Perfect pairing of artist and biographer
Lee’s access to Stoppard’s life was extensive — and results in a rich portrait of the playwright
When Tom Stoppard asked Hermione Lee, the distinguished Oxford literary critic, to write his biography, he gave her access to a wealth of materials and permission to quote from them; he also put her in touch with his collaborators, colleagues, friends, lovers and family. The resulting “Tom Stoppard: A Life,” is a comprehensive and endlessly fascinating biography of one of the major figures of contemporary film and theatre.
Born Tomas Straussler in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, in 1937, he was 18 months old when he and his family fled their home as Hitler invaded. They travelled to Singapore where his father would resume his medical practice. When Singapore fell to the Japanese, the family moved to India, his father intending to follow later; the Japanese then sunk the ship he was on. Tom and his older brother stayed in India with their mother until she married Major Kenneth Stoppard and uprooted her family to England at the beginning of 1946.
Stoppard’s childhood and his English adoption mean that he always cares for the country that accepted him and idealizes its traditional values. His gratitude as an immigrant to Britain parallels his lifelong awareness that he could have easily grown up under the communist regime in Czechoslovakia, had fate been otherwise.
As a teenager, Stoppard worked as a journalist in Bristol, doing film reviews, gossip columns and some social coverage. He admired Ernest Hemingway and was inspired by his prose style. “I
don’t get emotional about any other writer,” he observed. And he was consumed, as Lee points out, by his selftaught curiosity and his insatiable appetite for knowledge.
From writing journalism, he turned to theatre, writing his first commercial success, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” at the age of 29. Arising from T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” buoyed by Stoppard’s deep reverence for Samuel Beckett (Vladimir and Estragon pave the way for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) and utilizing popular comedy that he loved, the witty play was also a dark study of mortality.
His many letters to his mother, which Stoppard authorized Lee to read and quote from, reveal his deep indebtedness to and love of her, despite his problems with her husband Kenneth’s antiSemitism and xenophobia. When he comes to learn in 1993 that he is Jewish, a fact his mother concealed from her children, he reaches out to relatives he did not know existed.
“I’m quite pleased to have Jewish blood. To my mind it’s a little bit of a distinction … a charmed life, when you thought about it,” Stoppard’s partial surrogate, Leonard Chamberlain, né Leopold Rosenbaum, states at the end of “Leopoldstadt.”
As his plays progressed, Stoppard was less and less a guarded writer, Lee observes, his later plays including “The Real Thing,” “Arcadia,” “Rock ’n’ Roll,” and embracing self-revelations in his latest, “Leopoldstadt,” not possible in his earlier writings.
What emerges from Lee’s biography is the portrait of a singularly gifted artist and human being.
The people in Stoppard’s life read like a cast of 20th-century culture and thinking: he knew Peter O’Toole from his journalistic days in Bristol; Harold Pinter, his illustrious contemporary; Vaclav Havel, whose literary works he translated; the actors and the directors of his plays, many of them interviewed tellingly by Lee. Yet, Lee notes, he behaved the same with everyone, regardless of their status or fame.
The director Mike Nichols, whom he met later in life, for example, “admired Stoppard’s metaphysical, intellectual intelligence. And he liked the fact that in spite of that intellect, Stoppard didn’t judge people. He was a curious, adventurous, gregarious, much-travelled person.” And when any one of his many friends passed away, he stopped everything to attend the funeral.
There is also the feeling of Stoppard being a fan when in the presence of a great dramatist or luminary, reflecting his role as an outsider who finds himself accepted as being inside. “(H)umility,” as Eliot, one of Stoppard’s literary heroes, once wrote, “is endless.”
At her book’s end, Lee acknowledges that Stoppard “responded to my questions, undertook long conversations about his life and work over several years, read the typescript for factual errors.”
A perfect meeting of the artist and
Lee’s inestimable diligence.