text:
In "Jumpers," a play by Tom Stoppard, whose other works include "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," "Travesties," and "Dirty Linen," a man carrying a tortoise in one hand and a bow and arrow in the other, his face covered with shaving cream, opens the door of his apartment. Standing outside is a police inspector bearing a bouquet of flowers. There is a perfectly rational explanation for this.
In "After Magritte," a much shorter play by the same author, we learn that a one-legged blind man with a white beard, who may in fact have been a handicapped football player with shaving cream on his face, has been seen hopping, or perhaps playing hop-scotch, along an English street, wearing striped pajamas, convict garb, or possibly a West Bromwich Albion football jersey, waving with one arm a white stick, a crutch, or a furled parasol while carrying under the other what may have been a football, a wineskin, an alligator handbag, or a tortoise. (One of the characters, discounting the hypothesis that the man was blind, scornfully inquires whether it was a seeing-eye tortoise.) There is also a perfectly rational, though much longer, explanation for this.
In "The Language of Theatre," an address delivered by the same author in January, 1977, at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the lecturer began by stating that he was not going to talk about the language of theatre. ("That was just a device to attract a better class of audience," he said, eying the spectators. "I see it failed.") Instead—and among other things—he told a story about a man he knew who bought a peacock on impulse and, shortly afterward, while shaving in his pajamas, observed the bird escaping from his country garden. Dropping his razor, he set off in pursuit and managed to catch the feathered fugitive just as it reached a main road adjoining his property. At that moment, a car flashed by, middle-aged husband at the wheel, wife at his side. For perhaps five seconds—vrrrooommm—they caught sight of this perplexing apparition. Wife: "What was that, dear?" Husband: "Fellow in his pajamas, with shaving cream all over his face and a peacock under his arm." There was, as we know, a perfectly rational explanation. (Stoppard went on to say that several of his plays had grown out of images such as this. He added that when he tried the peacock anecdote out on the members of a literary society at Eton College, it was received in bewildered silence. He soon realized why: "They all had peacocks.")
In none of the same author's plays will you find any reference to (or echo of, or scene derived from) the following singular, and partly equivocal, story. During the nineteen-thirties, there lived in Zlín—a town in Czechoslovakia that is now known as Gottwaldov—a middle-class physician named Eugene Straussler, who worked for a famous shoe company. Either he or his wife (nobody seems quite sure which) had at least one parent of Jewish descent. In any case, Dr. Straussler sired two sons, of whom the younger, Thomas, was born on July 3, 1937. Two years later, on the eve of the Nazi invasion of their homeland, the Strausslers left for Singapore, where they settled until 1942. The boys and their mother then moved to India. Dr. Straussler stayed behind to face the Japanese occupation. He died in a Japanese air raid, or in a prisoner-of-war camp, or on a Japanese prison ship torpedoed by the British (nobody seems quite sure which). In 1946, his widow married a major in the British Army, who brought the family back with him to England. The two Straussler scions assumed their stepfather's surname, which was Stoppard. Thomas, who claims to have spoken only Czech until the age of three, or possibly five and a half (he does not seem quite sure which), grew up to become, by the early nineteen-seventies, one of the two or three most prosperous and ubiquitously adulated playwrights at present bearing a British passport. (The other contenders are Harold Pinter, who probably has the edge in adulation, and Peter Shaffer, the author of "Equus," whose strong point is prosperity.) There is no perfectly rational explanation for any of this. It is simply true.
Preliminary notes from my journal, dated July 24, 1976:
Essential to remember that Stoppard is an émigré. A director who has staged several of his plays told me the other day, "You have to be foreign to write English with that kind of hypnotized brilliance." An obvious comparison is with Vladimir Nabokov, whom Stoppard extravagantly admires. Stoppard said to me not long ago that his favorite parenthesis in world literature was this, from "Lolita": "My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three." He is at present adapting Nabokov's novel "Despair" for the screen; Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who commissioned the script, will direct. Stoppard loves all forms of wordplay, especially puns, and frequently describes himself as "a bounced Czech." Like many immigrants, he has immersed himself beyond the call of baptism in the habits and rituals of his adopted country. Nowadays, he is plus anglais que les anglais—a phrase that would please him, as a student of linguistic caprice, since it implies that his Englishness can best be defined in French. His style in dress is the costly-casual dandyism of London in the nineteen-sixties. According to his friend Derek Marlowe, who wrote the best-selling novel "A Dandy in Aspic," "Tom goes to some very posh places for his clothes, but he finds it hard to orchestrate all his gear into a sartorial unity. The effect is like an expensive medley." (Told of this comment, Stoppard protests to me that Marlowe is exaggerating. "Derek," he says, "is a fantasist enclosed by more mirror than glass.") Because Stoppard has a loose, lanky build, a loose thatch of curly dark hair, loose, liver-tinted lips, dark, flashing eyes, and long, flashing teeth, you might mistake him for an older brother of Mick Jagger, more intellectually inclined than his frenetic sibling.
Stoppard often puts me in mind of a number in "Beyond the Fringe," the classic English revue of the sixties, in which Alan Bennett, as an unctuous clergyman, preached a sermon on the text "Behold, Esau my brother is an hairy man, and I am a smooth man." The line accurately reflects the split in English drama which took place during (and has persisted since) this period. On one side were the hairy men—heated, embattled, socially committed playwrights, like John Osborne, John Arden, and Arnold Wesker, who had come out fighting in the late fifties. On the other side were the smooth men—cool, apolitical stylists, like Harold Pinter, the late Joe Orton, Christopher Hampton ("The Philanthropist"), Alan Ayckbourn ("The Norman Conquests"), Simon Gray ("Otherwise Engaged"), and Stoppard. Earlier this year, Stoppard told an interviewer from the London weekly Time Out, "I used to feel out on a limb, because when I started to write you were a shit if you weren't writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no compunction about that. . . . 'The Importance of Being Earnest' is important, but it says nothing about anything." He once said that his favorite line in modern English drama came from "The Philanthropist": "I'm a man of no convictions—at least, I think I am." In "Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon" (1966), Stoppard's only novel to date, Mr. Moon seems to speak for his author when he says, "I distrust attitudes because they claim to have appropriated the whole truth and pose as absolutes. And I distrust the opposite attitude for the same reason." Lord Malquist, who conducts his life on the principle that the eighteenth century has not yet ended, asserts that all battles are discredited. "I stand aloof," he declares, "contributing nothing except my example." In an article for the London Sunday Times in 1968, Stoppard said, "Some writers write because they burn with a cause which they further by writing about it. I burn with no causes. I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really." On another occasion, he defined the quality that distinguished him from many of his contemporaries as "an absolute lack of certainty about almost anything."
Seeking artistic precedents for this moral detachment, this commitment to neutrality, I come up with four quotations. The first is from Oscar Wilde:
A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true.
The second is from Evelyn Waugh's diary:
I . . . don't want to influence opinions or events, or expose humbug or anything of that kind. I don't want to be of service to anyone or anything. I simply want to do my work as an artist.
Then these, from John Keats' letters:
It struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. . . .
The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing—to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts, not a select party.
In Stoppard's case, "negative capability" has been a profitable thoroughfare. When I asked him, not long ago, how much he thought he had earned from "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," his answer was honestly vague: "About—a hundred and fifty thousand pounds?" To the same question, his agent, Kenneth Ewing, gave me the following reply: "'Rosencrantz' opened in London in 1967. Huge overnight success—it stayed in the National Theatre repertory for about four years. The Broadway production ran for a year. Metro bought the screen rights for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars and paid Tom a hundred thousand to write the script, though the movie was never made. The play had a short run in Paris, with Delphine Seyrig as Gertrude, but it was quite a hit in Italy, where Rosencrantz was played by a girl. It did enormous business in Germany and Scandinavia and—oddly enough—Japan. On top of that, the book sold more than six hundred thousand copies in the English language alone. Up to now, out of 'Rosencrantz' I would guess that Tom had grossed well over three hundred thousand pounds."
