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.

Autobiographical elements in 'Dining Late with Claude La Badarian'

The autobiographical parallels between writer-director William Monahan and his fictional character Claude La Badarian in the fiction serial Dining Late with Claude La Badarian are many. Claude La Badarian is a middle-aged writer who often muses upon his complicated upbringing, has published a first novel and is working on a second novel, smokes a lot, and has been unsuccessful as a magazine professional. The same could have been said of William Monahan back in 2001 when the fiction serial was running. But Claude La Badarian makes a curious remark in letter 9, when he is confronted with a German translation of William Monahan's first novel Light House: A Trifle, that suggests that Claude La Badarian and William Monahan are really entirely different people despite the many similarities in their biographies. To make Claude La Badarian the despicable human being that he is and different from Mr. Monahan, Mr. Monahan has assigned Claude La Badarian the opinions of a juvenile sociopath. At least, that's what I've concluded from the following passage by Claude La Badarian from letter 9:

Had I seen this "exciting work of art in the Amerikanischen"? Well yes, Herr Doktor, you cunt, I have seen this masterpiece in the "Amerikanischen," and in fact tried to torpedo it on sight in one of the less-influential trades, through assigning to the auctorial voice the opinions of the protagonist, a juvenile sociopath. A base trick, yet an effective one, and unusually useful in a literary culture where it is utterly unknown (especially, alas, at the moment of composition) that author and protagonist are, or can be, different people.

Claude La Badarian is much more than a shell of autobiographical elements taken from Mr. Monahan's life. It is Claude La Badarian's abusive opinions, regularly spouted in his letters, that make him the character that he is. As the fictional character Claude La Badarian explains in the above passage, it is through the employ of a "base trick" in "one of the less-influential trades" (read: The Aristocrat or New York Press) that he purports to have succeeded in creating a fictional character for his works that is entirely different from himself. Although this "base trick" is discussed as having been employed by Claude La Badarian, I believe that it is Mr. Monahan (as the creator of Claude La Badarian) who has applied this "base trick" while creating Dining Late with Claude La Badarian. Though Claude La Badarian talks about creating a new sort of fictional character in American fiction, I suggest that it is actually Mr. Monahan who believes he has created a new sort of fictional character in Claude La Badarian. Conflating the author William Monahan with the fictional character Claude La Badarian is easy to do for any reader familiar with Mr. Monahan's autobiography. While not particularly in my first reading of Dining Late with Claude La Badarian, but more so my subsequent readings, I often did conflate the two. Certain aspects of Claude La Badarian do echo Mr. Monahan. But upon closer inspection I realized that something more was going on.

When Claude La Badarian writes about having tried "to torpedo [Mr. Monahan's novel Light House: A Trifle] on sight in one of the less-influential trades, through assigning to the auctorial voice the opinions of the protagonist, a juvenile sociopath," Claude La Badarian is in a sense talking metafictionally about how Mr. Monahan went about creating his character Claude La Badarian. In reality, it is Mr. Monahan who has assigned the opinions of a juvenile sociopath to his auctorial voice, which happens to be Claude La Badarian in the fiction serial Dining Late with Claude La Badarian. Claude La Badarian's personal history bears a striking resemblance to Mr. Monahan's. The "less-influential trade" that Claude La Badarian refers to in his letter is, most probably, either the Aristocrat magazine or the New York Press, which can be considered essentially the same publication in the context of Dining Late with Claude La Badarian. William Monahan is often personally attacked in Dining Late with Claude La Badarian, though ultimately his fictional self has his revenge on Claude La Badarian.

