Wilson Read online

  by the same author

  FICTION:

  THE OLD RELIGON

  THE VILLAGE

  NON-FICTION:

  THREE USES OF THE KNIFE

  JAFSIE AND JOHN HENRY

  TRUE AND FALSE

  MAKE-BELIEVE TOWN

  THE CABIN

  ON DIRECTING FILM

  WRITING IN RESTAURANTS

  POETRY:

  THE CHINAMAN

  THE HERO PONY

  PLAYS:

  BOSTON MARRIAGE

  THE CRYPTOGRAM

  THE OLD NEIGHBORHOOD

  OLEANNA

  NO ONE WILL BE IMMUNE

  GOLDBERG STREET

  GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS

  AMERICAN BUFFALO

  A LIFE IN THE THEATRE

  SPEED-THE-PLOW

  THE WOODS, LAKEBOAT, EDMOND

  SEXUAL PERVERSITY IN CHICAGO and THE DUCK VARIATIONS

  SCREENPLAYS:

  STATE AND MAIN

  THE SPANISH PRISONER and THE WINSLOW BOY

  HOMICIDE

  HOUSE OF GAMES

  WE’RE NO ANGELS

  Copyright

  First published in the United States in 2001 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  Woodstock & New York

  WOODSTOCK:

  One Overlook Drive

  Woodstock, NY 12498

  www.overlookpress.com

  [for individual orders, bulk and special sales, contact our Woodstock office]

  NEW YORK:

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  Copyright © 2000 by David Mamet

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  The paper used in this book meets the requirements for paper permanence as described in the ANSI Z39.48-1992 standard.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mamet, David.

  Wilson : a consideration of the sources / David Mamet. —1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “Containing the original notes, errata, commentary,

  and the preface to the second edition.”

  1. Internet—Fiction. 2. Learning and scholarship—Fiction. I. Title

  PS3563.A4345 W55 2001 813’.54—dc21 2001036016

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  FIRST EDITION

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  ISBN 1-58567-189-4

  ISBN 978-1-46830-232-5

  Contents

  By the same author

  Copyright

  Preface to the Second Edition

  Invocation

  Invocation

  A Consideration of the Sources

  A Consideration of the Sources

  The Poem Itself

  The Poem Itself

  Authorship of the Poem

  The Riots

  The Riots

  Three into Twelve

  A Close Contemporary Allusion to “The Riots”

  Ramifications of the Joke Code

  The Writer’s Mind

  The Writer’s Mind

  Dear Diary

  “Come Smoke a Coca-Cola”

  The Wobbly

  Let Us Consider the “Wobbly”

  “Like Shrimps that Crash in the Night …”

  A Poem

  A Poem

  The Library

  The Library

  Let Us Cast Our Attention, Then, to “Upheavals of the Great”

  The Papers on the Shelf

  The Settlement of Michigan

  The Settlement of Michigan

  Birnam Wood Do Come to Dunsinane

  The Strikeplate

  The Amulet [disputed]

  The Amulet

  Section Two

  The Sample Paragraph

  If this, then that

  Time

  Time

  Dear Diary

  A Doubt

  How Funny

  Obsess

  Bongazine

  Bongazine

  O, Bongazine

  The Death of My Kitten

  [Untitled]

  A Disquisition on the Mud Pond

  A Disquisition on the Mud Pond

  Get Dressed, You Married Gentlemen

  The Halfway Point

  Dating the Material

  Dating

  The Uses of Inaccuracy

  Greind, and the Development of the Bungalow

  Lost

  Lost

  The Toll Hound

  The Toll Hound

  Found in a Trunk in Pinsk

  The Sermon

  The Skunk

  Other Breeds

  The Dunes

  Capsule Note

  Bootsie and the Bootsie Clubs

  Bootsie and the Bootsie Clubs

  The Club

  Gentlemen

  Bootsiana

  The First Mention of “The Capsule”

  Weebut

  “Could Weebut Recall That Sweet Moment Sublime”