And now, on this sunny Saturday afternoon, to Gunnersbury Park, in West London, where a cricket match is to be played. Cricket, to which I am addicted, is a pastime of great complexity and elegance. Shapeless and desultory to the outsider, it has an underlying structure that only the initiate perceives. At the international level, a match may last five days, end in a draw, and still be exciting. Cricket may seem to dawdle, to meander, to ramble off into amorphous perversity; but for all its vagaries and lapses into seeming incoherence there is, as in a Stoppard play, a perfectly rational explanation. Not surprisingly, Stoppard is a passionate fan of the game—an enslavement he shares with many British writers of the cool school. Generalization: Cricket attracts artists who are either conservative or nonpolitical; e.g., P. G. Wodehouse, Terence Rattigan, Samuel Beckett, Kingsley Amis, Harold Pinter, and Stoppard, all of them buffs who could probably tell you how many wickets Tich Freeman, the wily Kent spin bowler, took in his record-breaking season of 1928. Leftists, on the whole, favor soccer, the sport of the urban proletariat. It's hard to imagine Wesker, Arden, Trevor Griffiths, or the young Osborne (the middle-aged Osborne has swung toward right-wing anarchism and may well, for all I know, have taken up the quarterstaff) standing in line outside Lord's Cricket Ground. As a cricket-loving radical, I am an anomaly, regarded by both sides with cordial mistrust.
Today's game is an annual fixture: Mr. Harold Pinter's XI versus the Guardian newspaper's. The field, rented for the occasion, is impressively large, with a well-equipped pavilion, inside which at 2:30 P.M., the advertised starting time, both teams are avidly watching another match—England versus the West Indies—on television. Eight spectators, including two children and me, have turned up. The Guardian XI looks formidably healthy, featuring several muscular typesetters and the paper's industrial correspondent. The Pinter squad seems altogether less businesslike. To begin with, only nine of the players are present, the principal batsman having discovered on his arrival that he had left his contact lenses at home. Since he lives in an outlying northern suburb, the game may easily be over by the time he returns. Moreover, Skipper Pinter, inscrutable as always, has decided at the last moment to absent himself, thereby leaving his lads leaderless. Among the nine remaining are a somewhat bald fortyish publisher, a retired Chelsea football player, Pinter's teen-age son Daniel (already a published poet, who has lately won a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford), and—by far the most resplendent, in gauntlets of scarlet leather and kneepads as blindingly white as Pitz Palu—Tom Stoppard, the team's wicketkeeper, who swears to me that he has not played cricket for over a year.
He asks me to take the place of the myopic batsman. I refuse, on the ground that I have no white flannels. Characteristically, Dandy Tom has brought a spare pair. I counter by pleading lack of practice, not having put bat to ball for roughly twenty years, and am grudgingly excused. Why, I wonder, has Pinter let down the side? The answer, gleaned from his teammates, is that his estranged wife, the brilliant but temperamental actress Vivien Merchant (who made no secret of her vexation when, a year earlier, Pinter left home to live with Lady Antonia Fraser, the biographer of Cromwell and Mary Queen of Scots), has announced her intention of watching the game, ostensibly to see her son in action. Anxious to avoid a scene, the captain has retired to a nearby Thames-side pub, where—doubtless biting his nails, for he is a deeply competitive man—he will await the result. (As it happened, he need not have worried: Mrs. Pinter failed to show up until the game was over.) Many amateur cricket teams have specially designed ties; I learn from Stoppard that the Pinter outfit does not. "But if it had," he adds, alluding to the pauses for which Pinter's plays are famous, "the club insignia would probably be three dots." The Guardian XI, having torn itself away from TV and won the toss, has elected to bat first; it is time for the Pinter XI (reduced to IX) to take the field. Stoppard goes out, managing as he does so to drop a smoldering cigarette butt between kneepad and trousers. "There may be a story here," he calls back to me. "'Playwright Bursts Into Flames at Wicket.'"
Having no fast bowlers, who are the match-winning thunderbolts of cricket, the Pinter team is forced to rely on slow spinners of the ball, oblique and devious in their approach. To hazard an analogy: Pinter onstage is a masterly spinner, but his surrogates on the field, lacking his precision, are mercilessly bashed about by their opponents. The tough and purposeful Guardian team scores eighty-three runs, and the figure would be much higher if it were not for the elastic leaps and hair-trigger reflexes of Stoppard behind the stumps, where (in the role that approximates the catcher's in baseball) he dismisses no fewer than four of the enemy side. This leaves room for hope—though not for all that much, as we realize when the Pinter IX starts to bat. Its acting captain, the somewhat bald publisher, holds his own, scoring with occasional suave deflections, the picture of public-school unconcern; but the Guardian bowlers have muscle and pace, and wicket after wicket falls to their intimidating speed. The game is all but lost when Stoppard ambles in to bat, with the score at sixty and only two men to follow him. Within ten minutes, in classic style, he has driven three balls to the boundary ropes for four runs apiece. Six more graceful swipes bring his personal total to twenty, thereby making him the top scorer and winning the game for his side. He is welcomed back to the pavilion with cheers.
We repair to the riverside pub, where Skipper Pinter, accompanied by Lady Antonia, has just heard the news. Bursting with pride, he embraces Stoppard and buys expensive drinks for the whole team. (Lady A. sips chilled cider.) He has been informed of certain crass errors made in the course of play, and sharply chides those responsible. It is like listening to Wellington if an attack of gout had kept him away from Waterloo. (Pinter's record commands respect: turning out every Saturday afternoon, he has a batting average that has seldom dipped below seventy, which is very high indeed.) In T-shirt and slacks, this sun-drenched evening, he looks dapper and superbly organized behind his thick horn-rimmed spectacles. Pinter has two basic facial expressions, which alternate with alarming rapidity. One of them, his serious mask, suggests a surgeon or a dentist on the brink of making a brilliant diagnosis. The head tilts to one side, the eyes narrow shrewdly, the brain seems to whirr like a computer. His stare drills into your mind. His face, topped by shiny black hair, is sombre, intent, profoundly concerned. When he smiles, however, it is suddenly and totally transformed. "Smile" is really the wrong word: what comes over his face is unmistakably a leer. It reveals gleaming, voracious teeth, with a good deal of air between them, and their owner resembles a stand-up comic who has just uttered a none too subtle sexual innuendo. At the same time, the eyes pop and lasciviously swivel. There seems to be no halfway house between these two extremes, and this, as Pinter is doubtless aware, can be very disconcerting.
Pinter's absence from the field, which might have spelled disaster, has in fact made no difference at all, thanks to Stoppard's dashing performance. Where a lesser man might have been nettled, Pinter is genuinely delighted. Team spirit has triumphed: the leer is positively euphoric. Stoppard makes his farewells and departs (to keep a date with his wife), leaving the skipper surrounded by disciples. One might, I suppose, discern a kind of metaphorical significance in the fact that while the top-ranking English playwright's back was turned the runner-up nipped in and seized the victor's crown. But, as Noël Coward said in "The Scoundrel," I hate stooping to symbolism.
