Update: The Long Play and William Monahan

The Long Play script that filmmaker William Monahan was hired to rewrite back in 2007 is no longer happening as a feature film. Deadline Hollywood Daily reports that the Mick Jagger/Martin Scorsese project about the rock music business, formerly intended to be a film titled The Long Play, will now be produced as an HBO period drama series. However, Mr. Monahan is not attached, anymore. I guess his rewrite of The Long Play is only of interest to scholars, such as myself, now. I know I've been abusing the term "scholar" a lot lately, but it's hard to stop when it's a major part of your identity.

The rest of my blog entry about Mr. Monahan's days as a musician still stands, though. Read it.

The Collected Electronic Correspondences of William Monahan

While imagining, as a thought experiment, what could be contained in a volume titled "The Collected Electronic Correspondences of William Monahan," I realized that I could be in it. I've had my share of correspondences with filmmaker William Monahan. At first probing with various fake email accounts, Mr. Monahan eventually began using an @mac.com email address ("wjmonahan@mac.com") to size me up. Ours has been a savage correspondence, with Mr. Monahan acting as a ruthless mentor through edit summaries on the English Wikipedia and as a paranoid celebrity through various email accounts. Originally, I antagonized Mr. Monahan by simply being a terrible writer who was working on his Wikipedia article. He'd correct my writing on Wiki. After he got a hold of my email address, silliness took over. Through perseverance I like to think that I've progressed from someone who had below average reading comprehension into a mediocre scholar. Certainly Mr. Monahan had legitimate issues to raise about some of my bad writing on the English Wikipedia. These days, I do my work at Squidoo.

I'm fascinated by the subject of collecting emails from authors. Are such collections of emails going to become the new Collected Letters? Any kind of electronic correspondence could possibly be collected. Facebook and Twitter are currently big with celebrities. The Library of Congress recently announced that it will be archiving all tweets, by everyone. Twitter is easy, since the information is public, but emails are private.

Although all these electronic correspondences need to be saved, it's hard to say exactly how the next generation of scholars will get a hold of all these Important Emails. An extreme method would be to hire your hackers Joe Wardriver, Sue Cracker, or Thomas Nation to break into the email accounts of authors for the purposes of dumping the lot onto the web. There have been instances when excerpts of Mr. Monahan's emails have been published, but this can hardly be relied upon. NYPress founder and former publisher Russ Smith has excerpted, in his Mugger column, some of his correspondences with Mr. Monahan regarding the possibility of a Hillary Clinton assignment. I believe, however, that a more practical method of acquiring Important Emails might be email donations from persons who have had lengthy exchanges with authors like Mr. Monahan. I, myself, happen to have been blessed with several emails from Mr. Monahan, from his MobileMe account, as well as from his various fake email accounts. To give this idea of making donations of Important Emails Exchanged With Authors some weight, I've decided to release a few of the more interesting emails that Mr. Monahan and I have exchanged.

Before I do that, however, I would just like to emphasize the importance of Mr. Monahan's electronic correspondences. In prose, Mr. Monahan is incredibly informative. His densely packed sentences are of equally high quality in both his journalism and his interviews. Mr. Monahan doesn't do conventional interviews, as Juan Morales wrote in his Los Angeles Times article. It seems his preferred format is the email interview and for good reason. Compare his recent Screen Daily interview with the 2008 video interview conducted by Evelyn Vaccaro below:




There's a stark difference in the quality of these two interviews, though both are equally informative. In the Screen Daily interview he's eloquent, but in the video interview above he comes off as a blubbering fool constantly wondering if, you know, we, you know, know what he's talking about. It's unlikely that Mr. Monahan will be submitting himself to much more of that. So when it comes to Mr. Monahan, we scholars will find the most interesting insights in his emails, forum posts, and so on.

There may be a wealth of forum posts out there by Mr. Monahan, somewhere in the deep Web. Vanity Fair columnist James Wolcott remembers Mr. Monahan participating in discussions on an Internet chat board, which might have been Echo BBS since that's where TV critic Aaron Barnhart encountered Mr. Monahan in those days. I haven't yet probed the archives of Echo BBS. You have to register. There's research to be done there.

But to get back to the subject of Important Emails, it was on August 7th, 2009 that Mr. Monahan decided to switch from using various fake email accounts for his correspondences with me to using an @mac.com email address with his real name: "wjmonahan@mac.com". What is telling is that by 2009, you could no longer get yourself an @mac.com email address. The .Mac service was re-branded as MobileMe in 2008, so from then on Apple was handing out @me.com email addresses. It is highly unlikely that the "wjmonahan@mac.com" email address was created a year in advance for future use as a fake email account.

At any rate, it was a Friday night when I received my first email from Mr. Monahan's @mac.com email address. According to the email header of this first email, Mr. Monahan was in the City of London. He had been filming London Boulevard. It was a Saturday morning for him.

Received: from Unknown-00-23-6c-94-2f-4b.home ([81.154.188.105])
by asmtp014.mac.com
From: WILLIAM MONAHAN
To: [my email address]
Subject:
Date: Sat, 08 Aug 2009 04:20:42 +0100
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.935.3)

You're fucked. Have a nice day.