Although it is very clear that Mr. Monahan purposely gave Claude La Badarian a personal history similar to his own, it is less clear what his reason for doing this was. In the passages below I show that identical autobiographical details appear in both Mr. Monahan's essays and in the letters written by the character Claude La Badarian. The comparisons are remarkable! Afterward, I will explain the reason for which I think William Monahan created the Claude La Badarian character in the way he did. As you will see below, it's almost as if Mr. Monahan went through his non-fiction work with the specific intention of lifting key autobiographical passages for the purposes of applying them to Dining Late with Claude La Badarian. Here are three examples in which Mr. Monahan's essays match up with his fiction serial (note: the Variety essay came nearly six years after the publication of Dining Late, meaning Mr. Monahan may continue to shed light on the autobiographical elements in Dining Late with future essays):

Example 1: Mr. Monahan's maternal grandfather

I have written in a previous blog entry about the similarities between Mr. Monahan's maternal grandfather and Claude La Badarian's grandfather. Please see "William Monahan put his maternal grandfather into fiction" for further details.

Example 2: Mr. Monahan's childhood

Claude La Badarian writes in letter 12:

[T]he term "American" is a fiction for simpletons, foreigners and federals: the USA is a lot of countries unnaturally related. Claude is a member of the New England civilization. Poor Claude, literate little boy, fond of drawing, diffidence, solitude, beans on toast, "r" unknown in the La Badarian household, never saw himself on tv–not on Gilligan, not in cowboy films–until he saw David Hemmings in the cheapo early-60s seaside musical comedy Be My Guest.

Mr. Monahan writes in a 2007 Variety essay:

Growing up in Boston and environs in the '60s and '70s was very strange, because we, perhaps the primary American civilization, had no representation in art, anywhere. When I was a kid I used to watch television and you'd see an "American" family living in an "American" house having "American" problems, and I'd think, right, but where do they put their books? Why are they talking openly rather than metaphorically? On top of that, why don't they realize that what bothers them doesn't matter? Why isn't it raining and why is no one actually funny? Why do they think that a doctor has social status? Why doesn't anyone die?

Television and most films, granted, are under no obligation to be a mirror to nature -- Sherwood Schwartz was not required to be Flaubert -- but I literally didn't see anyone like myself, or anything like my own environment or condition or family, until I started to read books such as "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" and see movies set in the north of England, which were usually about reassuringly paradoxical people who made terrible, negative decisions.

Both Claude La Badarian and William Monahan had problems "seeing themselves" in TV and film, until they came across a certain type of British film. They also both emphasize that the term "American" is a vague one. They both mention Sherwood Schwartz's work as an example of the kind of TV in which they didn't "see themselves" (Sherwood Schwartz was the creator of Gilligan's Island), and they both point to films set in the north of England as examples of films in which they did "see themselves" (the seaside musical comedy Be My Guest was filmed in the north of England). Both Claude La Badarian and William Monahan had the same experience with TV and film while growing up in New England.

Example 3: Mr. Monahan's philosophies

Claude La Badarian writes in letter 4:

La Badarian, pill-crazed late-night epistolarian—omnia transformans sese in miracula rerum—operating on the Rimbaudian principle that the "I" is someone else, enhanced by insomnia, financial peril, and extensive media connections, is definitely not something we need to resurrect

Mr. Monahan writes in a 2001 Bookforum essay:

When the present writer was a very horrible young man, transfixed by Duchamp and the Sex Pistols, unable to forget Rimbaud's "The 'I' is somebody else" and Iago's artistically metasignificant "I am not what I am," he typed the following on a piece of paper: Write like Hamlet mad: Risk everything.

So both Claude La Badarian and Mr. Monahan are adherents to the Rimbaudian principle. Mr. Monahan is obviously basing his character Claude La Badarian on his own autobiography.

Yet, despite the fact that Claude La Badarian has the grandfather of William Monahan, the childhood of William Monahan, and some of the same philosophies as William Monahan, he is really best defined by his crude opinions which seem to be crafted by Mr. Monahan to be those of a juvenile sociopath. Claude La Badarian slowly takes on the character of a scumbag as he shares his opinions about women, colleagues, and so on. Similar opinions have not been expressed by William Monahan.