Back home after the match, I decide that for Stoppard art is a game within a game—the larger game being life itself, an absurd mosaic of incidents and accidents in which (as Beckett, whom he venerates, says in the aptly entitled "Endgame") "something is taking its course." We cannot know what the something is, or whither it is leading us; and it is therefore impermissible for art, a mere derivative of life, to claim anything as presumptuous as a moral purpose or a social function. Since 1963, when the first professional performance of a script by Stoppard was given, he has written one novel, four full-length plays, one miniplay ("Dirty Linen") that was cheekily passed off as a full-length entertainment, five one-acters for the stage, and ten pieces for radio or television. Thus far, only one of his performed works ("Jumpers," to my mind his masterpiece, which was first produced in 1972) could be safely accused of having a moral or political message; but the critics are always sniffing for ulterior motives—so diligently that Stoppard felt it necessary to announce in 1974, "I think that in future I must stop compromising my plays with this whiff of social application. They must be entirely untouched by any suspicion of usefulness. I should have the courage of my lack of convictions." In another interview, he said he saw no reason that art should not concern itself with contemporary social and political history, but added that he found it "deeply embarrassing . . . when, because art takes notice of something important, it's claimed that the art is important. It's not." Hating to be pinned down, politely declining to be associated with the opinions expressed by his characters, he has often remarked, "I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself." (Many of his apparent impromptus are worked out beforehand. Himself a onetime journalist, he makes a habit of anticipating questions and prefabricating effective replies. Indeed, such was his assurance of eventual success that he was doing this long before anyone ever interviewed him. When he read the printed result of his first conversation with the press, he said he found it "very déjà vu." Clive James, the Australian critic and satirist, now working in London, has rightly described him as "a dream interviewee, talking in eerily quotable sentences whose English has the faintly extraterritorial perfection of a Conrad or a Nabokov.")
Philosophically, you can see the early Stoppard at his purest in "Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon," which sold only four hundred and eighty-one copies in 1966, when it was published. Malquist says:
Nothing is the history of the world viewed from a suitable distance. Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering; the capacity for self-indulgence changes hands. But the world does not alter its shape or its course. The seasons are inexorable, the elements constant. Against such vast immutability the human struggle takes place on the same scale as the insect movements in the grass, and carnage in the streets is no more than the spider-sucked husk of a fly on a dusty windowsill.
Later, he adds, "Since we cannot hope for order, let us withdraw with style from the chaos."
When Moon, his biographer and a professed anarchist, attacks Malquist's anti-humanism on the ground that, whatever he may say, the world is made up of "all people, isn't it?" Malquist scoffs:
What an extraordinary idea. People are not the world, they are merely a recent and transitory product of it. The world is ten million years old. If you think of that period condensed into one year beginning on the first of January, then people do not make their appearance in it until the thirty-first of December; or to be more precise, in the last forty seconds of that day.
Such trivial latecomers sound barely worth saving.
Though Stoppard would doubtless deny it, these pronouncements of Malquist's have a ring of authority which suggests the author speaking. They reflect a world view of extreme pessimism, and therefore of conservatism. The pessimist is necessarily conservative. Maintaining, as he does, that mankind is inherently and immutably flawed, he must always be indifferent or hostile to proposals for improving human life by means of social or political change. The radical, by contrast, is fundamentally an optimist, embracing change because he holds that human nature is perfectible. The Malquist attitude, whatever its virtues, is hardly conducive to idealism. I recall a conversation with Derek Marlowe about Stoppard's private beliefs. "I don't think," Marlowe said, "that there's anything he would go to the guillotine for." I found the choice of instrument revealing. We associate the guillotine with the decapitation of aristocrats. Marlowe instinctively identified Stoppard with the nobility rather than the mob—with reaction rather than revolution.
There are signs, however, that history has lately been forcing Stoppard into the arena of commitment. Shortly after I wrote the above entry in my journal, he sent me a typescript of his most recent work. Commissioned by André Previn, who conducts the London Symphony Orchestra, it is called "Every Good Boy Deserves Favour"—a mnemonic phrase familiar to students of music, since the initial letters of the words represent, in ascending order, the notes signified by the black lines of the treble clef. Involving six actors (their dialogue interspersed with musical contributions from Mr. Previn's big band), it had its world première in July at the Royal Festival Hall, in London. It started out in Stoppard's mind as a play about a Florida grapefruit millionaire, but his works have a way of changing their themes as soon as he sits down at his typewriter. The present setting is a Russian mental home for political dissidents, where the main job of the staff is to persuade the inmates that they are in fact insane. What follows is a characteristic exchange between a recalcitrant prisoner named Alexander and the therapist who is assigned to him:
PSYCHIATRIST: The idea that all the people locked up in mental hospitals are sane while the people walking about outside are all mad is merely a literary cliché, put about by the people who should be locked up. I assure you there's not much in it. Taken as a whole, the sane are out there and the sick are in here. For example, you are here because you have delusions that sane people are put in mental hospitals.
ALEXANDER: But I am in a mental hospital.
PSYCHIATRIST: That's what I said.
Alexander, of course, refuses to curry Favour by being a Good Boy. Beneath its layers of Stoppardian irony, the play (oratorio? melodrama?) is a point-blank attack on the way in which Soviet law is perverted to stifle dissent. In the script I read, Alexander declares, at a moment of crisis, "There are truths to be shown, and our only strength is personal example." Stoppard, however, had crossed this line out, perhaps being reluctant to put his name to a platitude, no matter how true or relevant it might be. Simplicity of thought—in this piece, as elsewhere in his work—quite often underlies complexity of style. "E.G.B.D.F." rests on the assumption that the difference between good and evil is obvious to any reasonable human being. What else does Stoppard believe in? For one thing, I would guess, the intrinsic merits of individualism; for another, a universe in which everything is relative yet in which moral absolutes exist; for a third, the probability that this paradox can be resolved only if we accept the postulate of a presiding deity. In 1973, during a public discussion of his plays at the Church of St. Mary Le Bow, in London, he told his interlocutor, the Reverend Joseph McCulloch:
The whole of science can be said, by a theologian, to be operating within a larger framework. In other words, the higher we penetrate into space and the deeper we penetrate into the atom, all it shows to a theologian is that God has been gravely underestimated.
Nietzsche once said that convictions were prisons—a remark that the younger Stoppard would surely have applauded. Later, I shall try to chart the route that has led Stoppard, the quondam apostle of detachment, to the convictions he now proclaims, and to his loathing for the strictly unmetaphorical prisons in which so many people he respects are at present confined.
Stoppard's childhood was full of enforced globe-trotting. Much of it was spent on the run from totalitarianism, of both the European and the Oriental variety. By the time he was five years old, he had moved from his Czechoslovakian birthplace to Singapore and thence—with his mother and elder brother—to India. His father, as we have seen, stayed on in Singapore, where he died in circumstances that remain obscure. (Not long ago, I asked Stoppard why this question, like that of the family's Jewish background, could not be cleared up by his mother, who, together with his stepfather, nowadays lives in the Lake District. "Rightly or wrongly, we've always felt that she might want to keep the past under a protective covering so we've never delved into it," he said. "My father died in enemy hands, and that's that.") Stoppard attended a multiracial, English-speaking school in Darjeeling. There his mother managed a shoe store and met Major Kenneth Stoppard, of the British Army in India, whom she married in 1946. By the end of the year, Major Stoppard had brought his new family back to England. Demobilized, he prospered as a salesman of machine tools, and Tom went through the initial hoops of a traditional middle-class education. From a preparatory boarding school in Nottinghamshire he moved on to "a sort of minor public school" in Yorkshire. He summed up his extracurricular activities for me in a recent letter:
I wrote a play about Charles I when I was twelve. It was surprisingly conventional: he died in the end. I edited no magazines but I did debate. I remember being completely indifferent as to which side of any proposition I should debate on.
