William Monahan, High School Graduate?

Writer-director William Monahan attended Gloucester High School in Massachusetts, as memoirist David Lovelace (author of Scattershot: My Bipolar Family) passingly mentions in an interview with The Boston Globe. There's a history of members of Mr. Monahan's family on his mother's side having attended Gloucester High School, going as far back as his maternal grandfather, Harold L. Armstrong, who graduated there in the 1910s and was later a member of the Gloucester School Committee.¹ Although Mr. Monahan did go to Gloucester High School, it's difficult to determine if he graduated from there. Figuring out Mr. Monahan's educational background is a bit tricky. After his parents divorced he "lived all over the North Shore with his mother and sister," so there may have been several high schools that Mr. Monahan attended in his youth. He has, on one occasion, situated his high school in a "well-to-do country town north of Boston," which hardly describes Gloucester, Massachusetts well enough.² Whichever high school it was that Mr. Monahan attended in his final year, he has written that he was not allowed to graduate. He explains why in his New York Press essay "Joey Pinhead, College Graduate":²

That pinhead was a member of my high school class. Not in any functional sense, but he was graduated with all the rest of us, to wild sentimental applause. They didn't (not that he could have given a shit either way) give him a special diploma; he got a regular one. This seemed to be regarded in some fashion as socially progressive. But I thought that it was an atrocity—a barbarity, a bafflement, a lie. I thought it was the worst thing I've ever seen.

The pinhead didn't complete any of the courses of study—he was a whole galaxy away from being able to read—and they let him walk with a full diploma. For my part, I wasn't allowed to graduate because I had something like 12,000 unserved detentions, and hadn't been to gym class in seven months. I had no complaint against the pinhead. Each of us has his own row to hoe, that sort of thing, and I've never measured my existence against anyone else's. But it struck me as pretty damned typical about the pinhead.

Mr. Monahan's mockery of the pinhead is rife throughout the essay. Along the way, he subtlety groups himself in with the natural intellectuals of America who are hindered by the public education system's attempts to cater to the lowest common denominator. He uses the pinhead and his ilk ("hydrocephalics, stutterers, mongoloids, loonies and people who just couldn't read a cereal box in a million years if you took a bat to them"²) as a prime example of what is wrong with education in America and provides a proposal toward the end titled "This Is My Proposal for Improving the American Public Education System." The final recommendation succinctly describes Mr. Monahan's ideal public education system:

Enact the most savage classical standards in the history of mankind. Anyone failing to meet those standards for free public education shall be summarily expelled and have to go to a safety school, like Exeter.

For those of you who attended Gloucester High School yourselves, here is Mr. Monahan's full description of his high school— which is only maybe Gloucester High School— from his essay "Joey Pinhead, College Graduate":

My high school was supposedly a very good school. It was in a green and well-to-do country town north of Boston. Its test scores were the highest in the state, which meant that a lot of parents who in another town, would have been shucking out private school fees, simply sent their kids to the public high school. The general impression was that the school was just great.

Despite not graduating from high school in his final year (did he end up taking summer classes in order to graduate?), Mr. Monahan did attend university. In an essay titled "A Night on the Tiles," he briefly discusses his university years and indicates that he made good use of CLEP credits during the admissions process, perhaps to compensate for not having a high school diploma:³

John Allen plays a pennywhistle and isn't an Irishman and back in the old days in Northampton when I was a complete asshole (decompensating, as they say, after my father's death, and the auto-destruction of my almost-scary academic career: "If I don't do it now," I thought in horror, meaning, start to fuck off, having entered university as a functional CLEP-ed out junior, and having read everything in English already, my professors practically in line to blow me out of sheer gratitude, "I'll be a professor"), I held that against him. Young Irish-American men go through bad patches when they can't quite figure out what they are—what this "American" shit is.

In my opinion, Mr. Monahan actually started to fuck off in his final year in high school, but, as some might say, whatever... What is particularly interesting is this part about entering university as a "CLEP-ed out" junior. A junior can avoid a lot of the boring introductory college classes by passing CLEP exams that cover the same material. You can CLEP-out of some of the courses encountered in the first two years of college if you pass the related CLEP exams with a high enough grade. Since I have my high school diploma, I never had to turn to alternative avenues to get into university. Would a lot of CLEP credits be sufficient to enter university without a high school diploma, or did Mr. Monahan go another route, such as getting a General Equivalency Diploma (GED) instead?

High school aside, he may have attended a middle school in Hamilton, Massachusetts. In an essay titled "M1: It Really Was Father's Day", he tells of how, at the age of 14, he discovered a Marlin bolt-action rifle in his great-aunt's house and would skip classes to fire it off in the woods.⁴ He recalls living nearby Bradley Palmer State Park, which is located in Hamilton, Massachusetts. At the age of 14 and given the seasons of the events of the essay, Mr. Monahan would have been in the 8th grade and the year would have been 1974 with Mr. Monahan preparing to enter high school toward the end of summer:

At that time we lived inland, in a horsy town, on property with plenty of woods. As for shooting the rifle, I could get away with it; my parents were divorced and my mother's job at that time involved spending half the week in Manhattan. At home with my grandmother watching me, I could get away with just about anything. On not a few mornings I doubled back from the bus stop, got in through the back door and dragged my motorcycle silently off into the woods, or spent the schoolday happy as a clam in the furnace room doing something I couldn't do in school—reading. I had no record of dereliction whatsoever (and was in fact a pretty good kid). It was no trouble to start shooting in the glades by the pond every afternoon and again. There was always firing from the Bradley Palmer State Park, which adjoined the property.

At any rate, after high school, as Sam Allis of The Boston Globe reports, Mr. Monahan "tossed boxes at Blanchards in West Roxbury" before attending UMass-Amherst as an undergraduate. How he fared there is another blog entry, a future one, that will reveal even greater mysteries. More to come. Stay tuned.

Take-away question: Did William Monahan ever achieve a high school diploma?

Sources:

1) Obituary: "Harold L. Armstrong, Magistrate in Gloucester for 45 Years; At 83", 1981-04-22, The Boston Globe.
2) William Monahan. "Joey Pinhead, College Graduate: Education in an Ignorant Society", New York Press, vol. 8, no. 15 (April 12–18, 1995), pp. 1, 27–28.
3) William Monahan. "A Night on the Tiles: The Big Bad Bollocks & the Mirror of England", New York Press, vol. 13, no. 27 (July 5–11, 2000), pp. 1, 27–29.

4) William Monahan. "M1: It Really Was Father's Day", New York Press, vol. 10, no. 23 (June 11–17, 1997), pp. 32, 34.