Interestingly, in the final letter from Claude La Badarian, a fictional Mr. Monahan is reported to be "having the usual problems with people he hadn’t thought about in a million years confusing themselves hopefully with completely fictional creations." A slight digression, so let's get back to the main thrust of my argument:

Throughout the fiction serial, Claude La Badarian is always ranting about how predictable American literature is, emphasizing how a lot of American fiction seems to be memoirs converted into fiction. This particular excerpt from letter 4 is interesting because it shows that Mr. Monahan is keenly aware of how ordinary it is for an author to include autobiographical elements in his/her fiction: 

After one realises that one’s Memoir is a stack of prevarications, it is possible to convert the mass of text into a perfectly serviceable coming-of-age novel, but alas, Henry, what you’re left with then is the ordinary First Novel (a pitfall Claude La Badarian tried to avoid by calling his first novel Second Novel), in which a person resembling yourself in every detail ends up doing roughly the same shit you did but doing it (precisely as in Memoir) better than in the original. At this point in literature this obscenity (which is to say all of American Literature) must be avoided at all costs. 

Mr. Monahan confronts this tendency among writers of American literature to include autobiographical elements in their work by doing something new with Dining Late with Claude La Badarian. Although he seems to be doing the same as most authors do with their fiction -- using their autobiography to create fictional characters -- he goes a step further by throwing in a twist. Mr. Monahan gives Claude La Badarian the opinions of a juvenile sociopath. These opinions are what make Claude La Badarian who he is. As sprinkled with autobiographical prose from William Monahan's essays as Claude La Badarian's letters may be, Claude La Badarian is not really anything like William Monahan. He quickly comes into his own, as the fictional character Claude La Badarian.

William Monahan put his maternal grandfather into fiction

Writer-director William Monahan grew up in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where, in his own words, he "had a whole vibrant network of relations in the best marine landscape on the earth."¹ His maternal grandparents resided above Gloucester Harbor, in an old sea captain's house. Mr. Monahan occasionally mentions his maternal grandfather in his essays, and as I pieced together a mini biography of his maternal grandfather, Harold L. Armstrong, I realized that Mr. Monahan had also put him into his fiction, as the grandfather of the protagonist Claude La Badarian of the fiction serial Dining Late with Claude La Badarian. If you don't know about William Monahan's fiction serial Dining Late with Claude La Badarian, then get on it. I've written up a web page at Squidoo about it. Dining Late with Claude La Badarian is written in epistolary form, meaning as a series of letters, and was published in 2001 over a period of thirteen weeks in the Manhattan weekly New York Press. In it, the protagonist Claude La Badarian has a grandfather nicknamed The Senator who shares much of the same personal history as Mr. Monahan's maternal grandfather, Harold L. Armstrong.

Back when James Michael Curley was Governor of Massachusetts during the period 1935-37, Mr. Monahan's maternal grandfather Harold L. Armstrong was appointed⁸ clerk magistrate of the Eastern Essex District Court in Gloucester, Massachusetts, a position he held for 45 years.² Mr. Monahan has described his maternal grandfather as a "low-level pol,"³ "Anglo-Saxon and Protestant,"⁴ and "influential."⁵ He has a photograph of his maternal grandparents "at a table at some fundraising function with Robert F. Kennedy."⁹ At some point during his lifetime, Mr. Armstrong had been an exalted ruler of the Gloucester Lodge of Elks and a commander of the Veterans of Foreign War post in Gloucester. He was also a charter member of the Gloucester Council of the Knights of Columbus and a member of the American Legion in Rockport, Massachusetts.² Born on January 21st, 1898, he died of pancreatic cancer⁴ on April 21, 1981. He left behind his second wife, Mary G. Armstrong, whom he had been married to for 49 years and with whom he had a daughter named Constance Armstrong, the mother of Mr. Monahan.