In 1954, aged seventeen, he left school to live with his family in the West Country port of Bristol, where they had settled a few years earlier. He bypassed higher education and plunged into local journalism, first at the Western Daily Press and later at the Bristol Evening World, in a variety of posts, including those of news reporter, humorous columnist, feature writer, and reviewer of plays and films. For a while, although he was unable to drive, he held down the job of motoring correspondent on the Daily Press. ("I used to review the upholstery," he says.) He rejoiced in the life of a newspaperman, relished "the glamour of flashing a press card at flower shows," and had no higher ambition than to make a gaudy mark in Fleet Street. He did not contemplate becoming a playwright until the late nineteen-fifties, when a new breed of English authors, led by John Osborne, began to assert themselves at the Royal Court Theatre, in London. Simultaneously, a new breed of actors emerged, to interpret their work. One of the latter, the then unknown Peter O'Toole, joined the Bristol Old Vic—probably the best of Britain's regional repertory companies—and in the course of the 1957–58 season he played a series of leading parts, among them the title role in "Hamlet" and Jimmy Porter in Osborne's "Look Back in Anger." (This was the unique and original O'Toole, before he submitted his profile to surgical revision, which left him with a nose retroussé and anonymous enough to satisfy the producer of "Lawrence of Arabia.") Years later, at a seminar in California, a student asked Stoppard, "Did you get into the theatre by accident?" "Of course," he said innocently. "One day, I tripped and fell against a typewriter, and the result was 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.'" In reality, it was O'Toole's blazing performances—and the plays they adorned in Bristol—that turned Stoppard on to theatre. By the end of the season, he was incubating a new vocation.
Meanwhile, he stuck to journalism, writing two columns (both pseudonymous) in every issue of the Daily Press. "They became a bit tiring to read, because they were a little too anxious to be funny," he says nowadays. "At the time, I was desperate to be printed in Punch. I was overextended." During this period, Bristol was a seedbed of theatrical talent. Geoffrey Reeves, who directed the first performance of "After Magritte" and collaborated with Peter Brook on several of the latter's productions, was then a research student in Bristol University's Drama Department. He recalls Stoppard as "a cynical wit in a mackintosh, one of the very few sophisticated journalists in town—though I would never have thought of him as a potential playwright." Peter Nichols (the author of "A Day in the Death of Joe Egg") and Charles Wood (who wrote the screenplays of "The Knack," "How I Won the War," and "The Charge of the Light Brigade") were both growing up in Bristol when Stoppard was there. Wood remembers Stoppard as "a sort of Mick Jaggerish character, who wrote some rather unfunny newspaper columns," and adds, "He wasn't a part of our world." Nichols' recollections are similarly tinged with waspishness: "Tom was a great figure in Bristol, to be mentioned with bated breath. His comings and goings were reported as if he were Orson Welles." When Nichols told me this, he had just returned from Minneapolis, where one of Stoppard's works was being performed. With a glint of malice in his voice, he continued, "Tom is very big in Minneapolis. Unlike a lot of modern British drama, his stuff travels well. No rough edges on Tom. None of those awkward local references. There never were." During the nineteen-sixties, Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern," Wood's "H" (a chronicle of the Indian Mutiny of 1857), and Nichols' "The National Health" were all to be presented at the National Theatre, thereby provoking rumors of a Bristolian conspiracy to dominate British drama. "H," stunningly written but structurally a mess, was a box-office failure; the Nichols play, in which a hospital ward symbolized the invalid state of the nation, had a great success with British audiences; but Stoppard's was the runaway smash, at home and abroad, with critics and public alike.
His career as a playwright began in 1960, when he wrote a one-act piece called "The Gamblers," which he described to me in a recent letter as "'Waiting for Godot' in the death cell—prisoner and jailer—I'm sure you can imagine the rest." (It was staged in 1962 by Bristol University undergraduates, and has never been revived.) Later in 1960, he spent three months writing his first full-length play, "A Walk on the Water." It was so weightily influenced by Arthur Miller and by Robert Bolt's "Flowering Cherry" that he has come to refer to it as "Flowering Death of a Salesman." He said in 1974 that, although he thought it worked pretty well onstage, "it's actually phony, because it's a play written about other people's characters—they're only real because I've seen them in other people's plays." A few years afterward, indulging in his hobby of self-contradiction, he told a group of drama students, "What I like to do is take a stereotype and betray it, rather than create an original character. I never try to invent characters. All my best characters are clichés." This is Stoppard at his most typical, laying a smoke screen designed to confuse and ambush his critics. Run the above statements together and you get something like this: "It's wrong to borrow other writers' characters, but it's all right as long as they're clichés." "A Walk on the Water" is about George Riley, a congenital self-deceiver who declares roughly once a week that he is going to achieve independence by leaving home and making his fortune as an inventor. Never having won more bread than can be measured in crumbs, he is entirely dependent—for food, shelter, and pocket money—on his wife and their teen-age daughter, both of whom are wearily aware that, however bravely he trumpets his fantasies of self-sufficiency in the local pub, he is sure to be back for dinner. For all his dottiness (among his inventions are a pipe that will stay perpetually lit provided it is smoked upside down and a revolutionary bottle opener for which, unfortunately, no matching bottle top exists), Riley has what Stoppard describes as "a tattered dignity." This attribute will recur in many Stoppard heroes, who have nothing to pit against the hostility of society and the indifference of the cosmos except their obstinate conviction that individuality is sacrosanct. C. W. E. Bigsby says in a perceptive booklet he wrote on Stoppard for the British Council:
While it is clear that none of his characters control their own destiny . . . it is equally obvious that their unsinkable quality, their irrepressible vitality and eccentric persistence, constitute what Stoppard feels to be an authentic response to existence.
The first performance of "A Walk on the Water" (and the first professional production of any Stoppard play) was given on British commercial television in 1963. Considerably rewritten, and retitled "Enter a Free Man," it was staged in the West End five years later, when "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern" had established Stoppard's reputation. Both versions of the text are indebted not only to Miller and Bolt but to N. F. Simpson (the whimsical author of "One Way Pendulum," a gravely surreal farce that contains a character whose ambition is to train a team of speak-your-weight machines to sing the "Hallelujah Chorus"), and both pay respectful homage to P. G. Wodehouse and to British music-hall comedy, especially in the exchanges between Riley and a saloon-bar companion named Brown. In one of these, Riley insists that Thomas Edison was the inventor of the lighthouse. Brown, anxious to avoid a row, hints at the probable source of his friend's misapprehension by gently singing the opening lines of a well-known folk song: "My father was the keeper of the Eddystone light and he met a mermaid one fine night." This causes "a terrible silence," after which:
RILEY: Your father was what?
BROWN: Not my father.
RILEY: Whose father? . . . Whose father was a mermaid?
BROWN: He wasn't a mermaid. He met a mermaid.
RILEY: Who did?
BROWN: This man's father.
RILEY: Which man's father?
BROWN (testily): I don't know.
RILEY: I don't believe you, Jones.
BROWN: Brown.
RILEY: This is just sailors' talk, the mythology of the seas. There are no such things as mermaids. I'm surprised at a grown man like you believing all that superstitious rubbish. What your father saw was a sea lion.
BROWN: My father didn't see a sea lion!
RILEY (topping him): So it was your father!
Both scripts are flawed by a running gag that the passage of time has tripped up. The invention that is supposed to demonstrate Riley's invincible stupidity beyond all doubt—viz., an envelope with gum inside and out, so that it can be used twice—has since been widely adopted as an efficient method of sending out bills. (Hazards of this kind are endemic to humorists who mistrust the march of science. Cf. the English wit J. B. Morton, who convulsed his readers in the nineteen-thirties by predicting the advent of an electric toothbrush.) Wherever the 1968 text differs from the original, the changes are for the better, as witness the addition of Riley's crowning fancy—a device that supplies indoor rain for indoor plants. From Stoppard's deletions, however, we learn something crucial about the nature and the limitations of his talent.
