How Tom Stoppard found his mojo
The greatest British playwright of his generation, who died at the age of 88, was not immune from writer’s block. But in the end, he found inspiration in his own life.
The first time I interviewed Tom Stoppard was in 1999 on the eve of the British release of his soon-to-be Oscar-winning comedy, Shakespeare in Love. It was an ebullient comic fantasy in which Joseph Fiennes as Shakespeare was cured of writer’s block by a love affair with Gwyneth Paltrow’s would-be actor, Viola. It was fantasy but also, with its multiple riffs on his work, imbued with Stoppard’s love of Shakespeare, the impossible genius. So I asked him about the theory that Shakespeare’s plays could not possibly have been written by this grammar school boy from the Midlands.
Stoppard replied that the scenario was certainly unlikely – but that by no means meant it was untrue. Stoppard was, of course, the proof of his own argument.
The final moments of his 1993 masterpiece, Arcadia, meld the play’s two time schemes (1812 and the present day) and its two intellectual themes (the 19th-century Romantic movement and chaos theory) in a gloriously sexy waltz.
The scene has always seemed the quintessence of the best of Englishness, a miraculous concoction of humour, erudition, carnality, nonsense and emotion. Yet it was written by a child-exile from Czechoslovakia, who spent his early years in the Indian Himalayas, a boy who, like Shakespeare, never went to university but ended up not only the greatest British playwright of his generation but an emblem of his adopted nation. How did that happen?
The problem for me, at least back in 1999, was that while Stoppard in his plays was fascinated by biography – from Byron through Lenin to Alfred Housman and Oscar Wilde – he was rather averse to discussing his own. He had been a regional journalist himself and, I sensed, was still sensitive to our needs, but the trouble with interviews, he told me in a hotel near his then home of Chelsea Harbour, was that every interview he did was “an attempt to erase the misapprehensions of the previous 400 interviews”. A recent one had, for instance, quoted him saying that he was not a romantic. “But that is one of the two things everyone knows about me: I am Czech and I am a romantic,” he complained with a trace of the middle-European accent he thought he had lost but never quite would.
When I tried to broach his early years – the father who had died in a bombing raid while fleeing Singapore, his English stepfather who seemed not to like him – he prevaricated. Would he ever write an autobiographical play? “It is not a subject matter I have any appetite for,” he replied.
Serious biographies were no better, and Stoppard secretly hoped that the one being written about him at the time would be riddled with inaccuracies. He was scathing of historians’ reverence for written sources. Hundreds of times he had committed falsehoods to paper. For example, he would realise he had not thanked someone for a dinner party, and his eventual note would start with the lie of dating it three days earlier to give the impression he had written it promptly, but just forgot to post it.
About his own love life he was especially reticent. His first wife, a nurse called Jose Ingle, once interrupted an interview with him to say that she had to accept that if she died her husband would be “upset but in the end his life would not be all that different”. His second wife was the journalist and doctor Miriam Stern but they broke up after 19 years when he began a relationship with Felicity Kendal, the female lead of his “infidelity” play, The Real Thing.
I quoted to him a speech by the play’s adulterous playwright, that love meant “mess, tears, pain, self-abasement, loss of self-respect, nakedness”. Was that what love was to him?
“No, I don’t consider that necessary to be a romantic.” And, to be fair, when I later interviewed Kendal, after her years with Stoppard were over, and asked why none of his exes ever had a bad word to say about him, at least to the press, she replied it was probably because there was not a bad word to say.
I interviewed him again in 2017. It should have been a happy day. He was being presented with a prestigious and lucrative prize for literature. Now 80, he had, three years before, married television producer Sabrina Guinness. “She’s lovely. Very nice,” he said of Guinness, with whom he was now living in Dorset. “I’m not going to move house again, that’s for sure.”
He conceded, however: “I’m a bit oversensitive about the ideal conditions that I desire or require for doing proper work. They tend towards the extreme, isolation. It’s as though I need to be the only person in the house before I can completely let go of everything around me.
“I had about 20 years where I wasn’t married and I lived on my own. So there was no distinction between home and office. But I love domestic life. I love married life. I wouldn’t change it.”
If it came at the cost of the next Stoppard play I was a bit against it, I said. “What I’m actually saying is that it’s no excuse for not writing one.”
Until he warmed up – which he did, admitting to me, for instance, that his stepfather, despite marrying “a Jewess”, was “actually somewhat anti-Semitic” – Stoppard was not in a great mood. What tormented him was a writer’s block as terrible as any that might (but probably didn’t) afflict Shakespeare.
“Presently,” he explained, “there are so many things that ought to be written about, and could be written about, that the contents of my head appear to be mostly white noise, a buzz of all the possible things: machine learning, electronic surveillance, climate change. Trump. The alt-right.”
Just put them all together, I suggested. “Well, exactly, but, as you know, you don’t really have anything until you have the story. All you’ve got is an essay.”
Death, I privately thought, would be the obvious subject for a man in his 80s, but he had already addressed it in his first hit, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. I wondered aloud whether the passage in the play in which Rosencrantz considers what it must be like to lie dead in a coffin spoke a bit more personally to him these days. “I would like to be in a box rather than in a vase,” he replied.
Was he thinking about death a bit more? “At the edge of my mind somewhat, yes, but only in a way that makes me concerned about using my time well.”
Today, it is only a little less painful to contemplate that not only are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern dead but their (re-)creator too. On my hall mirror I keep the card he sent me after that interview, complimenting it in neat fountain pen. It remains there partly because of the honour of getting it, but partly also to remind me that we all write hundreds of things in letters that are “completely untrue”.
His note recorded how he had spent the rest of his day (more interviews, dinner with friends) and ended with the words: “Now I’m back, looking for inspiration.”
We now know he found it in exactly the place that 25 years ago he had told me he had no interest in looking. His final play, Leopoldstadt, about the life of a family of Viennese Jews from the turn of the last century, was finally about himself, or at least about his hinterland. It ended with a leap to 1955 and a speech from a character, generally regarded as a surrogate for Stoppard himself, who was being chided by a relative for not facing where he came from. “I loved being English,” it began but ended in a recital of his family members’ almost unvarying fates in Nazi death camps.
And how right, I can now allow, Tom Stoppard was in not entrusting this unembellished story – these precious emotions – to a journalist, but to the unrivalled supremacy of his own pen.
The Times
