Screenwriter William Monahan once used the pen name "Tom Common"

I recently discovered, while investigating contributions that screenwriter William Monahan (The Departed, Kingdom of Heaven) made to Spy magazine in the late 1990s, that the writer once wrote under the pen name "Tom Common" in Spy magazine. Mr. Monahan had a brief, unremarkable tenure as an "editor at large" at Spy while Bruno Maddox was the editor-in-chief. Although he has said that "Spy failed four issues after [he] started," he is in fact only acknowledged as a contributor in three issues: November 1997, December 1997/January 1998 (Holiday Issue), and March 1998. Under his real name, there are no articles credited to Mr. Monahan in any Spy issues. Only as "Tom Common" does he hold a byline.

Mr. Monahan was not even listed on the masthead in the first Spy issue he contributed to: the November 1997 issue. If it weren't for his contributors' biography on the contributors page (p. 8), indicating that he did in fact have a minor contribution to the November 1997 issue, it would otherwise seem that he had only contributed to two Spy issues:

William Monahan contributed nothing to this issue but the word 'Rogue' {first use, page 56}, for which he was paid $500, making him, quite possibly, the highest-paid freelance writer in history. He is ignorant of the use or uses to which this word will be put. If there is a porn mag named Rogue, for example, operating out of a dumpster in Salt Lake City, it is not his problem legally. This is not his thumb-print. So don't go making a cast of it in latex and wearing it on your thumb when you go around killing people, signing for cars, and pretending to be him. Mr. Monahan lives in New York. He will be contributing to SPY whenever he feels like it, and anyone who doesn't like it can fuck off.

Note: For those wondering about the mention of a thumb-print in the contributors' biography above, just picture in your mind's eye an image of such a thumb-print on the right side of the page, one that may or may not belong to Mr. Monahan.

The article that was mentioned in his contributors' biography above and to which he made his minor contribution, is titled "Rogue Again?", a spoof article claiming a former executive editor of YM named Michael Sedgwick was preparing to relaunch the once-great Rogue magazine with the financial backing of Rupert Murdoch. Rogue ran from 1955 until 1967, publishing writers such as Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson. Being a history buff, Mr. Monahan was probably quite familiar with Rogue. Having recently relaunched as well, Spy was being ironic in publishing a spoof article about how Rogue was preparing its own relaunch, after having folded in 1967, with, ironically again, its own plans for a spoof article in its forthcoming inaugural issue.

In the following Spy issue, which listed Mr. Monahan as "editor at large" on the masthead for the first time, a satirical article was published with the title "Dorks In Progress," written by Tom Common, a writer previously unknown in the publishing world who completely disappeared afterward as far as I have been able to determine in my extensive research on the matter. After a comparison of the text of "Dorks In Progress" with the corpus of works by Mr. Monahan, it is evident that "Tom Common" is actually a pen name of Mr. Monahan's.

In "Dorks In Progress," "Tom Common" gives an account of a recent tour he made of the amateur reading scene in Manhattan, as well as an assessment of the state of amateur writing.

"Dorks In Progress" is full of the expressions, metaphors, and obscure arcana that are typical of Mr. Monahan's works. In the second paragraph of "Dorks In Progress", "Tom Common" includes a nod toward the rivalry between the Village Voice and the New York Press: he mentions that the ad for the reading he had attended had appeared in the Village Press, a fictional publication combining the first word in Village Voice with the last word in New York Press. As a New York Press writer from 1994 until 2001, Mr. Monahan could be expected to make this kind of wordplay with the names of the dueling papers, Village Voice and New York Press:

This evening's event is billed in our trusty Village Press as "Great Spanish Speaking Poets." We do not allow ourselves to become too aroused, however; we suspect that all the great Spanish-speaking poets are dead. Besides, we are not here to ogle stars--like the written word's late Pablo Neruda--but rather to understand why that mysterious section of our newspaper labeled "Readings" is getting thicker as we near the century's close.