END OF EMAIL

My response was immediate:

To: WILLIAM MONAHAN
Subject: Re:
Date: Fri, 7 Aug 2009 20:56:56 -0700 (PDT)

Sir, you have dreamed of having an antagonist like myself. Light House: A Trifle, Dining Late with Claude La Badarian, and even that BlackBook Magazine interview you did with Mr. Thewlis, indicate a deep obsession with the kind of character I have been.

How much do you know about me?

END OF EMAIL

Mr. Monahan's response was equally immediate:

Received: from Unknown-00-23-6c-94-2f-4b.home ([81.154.188.105])

 by asmtp011.mac.com

From: WILLIAM MONAHAN
To: [my email address]
Subject: Re: Re:
Date: Sat, 08 Aug 2009 05:36:24 +0100
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.935.3)

I know most recently, Moriarty, that you're the kind of fool who responds to a showdown by instantly cutting his own throat legally with a single English sentence. You're all done, William.

END OF EMAIL

My response was:

To: WILLIAM MONAHAN
Subject: Re: Re:
Date: Fri, 7 Aug 2009 21:42:51 -0700 (PDT)

You mean your email from an hour ago was the beginning of a showdown?

What could I have won if the "showdown" had gone better for me?

END OF EMAIL

Mr. Monahan's response was:

Received: from Unknown-00-23-6c-94-2f-4b.home ([81.154.188.105])
by asmtp019.mac.com
From: WILLIAM MONAHAN
To: [my email address]
Subject: Re: Re: Re:
Date: Sat, 08 Aug 2009 05:47:00 +0100
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.935.3)

No, it was the end of one. You crapped it at first fire and admitted that you were an insane stalker, you retard.

END OF EMAIL

Yet, off-and-on we went for months. I tried to steer the conversations toward questions I had about his works, but I was never even remotely successful. We simply had a very weird back-and-forth, which maybe said everything. For the record, I consider myself to be a Monahan scholar rather than his "insane stalker." The character that I had mentioned having been was that of an amateur desperately seeking recognition, an appreciative clapping sound for my efforts. 

At some point, Mr. Monahan decided to try to convince me that he actually wasn't "William Monahan," but I am someone who can penetrate background, so while he was trying to convince me that he actually wasn't who he had presented himself as, he gave himself away, ironically, using a single English sentence:

Received: from [10.103.27.56] (166-205-007-042.mobile.mymmode.com [166.205.7.42])
by asmtp011.mac.com
From: William Monahan
To: [my email address]
Subject: Re: Build now
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 2009 21:25:42 -0700
X-Mailer: iPhone Mail (7C144)

Hey, Maggot, what's shaking. It's probably past time to tell you that im not William Monahan, so whatever rocks you're getting off with the doofy subnormal autodidact antichrist shit, sorry. 

END OF EMAIL

In that last English sentence he uses the idiom "get your rocks off" and the term "autodidact", all the while using a persona that reminded me of some sort of "Rock 'n Roll" guy. Your clues are "get your rocks off" and "autodidact". Back in 1997, when he and NYPress colleague C.J. Sullivan had a tiff in the letters column of NYPress, he made a similar remark to C.J. Sullivan.¹ It's a long letter, which I only excerpt below, but worth reading in its entirety, particularly if you're doing criticism of The Departed:

Boston or the boroughs, I know Sullivan like a species of bird: a shamrocks-and-vomit shovel leaner of the type who gets his rocks off by being "connected." These guys like to hang out with cops and ward bosses and so forth. They tend to use phrases like "fallen fireman" without irony; they start to sound like Barry Fitzgerald when they get drunk; and they like to hang around bars getting off on how superior they are to guys who actually do anything or, say, go home and fuck their wives. You know what had me on the floor about Sullivan's letter? When he mentioned knowing the cop.

So while C.J. Sullivan is the type who gets his rocks off by being "connected," I am apparently the type who gets his rocks off with my "doofy subnormal autodidact antichrist shit." I would have described myself as the type who gets his rocks off by doing literary biography, piecemeal, all the while chronicling my efforts in my blog. As for the term "autodidact", it shows up, in comedic form, in his novel Light House: A Trifle, but more so, it's one of the main themes of his journalism.

It's ironic that while attempting to deny who he was to his unofficial biographer (me), he in fact gave himself away. But then again, I have an encyclopedic knowledge of Mr. Monahan's works, and if anyone was going to pick up on these clues it was going to be me.

After the @mac.com email address ceased to be responsive, other fake email accounts continued our correspondence, with one lady named "Manda Trothero" writing to inform me that the "wjmonahan@mac.com" email address had been previously used by an assistant in her office:

You recently wrote to a defunct email previously used by an assistant in this office. William Monahan does not use email. However, he does answer questions! If you would like to ask questions, please direct them to this address. If you are a journalist please identify the publication for which you work. If you are a scholar, please identify the institution at which you study or teach. Thank you! 

Our conversations abound with silliness. Mr. Monahan is a writer who writes weird characters, such as Claude La Badarian. If I've become a part of Mr. Monahan's creative process, so be it. I enjoy our emails.

As the fictional character Claude La Badarian said of Mr. Monahan:

An obscenity has come to my attention. William Monahan's Light House: A Trifle has gone into trade paperback. After all the work I did--all the letters I wrote, telling Riverhead Books what an unreliable, ridiculous clown and megalomaniac viper they had taken to their multinational breast--after all the lack-of-character-demonstrating e-mails many mediums have received from various "hotmail" addresses, as well as the mindspring account Monahan claimed dubiously was password-hacked a few years ago (Monahan, usually indisposed in other states, as well as rather various, personality-wise, is unusually open to calumny)--I cannot believe that this book has again been put into print.