  His Epitaph

  Flight from Egypt

  Mars

  Mars

  Chip

  Mars

  Family Life on Mars

  Inkblots, and What Can Be Made of Them

  Greind

  Psychotic

  The Parking Meter Problem

  Binky Beaumont

  Binky Beaumont

  The Tie

  The Capsule

  In the Capsule

  Relics

  Folderol

  Folderol

  Quick Study Guide

  The Inner Code

  The Inner Code

  Aphrodite

  The Timesheets

  The Timesheets: A Timely Surprise

  Ages – Sages

  Slowly I Turned

  Muuguu

  From Tales of the Fantasist

  Lola Montez and the Moving Picture Boys

  Lola Montez

  Jane of Trent

  Jane of Trent

  From Self Help and Purity for Girls

  Sensing, one might say, were one to go that way

  The Lake Poets can kiss my ass

  An Adumbration of the Inner Code

  End of the Second Section

  Section Three

  The Boathouse

  Chet and Donna

  Alligators

  From Newport Summer

  Dink Stover at Yale

  Philology

  The Trial of Ginger

  Stuffed in the Airlock

  The Petition

  Tom Tiddler’s Fancy

  When All Is Said and Done

  Esquimaux

  A Disquisition on the Uses of Narrative

  A Disquisition on the Uses of Narrative

  Soap

  The Old Wrangler

  The Old Wrangler

  How the Old Wrangler and Bootsie Met

  The Joke Code

  The Pet Door

  From Muuguu

  The Missing Page

  The Missing Page

  L’Envoi

  L’Envoi: The Noted Fighting Prowess of the Cottage Queen

  Where the Sea Ends, There the Land Begins

  The End of the Day

  The Poem Reiterated

  The Poem Reiterated

  Closing Note

  Closing Note

  The End

  Three

  oh hey oh ho ye ca
rrion crowe

  ye kistrel ca’ th’ crowe awae

  ye cuttie wren leuked doun a span

  anent th’ wanworth weurks o’ man

  ye linnet skiffed th’ low-cut haye

  aboun th’ rick ye jay

  Preface to the Second Edition

  The Editors of Bongazine

  It is not enough, I feel, to refer to these investigations as “Tales of the Old Wrangler.”

  Granted, the appellation could be stretched to fit; but one might, with as much justification, condense the whole of human history to “Anecdotes of the Famous and Misguided.”

  Yes, certainly, the following do and must treat (either directly, or by implication) of the Old Wrangler, but, more usefully, they deal with Krautz.

  The growth of Krautz’s canon, beginning with the Cola Riots, can be seen to parallel the settlement of Mars; he has, in fact, been identified (under the nom de guerre of Bennigsen)* with Mars, the God of War of the Ancient Geeks.

  It is this quality to which we have directed our efforts.

  The period of the Riots was known to its most immediate historians as the “Time of the Destruction of All Knowledge.” But what, finally, was this destructive force?

  Any schoolchild would answer, “The transfer of human literature into computer form, and its subsequent and accidental erasure”; and this was, of course, the response required by how many generations of scholastics.1

  This would not, however, have been the response of a contemporary.

  For a contemporary would have “known” that that “destruction” was caused not by the loss of “computer knowledge,” but by the subsequent destruction of the Library and Stop ’n’ Shop.2

  It was the Great Decampment which began the “Change,” as the last links were severed between our age and the “Written Word.”3

  This is the time which I would call that of the Great Romanticism – in which everything “left behind” was per se good.

  But for this nostalgomania to function, it was necessary, of course, for things to be left behind.

  And the Destruction of All Knowledge, whether occasioned by the Great Crash, or by the Fire, is, finally, a literary fiction.

  For all knowledge, of course, was not lost.

  What was lost?

  That which is always lost, in the transition from one age to another, from one life to another, from one mood to the next, et cetera: something. Something. But not all. “All” was but a sentimental fiction, occasioned or necessitated, again, by the cognitive dissonance itself occasioned by the move to Mars. It has been written that the move from the Malls to Mars was, finally, “no great big deal”; but I cannot think that was the case.

  It is my thesis that the literature “salvaged” equals, or must equal, the literature “created” – that it is not for nothing that these fragments survived, that their survival is as significant as would have been their creation, and that they must be taken as the ding an sich – as, if you will, the literature, mythology, or “Collective Memory” of that era.

  For, yes, they treat of the Old Wrangler – as what does not? – but let us lay aside (let us say, for those readers of – and we do not disparage it – a religious turn) the (certainly true) notion of the Demiurge, and conjecture the existence of an independent consciousness or spirit, and we will call it the “Mind of Man.”4 Such, being by definition imperfect, must be other-than-unitary, must be mosaic; let us call its components “thoughts.”

  These “thoughts,” these atomic, these irreducible “building blocks” of consciousness, must, again by definition, be, in themselves, incomplete.

  The urge to order these “thoughts” is that which separates Homo s. from the lower orders. The urge to cease from doing so unites us with them.

  So, then, yes, one might say, Bennigsen and Krautz are One; or, the Dog on the Capsule was the Toll Hound.

  But were they One? What was the role of Jacob Cohen in the development of the Bootsie Clubs, and (though one has heard it innumerable times, I ask it again): What Became of Ginger?

  It was the Wrangler himself who said that all was “Combination, Dissolution, or the Pause Between the Two”;5 and these peregrinations, misguided, as must finally be, like all human endeavor, in my consignment of them to the written page, and, thus, to the Collective Unconsciousness, for all that they are an attempt to unify-through-analysis (for what other tool does the historian have?), must themselves, at the end of the day, being “yet another term,” finally but add to the burden of the reader–student, for which my apologies.