A common theme in Mr. Monahan's works is his satire of autodidacts and literary pretenders. Just as Mr. Monahan skewers them in his novel Light House: A Trifle, so too does "Tom Common" in the essay "Dorks In Progress." One example of such skewering can be found in a passage in Mr. Monahan's novel Light House: A Trifle, in which the character Professor Eggman says to his cab driver who happens to know a thing or two about the arts and is intent on having an intelligent discussion with the professor (Light House: A Trifle, p. 94):

"I am late for my Fiction Workshop. I am in no mood to endure the worthless conversation of an autodidact. Thank you." 

Finally, after several back and forths, the cabdriver asks Professor Eggman to get out of the cab, which ends badly when the professor refuses and has to be dragged out (Light House: A Trifle, p. 98):

"Be reasonable," said Professor Eggman to the driver. He was nearly in tears. "How was I supposed to know you were not completely ignorant?"

"Even if I were, you shouldn't treat people like that. Get your shit--and get out."

In "Dorks In Progress", "Tom Common"'s concluding remarks are really just an extension of Mr. Monahan's opinions on autodidacts and literary pretenders:

Yes, our dorks have created a most excellent and admirable climate, a happy universe, where anyone can rise from his seat, do anything, and hear a clapping sound for his efforts; but perhaps the happy, safe, non-judgemental space we have created for ourselves is turning out (as do so many of those structures that people create for themselves, and which end up getting exploded in the penultimate few paragraphs of articles such as this one) to have a fatal flaw.

The golden rule is all very well and good, but you've got to keep it away from the Art. If you don't, you will (1) applaud in the most obvious and despicable self-service; and (2), you will find yourself wondering--unpleasantly-- which of us is really any better than an obese psychopath with an Ernie puppet.

Often in Mr. Monahan's works, references are made to harsh truths about events or common practices that took place in history. In the passage below, "Tom Common" delights in the kinds of barbaric treatments a poet may have endured in the old days, echoing Mr. Monahan's style:

It's chilling to imagine how many of yesterday's more "inaccessible" artists may have ended up hanging from fortress gates, wearing signs that read "Boring," or "More Deformed Giants." There was no "safe space," in the old days, for people who wanted to be poets with all their hearts and were not strictly "good." Is it possible that in our own age this defect has been corrected?

Similarly, in an essay titled "The World in Revolt: Amherst Takes Back The World From Greed And Death," (New York Press, 1999) Monahan begins a history lesson by musing about the bar at the Lord Jeffrey Inn in Amherst, Massachusetts where he and his friend Mike Ruffino end up one afternoon:

I wanted a smoking mug of heavily spiked cider, but they, despite the 18th-C. tavernboard, didn't have any. Back in the days when they did (when Amherst was more a lord than a town, long before nouvelle cuisine was a glint in the eye of the first homosexual), the Indians used to raid down the Connecticut River from Canada and fuck the place up, burning farms, raping, looting, hatcheting infants, sexually mutilating the dead, torturing women and dragging buggered captives north through the snow. They did this for years, the friendly as well as clever indigenous people, and the fact that Lord Amherst apparently flung some smallpoxed quilts at them is still enough to start a fistfight in the Graduate Lounge. Between you and me, if I had rebuilt my house five times, British powder and lead costing what it did under the Mercantile System, myself having a family, and the nearest fort being 20 miles away in a country that might as well have been the Rhineland in the age of Vespasian, with fucking painted savages with torches suddenly looking in through your isinglass window while you were trying to carve a cradle for your only surviving child out of green oak, I am not sure that I wouldn't have handed an infested afghan, tainted sleeping bag or polyfill comforter sprayed with crackhouse gore, with my maximum compliments, to the first St. Francis Indian who was heading back upriver to French territory with his quota of English or Yingese or Yankee hair. Honestly I don't know what I would have done. And neither do you. It was a war, like any other. They lost. People do.

