And, lo, it came to pass. Along the way, there were halting attempts at fiction, including a frantic novel, “Lord Malquist and Mr Moon.” There were pseudonyms: in print, Stoppard signed himself “Brennus,” “William Boot”—the name is pinched from Evelyn Waugh—and, briefly breaking cover, “Tomik Straussler.” There were plays for radio and television, some of them with “Boot” and “Moon” in the title. (Blithely dreaming up characters named Hound, Dogg, and Bone, Stoppard is ever alert to the plump comedy of the monosyllabic, and to words that are confusingly shared by people and things.) There was a first trip to New York, where he met Mel Brooks. There was a relocation to London. And, always, there were cigarettes, each one discarded after three puffs—Stoppard’s factory chimneys, which proved that the manufacture of prose was under way. As Lee informs us:
The curtain comes up on the première of “Rosencrantz,” in London, on page 128 of “Tom Stoppard: A Life.” There are more than six hundred and twenty pages to go. In a sense, the principal drama of the book is over and done with before the dramas begin—before the acrobatically ruminative “Jumpers” (1972), “Travesties,” “Night and Day” (1978), “The Real Thing” (1982), the spy-infested “Hapgood” (1988), and “Arcadia” (1993), Stoppard’s masterpiece, with its glimpses of a paradise that is not so much lost as laughably difficult to reconstruct. After the pitch and yaw of his early years, and the headlong roll of his apprenticeship, success, when it comes, has an oddly levelling effect, just as war makes peace look flat.
Along the way, Lee steers us through each play, major or minor, with a sturdy account of the background, the plot, the production, the casting, the reviews, the transfers to other theatres, and the intellectual grist. Whether her readers will match her for stamina is open to debate, though you can’t predict what will catch your eye as the minutiae stream past. When “Arcadia” first opened, for example, audiences delighted in Rufus Sewell as the comely and Byron-flavored tutor, but did they realize that Ralph Fiennes and Hugh Grant had auditioned for the part? More bewitching yet is the instruction that Stoppard issued to Glenn Close and Jeremy Irons, who were starring in “The Real Thing,” directed by Mike Nichols, on Broadway: “If you ever get lost, just drown in each other’s eyes.”
That’s quite a line, not least because it sounds so non-Stoppardian. To his battalions of fans, as to his detractors, Stoppard is the cerebrator-in-chief, whose plays dispatch you into the outside world with a pleasantly spinning head. (“Oh, do keep up!” an actor suddenly said, addressing the audience, at a matinée of “Travesties.”) Part of Lee’s mission is to demonstrate that this constricted view of him will not suffice. She’s right; Stoppard is no more Tin Man than he is Scarecrow, and to treat the emotional impact of “The Real Thing” as an unprecedented jolt, as some critics chose to do, is to ignore the heartaches and pains that suffused what had come before. When I first saw “Rosencrantz,” in my teens, it was not the wordplay or the horseplay that stuck with me but the tang of evanescence—“a certain brownness at the edges of the day,” as one of the characters puts it. Evidently, the play’s maker was more Feste than Osric, decked in the motley of melancholia:
That is Guildenstern, rubbing and reviving a cliché, and for what? To show off? No, to conjure a crisp autumnal image, and to air the mortal premonition that lingers in the title of the play. Deaths in Stoppard, as in Greek tragedy, tend to happen offstage, and the distance lends disenchantment; I remember a communal gasp in the theatre, toward the end of “Arcadia,” as we were told, in passing, that the heroine, Thomasina—an electrical life force—had died in a fire in 1812, on the eve of her seventeenth birthday. A small fictional spark went out, long ago, and we were slain.
Other sorrows embroil the plays. “Jumpers” revolves around a philosopher named Moore, and Stoppard duly prepared by studying Russell, Wittgenstein, G. E. Moore (not the same Moore), and “the Vienna school of logical positivism,” but what we witness onstage, amid the folderol, is the sad sundering of a husband from his wife—the logical negativism to which love, like other attachments, is forever prone. Lee shrewdly notes that “Jumpers” opened two days after Stoppard’s divorce from his first wife, Jose Ingle. He was granted primary custody of their two sons, one of whom later described Ingle as “a schizophrenic alcoholic.” A letter that Stoppard wrote to his brother, clarifying the crisis, bore an unwonted urgency: “I had to change my life.” When existence is no laughing matter, as in this distressing case, is it cool, or cruel, of a creative artist to persist in the devising of a complex entertainment, parts of which may be wrought from those same woes? Or is it, on the contrary, a question of honor, even of courage, to remain, as Henry James says, “one of the people on whom nothing is lost?”
