I have never met the brilliant Czech-born, British-reared playwright Tom Stoppard, but on a few occasions, I have become aware of just how revered he is within the entertainment industry. In 2004, in the course of interviewing the great filmmaker Bob Rafelson, I asked him about one of his least-known projects, a 1998 made-for-cable adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s Poodle Springs. The script was written by none other than Stoppard, whose involvement was Rafelson’s chief reason for signing on.
“I thrilled at the possibility of collaborating with such a brilliant writer,” Rafelson told me then. “And the first question I asked was, ‘Is he still on the project? And will he be?’ And they said, ‘Well, we’re not sure.’ And I said, ‘Well, let me get him on the telephone and make sure because that would be the main reason for my doing the film,’ which flattered the s— out of him, and his response flattered me.”
Stoppard’s reputation, by and large, rests on a series of plays in which the combination of wordplay, wit, and deeply researched wisdom captivated audiences. Among these are the Shakespeare-derived fantasia Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), his first triumph and still his most widely loved work, The Real Inspector Hound (1968), The Real Thing (1982), and Arcadia (1993). It’s one of the remarkable features of Stoppard’s career that his mystique persists in spite of the fact that he has always been willing to get his hands dirty, lending his gifts to nakedly commercial enterprises, including the romantic comedy Shakespeare in Love (1998) — for which he won an Academy Award — numerous rewrite jobs for Steven Spielberg, and, indeed, that made-for-cable adaptation of Chandler.
Stoppard’s charisma is on vivid display throughout Hermione Lee’s definitive new biography, at the end of which she offers a kind of after-the-fact precis of the man whose life, career, and comings and goings she has spent the preceding 700-plus pages chronicling. “By far the most frequent adjectives have been: loyal, kind, considerate, glamorous, generous and intelligent,” Lee writes, referring to her habit of asking interviewees how they would describe Stoppard in three words. “Nobody says cruel, proud, selfish or inattentive. The people who are giving me these accounts of him are sincere: this is what they feel about him.”
So, too, will most readers after ploughing through Lee’s biography, which, in exhausting its subject, risks becoming exhausting in and of itself. Yet the book avoids this trap because, while it is undergirded by seemingly unending minutiae concerning the development, production, and legacy of every major and minor work to which the playwright affixed his name, it allows Stoppard’s altogether charming personality to continually shine through. Like his friend and colleague Mike Nichols, who helmed the Broadway run of The Real Thing, Stoppard exudes gratitude for a grand life that could have so easily gone off the rails.
Born Tomas Straussler in Czechoslovakia to Jewish parents in 1937, he was an exile from the time he was 18 months old. Seeking to evade the Nazis, the Strausslers first relocated to Singapore and then, in flight from the Japanese, to India; his father died aboard a ship on his way out of Singapore. Then, finally, came a reprieve: After their mother married a disagreeable English army major, Kenneth Stoppard, “a handsome, clean-cut Englishman, with a passion for fly-fishing and a strong commitment to King and Country,” Tomas and his brother, Petr, now Tom and Peter, were delivered to England, giving rise to a deep-seated Anglophilia. Stoppard, described as immune to the charms of Left protest movements, speaks of England with the enthusiasm of a new immigrant, referring to it as “the least worst system into which one might have been born — the open liberal democracy whose very essence was the toleration of dissent.” He also loves cricket, to which he compared good writing. “Good prose is ‘sprung’ like a cricket bat is sprung,” he said in a 1976 journal entry (later elaborated in The Real Thing).
Perhaps Stoppard’s subsequent literary profligacy — his willingness to work as a sought-after script doctor in Hollywood while toiling away on his own brain-teasing plays — has its origins in his own early life as a newspaperman. Sidestepping a college education, Stoppard began his journalistic career as a junior reporter at the Western Daily Press in Bristol, an unglamorous post in which the future playwright saw an entree to the world. “From a sheltered middle-class boarding school half-life, I was admitted to a camaraderie of journalists with a ticket to worlds I knew nothing about — law courts, local government, theatre backstage, boxing matches, crime scenes, in fact ‘all of human life’ as the News of the World used to say,” he said. Among this litany, “theatre backstage” in time took on particular importance, leading to his own nascent playwriting efforts, culminating with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
Lee has a real gift for evoking Stoppard’s magic on the page. “It wasn’t just Shakespeare or Beckett — or Pirandello, or James Saunders, or Brecht, or Kafka, or Wilde — who lay behind this, though Vladimir and Estragon do pave the way for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, just as Lucky and Pozzo do for the Player and his troupe,” Lee writes of the influences that fed into Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. “It was also the popular comedy he loved: Buster Keaton, Mel Brooks, Morecambe and Wise, One Minute Please … The Goon Show.”
“Lucky Tom” is how fellow playwrights Peter Nichols and Charles Wood referred to him, and so he was: Again like Nichols, who prospered beyond his wildest dreams after making it with Nichols and May, Stoppard found himself flush after the sensation of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: He lent money to chums, gifted family members, and holidayed in such faraway locales as Madeira and Florida. “Once he had learned to drive, he bought a BMW car,” Lee writes. “Most pleasurably, he bought paintings, books and clothes.”
To her credit, Lee is equally attentive to both Stoppard’s peak era of playwrighting, or the years that gave the world Arcadia and The Invention of Love (1997), and his concurrent popularity as a kind of screenplay wizard. After working with him on Empire of the Sun (1987), Steven Spielberg was sufficiently impressed by Stoppard’s chops — “He’s great at catching me when I’m trying to be quaint or cute” — to keep turning to him to enliven scripts that otherwise could have been ordinary. Among these was the third Indiana Jones film, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which Stoppard earned a small fortune for revising. Hollywood kept calling, leading to a period during which seemingly every other semi-literate film bore Stoppard’s credit, from The Russia House (1990) to Enigma (2001), Shakespeare in Love to the recent version of Anna Karenina (2012). But Stoppard didn’t view his work for the screen cynically, and Lee convincingly integrates it into the broader arc of his career.
Casual readers may lose the thread on all that is crammed into this book, the plays, the films, the marriages, the relationships, the friendships, but perhaps a writer as prolix as Stoppard deserves a biographer as bounteous as Lee.
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.
