The hostility and profanity of his plays . . . . Nadel, p. 18.
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Mamet embodies Sherwood Anderson’s remark that “for a long time I have believed that crudity is an inevitable quality in the production of a really significant present-day American literature.” Nadel, p. 5.
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Chicago united the populist and the intellectual, a union that Mamet still praises. It is the citizen’s willingness to discuss Nietzsche or Kipling in any bar, and the knowledge that literature is an organic part of the people. Individuality defines its own culture, with the autodidact the ideal, especially when he absorbs the ideas of a “European freethinker” (CA 56). This liberalism, coupled with earlier celebrations of the city’s democratic roots -- see William Dean Howells or H.L. Mencken on its early life -- dominates its literary landscape. Nadel, p. 17.
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The Chicago style is harsh because it does not tolerate evasion. Chicago audiences are, in turn, difficult to fool; they want things to be on the level, to hear things straight (Case 29). Nadel, p. 5.
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The program was Chicago. It was the Chicago of the living culture of the mind. The Chicago of Hutchins, and the tradition of free thought: the Hyde Park tradition of Thorstein Veblen and Clarence Darrow, of Vachel Lindsay, of Dreiser.
The idea in the air was that culture was what we, the people, did. The idea was -- and is -- that we were surrounded by culture. It was not alien to us. It was what the people did and thought and sang and wrote about. The idea was the particularly Chicagoan admixture of the populist and the intellectual. The model, the Hutchins model, the Chicago model of the European free thinker, was an autodidact: a man or woman who so loved the world around him or her that he or she was moved to investigate it further -- either by creating works of art or by appreciating those works. Mamet, The Cabin, pp. 55 and 56.
Now, when I grew up in Chicago, the cultural part of Mamet’s (far broader) experience was not part of my world. The more’s the pity for me. Perhaps my feelings about the city would be different if it had been. But what was part of my world was the dichotomy of gutter speech and serious subjects, what Sherwood Anderson called the ‘“crudity [that is] an inevitable quality in the production of a really significant present day American literature.’”
Mamet also had another experience in Chicago that was similar to mine, an experience that shapes views which, I have found, and have written in Alabaster, do not go down well in most of the circles of America in which I’ve lived as an adult (or, for that matter, in which I’ve lived from my junior year in high school onward). Let me quote from Nadel:
Mamet’s father, Bernard, was born “right off the boat” and raised during the Depression. Bernard’s family had little money and brought nothing from the shtetl except a soon-to-be-despised language, Yiddish. Bernard’s father, however, left his wife, Calara (Mamet would name his third daughter, Clara, after her), who then had to bring up the family by herself. The poverty transformed the son, Bernard (Bernie), into a driven man: he put himself through Wilson Junior College and “bluffed” his way into Northwestern Law School using a forged transcript. He ended up first in his class, edited the law review, and was inducted into their legal honor society. After graduation, he worked for the law firm then headed by Arthur Goldberg, who would become a Supreme Court Justice and then U.N. Ambassador. At the time, the firm represented the United Steel Workers Union and later the AFL-CIO. Nadel, p. 12.
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Mamet’s sympathy for the underdog and working stiffs derives in part from his father’s identity with a world Mamet saw firsthand. Occasionally, when Bernie went to visit a union leader, the young Mamet would go along, observing the talk, attitudes, and mannerisms of these working men. The family was “comfortably middle class” but Bernie Mamet was conscious of “the fear of poverty,” which he shared with his family. Nadel, p. 13.
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