"Tom cares more about the details of writing than anyone else I know," Derek Marlowe told me. "He's startled by the smallest minutiae of life. He'll rush out of a room to make a note of a phrase he's just heard or a line that's just occurred to him. But the grand events, the highs and lows of human behavior, he sees with a sort of aloof, omniscient amusement. The world doesn't impinge on his work, and you'd think after reading his plays that no emotional experience had ever impinged on his world. For one thing, he can't create convincing women. His female characters are somewhere between playmates and amanuenses. He simply doesn't understand them. He has a dual personality, like the author of 'Alice in Wonderland.' His public self is Charles Dodgson—he loves dons, philosophers, theorists of all kinds, and he's fascinated by the language they use. But his private self is Lewis Carroll—reclusive, intimidated by women, unnerved by emotion."
Geoffrey Reeves agrees with this analysis: "However abstract Beckett may seem, he always gives you a gut reaction. But Tom hasn't yet made a real emotional statement."
This is not to say that he hasn't tried. In the telecast of "A Walk on the Water," as in the stage version, Riley's daughter is horrified to discover that her lover, whom she thought to be unmarried, has a wife. Before the play reached the theatre, however, Stoppard excised the following outburst, addressed by the girl to her mother:
He said he loved me. Loved me enough to have me on the side, didn't he? For his day off. . . . I asked him if he'd meant it, about loving me, really, and he said, he liked me a lot. It's murder. . . . If I was king, I'd hang people for that. Everybody saying they love each other when they only like each other a lot—they'll all be hung and there'll be no one left except hangmen, and all of them will say how they love each other when they only like each other a lot, until there's only one left, and he'll say—That's everybody, king, except me, your only true and loving hangman. And I'll say, you don't love me, you only like me a lot, and I'll hang him, and I'll be king, and I'll like myself a lot.
There was more in that vein, which playgoers were luckily spared. Not long ago, I asked Stoppard what he thought of Marlowe's charge that his plays failed to convey genuine emotion. He reflected for a while and then replied, "That criticism is always being presented to me as if it were a membrane that I must somehow break through in order to grow up. Well, I don't see any special virtue in making my private emotions the quarry for the statue I'm carving. I can do that kind of writing, but it tends to go off, like fruit. I don't like it very much even when it works. I think that sort of truth-telling writing is as big a lie as the deliberate fantasies I construct. It's based on the fallacy of naturalism. There's a direct line of descent from the naturalistic theatre which leads you straight down to the dregs of bad theatre, bad thinking, and bad feeling. At the other end of the scale, I dislike Abstract Expressionism even more than I dislike naturalism. But you asked me about expressing emotion. Let me put the best possible light on my inhibitions and say that I'm waiting until I can do it well." And what of Marlowe's comment that he didn't understand women? "If Derek had said that I don't understand people, it would have made more sense."
(A word on Stoppard and women. It is felt by some of his friends that his sexual ambitions, compared with his professional ambitions, have always been modest. He has been twice married. He met his first wife, a nurse called Jose Ingle, in London in 1962; Derek Marlowe remembers her as being "svelte and sun-tanned." Their marriage produced two sons, who bear the Dickensian names of Oliver and Barnaby. But the dramatic change in Stoppard's way of life that followed the triumph of "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern" in 1967 was more than Jose could cope with, and that familiar show-business phenomenon—the ditching of the pre-success partner—took its sad accustomed course. According to one observer, "Jose was a feminist before her time, and she got bloody-minded about being overshadowed by Tom." At all events, she finally suffered a nervous breakdown. Now fully recovered, she lives in a flat on the northern outskirts of London and is studying at a technical college for a teaching diploma. Divorce proceedings began when Stoppard left home, in 1970. Shortly afterward, he set up house with Miriam Moore-Robinson, a dark-haired pouter pigeon of a girl, buxom and exuberantly pretty, whom he had known, on and off, for about four years, and whose marriage to a veterinary surgeon was already at the breaking point. Miriam was the same age as Stoppard, and her ancestry included a Jewish grandparent who was born in Czechoslovakia. A qualified doctor, she worked for a pharmaceutical company that specialized in birth-control research, and has gone on to become its managing director. She has also made vivacious appearances on popular-science programs on British TV, answering questions on biology, zoology, and sex. Since 1972, when she and Stoppard were married, she has given him two more sons, William and Edmund. In matters of emotion, Stoppard is one of nature's Horatios; you could never call him passion's slave, or imagine him blown off course by a romantic obsession. He thrives in the atmosphere of a family nest. "I can't work away from domestic stability," he once told me.)
To revert to chronology: In 1960, the text of "A Walk on the Water" landed on the desk of Kenneth Ewing, the managing director of a newly formed script agency, which now represents such writers as Michael Frayn, Charles Wood, Adrian Mitchell, and Anthony ("Sleuth") Shaffer. Ewing sent Stoppard an encomiastic letter; the two men lunched in London; and Ewing has ever since been Stoppard's agent. "When I first met him, he had just given up his regular work as a journalist in Bristol, and he was broke," Ewing says. "But I noticed that even then he always travelled by taxi, never by bus. It was as if he knew that his time would come." In 1962, Stoppard heard that a new magazine called Scene was about to be launched in London; he applied for a job on the staff and was offered, to his amazement, the post of drama critic, which he instantly accepted. He then left Bristol for good and took an apartment in Notting Hill Gate, a dingy West London suburb. Derek Marlowe lived in the same dilapidated house. "Tom wrote short stories, and smoked to excess, and always worked at night," Marlowe recalls. "Every evening, he would lay out a row of matches and say, 'Tonight I shall write twelve matches'—meaning as much as he could churn out on twelve cigarettes." Scene made its début early in 1963. Virulently trendy in tone and signally lacking in funds, it set out to cover the whole of show business. In seven months (after which the money ran out and Scene was no longer heard from), Stoppard reviewed a hundred and thirty-two shows. Years later, in a sentence that combines verbal and moral fastidiousness in a peculiarly Stoppardian way, he explained why he thought himself a bad critic: "I never had the moral character to pan a friend—or, rather, I had the moral character never to pan a friend."
Since the magazine was ludicrously understaffed, he filled its pages with dozens of pseudonymous pieces, most of which he signed "William Boot." The name derives from Evelyn Waugh's novel "Scoop," in which William Boot is the nature columnist of a national newspaper who, owing to a spectacular misunderstanding, finds himself shipped off to cover a civil war in Africa. (As things turn out, he handles the assignment rather well.) Boot took root in Stoppard's imagination, and soon began to crop up in his plays, often allied to or contrasted with a complementary character called Moon. As a double act, they bring to mind Lenin's famous division of the world into "Who" and "Whom"—those who do and those to whom it is done. In Stoppard's words, "Moon is a person to whom things happen. Boot is rather more aggressive." Early in 1964, BBC radio presented two short Stoppard plays entitled "The Dissolution of Dominic Boot" and "M is for Moon Among Other Things." The leading characters in "The Real Inspector Hound" (1968) are named Birdboot and Moon. Apropos of the eponymous heroes of "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern," the English critic Robert Cushman has rightly said:
Rosencrantz, being eager, well-meaning, and consistently oppressed or embarrassed by every situation in which he finds himself, is clearly a Moon; Guildenstern, equally oppressed though less embarrassed and taking refuge in displays of intellectual superiority, is as obviously a Boot.
Cushman once asked Stoppard why so many of his characters were called Moon or Boot. Stoppard crisply replied that he couldn't help it if that was what their names turned out to be. "I'm a Moon, myself," he went on. "Confusingly, I used the name Boot, from Evelyn Waugh, as a pseudonym in journalism, but that was because Waugh's Boot is really a Moon, too." Having thus befogged his interviewer, he added a wry etymological touch. "This is beginning to sound lunatic," he said.