The part above about Mr. Monahan being "rather various, personality-wise" has been my experience, too. In the fiction serial Dining Late with Claude La Badarian, Mr. Monahan's fictional character Claude La Badarian mentions how the fictional William Monahan's Mindspring account had apparently once been password-hacked, throwing all suspicion on Claude La Badarian, of course; but this is fiction, fiction set in 2001. In the year 2010, I know of only one person who still has a Mindspring account and uses it regularly for email; other than that, it's a relic. The fictional character Claude La Badarian had a Mindspring email address too: LaBadarian@mindspring.com. If Mr. Monahan truly had a Mindspring account in real life, I hope we will one day get to read the email correspondences that took place in his Mindspring account, perhaps in a volume titled "The Collected Electronic Correspondences of William Monahan"?

Take-away question: Is there anyone else out there willing to make donations to the web of their email correspondences with William Monahan?

Sources:

1) William Monahan responds to C.J. Sullivan's letter "The Troubles" to the paper, in his own letter "They're a Touchy People, And Like to Fight", New York Press, vol. 10, no. 4 (January 22–28, 1997), p. 46. Note: Both William Monahan and C.J. Sullivan were NYPress writers at the time.

Who disinherited William Monahan?

Now, for some of you who are following my blog religiously, as much as that is possible given my infrequent posts, the idea that writer and filmmaker William Monahan modeled the personal history of his fictional character Claude La Badarian after his own personal history, may be a self-evident truth at this point. Yet, I am still not satisfied with the evidence that I have discovered and I believe that there remain nuances that could be better understood with further research. Knowing which family member it was that, at some point in time, disinherited Mr. Monahan, could potentially have a huge impact on the body of knowledge concerning the fiction serial Dining Late with Claude La Badarian, particularly if it was Mr. Monahan's maternal grandmother who disinherited him under similar circumstances to which Claude La Badarian was disinherited by his own grandmother. Already I have provided supporting evidence that Mr. Monahan's maternal grandfather is a match for Claude La Badarian's grandfather, so to be able to say as much about both of Mr. Monahan's maternal grandparents would be earth shattering to the insular world inhabited by Monahan scholars such as myself.

It is in Mr. Monahan's 2000 essay "Stoned in Amherst," that he mentions that he was disinherited, a commonality he points out that he shares with the fictional character Ivanhoe:¹

"I suppose it's a sketchbook, technically, perennially associated with undergraduate poets and ex-Seven Sisters Young Moms with a few minutes to spare to pour forth from their collective anima their Mistreatment Diaries and the latest version of I Stand here Ironing, Tillie Olsen's much-anthologized masterpiece about standing there ironing and feeling Vaguely Dispossessed and au fait, as opposed to, say, Disinherited, like Ivanhoe and me."

That phrase, "Disinherited, like Ivanhoe and me," could just as easily have been said by Mr. Monahan's fictional character Claude La Badarian in the La Badarian letters (aka Dining Late with Claude La Badarian) since Claude La Badarian happens to have been disinherited as well, by his grandmother no less, the result of a conspiracy on the part of the Medford La Badarians. Claude La Badarian writes in letter 7, "Claude and the Little People":

"When I explained to my grandmother that I had been disinherited, she wrote me a check for five dollars, the sum she put in my Christmas cards until I was 40. It bounced. If I am going to get a summerhouse of the sort to which I am accustomed, Henry, I am going to have to do it myself–a daunting prospect."

I admit, this is one of the weakest comparisons I have made between the personal history of Mr. Monahan and his fictional character Claude La Badarian. But seen within a larger context, it is further damning evidence. Perhaps you are not familiar with some of the supporting evidence I have previously proffered, indicating that Mr. Monahan was lifting passages from his own published works while writing the La Badarian letters? I will be drudging up new supporting evidence below, so feel free to ignore my previous blog entries while reading this one, until after you are done.

I have previously postulated that in using his own autobiography to create Claude La Badarian, Mr. Monahan is making some sort of point about autobiographical writing. But, then again, there is always the possibility that I am afflicted with a mild form of Asperger's syndrome (based on my understanding of that disorder from David Mamet's book Bambi vs. Godzilla) and am simply connecting everything to the point of uselessness. It's not like a writer becomes an entirely new person each time he starts an essay, novel, or script. But as you will see below Mr. Monahan very clearly copied from his works, practically verbatim. As I have delved deeper into Mr. Monahan's personal history through his works (and genealogical research with regards to his maternal grandfather Harold L. Armstrong), I have come to realize just how much of Mr. Monahan's autobiography has been passed down to his character Claude La Badarian.

From letter 1, "The Last Supper": Claude La Badarian writes:

There comes a time in every writer’s life when he realizes that he has a biography rather than a life. Some of us can delay this disastrous cognition until the Pulitzer, or the Lethe of senility; but I’ve been worried since the age of sixteen about unborn people wondering about what "lay behind" my poems, and where I was living, and whose purse I was taking pills out of, and so forth. Paranoids, Henry, have real biographers–especially when, like me, Claude La Badarian, they’re massive polymathic geniuses.