In the passage below, "Tom Common" exhibits Mr. Monahan's characteristic use of 'plus' in lieu of the more common 'and':

Our newspaper next sends us over to the Asian-American Writer's Workshop on St. Mark's Place. This is a performance space plus bookshop plus, evidently, "workshop"--though I could not identify any corner where anyone, if they happened to be Asian-American, might come in to cobble away at ficciones.

The use of 'plus' is found in Mr. Monahan's interview with David Thewlis in BlackBook magazine from 2007:

Seems like you had a similar situation, plus Lancashire.

And in an interview with Mr. Monahan in Collider.Com in 2007:

So yeah, there I am, and [I'm] sure I know English drama, plus film, ...

Elsewhere in the text, "Tom Common" writes, in Mr. Monahan's typically misanthropic style:

The music consists of funeral home farfisa set over a crippled samba beat. The only time the music gets turned down is when the poetry starts. Which is the solitary reason to be grateful for most of the poetry, if we weren't already on tenterhooks for it.

Mr. Monahan's sarcastic use of the expression "on tenterhooks" can be found in several passages taken from his New York Press essays. In "Up New Hampshire: Dark Thoughts in Dixville Notch" (12/30/98):

Being anxious to vote first, let alone at all, is the precise equivalent of being on tenterhooks to volunteer to be the first to be made to walk up and down emitting chicken-noises when Professor Caligostro's Mesmerism Show, late of the courts of Europe and wanted for fraud in Chickasaw Country, pitches its tents outside Hogville, TN.

In his essay, "A Glimpse of Bush: Happy Cowpoke George W. Hits the NY Campaign Trail" (03/08/00):

They were going to talk about health care in a country without any. I was on tenterhooks.

In a passage taken from a fictional letter addressed to famed editor Tina Brown in Dining Late with Claude La Badarian:

I have to tell you that I have been on tenterhooks ever since, waiting to see to what, exactly, I might be invited.

Another similarity with "Tom Common"'s article and Mr. Monahan's Dining Late with Claude La Badarian involves the modifier 'damaged'. "Tom Common" writes:

A damaged person in a print dress then gets up and reads something that confuses a pogromized ancestor first with Christ, and, then (in ascending order) self. Her crucifixion--personally complete with nails and Romans--is that she has had a bad time with the opposite sex.

In Claude's letter, "Claude and the Little People," it is written:

Or perhaps I could go live off the land in Alaska, like that guy who died in a bus with a bellyful of potato seeds. Why? Because novels are bunk, written by damaged frauds, and published boringly by idiots. 

"Tom Common"'s inventive use of the adverb "musically" below, has been used by Mr. Monahan as well, I just can't remember where exactly it is that I've seen it, but I'm sure that I have :

Ten minutes pass musically, and then, as we tense for poetry, a woman gets up and appeals to our senses of charity, asking for big donations.

Finally, the article "Dorks in Progress" is subtitled, "An Evening Spent By One Man Among the Literary Readings, So-Called, of Manhattan, Containing Some Several Inquiries into Dorks, and their Progress in the Various Practices of Poetry, Prose, and Worse," which recalls Mr. Monahan's quirkily titled Pushcart Prize winning short story, "A Relation of Various Accidents Observable in Some Animals Included in Vacuo."

The similarities go on and on, for "Tom Common" is, without a doubt, the pen name of novelist-turned-screenwriter William Monahan. 

So, the question is, are there any other pen names out there that Mr. Monahan has used?


Take-away question: What other pen names has William Monahan used?


Spy articles mentioned:

1) "Rogue Again?: How on God's green earth can a once-great magazine compete in the groovy and ironic late nineties? No, seriously. Like, what is going on?", Spy magazine, November 1997, pp. 56-60.

2) Tom Common. "Dorks in Progress: An Evening Spent By One Man Among the Literary Readings, So-Called, of Manhattan, Containing Some Several Inquiries into Dorks, and their Progress in the Various Practices of Poetry, Prose, and Worse", Spy magazine, December 1997/January 1998 (Holiday Issue), pp. 54-57.