In 1964, a cobbler sticking to his last, Stoppard wrote a ninety-minute TV play called "This Way Out with Samuel Boot," which he equipped with a pair of Boots, who represent diametrically opposed attitudes toward material possessions. Samuel Boot, a fortyish man of evangelical fervor, preaches the total rejection of property. Jonathan, his younger brother, is a compulsive hoarder of objects, unable to resist mail-order catalogues, who fills his home with items bought on credit which are constantly being repossessed, since he never keeps up the payments. ("It's like Christmas in a thieves' kitchen," Samuel cries, surveying a room stacked with vacuum cleaners, goggles, filing cabinets, miners' helmets, boomerangs, knitting machines, miniature Japanese trees, and other oddments.) At one point, a salesman comes to deliver a hearing aid for a week's free trial. Having fitted the device into Jonathan's ear, he shouts into the box, "There! That's better, isn't it?" "You don't have to shout," says Jonathan sharply. "I'm not deaf." He demands to know who told the salesman that he suffered from this infirmity.
SALESMAN: It was an assumption.
JONATHAN: If I told you I'd got a wooden leg, would you assume I was one-legged?
SALESMAN: Yes.
JONATHAN: Well, I have. And you may have noticed I'm wearing skis. You seem to be making a lot of nasty assumptions here. You think I'm a deaf cripple.
This reductio ad absurdum is pure Stoppard. An unreasonable man uses rational arguments to convince a reasonable man that he (the latter) is irrational. The salesman flees in panic, but Jonathan still has the hearing aid. Though both brothers are Boots by name, Samuel turns out to be a Moon by nature. He ends up defeated by his own innocence. When he claims to have found an exit from the commercial rat race, Jonathan brutally demolishes his dream:
There's no out. You're in it, so you might as well fit. It's the way it is. Economics. All this stuff I've got . . . people have been paid to make it, drive it to the warehouse, advertise it, sell it to me, write to me about it, and take it away again. They get paid, and some of them buy a carpet with the money. [He has just had a carpet repossessed.] That's the way of it and you're in it. There's no way out with Samuel Boot.
Jonathan has a vast collection of trading stamps. Samuel steals them and holds a public meeting at which he proposes to give them away. He is mobbed and killed by a crowd of rapacious housewives. "He died of people," says one of his disciples, a young deserter from the Army. "They trod on him." To this, Jonathan replies, "That's what it is about people. Turn round and they'll tread on you. Or steal your property." The deserter delivers Samuel's epitaph:
He was a silly old man, and being dead doesn't change that. But for a minute . . . his daft old crusade, like he said, it had a kind of dignity.
Whereupon he picks up, as a souvenir of Jonathan's acquisitive way of life, a newly delivered vacuum cleaner. Rising to the defense of property, Jonathan shoots him dead with a mail-order harpoon gun.
"Samuel Boot" is patchily brilliant, an uneasy blend of absurdist comedy and radical melodrama. I have dwelt on it because (a) it is the last Stoppard play with a message (i.e., property is theft) that could be described as leftist, and (b) it is one of the few Stoppard scripts that have never been performed in any medium. Kenneth Ewing offered it to a London commercial-TV company and took Stoppard with him to hear the verdict. It was negative. "Stick to theatre," he advised his dejected client on the way back. "Your work can't be contained on television." Then Ewing's thoughts moved to Shakespeare, and, for no reason that he can now recall, he brought up a notion he had long cherished about "Hamlet." Quoting the speech in which Claudius sends Hamlet to England with a sealed message (borne by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) enjoining the ruler of that country to cut off Hamlet's head, Ewing said that in his opinion the King of England at the time of their arrival might well have been King Lear. And, if so, did they find him raving mad at Dover? Stoppard's spirits rose, and by the time Ewing dropped him off at his home he had come up with a tentative title: "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at the Court of King Lear." A seed had clearly been planted. It pleases Ewing to reflect that agents are not necessarily uncreative.
In the spring of 1964, the Ford Foundation awarded grants to four British playwrights (or would-be playwrights) enabling them to spend six months in West Berlin. The senior member of the chosen quartet was James Saunders, then thirty-nine years old and very much in vogue as the author of "Next Time I'll Sing to You," a lyrical-whimsical play that seemed to some critics anemic and to others a near-masterpiece. The remaining grants went to Derek Marlowe, Piers Paul Read (son of Sir Herbert, the illustrious poet and critic), and Stoppard, an avowed admirer of Saunders, by whose penchant for fantasy and wordplay his own work had been visibly affected. The four authors were installed, courtesy of Ford, in a mansion on the shore of the Wannsee. "We were there as cultural window dressing," Saunders says, "to show the generosity of American support for European art." They were all eager to see Brecht's Berliner Ensemble, in East Berlin, and three of them immediately did so. Stoppard alone hung back, and did not make the trip until his stay in Berlin was nearly over. He had never set foot in Communist territory, and the prospect of crossing the border repelled him. Although his passport was British, it stated that he was born in Czechoslovakia, and this had planted in him a superstitious fear that, once in East Berlin, he might never be allowed to return.
In the house by the Wannsee, he wrote a one-act comedy in verse, "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear." His work, like that of his colleagues, was performed by English amateur actors in one-night stands at a theatre on the Kurfürstendamm, with no décor apart from a large photograph of the author. Saunders, having seen Stoppard's jeu d'esprit, urged him to expand it into a full-length play. In his spare time, Stoppard was recruited by a young Dutch director to appear in a low-budget film based on a short story by Borges. He played a cowboy, and Marlowe has vivid memories of a sequence that showed Stoppard belligerently twirling a pair of six-shooters in front of the Brandenburg Gate. While Stoppard was in Germany, a Hamburg theatre presented the first stage production of "A Walk on the Water," and he flew from Berlin for the première. The performance passed off in silence but without incident; and when the curtain fell Stoppard's German agent rashly urged him to go onstage and take a bow. He did so, with a cigarette between his lips—perhaps in emulation of Oscar Wilde, who had once used the same method of showing his indifference to audience reaction. He was greeted, for the first time in his life, by a storm of booing. It was directed, as he readily admits, at the text, not the tobacco.
Summing up his impressions of Stoppard, in Berlin and afterward, James Saunders says, "Diffident on the surface, utterly unworried underneath. He's extremely cautious about being thought too serious. I've heard him quote Auden's famous remark to the effect that no poet's work ever saved anyone from a concentration camp. Well, that may be true, but it's terrible to admit that it's true. After all, the writer's job is constantly to redefine the role of the individual: What can he do? What should he do? And also to redefine the role of society: How can it be changed? How should it be changed? As a playwright, I live between these two responsibilities. But Tom—Tom just plays safe. He enjoys being nice, and he likes to be liked. He resists commitment of any kind, he hides the ultimate expression of his deepest concerns. He's basically a displaced person. Therefore, he doesn't want to stick his neck out. He feels grateful to Britain, because he sees himself as a guest here, and that makes it hard for him to criticize Britain. Probably the most damaging thing you could say about him is that he's made no enemies." Since Berlin, Stoppard's star has risen while Saunders' has tended to decline. I asked Saunders how this had affected their relationship. He smiled, and quoted a well-known British dramatist who had once told him, "Whenever I read a rave review of a young playwright in the Sunday papers, it spoils my whole day." He continued, "When Tom first became famous, he gave a series of expensive lunches at the Café Royal to keep in touch with his old pals. I thought that was pretty ostentatious behavior. Meeting him nowadays, I do feel a sort of cutoff." He made a gesture like a portcullis descending. "I don't think that he's overrated, as much as that many other writers are underrated. He has distracted attention from people who have an equal right to it."
(A word on Stoppard and friendship. Most of those who know him well regard him as an exemplary friend. "He actually drops in unannounced, which hardly anyone does in London," says a close female chum, "and he usually brings an unexpected but absolutely appropriate present. And he mails huge batches of postcards, which are not only funny but informative and helpful. He really works on his friendships." When Derek Marlowe wrote a novel entitled "Nightshade," Stoppard, who knew that Marlowe venerated Raymond Chandler, sought out an antique pulp magazine containing a Chandler story called "Nightshade," and arranged for it to reach Marlowe on publication day.)
