Until I read Hermione Lee’s life of Tom Stoppard, I didn’t know it was possible to bask in envy. As if being handsome, funny and a dazzling writer (and good at cricket and fly-fishing) weren’t enough, Stoppard is immensely rich – not just in money but also, Lee shows, in family, lovers, friends and even, which may sound pompous, moral qualities. ‘What is the Good?’ Emily asks in his 2013 radio play Darkside. ‘It is nothing but a contest of kindness.’ We learn of his devotion to his mother, brother, sons and grandchildren, his ability to stay friends with his exes and his work on behalf of good causes, beneficiaries of which include the opposition in Belarus, which he has supported since before Lukashenko came to power, and refugees encamped at Calais. There are a couple of brilliant paragraphs late in the book about the meanings and pitfalls of charm, and also of luck. A small part of Stoppard’s good luck is that, unlike the subjects of most worthwhile biographies, he’s alive to enjoy this one.
It’s the book itself, though, that made me most happily jealous. The research couldn’t be more thorough. Stoppard’s decade in provincial journalism in Bristol is perfectly evoked, for example: jazz clubs, coffee bars, kids chain-smoking in polo-necked black jerseys. I was one of them and went to some of the productions at the Old Vic that Stoppard reviewed, such as Look Back in Anger with Peter O’Toole as Jimmy Porter, so I know. The narrative moves fluently between the raffish, impoverished life he was living there, his main love affair and friendships – most of them kept up for a lifetime – and his journalism. Lee is fascinating on his early pieces, including an irreverent one on the ‘workers’ theatre’ pretensions of Arnold Wesker’s Centre 42:
Art is not withheld from anyone. Like Mount Everest, it is there. The slopes are sprinkled with people shouting ‘Come on up, it’s marvellous!’ but … The millions aren’t dissatisfied … What it has got is football, films, telly, bingo and pools – and it likes them very much, thanks.
Lee is terrific on other places and times too: the Darjeeling of his early childhood, or Iver Grove, the 18th-century brick mansion and garden restored by his second wife, Miriam, the subsequent dilapidation of which is described in a paragraph worthy of Elizabeth Bowen. And she’s wonderful at people, being warmly perceptive but not without sharpness. Her accounts of the waning of love affairs are sophisticated, never cynical. She lets in occasional flashes of gossip: Marigold Johnson, for example, saying that Miriam’s kitchen-blackboard instructions for her sons’ and stepsons’ lunch invariably said, ‘Fish fingers. Peas.’ And so it goes on for 850 pages, until the shrewdly delayed moment very near the end when Lee lets herself in to speak of her experience of being Stoppard’s biographer and his complicated reactions to the process. Then she slips away again into the famous story – a favourite of Stoppard’s – of the last seconds of Nevill Coghill’s open-air production of The Tempest, where Ariel skipped along duckboards just submerged in the lake of Worcester College, Oxford, and up a concealed ramp before disappearing into a firework.
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