suck it.

 

There is nothing in Mamet's plays as deliberately lyrical or symbolic as this, or as incantatory, as devoted to a voice speaking to itself.  In Lakeboat the overheard solo voices serve the action completely.

       Consider Roma's speech in  Glen­gar­ry Glen Ross, delivered in a Chinese restaurant and not from a wheelchair on a stage containing his perky little parents in garbage cans as in Endgame, or at the end of a play with everyone in the cast frozen in position as in Party Time.

ROMA:...all train compartments smell vaguely of shit.  It gets so you don't mind it.  That's the worst thing that I can confess.  You know how long it took me to get there?  A long time.  When you die you're going to regret the things you don't do.  You think you're queer...? I'm going to tell you something:  we're all queer.  You think that you're a thief?   So what?  You get befuddled by middle class morali­ty...?  Get shut of it.  Shut it out.  You cheated on your wife...?  You did it, live  with it.  (Pause.)  You fuck little girls, so be it.  There's an absolute morality?  May be.  And then what?  If you think there is, then be that thing.  Bad people go to hell. I don't think so.  If you think that way, act that way.  A hell exists on earth.  Yes.  I won't live in it.  That's me.  You ever take a dump made you feel you just slept for twelve hours...?

LINGK.  Did I...?

ROMA.  Yes.

LINGK.  I don't know.

ROMA.  Or a piss...?  A great meal fades in reflection.

Everything else gains.  You know why?  Cause it's only food.  The great fucks that you have had.  What do you remember about them?

LINGK.  What do I...?

ROMA.  Yes.

LINGK.  Mmmmmm...?

ROMA.  I don't know.  For me, I'm saying, what it is, it's probably not the orgasm.  Some broad, forearms on your neck, something her eyes did.   There was a sound she made...or, me, lying in the, I'll tell you: me lying in bed: the next day she brings me café au lait.  She gives me a cigarette, my balls feel like concrete.  Eh?  What I'm saying, What is our life: (Pause.) It's looking forward or it's back.  And that's our life.  That's it.  Where is the moment.

 

     Like the passage from Endgame, this is a mock meditation on the meaning of life, but it is not poetic in Beckett's lyrical mode.  Its metaphysical gestures and impulses are part of a virtuoso sales pitch and the speech is wrung through with the specific irony of greedy calculation behind the fake sincerity about deep and deeply private things, a particularly American way of being straightforward and intimate with the guys in that great American institution, the Chinese Restaurant.  What makes this unlikely material poetic is the pointed brilliance of its satire, its Swiftian energy (and I mean the energy of Swift's prose as it moves toward poetry),  the sense that not a word is out of place, nor a pause nor any aspect of rhythm, and its intense compres­sion.  One could well argue that it meets the stringent defini­tions of poetry by Yvor Winters, that it is "a species of compo­sition making maximum use of all the resources of language,"  and by Pound, "language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree."  And it is entire­ly imbedded in the action of the character and the play.  It is realistic dialogue of stunning dramatic precision--as opposed to simple tape-recorder accuracy.  In this passage the patterned repetition is not there primarily for reasons of musical organization, but for the formal rhetori­cal organization of an insistent argument.

     What Mamet shares with the three writers we have looked at is a commitment to specifically dramatic poetry, and as far as influence goes, his comment that "one learns how good it's possible to be" is the most precise and inclusive.  For all of the poetic stylization of his dialogue, the studied, musical repetition, the language in his play is wedded to dramatic action and the strongly marked lyrical elements never go off on their own, as they do, startlingly, in Beckett and Pinter.  There is something deeply restrained and severe in Mamet's lyrical abun­dance.

                                  Barry Goldensohn

                                  Skidmore College

                                  Saratoga Springs, NY 12866

                                  Home phone: (518)584-7962

                                  Office phone: (518)580-5165


    [1] Parnassus, Spring-Summer, 1991.

     [2]  In the twentieth century the fragment has become a genre of its own and our translators no longer feel the pressure to reconstruct the possible poems that the fragments of Sappho or Archilochos suggest to them.  They let the fragments speak for themselves.

     [3]  There is a counter-tradition of highly lyrical drama like the plays of Yeats, Eliot's early plays, Archibald MacLeish, etc., all primarily poets and the plays dominantly "ritual," as Yeats called it.

     [4]  I asked Susan Sontag if her courageous production of Godot during the siege of Sarajevo, at a time when peace seemed impossi­ble and cruelly and absurdly absent, reduced the meaning of the play by forcing the symbol of the absent Godot into something all too specific in that horror.  She refused to consider the question, but I am sure I am right.