As a member of the American Legion in Rockport, Massachusetts, Mr. Armstrong took a particular liking to the American Legion Post in Paris, as recollected by Mr. Monahan. When his grandfather was dying of pancreatic cancer, he had longed to return to France and "have a steak and mashed potatoes at the American Legion Post in Paris, which ... was his favorite place to eat in Paris."⁴ Back then, when the American Legion Post in Paris (also known as Paris Post No. 1) was located in Pershing Hall, it had a restaurant, which is no longer the case since Paris Post No. 1 moved to a different building. What is very interesting is that Claude La Badarian's grandfather also enjoyed eating at the American Legion Paris Post No. 1, as mentioned in the twelfth letter of Dining Late with Claude La Badarian, "Je Suis Un Genius, Baby."

"The Senator, desperate for two eggs, used to order "dix oeuvres" (which sounds like half of what his grandson serves in Café La Badarian) in the morning and finally gave up and took his meals over at American Legion Post Number One. "

There are other similarities, too. Mr. Monahan has fond childhood memories of trips he went on with his grandfather, just as Claude La Badarian does. In a 2001 Hartford Courant interview, Mr. Monahan fondly mentions that his "grandfather took him to Europe" when he was a kid.¹⁰ Mr. Monahan reminisces, in his essay "Dixville Notch", about visiting Benson's Wild Animal Farm with his grandfather, a long-running private zoo in New Hampshire that's now defunct.⁶ Then there is La Badarian who recalls trips to New York with his own grandfather the Senator, in Letter 10 (L10), and seems to be recalling firsthand the eating habits of his grandfather while visiting France, in Letter 12 (L12), which strongly suggests that Young La Badarian's grandfather also took him to Europe. While not exactly shocking that a writer's fiction contains autobiographical elements, Mr. Monahan's intention in making the grandfather of the fictional character Claude La Badarian similar to his own grandfather is actually much more interesting and deserves further consideration, but will have to be the subject of a future blog entry as it requires taking a much broader look at Dining Late with Claude La Badarian. But to continue with the subject of The Senator, he appears in a total of three letters in Dining Late with Claude La Badarian: "Claude and the Little People" (L7), "Home Again" (L10), and "Je Suis Un Genius, Baby" (L12). Claude La Badarian almost always refers to his grandfather as The Senator, an apt nickname for a man who is politically ambitious, which, based on the three letters The Senator appears in, is hard to determine, however, if Mr. Monahan were making a further nod toward his maternal grandfather then this makes much more sense. His maternal grandfather was politically ambitious, as evidenced by his social status in and around Gloucester, Massachusetts, which is what a nickname like The Senator is supposed to imply.

Very recently, Mr. Monahan's maternal grandmother, Mary G. Armstrong, passed away.⁷ Mrs. Armstrong lived to be a centenarian. It's not yet possible to draw any concrete connection between the grandmother of Claude La Badarian (whom he calls Gram) and Mr. Monahan's maternal grandmother, because little is known about her biography, but were more known, perhaps a resemblance would arise between Mr. Monahan's maternal grandmother and Claude La Badarian's grandmother. Claude La Badarian's grandmother had a troubled time after The Senator died: the Medford Badarians put her in a home and robbed her of her finances. At any rate, as far as similarities between real people and fictional characters in Dining Late with Claude La Badarian go, what I have found is that the most striking similarities lie between Mr. Monahan's grandfather and Claude La Badarian's grandfather.

Yet, despite the striking similarities, some of the description of Claude La Badarian's grandfather has nothing to do with Mr. Monahan's maternal grandfather, such as the fact that Claude La Badarian's grandfather died after being struck by lightning, while Mr. Armstrong died of pancreatic cancer. However, they did both die around the same year and they did both reside in Massachusetts. Mr. Armstrong died on April 21, 1981, while Claude La Badarian's grandfather seems to have died some time in between September 1981 and August 1982 if the publication date, August 1st 2001, of the letter "Claude and the Little People" is any indication and considering what is written in the letter:

"I do not know if I reported to you, Henry, that my grandfather, the Senator, is dead. He is. It happened 19 years ago. He was struck by lightning and incinerated while guiding his gasoline-powered Scamp between the eighth and ninth holes at some sinister, scrubby links on what people call The Island."