After such lows, in the early nineteen-seventies, Stoppard’s fortunes, in Lee’s account, rose to higher and firmer ground. In 1972, he married Miriam Stern, whose television programs on science and medicine—she was hotly anti-smoking, which must have added to the fun—would often mean that her celebrity outshone that of her spouse. The marriage lasted twenty years. So crammed were their diaries, we are told, with appointments on different continents, that, in order to find time together, they occasionally resorted to the Concorde: a strange and supersonic parody of Stoppard’s childhood wanderings. Back in 1968, in “The Real Inspector Hound,” he himself had spoofed the rural murder mystery, with a housekeeper who picked up the phone and declared, “Hello, the drawing-room of Lady Muldoon’s country residence one morning in early spring?” Now he acquired a country residence of his own. No doubt he saw the joke.
Honors and obligations fell upon Stoppard like dew. Thus nourished, he bloomed into the consummate Englishman—or, as he modestly put it, “a fake Englishman,” spying on himself, with a knighthood to crown the role. In 2014, he married Sabrina Guinness. (“We thought we were quite well connected until we met Sabrina,” one member of the British royal family commented. Or so the story goes.) Lee, all of a flutter, ushers us into the wedding. It sounds like the finale of a play:
If detail is what you crave, you’ve come to the right book. I hadn’t realized, hitherto, that Stoppard can barely carry a tune; confronted with an opera, he has to consume strong mints in an effort to stay awake. (Mind you, when asked to reshape the libretto of Prokofiev’s “The Love for Three Oranges,” adjusting a literal English translation to fit the rhythms of the score, Stoppard did so with unhesitating grace—“in about five seconds,” according to the director.) I was also gratified to read that the author of “Jumpers,” a play that sports with the fable of the tortoise and the hare, was once required by law to attend a speed-awareness course.
Was it wholly essential, however, that we be acquainted with the layout of the house that Stoppard and Miriam bought in 1972 (“upstairs, a wide landing gave onto the main bedroom, with a balcony, a bathroom each, and a dressing room”), and so forth? Or that names be dropped with quite so resounding a clang? We are invited to be invisible guests at the annual fêtes galantes that Stoppard hosts, and personally funds, in an idyllic London garden, and thus to stumble upon Mick Jagger, Paul Simon, Harrison Ford, Alfred Brendel, Keith Richards, and the Duchess of Devonshire—the last two, presumably, locked in a close embrace. For good measure, we are regaled with extracts from the thank-you letters that ensue: “Do you think heaven is like this?” It was at one such celestial shindig, in 2013, that Stoppard approached Lee and broached the possibility that she might write the story of his life.
Lee is hardly the first biographer to be wooed by the allure of her subject; to risk being squashed by the weight of her research; or to concede that, despite her assiduity, much will elude her grasp. The more pressing problem with “Tom Stoppard: A Life” is that, in editorial terms, it’s a shambles. Consider one of Stoppard’s favorite lines, taken from a play by his contemporary James Saunders: “There lies behind everything . . . a certain quality which we may call grief.” Though moved to read it on page 185, I was rather less moved to read it on page 361. When it popped up a third time, on page 730, I was as movable as granite. Likewise, a quotation from Turgenev—a kindred spirit of Stoppard’s—is enfeebled, not fortified, by being repeated within four pages. Is it really a source of shame that such recurrences litter the book? Yes, because they ill befit the man at its core. Stoppard is a natural-born precisian, politely coaching actors in the beat of his phrasings; as Housman insists, in “The Invention of Love,” “There is truth and falsehood in a comma.”
And yet the devoted reader will find force, not merely mass and mess, in this bulging biography. Most of that force is political, and the character who holds the stage is not Stoppard the smooth social operator, Stoppard the fixture of the establishment, Stoppard the marrying man, Stoppard the doting father of four sons, or even Stoppard the hermit, content (like every writer) to be blessedly alone with a book. No, the toughest Stoppard is the moralist, who, from first to last, is vexed by the spectacle of freedom under threat. His chosen cause is nothing so flimsy as British party politics; though Stoppard admired Margaret Thatcher, he has, over the years, voted Conservative, Labour, Green, and Liberal Democrat. Rather, as a citizen of the Cold War, he has stared outward, from his well-feathered roost in a land where you could utter and publish what you liked, toward countries where the likes of others dictated what you could express, and where the wrong idea, whispered in the wrong ear, could tip you into jail.