In his 2000 essay "Coney-Catching,"² Mr. Monahan wrote the exact same thing, which was later copied verbatim to the La Badarian letter excerpted above:

"We wander around Cunt Island, feeling the same. Still hazy. A day to become disoriented in the sky. A day to slam your plane into the water to stop whatever this fucking shit is that is different from life, the shit that happens when you have, and know you have, a biography instead of a life.

And yet another comparison! From letter 4, "Silence, Exile, and Claude La Badarian": Claude La Badarian writes:

Claude La Badarian, from earliest youth (photograph exists of the young Claude in a badged blazer, emerging from a basilica with his palms pressed together and his eyes turned skyward), has been besieged by gratuitous integrity. Anti-success training is the specialty of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church.

In his 1995 essay "The Angel Factory",³ Mr. Monahan wrote of having had the exact same experience:

"The last time I took Communion and believed it meant anything was when I was in the second grade, wearing a blue school blazer with a badge on it, coming out of a counterfeit basilica with my palms pressed together, in a sexist double-crocodile of embarrassed Irish and Italian kids. I never got confirmed."

Pretty amazing stuff. The prose speaks for itself.

So, no concluding thoughts this time, simply a promise to discuss the importance of Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Cask of Amontillado" as it appears in the La Badarian letters for my next blog entry about Dining Late with Claude La Badarian.

Oh wait, I almost forgot, here is a quote from Mr. Monahan's essay "A Night on the Tiles," in which he states that the only person he ever satirizes is himself:⁴

"It's ordained […] that I can never write satire of other people: I can start to do it, but God has ordained that I am smart enough to turn the burning glass around on myself: the only person I ever satirize, thank Christ, is myself. I have a built-in, possibly Catholic, ethical alarm system."

That says it all, doesn't it?

Take-away question: Whom was it that disinherited William Monahan?

Sources:

1) William Monahan. "Stoned in Amherst", New York Press, vol. 13, no. 2 (January 12–18, 2000), pp. 1 (Sec 1), 8–9 (Sec 2).
2) William Monahan. "Mermaid Parade: Coney-Catching", New York Press, vol. 13, no. 26 (June 28–July 4, 2000), pp. 14–15.
3) William Monahan. "The Angel Factory: Making Martyrs & Monsters", New York Press, vol. 8, no. 3 (January 18–24, 1995), pp. 1, 16–17.
4) 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.

The father of William Monahan

If William Monahan's father could perceive that the web now has a blog entry dedicated to the subject of him (you are reading said blog entry right now), he'd probably consider its author to be a true donkey, perhaps the primary donkey (I'd be fine with this distinction, I've earned it). Writer-director William J. Monahan's father was William Joseph Monahan, so both father and son carry the same initials: W. J. M (to avoid confusion I will refer to the writer and filmmaker as Mr. Monahan, and his father by his full name). Born January 21, 1934 in Boston, Massachusetts, William Joseph Monahan was the fifth child of Mary Regina McGee and Alphonsus George Monahan.¹ He had eight siblings, whose names, from oldest to youngest, were: Rose, John, Edward, George, Mary, Regina, James, and Ruth.¹ When William Joseph Monahan was seven years old, his father died. Mr. Monahan recalls in a New York Press essay:⁴

"My dad, whose own father had died when my grandmother's ninth child was unborn, had been shining shoes in Maverick Square in East Boston when he was 12."⁴

As a young man William Joseph Monahan served in the Korean War. His record with US Veteran's Affairs indicates that he eventually achieved the rank of 1st Lieutenant in the US Army Air Corps.⁹ Mr. Monahan writes in another New York Press essay:³

"My dad was a combat infantryman and platoon sergeant at a shockingly young age in the Korean War, but if you heard about the war, it was never from him."³

Shortly before turning 30 years old, William Joseph Monahan married Constance Armstrong. Their wedding took place on February 20, 1960 at St. Ann's Church in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Constance Armstrong must have very recently become pregnant, or was shortly going to become pregnant, with Mr. Monahan who would be born less than nine months later on November 3, 1960. They would have one other child, a daughter named Susan. About six years later, William Joseph Monahan and Constance Armstrong divorced.

Although William Joseph Monahan was an engineer,⁵ he was apparently not an ambitious man which would be the primary reason that his marriage would fail.⁴ His father Alphonsus George Monahan had also been an engineer, a civil engineer for the Bay State Railroad.¹ Mr. Monahan writes:

"My father had an IQ in the 180 range and wanted (though he ended up with more than that by default) no more from life than the enough of the Irish ghetto. Had my mother not left my father owing to his lack of ambition (that is, his ambitions were to be an Irishman), I might have been a very different person. Maybe I'd be dead. And maybe my mother, on the whole, made the right decision on behalf of the child, as women with children will. It used to occasionally occur to me, on the evidence presented by my father, that being very clever and handsome and verbally brilliant wasn't enough--or otherwise he would have lived with us, instead of the more prosperous asshole who did. Perhaps it was for the best. But it was hard to take. It was hard to take at Christmas."⁴

Of his paternal family, Mr. Monahan has written that they were "deeply Irish, deeply Catholic and rigorously structured ('working class' to the bone, as some Irish families can be even when they've got a hell of a lot of money: translate 'working class' as 'ascetic Catholics' and you're more on the ball than a Marxist would be)."⁴ He has described his ancestors from the 1880s as also being deeply Catholic, if not more so than his aunts and uncles:

