Tom Stoppard: A Life
Hermione Lee
Knopf (February 2021)

A lively and rigorous exploration of an enormous life spent in constant motion

In his brilliant review of this book for The New York Times, Dwight Garner observes: “Now 83, he’s led an enormous life. In the astute and authoritative new biography, ‘Tom Stoppard: A Life,’ Hermione Lee wrestles it all onto the page. At times you sense she is chasing a fox through a forest. Stoppard is constantly in motion — jetting back and forth across the Atlantic, looking after the many revivals of his plays, keeping the plates spinning, agitating on behalf of dissidents, artists and political prisoners in Eastern Europe, delivering lectures, accepting awards, touching up scripts, giving lavish parties, maintaining friendships with [Harold] Pinter, Vaclav Havel, Steven Spielberg, Mick Jagger and others. It’s been a charmed life, lived by a charming man. Tall, dashing, large-eyed, shaggy-haired; to women Stoppard’s been a walking stimulus package.”

Obviously, the more you already know about Stoppard’s like and work, the better you will understand — and the more you will appreciate — what Lee offers in what is certain to be a definitive biography. That said, It would be a mistake to assume that if you have seen performed or read few (if any) of Stoppard’s plays, or are unfamiliar with his numerous film screenplays, this book offers little that will be of interest and value to you. Not so. On the contrary, if you are attracted to immensely interesting people, Lee’s multi-dimensional portrait of Stoppard will generously reward your curiosity. You will cherish her lively exploration of an enormous life spent in constant motion.

In or near the central business district of most major cities, there has been a farmer’s market at which — at least prior to the pandemic — a few of the merchants offer slices of fresh fruit as samples of their wares. In that same spirit, I now share a few brief excerpts that caught my eye in order to suggest the thrust and flavor of Lee’s narrative:

o “That early romantic feeling for America left strong traces…Looking back on his first visit to New York, he said that he went as a pilgrim, and felt like Columbus the whole time he was there.” (Page 67)

o “In all the mixed, prolific output of his ten-year apprenticeship as a writer, from `1954-1964, ‘The Story‘ is the first piece that puts its mark down with assurance. Unlike any of his other early prose pieces, it had an afterlife.” (72)

o Stoppard in 1976: “Yesterday I started work at half past nine in the morning and ended up at five o’clock in the afternoon in a foul mood because I’d been interrupted every twelve minutes by one of the four children or one of their three or four friends or telephone calls…It’s domestic life. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I can’t bear that sort of monk writer. I knew one once who worked in a garage and they had to slip notes under the door. I think one should stop for the children and not make children stop for the writing.” (221-222)

o “The Real Thing is one of the Stoppard plays that doesn’t feed off another text. He said of it proudly: ‘Here we are all on our own. No coat-tails!’ No Hamlet, no Wilde, no Wittgernstein. But there are plenty of echoes…The play offers us some modern cointrasts of language too: the sophisticated style of a West End comedy of manners, the polemics of left-wing theatre, the clunky clichés of popular film or the poignant banality of 1960s pop songs.” (354 and 355)

o “Making the link between the personal and the political was one challenge he had set for himself in writing the trilogy [The Coast of Utopia, 2002]. This was not the only one. Coast covers thirty-five years across nine hours (eight in New York) of theatrical time…turning his historical sources into dramatic dialogue was something he loved doing. He could be as anachronistic as he liked.”  (593-594)

o “Anyone writing a life of Stoppard would know that he has always had mixed feelings about biography. You can’t go far in his work without running up against remarks like that of Mrs. Swan to the would-be biographer Mr. Pike in Indian Ink: ‘Biography is the worst possible excuse for getting people wrong.'” On the whole, he helped but not hindered Lee. “But his line to me is; ‘I’m not supposed to be helping you, you’re on your own.'” (751)

Near the end of her book, Hermione Lee shares this observation “The biographer’s problem reminds me of a story Stoppard has often told when talking about plays and play-writing, of an open-air production of The Tempest, staged by the lake in the gardens of an Oxford college in the late 1950s. He uses this example for one of his favourite themes: that what the writer brings to the theatre is only a small part of what happens in the lived moment of the play. The magic of theatre can be created through many other things than words. With modesty, paradox, and humour, this magicians and pragmatist of the theatre, this master of language — Prospero and Ariel in one — tells us that words are only a part of the mystery. This is how he tells the story, and this is where our ways must part.” Tom Stoppard’s brief remarks on the creative process then follow.

He will no doubt continue to follow these principles for as long as he is able, in ways and to an extent as only he can.