After Stoppard returned from Berlin, he shared a flat in Westminster with Marlowe and Piers Paul Read. "At this period, his idol was Mick Jagger," Marlowe says. "He looked like him, he dressed like him, and he was thrilled when he found out that Jagger loved cricket as much as he did." Stoppard transmuted "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern" from verse into prose, and turned out a couple of short plays for television; but for the greater part of 1965 "he lived on the Arabs," as Kenneth Ewing puts it. "For some unfathomable reason, the BBC hired him to write the diary of an imaginary Arab student in London, which was then translated into Arabic and broadcast on the Overseas Service. He alternated with another author, and every other week he was paid forty pounds for five episodes. As far as I know, he had never met an Arab in his life. But the job kept him going for about nine months." Eager to scan the results of this bizarre assignment, I approached the BBC for permission to consult its files. I was told that no copies of the scripts were in existence—a body blow to theatrical history but conceivably good news to Stoppard.
Early in 1965, the Royal Shakespeare Company took a twelve-month option on a play that was by then called "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead." The company failed to fit the play into its repertoire, and after the option expired the script went to several other managements, all of which rejected it. In the summer of 1966, the president of the Oxford Theatre Group walked into Kenneth Ewing's office and asked for permission to present an amateur production of the play on the Fringe of the forthcoming Edinburgh Festival. (The Fringe is Edinburgh's Off and Off Off Broadway.) At first reluctant, Ewing eventually consented. He did not regret his decision. The opening night got a handful of bad notices, but over the weekend the momentous, life-changing review appeared. Ronald Bryden, writing in the Observer, described the play as an "erudite comedy, punning, far-fetched, leaping from depth to dizziness," and continued, "It's the most brilliant début by a young playwright since John Arden's." At the time, I was working for Laurence Olivier as literary manager of the National Theatre, whose company was housed at the Old Vic. Minutes after reading Bryden's piece, I cabled Stoppard, requesting a script. Olivier liked it as much as I did, and within a week we had bought it. Directed by Derek Goldby, it opened at the Vic in April, 1967. Very seldom has a play by a new dramatist been hailed with such rapturous unanimity. Harold Hobson, of the Sunday Times, called it "the most important event in the British professional theatre of the last nine years;" that is, since the opening of Harold Pinter's "The Birthday Party." Stoppard, who had subtly smoothed and improved the text throughout rehearsals, found himself overnight with his feet on the upper rungs of Britain's theatrical ladder, where several hobnailed talents were already stamping for primacy.
When "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern" had its London triumph, Václav Havel was thirty years of age, just nine months older than Stoppard. He wore smart but conservative clothes, being a dandy in the classic rather than the romantic mode. Of less than average height, he had the incipient portliness of the gourmet. His hair was trimmed short, and this gave him a somewhat bullet-shaped silhouette. He both walked and talked with purposeful briskness and elegance. He drove around Prague (where he was born on October 5, 1936) in a dashing little Renault, bought with the royalties from his plays—for in 1967 Havel was the leading Czechoslovakian playwright, and the only one to have achieved an international reputation since Karei Čapek wrote "R.U.R." and (with his brother Josef) "The Insect Play," between the wars. Havel's family connections were far grander than Stoppard's. Vera Blackwell, a Czech émigrée who lives in London and translates Havel's work into English, has said that "if Czechoslovakia had remained primarily a capitalist society Václav Havel would be today just about the richest young man in the country." One of his uncles was a millionaire who owned, apart from vast amounts of real estate and a number of hotels, the Barrandov studios, in Prague, which are the headquarters of the Czech film industry. All this was lost in the Communist takeover of 1948, and, during the dark period of Stalinist rigor that followed, Havel's upper-class background prevented him from receiving any full-time education above grade-school level. Instead, he took a menial job in a chemical laboratory, spending most of his off-duty hours at evening classes, where he studied science. In 1954, he began two years of military service, after which he made repeated attempts to enter Prague University. All his applications were turned down. His next move was to offer himself for any theatrical work that was going. He found what he was looking for in the mid-sixties, when he was appointed Dramaturg (i.e., literary manager, a post that in Europe quite often means not only play selector and script editor but house playwright as well) at the Balustrade Theatre, which was Prague's principal showcase for avant-garde drama.
We nowadays tend to assume that the great thaw in Czech Socialism began and ended with the libertarian reforms carried out by Alexander Dubček's regime in the so-called Prague Spring of 1968. By that time, artistic freedom had in fact been blooming for several ebullient years: a period that saw the emergence of filmmakers like Miloš Forman, Ivan Passer, Jan Němec, and Ján Kadár; of theatrical directors like Otomar Krejča and Jan Grossman (who ran the Balustrade); and of a whole school of young dramatists, at whose head Václav Havel swiftly established himself. In one sense, he was a traditional Czech writer. Using a technique that derived from Kafka, Čapek, and countless Central European authors before them, he expressed his view of the world in nonrealistic parables. His plays were distorting mirrors in which one recognized the truth. Stoppard belongs in precisely the same tradition, of which there is no Anglo-Saxon equivalent. Moreover, Havel shares Stoppard's passion for fantastic word juggling. Some critics have glibly assigned both writers to the grab bag marked Theatre of the Absurd. But here the analogy falters, for Havel's Absurdism is very different from Stoppard's. Vera Blackwell says:
Havel does not protest against the absurdity of man's life vis-à-vis a meaningless universe, but against the absurdity of the modern Frankenstein's monster: bureaucracy. . . . The ultimate aim of Havel's plays . . . is the improvement of man's lot through the improvement of man's institutions. These, in their turn, can become more "human" only insofar as the individual men and women who invent and people these institutions are prepared to be fully human—i.e., fully responsible for their actions, fully aware of their responsibility.
If Dubček's policies represented what Western journalists called "Socialism with a human face," Havel's work gave Absurdism a human face, together with a socially critical purpose.
Like Stoppard, he had his first play performed in 1963. Entitled "The Garden Party," it was staged by Grossman at the Balustrade. The hero, Hugo Pludek, is a student whose consuming interest is playing chess against himself. "Such a player," says his mother sagely, "will always stay in the game." His parents, a solid bourgeois couple, base their values on a storehouse of demented proverbs that they never tire of repeating; e.g., "Not even a hag carries hemp seed to the attic alone," "He who fusses about a mosquito net can never hope to dance with a goat," "Not even the Hussars of Cologne would go to the woods without a clamp," and—perhaps most incontrovertible of all—"Stone walls do not an iron bar." They worry about Hugo, since he shows no inclination to apply for work in the ruling bureaucracy. Under their pressure, he attends a garden party thrown by the Liquidation Office, where he poses as a bureaucrat so successfully that before long he is put in charge of liquidating the Liquidation Office. From a high-ranking member of the Inauguration Service—the opposite end of the scale from the Liquidation Office—he learns the Party line on intellectual dissent: "We mustn't be afraid of contrary opinions. Everybody who's honestly interested in our common cause ought to have from one to three contrary opinions." Eventually, the authorities decide to liquidate the Inauguration Service, and the question arises: Who should inaugurate the process of liquidation—an inaugurator or a liquidator? Surely not the former, since how can anyone inaugurate his own liquidation? But, equally, it can't be the latter, because liquidators have not been trained to inaugurate. Either liquidators must be trained to inaugurate or vice versa. But this poses a new question: Who is to do the training? At the end of the play, driven mad by living in a society in which all truths are relative and subject to overnight cancellation, Hugo feels his identity crumbling. He knows what is happening to him, but, good bureaucrat that he now is, he cannot resist it. In the course of a hysterical tirade, he declares:
Truth is just as complicated and multiform as everything else in the world—the magnet, the telephone, Impressionism, the magnet—and we are all a little bit what we were yesterday and a little bit what we are today; and also a little bit we're not these things. Anyway . . . some of us are more and some of us are more not; some only are, some are only, and some only are not; so that none of us entirely is, and at the same time each one of us is not entirely.