"While I know some Hispanics who are as Catholic as my paternal family was in Boston in the 1880s, there's not a single Irish or Italian or Pole of my acquaintance under the age of 50 whose Catholicism isn't totally lapsed into a condition of nostalgia."²

At least two of Mr. Monahan's aunts on his father's side were are nuns [see comment below]. After the reforms of the Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church took hold in the 1960s, his aunts the nuns were allowed to take off their medieval robes and veils and put on ordinary clothes, as well as leave the convents and live independently. While growing up, Mr. Monahan recalls having nuns around the house. His "eldest nun-aunt", Rose Elizabeth Monahan, "used to cram [he and his sister] into some wrecked convent school desks in the attic and teach [them] about God." He goes on to write:

"She nearly gave my sister a complex for life by dragging her out of a room full of uncles at the age of four and hissing at her, 'Those are men! Men!' forcing her to change, crying, aged four, out of a short yellow nightgown which only she had noticed."²

In "Growing Up Racist,"⁸ Mr. Monahan writes of his father's attitude toward African Americans:

"I come from a long line of Yankee racists, who never even saw any black people yet disliked them, and a long line of Irish Catholic urban racists, who saw black people every day and on the whole disliked them more. This was disturbingly contrary to popular wisdom (that is, opposed to Error, as both the Church of England and the Spanish Inquisition used to say) when I was growing up. It took me 20 years to get Dad to stop saying 'nigger,' and then when he did he said 'black chaps' instead."⁸

Among the Monahans, it was Mr. Monahan's paternal grandmother Mary Regina McGee who commanded authority over the family. Mr. Monahan describes her as "a matriarch of the Boston Irish variety (you don't mess with them, ever, take my word for it)".⁶ She lived a long life, but, unfortunately, had to bury four of her five sons before her own time came on April 27, 1997. It was on May 18, 1990 that William Joseph Monahan finally succumbed to the cancer that he had been diagnosed with several months earlier.⁵ He was buried at the Massachusetts National Cemetery in Bourne, Massachusetts, where his brother, a retired Master Sergeant of the US Air Force, had also been buried.^9-10 It was exactly a year to the day that his father died that Mr. Monahan completed "Light House", later to be published as Light House: A Trifle by Riverhead Books.⁷ A fine tribute to his father, as well as perhaps the beginning of Mr. Monahan's literary career.

Sources:

1) Cathy Kendrick. "Descendants of John McGee", FamilyTreeMaker.com, Retrieved 2010-06-24.
2) William Monahan. "Actual Modern Popery: Pope-Art Through the Ages", New York Press, vol. 8, no. 42 (October 18–24, 1995), pp. 1, 18, 20, 22, 24.

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

4) William Monahan. "Merry Crucifix", New York Press, vol. 9, no. 48 (November 27–December 3, 1996), pp. 6–8.
5) William Monahan. "The Irish question", Old Crow Review, no. 6, FkB Press, December 1995, 5 pages.
6) William Monahan. "The Barbecutioner's Song: On Smoke, Flame, Boredom and Filial Piety", New York Press, vol. 8, no. 22 (May 31–June 6, 1995), p. 19.
7) Darcy Cosper (2001-10-02). "Writer's 'trifle' Aims Higher", The Hartford Courant.
8) William Monahan. "Black Comedy: Growing Up Racist", New York Press, vol. 9, no. 40 (October 2–8, 1996), pp. 31–32.
9) Find A Grave, Inc. Find A Grave, database, "Record, William J. Monahan (1934-1990), Memorial No. 1004292"
10) Find A Grave, Inc. Find A Grave, database, "Record, George F. Monahan (1932-1990), Memorial No. 1004219"

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.

William Monahan the musician

There is melody in writer-director William Monahan's prose, so much so that you could easily sing-a-long while reading most of his works. It's not the same with textbooks, the reading of which is almost a daily grind for me. With a textbook, you're only processing the information laid out to you, but with Mr. Monahan's prose you could easily sing-a-long if you were so inclined. As Sam Allis of The Boston Globe said of The Departed: "At its best, [Mr. Monahan's] phrasing and structure rival the music of the late, great novelist George V. Higgins." That may be in part due to Mr. Monahan having been a performing musician in the early 90s. He used to play guitar for a band called the Slags and then later for another band called Foam.

Although the chronology isn't too clear, at a minimum Mr. Monahan played guitar for the Slags during the period 1990-1991, and perhaps even going as far back as the late 80s. By 1993 he was playing for another band called Foam, touring in San Francisco at one point, though his career as a musician came to an end around 1994.¹

One of his bandmates in the Slags was New York artist Antony Zito, an old friend of Mr. Monahan's from Massachusetts. Of his days in the Slags, Mr. Zito has said, in an email, "We played in Sheehan's cafe and a few other spots in and around Northampton Mass around 1990 or so." According to a contributors note in an issue of Perkins Press, Mr. Monahan was still a guitarist in the Slags toward the end of 1991.²

Then, shortly afterward, Mr. Monahan started playing in another band called Foam. David Cronin, whose online handle is BostonBeaneater, recalls getting to know Mr. Monahan when visiting a friend in San Francisco in February 1993 who was the bass guitarist in Foam. Mr. Cronin said to me in an email, "I saw Foam perform live at an empty club in San Fran sometime around February 1993. They were a decent band with some clever songs. I'm not sure if Bill wrote all the songs but I know he had his hands in the pot. I was out there visiting a high school friend who had moved out there and shared a house with Bill and played bass in the band."