  Was “All Knowledge” lost?

  Had that been the case, how could one have made the assertion?

  Invocation

  Invocation

  O, ye exalted nine,1 smile upon me!

  A Consideration of the Sources

  A Consideration of the Sources

  The Burden of the Argument

  It must be noted that the phrase “it goes without saying” can be applied only to those things which are about to be conclusively demonstrated to require utterance.

  Is the historian, then, a vulture, a scavenger or eater-of-broken-meats, to wait, induced, like the hyena, to a diet of carrion, sub-ordinated to those rendered mighty over him by the mere accident of previous birth?

  And yet, were we to abjure Sloppy Seconds in the practice of our craft – upon what would we practice it?

  For must we not operate upon that, and exclusively upon that to which our attention has been drawn?

  The classes of phenomena, then, forming our raw material, may be said to be two: those things of which we have been informed, and those things which no one has noticed.

  The former being, by its very nature, productive of but few of the rewards historically associated with the practice of history, the historian is, it will be seen on scant reflection, forever preoccupied in a search, not for the true, but for the novel – his sole criterion, finally, “That’s never been said before!”, thus warping his craft and vitiating any benefits possibly derived therefrom in exchange for the specter of a momentary and possibly false sense of security derivative of his right of proprietorship in “the New”, and the chimerical notion that such would produce “a lasting fame.”

  What folly are the Works of Man. For what could it avail one to have spent one’s time and powers to this end: to achieve the prospective momentary approbation of the yet unborn.

  And, should the endorsement of that far-off time prove more than passing, to what immediate strife and vexation would it not decay, enticing now this one, now that, again like hyenas, to claw, to tear, to bite their way into what now would have become, and been ratified as, the succulent body of a New Truth.

  I cite the revelation in 2019 concerning the fingernails.

  It had, of course, long been known that the fingernails continue to grow after death.

  In 2019 an associate of Bennigsen (Greind) published a monograph – of which, of course, only a fragment remains.

  Greind set out to establish under laboratory conditions that which had been held to exist, previously, only as – in the pejorative phrase of the time, “anecdotal information”: that the fingernails do, indeed, et cetera.

  His findings – which, I caution, have yet to be duplicated or recognized by any generally accepted scientific body – announced that not only do the fingernails continue to grow after death, but they grow at a rate 108 per cent of that at which they grow during life.

  In searching for the exact moment of increased growth (brain death, heart death, etc.) – the signaling or triggering mechanism, as it were1 – his team found this: that the nails ceased to grow at death, and began to grow again (at the increased rate) after a short period of inactivity.

  Further attempts to fix the moment of increased activity caused the group to enlarge its investigations into the field of “near death,” in which efforts they found, in the celebrated incident,2 that the nails had ceased their growth some time previous to death; and, in fact, that
cessation of their growth was an infallible prognosticator of an imminent demise.

  The team’s research having been both lost and discredited, government funding ceased, and we are left with just the tantalizing quirky pamphlet3 and the survival, in our day, of the otherwise incomprehensible affection for calves’-foot jelly.

  Let us proceed to the Poem.

  The Poem Itself

  The Poem Itself

  Dawn, and the nascent, roseate glow.

  Friend, if thou art Friend, perchancèd Foe,

  Stand with me in the Light which sootheth all,

  Suffusing the now ended slumbers on The Mall.

  Only conceive, if it is granted thee,

  Those noted years of bootless Misery,

  The trials of the Heads of State,

  The ceaseless Perturbation of the Great,

  The ponderous burden of the few

  To license, nay, inaugurate the new

  Peregrinations of the Wandering Jew.

  But for a moment meditate, I pray,

  But for a moment stay.

  Encapsulate the figures carved in stone,

  Picture the absent flesh, the buried bone,

  Hear with your inner hearing that fell tone

  Of those controlled by Lust alone,

  Of those whom neither shame nor pride debars

  From luxury in the vermilion sway of Mars.

  Apostrophize, if you will, on the thrall

  Of History, and upon the futility of all.

  Then may my eyes meet yours. And, for that while,

  O, brother, may we not essay a smile?

  Lost in the maelstrom of time,

  Linked for a heartbeat sublime

  Held for the sake of what O’erarching All –

  Of what imponderables burnt –

  Upon the deepest revelation of them all …

  Authorship of the Poem

  How oft have we said, of this or that, “it was right before my eyes”? And is not the greatest scholarship that which, with no reference to the arcane or abstruse, indicates to the common understanding that which, ever after, must be seen as self-evident?

  The Poem on the Bookmark has, of course, long been held a piece of doggerel, important as “found in the Stop ’n’ Shop” – a souvenir, if you will, of that day, an example of the incunabula of the pre-Riots mind.

  And it was as such that I perused it1 when a pattern began to shape itself before me.