I leave you with Mr. Monahan's description of his maternal grandfather from his essay "The Irish Question."⁴

"My father coughed blood, was diagnosed, and died within months, but his affairs were in order and had been in order every single day of his adult life, owing precisely to his being what my mother called Irish and morbid, or being what my father called prepared. As an opposite case, when my maternal grandfather (Protestant and Anglo-Saxon) died, his affairs were not in order, even though he died in his eighties, and took two lucid and relatively painless years to die of pancreatic cancer.

Even when he couldn't walk and was finally hospitalized, my grandfather was making luminous plans to get the hell out of there, and go to Paris. He liked to speak French to French people, especially because his French was fifty times worse than Winston Churchill's reduction-of-Harfleur assaults on the language. He wasn't dying: he might have been slightly up against it, obviously, what with being eighty-three and having terminal cancer, but what he was going to do, instead of dying, was to go and have a steak and mashed potatoes at the American Legion Post in Paris, which (it wasn't my turn to watch him: no one could) was his favorite place to eat in Paris. He liked to walk around France trying to use U.S. currency, and when it was refused, he'd say, well, they'd sure as hell taken it in World War One. This was his hobby.

He didn't really think he was going to have a chance to needle French people again: but he liked to think it: so he believed, for the hell of it, that that was what was going to happen, and he didn't want to jinx himself by writing a will. He lay there obviously dying, and thinking simultaneously that he was going to be landing at Orly on Monday. It was a different intellectual set-up: it wasn't Irish. He did ask inspecifically to be cremated and have his ashes scattered at sea, if - that is, if - he died: my grandmother did the first, but then impulsively buried the urn where she could get at him with trowels and flowers." 

Take-away question: Did William Monahan also fictionalize his maternal grandmother in the fiction serial Dining Late with Claude La Badarian?


Sources:

1) William Monahan. "Greek Revival: Why You Need a Summer House", New York Press, vol. 10, no. 21 (May 21–27, 1997), pp. 64–65.
2)  Obituary: "Harold L. Armstrong, Magistrate in Gloucester for 45 Years; At 83", 1981-04-22, The Boston Globe.
3) William Monahan. "STRAW DOGS: Fairytale in New Hampshire", New York Press, vol. 9, no. 7 (February 14–20, 1996), p. 20.
4) William Monahan. "The Irish Question", Old Crow Review, no. 6, December 1995, FkB Press, 5 pages.
5) William Monahan. Stoned in Amherst", New York Press, vol. 13, no. 2 (January 12–18, 2000), pp. 1 (Sec 1), 8–9 (Sec 2).
6) William Monahan. "Up New Hampshire: Dark Thoughts in Dixville Notch", New York Press, vol. 11, no. 52 (December 30, 1998–January 5, 1999), pp. 1, 16–17.
7) Obituary: "Mary G. (Robinson) Armstrong", 2010-03-12, The Boston Globe.
8) William Monahan. "Guns and H.H. Rose's Biography, Please", New York Press, vol. 8, no. 48 (November 29–December 5, 1995), pp. 22, 26–27. QUOTE: "My grandfather, a Curley appointee to a Massachusetts court, used to be deluged with gifts of whiskey and cigars."
9) William Monahan. "The Angel Factory: Making Martyrs & Monsters", New York Press, vol. 8, no. 3 (January 18–24, 1995), pp. 1, 16–17.
10) Darcy Cosper (2001-10-02). "Writer's 'trifle' Aims Higher", The Hartford Courant.


See also Bibliography of works by William Monahan

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.