Though rare, occasionally Mr. Monahan has written about his years as a musician. In an essay titled "Cymru: A Week in Llareggub," he writes "When I was a musician I felt like a vaudeville fraud dying of cancer whenever I said what I did. We just got a new booking agent. I was on the radio once. We're opening for another band you've never heard of at Uncle Nasty's House of Pie."³ The italics are his own. I figure it was probably Foam that played on the radio and had a booking agent, since they also put out a demo tape according to Mr. Cronin who had a copy, and maybe still does, but hasn't yet searched through his archives to see if it's still there. A sampling of Mr. Monahan's work as a song-writer would be extremely interesting. Right now, we can only imagine how scabrous the lyrics might have been, but perhaps something will leak out onto the Internet in the years ahead as Mr. Monahan's star in the film industry continues to rise.

Mr. Cronin also got to know Mr. Monahan a bit when he was a graduate student in Western Massachusetts. That is another area where little is known about Mr. Monahan: his education. Though, don't worry, I'm hard at work on a future blog entry that pulls together tidbits about his education that I've gleaned from here and there.

A lot of great, original bands came out of Northampton, Massachusetts, according to Mr. Monahan in his essay "A Night on the Tiles: The Big Bad Bollocks & the Mirror of England."⁴ One of the most amusing bands to come out of Northampton was The Unband. A few of Mr. Monahan's friends were in the band, such as bassist Mike Ruffino. These crazy bastards were actually banned from one of Mr. Monahan's favorite dives in Northampton, the former Bay State Hotel, where, also, one of the bands that Mr. Monahan played in performed once, twice, or more (yeah, I know: vague). At any rate, the members of The Unband were banned from the Bay State Hotel in the 90s for a "nudity-and-pepper-spray incident" that they had been involved in.⁴ Mr. Monahan's friendship with Mr. Ruffino goes way back, farther than I know. When Mr. Monahan was briefly editor at Hamptons magazine in 1996, he hired on Mr. Ruffino as his assistant.⁵ When Kurt Vonnegut moved to Northampton in 2001, The New York Post briefly joked (probably in Page Six) that Mr. Monahan and Mr. Ruffino were going to personally welcome Mr. Vonnegut to their neighborhood, or something to that effect. There are also a couple of humorous mentions of Mr. Monahan in Mr. Ruffino's memoir, Gentlemanly Repose.⁶

All this background will probably inform, in some way or another, the rewrite that Mr. Monahan has been hired to do of the script for The Long Play, a film project about the music business that originated at Mick Jagger's production company Jagged Films and that Martin Scorsese is intending on directing. Obviously, however, Mr. Monahan's musical background is evident in any of his scripts.

Take-away question: During which years did Mr. Monahan play for the bands the Slags and Foam?

Sources:

1) William Monahan. "Vanity Plates: Something's Got to Give", New York Press, vol. 11, no. 8 (February 25–March 3, 1998), p. 62. QUOTE: "Four years ago I was in a band and weighed 160 in any weather."
2) "Contributors Notes", Perkins Press, vol. 2, no. 4, Late-Summer 1991. QUOTE: "William Monohan [sic] 'writes fiction and plays guitar for the Slags.' A long (but it's worth it) short story eats up pages 12 and 13."
3) William Monahan. "Cymru: A Week in Llareggub", New York Press, vol. 12, no. 27 (July 7–13, 1999), pp. 1, 18.
4) 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.
5) William Monahan. "The Burning Deck: My Brilliant Career at 'Hamptons'", New York Press, vol. 9, no. 29 (July 17–23, 1996), pp. 1, 28–29.
6) Michael Ruffino (2004-11-01). Gentlemanly Repose: Confessions Of A Debauched Rock 'n' Roller. Citadel Press. ISBN 978-0806526263. NOTE: Monahan is mentioned thrice in Ruffino's memoir: in the Acknowledgments as the person without whom the "book would not have been possible", on page 37 at a computer monitor smashing party, and on page 157 at a concert where The Unband opened for Def Leppard at the Tweeter Center in Mansfield, Massachusetts. Monahan may be present on page 193 as one of the "guest-listed friends" for The Unband's final show at the Bowery Ballroom on July 29, 2001.

The political reporting of William Monahan

Of writer-director William Monahan's past political reporting, there isn't much, and of what there is, it's all published in New York Press. He's covered politicians ranging from Hillary Clinton, to Pat Buchanan, Steve Forbes, Bob Dole, and George W. Bush. He sort of specialized in the New Hampshire primary, covering the stump speeches in 1996, and then in 1998 he covered the history and culture of the event before the primary date had even been set. In 2000, he covered George W. Bush on the NY campaign trail, in so much as he had an encounter with him, of which you can read about below, in Mr. Monahan's own words from his essay "A Glimpse of Bush" (illustration to the right republished with permission from Tony Millionaire), and Holy God.¹

With nothing else to do I took out my notebook and started organizing some notes. It was while I was doing this that George W. came down the aisle, greeting each member of the press, and he finally came down toward me. I thought of pretending to be asleep, but the tour was far too papal. I grasped his hand. This was not much of a man in front of me: a person who took every advantage and just became a cowboy apostle. Yet I was looking at probably the next president of the United States:

"William Monahan. New York Press"

"Am I supposed to know what that is?"

I gave him that one; after all, it was his plane. Universe, too, maybe.

"It's a weekly in Manhattan."

"A weekly," he said. (Later I wondered if he was thinking, Is it Catholic? In appearance I could have been a deranged Maynooth father in mufti come to bitch him out for breaking bread with a bigot, or being one.) "Well, I better be particularly nice to you. What day's it come out?" Meaning, this paper, in relation to the election.

"Day of," I said, meaning, this paper, in relation to the election.

"Well I better be real nice to you. Can I get you anything? A coffee? Something to eat?"

The candidate was antic; the mediums sycophantic. It seemed a developed and harmonious relationship. I said, "Already very generous, thank you." I think what happened then, I'm afraid, is that I had the arrant balls to ignore him. He passed on. I started transcribing mental notes from Long Island. The candidate came back and looked at me.

"You do know the rules," he said.

"Sure," I said, grandly and at hazard.

"What are they?" asked the candidate.

I had no idea, and had to inarticulately concede it.

"That everything here—" he indicated the plane—"is off the record."

I hadn't written anything down except the names of cookies and the way Long Island looked from the air, but I figured that he was still having fun.

"Oh, yeah, obviously."

"Then what," asked the Governor of Texas, suddenly about as fun as Caligula, "are you writing?"

I sat there, looking the candidate in the eye, glazed with fever, realizing that here was a seminal and useful encounter: the first guy in my life I cannot tell to fuck off. What could I say? Shut your ass before I kick it off you, your dad was worth 50 of you, you fucking prick, and that's your problem anyway, isn't it, you fucking meatball? Why don't you go back up to the front of the plane and brand a couple lobsters for me? Who the fuck are you, you fucking prick, telling me anything at all? Much less what the "rules" are, Your Excellency, you evil fucking pinhead? I'm a novelist. You're just the president—and only maybe. Shut up. Christ and Holy Mary will spare me from further intercourse with pricks with wired courtiers and security details.

If I had not been running a fever of 103 I probably would have gotten Tasered for a misinterpreted bon mot, or ended up on the national news as a crazed loner who sawed the head off the Republican nominee with a complimentary yogurt knife. Motherfucker telling me not to write. Worse, assuming I was one of these five-dollar wire service mediums.

I went to sleep. I must have snored, because I jolted awake again. I wanted off the plane more than I have wanted anything in my life. I am far from perfect, but I'm a lot more perfect than anyone who will put up with that sort of thing—from a president, or God for that matter.

There was a media event in Buffalo (a rigged GOP circle jerk designed as the theatrical backdrop for the release of "news"), but I'd already figured that one out, and I got on the bus and went to the hotel. I had a few drinks (not with the Bush cavalcade, of which I had ceased to be a part, but some people from a Sesame Street roadshow, which seemed cleaner), made a few calls and went to bed. Buffalo is a nice place for a dismal experience. I ran out of Kleenex and toilet paper, blowing my nose.

And that was the last of Mr. Monahan's political reporting, though the first instance of his political reporting seems to have been his column "Straw Dogs," covering the 1996 New Hampshire primary for six weeks.^2—7 Years later, when he returned to New Hampshire at the end of 1998, he mulled upon how the primary defines New Hampshire, in his essay "Up New Hampshire: Dark Thoughts in Dixville Notch," seemingly indicating at one point that he was a registered Democrat at the time: "the only thing good in this country at the moment is that Republicans are accidentally minting registered Democrats like pennies, one of them being me."⁸

Then in 1999, Mr. Monahan was interested in covering the 2000 NY Senate race but eventually begged off. Here is his explanation, as reported by New York Press publisher Russ Smith in his Mugger column:

"Belay the Hillary offer. Just say she's bogus and leave it at that. I have a theory that she's actively attempting to exhaust disgust. When critics are speechless and everything's been said she'll just waddle on to victory. She loses in New York, she notches up a defeat for women everywhere, thereby winning. She has no brains whatsoever. It's fucking unwatchable."

The following week, Russ Smith published another quote from Mr. Monahan, in which he rants further about his reasons for passing on the assignment to cover the Rudy-Hillary race, re-iterating that Hillary Clinton holds an extremely low brain cell count:

"What's frightening about Hillary is what's frightening about Bill Gates. They know they have a crap product; they don't care. That may be an angle. Hillary has no talent, no brains, she's sort of this virus-like thing, that should, maximum, have been a low-rent personnel officer, but escaped from the petri dish and hit the road, wearing that sick smile, altitude-sick, totally out of her depth, but on the march.

She's gotta know she's gravely unsuitable and actively bad for people, who deserve better. She doesn't care. She wants what she wants. That's what creates the late-century nausea.

There's also a tragic component in a literary sense: She's making a huge, overreaching mistake, and the only thing she's gonna accomplish is making Giuliani look like a combination of Thomas Jefferson and the Christian savior. I saw her on tv talking to the U.S. citizens as if they were illiterates to whom she had brought religious tracts and wagons of food paid for out of her own personal First Lady Treasury and almost lost my lunch.

So it's insane. I could do it. I wouldn't like it. But I could get something out of it if the nausea is just gotten over with, which is the thing I was missing."

While Mr. Monahan has hardly ever been kind to the politicians he's covered, he is particularly menacing toward Democrats. An anonymous comment on the Sadly, No! blog from someone called "forked tongue" alleges that Mr. Monahan despised liberals in general, not just Hillary Clinton as demonstrated above:

Since nobody asked, I had a few run-ins with Bill Monahan, screenplay winner for The Departed, and at the time at least (mid-late 90s) he was a drunken reactionary fucktard. Not exactly a wingnut, kinda more a South Park contrarian–claimed to hate conservatives, but REALLY FUCKIN HATED liberals. Wrote several pieces of ain’t-I-cute race-baiting and a stirring paean to Steve Forbes on libertarian grounds in a local pennysaver called New York Press

There is a grain of truth in the comment made by the anonymite named "forked tongue". Steve Forbes was definitely Mr. Monahan's favorite candidate in the 1996 New Hampshire primary. In "It Doles for Thee," he writes: "In the Forbes ascendancy there is a promise of the end of interest politics, of an impending altruistic and sensible vote, and a very worldly one, too. ... [The people of New Hampshire are] liking Forbes because they do not like the government, and because Forbes is a sensible revolutionary choice."³ As for the "ain't-I-cute race-baiting" pieces that the anonymite refers to, there are certainly essays by Mr. Monahan that could be interpreted as such. I'll leave a treatment of that for a future blog entry, but off the top of my head the essays "Dr. Rosenthal, I Presume: Don't Burden Yourself"⁸ and "Black Comedy: Growing Up Racist"⁹ could be considered race-baiting depending on your definition of the term. So there may indeed be something to "forked tongue"'s comment about Mr. Monahan's apparently confessed hatred for conservatives, yet apparently greater and more evident hatred for liberals. Applied to most writers, the previous sentence would probably be ridiculous, but Mr. Monahan's hatred of most politicians is so conspicuous in his political reporting that it merits serious attention. His misanthropy is really one of the defining characteristics of his journalism.

Back to then-Presidential hopeful George W. Bush: after only a day with the Bush campaign on the NY campaign trail in 2000, Mr. Monahan had had enough. In his hilarious essay "A Glimpse of Bush," he reports that he shortly "stopped traveling" with them for "moral and practical reasons." He found the entire experience to be pretty dismal, which is what he seems to have figured covering Hillary Clinton would have been like.¹

Mr. Monahan has been described by his colleague Dawn Eden as "libertarian-leaning," and he indicates in his essay "The Angel Factory" that he's a constitutionalist. He writes, "If I were the pope instead of a constitutionalist, and you didn't like this essay and got hit by a bus before you repented, you'd barbecue everlastingly in hell."¹⁰ He even adds, "I've got a handful of ideas that I'd probably die for, if it was absolutely necessary; and though none of them came from anyone else—except the ones that came from the United States Constitution—the severity of my stances on some of the things I believe in probably reflect Catholic thought, that original admiration of the backbone of the martyrs."¹⁰ That gives you a bit of an idea of Mr. Monahan's politics, as they were in the 1990s.

It would be interesting to hear Mr. Monahan's opinions on President Barack Obama. In the 2006 film The Departed, written by Mr. Monahan, the fictional character Costello says:

Twenty years after an Irishman couldn't get a job, we had the presidency. That's what the niggers don't realize. If I got one thing against the black chaps it's this. No one gives it to you. You have to take it.

That was before Barack Obama ran for President and won.

Take-away question: What strong opinions does Mr. Monahan hold about President Obama?

Sources:

1) William Monahan. "A Glimpse of Bush: Happy Cowpoke George W. Hits the NY Campaign Trail", New York Press, vol. 13, no. 10 (March 8–14, 2000), pp. 1, 15.
2) "Hillary on Golgotha: New Hampshire in the Primary Sense", New York Press, vol. 9, no. 5 (January 31–February 6, 1996), pp. 1, 18, 20.
3) William Monahan. "STRAW DOGS: It Doles for Thee: And Other Notes From the North", New York Press, vol. 9, no. 6 (February 7–13, 1996), pp. 1, 26–27.
4) William Monahan. "STRAW DOGS: Fairytale in New Hampshire", New York Press,  vol. 9, no. 7 (February 14–20, 1996), p. 20.
5) William Monahan. "STRAW DOGS: Stop the Weasel", New York Press, vol. 9, no. 8 (February 21–27, 1996), pp. 27–29.

6) William Monahan. "STRAW DOGS: Steve, Pat & the Strangler Fig", New York Press, vol. 9, no. 9 (February 28–March 5, 1996), pp. 20–23.

7) William Monahan. "STRAW DOGS: We Just Get Close", New York Press, vol. 9, no. 10 (March 6–12, 1996), p. 21.

8) William Monahan. "Dr. Rosenthal, I Presume: Don't Burden Yourself", New York Press, vol. 8, no. 25 (June 21–27, 1995), p. 14.
9) William Monahan. "Black Comedy: Growing Up Racist", New York Press, vol. 9, no. 40 (October 2–8, 1996), pp. 31–32.
10) William Monahan. "The Angel Factory: Making Martyrs & Monsters", New York Press, vol. 8, no. 3 (January 18–24, 1995), pp. 1, 16–17.