This was Absurdism with deep roots in contemporary anxieties. The play was an immediate hit in Prague, and went on to be performed in Austria, Switzerland, Sweden, Finland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and West Germany. Meanwhile, Havel composed a series of "typographical poems" to amuse his compatriots. One of them, labelled "Philosophy," went:
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Another, wryly political, was printed thus:
And the following is Havel's succinct comment on the role of humor under Stalinism:
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It is captioned "Constructive Satire."
Authentic satire operates on the principle of the thermos flask: it contains heat without radiating it. Havel's second play, "The Memorandum" (1965), was a splendid example: burning convictions were implicit in a structure of ice-cold logic and glittering linguistic virtuosity. His target was the use of language to subvert individualism and enforce conformity. Josef Gross, the managing director of a huge but undefined state enterprise, grows unsettled when he discovers that, on orders from above, the existing vernacular is being replaced by a synthetic language called Ptydepe, uncontaminated by the ambiguities, imprecisions, and emotional vagaries of ordinary speech. Its aim is to abolish similarities between words by using the least probable combinations of letters, so that no word can conceivably be mistaken for any other. We learn from the Ptydepe instructor who has been assigned to Gross's organization, "The natural languages originated . . . spontaneously, uncontrollably, in other words, unscientifically, and their structure is thus, in a certain sense, dilettantish." For purposes of official communication, they are utterly unreliable. In Ptydepe, "the more common the meaning, the shorter the word." The longest entry in the new dictionary has three hundred and nineteen letters and means "wombat." The shortest is "f" and at present has no meaning, since science has not yet determined which word or expression is in commonest use. The instructor lists several variations of the interjection "Boo" as it might be employed in a large company when one worker seeks to "sham-ambush" another. If the victim is in full view, unprepared for the impending ambush and threatened by a hidden colleague, "Boo" is rendered by "Gedynrelom." If, however, the victim is aware of the danger, the correct cry is "Osonfterte"—for which "Eg gynd y trojadus" must be substituted if both parties are in full view and the encounter is meant only as a joke. If the sham-ambush is seriously intended, the appropriate expression is "Eg jeht kuz." Jan Ballas, Gross's ambitious deputy, points out to his baffled boss that normal language is fraught with undesirable emotional overtones: "Now, tell me sincerely, has the word 'mutarex' any such overtones for you? It hasn't, has it! You see! It is a paradox, but it is precisely the surface inhumanity of an artificial language that guarantees its truly human function!" Gross's problems are compounded by the fact that he has received an official memorandum in Ptydepe, but in order to get a Ptydepe text translated one must make an application in Ptydepe, which Gross does not speak. "In other words," he laments, "the only way to know what is in one's memo is to know it already." Ever willing to compromise (and this is Havel's underlying message), he does not complain when he loses his job to Ballas; and it is through no effort of his own that he regains it at the end. The authorities have observed that, as one of their spokesmen resentfully puts it, wherever Ptydepe has passed into common use, "it has automatically begun to assume some of the characteristics of a natural language: various emotional overtones, imprecisions, ambiguities." Therefore, Ptydepe is to be replaced by a new language, Chorukor, based on the principle not of abolishing but of intensifying the similarities between words. Gross, reinstated to spearhead the introduction of Chorukor, remains what he has never ceased to be: a time-serving organization man.
This small masterpiece of sustained irony was staged throughout Europe and at the Public Theatre, in New York, where it won the 1968 Village Voice award for the best foreign play of the Off Broadway season. In April of that year, Havel's next work, "The Increased Difficulty of Concentration," opened in Prague. If the logical games and verbal pyrotechnics of "The Memorandum" suggested analogies with Stoppard, there were aspects of the new piece which anticipated a play that Stoppard had not yet written; namely, "Jumpers." Havel's central character is Dr. Huml, a social scientist engaged (like Professor Moore in "Jumpers") in dictating a bumbling lecture on moral values which goes against the intellectual grain of his society. He is interrupted from time to time by a couple of technicians bearing an extremely disturbed and unreliable computer with which they propose to study his behavior patterns. Here are some telescoped samples of Huml at work, with Blanka, his secretary:
HUML: Where did we stop?
BLANKA (reads): "Various people have at various times and in various circumstances various needs—"
HUML: Ah yes! (Begins to pace thoughtfully to and fro while dictating to Blanka, who takes it down in short-hand)—and thus attach to various things various values—full stop. Therefore, it would be mistaken to set up a fixed scale of values—valid for all people in all circumstances and at all times—full stop. This does not mean, however, that in all of history there exist no values common to the whole of mankind—full stop. If those values did not exist, mankind would not form a unified whole—full stop. . . . Would you mind reading me the last sentence? . . . There exist situations—for example, in some advanced Western countries—in which all the basic human needs have been satisfied, and still people are not happy. They experience feelings of depression, boredom, frustration, etc.—full stop. In these situations man begins to desire that which in fact he perhaps does not need at all—he simply persuades himself he has certain needs which he does not have—or he vaguely desires something which he cannot specify and thus cannot strive for—full stop. Hence, as soon as man has satisfied one need—i.e., achieved happiness—another so far unsatisfied need is born in him, so that every happiness is always, simultaneously, a negation of happiness.
Can science help man to solve his problems? Not entirely, says Huml, because science can illuminate only that which is finite, whereas man "contains the dimensions of infinity." He continues:
I'm afraid the key to a real comprehension of the individual does not lie in a greater or lesser understanding of the complexity of man as an object of scientific knowledge. . . . The unique relationship that arises between two individuals is thus far the only thing that can—at least to some extent—mutually unveil their secrets. Values like love, friendship, compassion, sympathy, even mutual conflict—which is as unique and irreplaceable as mutual understanding—are the only tools we have at our disposal. By other means we may perhaps be able to explain man, but never to understand him. . . . The fundamental key does not lie in his brain, but in his heart.
Meanwhile, the computer has broken down, and emits a shrill bombardment of imbecile questions, endlessly repeated:
Which is your favorite tunnel? Are you fond of musical instruments? How many times a year do you air the square? Where did you bury the dog? Why didn't you pass it on? When did you lose the claim? Wherein lies the nucleus? Do you know where you're going, and do you know who's going with you? Do you urinate in public, or just now and then?
On August 21, 1968, the Soviet Union, alarmed by the experiment in free Socialism that was flowering in Czechoslovakia, invaded the country and imposed on it a neo-Stalinist regime. One of the first acts of the new government was to forbid all performances of Havel's plays.
By the summer of 1968, Stoppard had had his third London première within fourteen months. "Enter a Free Man," which I've already discussed, had opened to mixed notices at the St. Martin's Theatre in March, and "The Real Inspector Hound," to which I'll return later, had been more happily received (the Observer compared it to a Fabergé Easter egg) when it arrived at the Criterion Theatre, in June, just two months before the Russian tanks rolled into Prague. "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern" remained a great drawing card in the repertory—a hand already stacked with aces—of the National Theatre. A couple of weeks before its first night, in 1967, I had written for this magazine a piece on the performing arts in Prague. In it I said that the new Czech theatre was "focussing its attention not only on man vs. authority but on man vs. mortality," and that "the hero is forced to come to terms not merely with the transient compulsions of society but with the permanent fact of death." Under liberal governments, I added, authors tend to concern themselves with "the ultimate problem of dying as well as the immediate problems of living." With the benefit of hindsight, I realize that every word of this might have been written about "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern": it fitted perfectly into my group portrait of Czech drama. (Perhaps the most memorable speech in the play occurs when the former and dumber principal character asks, "What ever became of the moment when one first knew about death?"—that shattering instant, surely inscribed on everyone's memory, which for some reason no one can remember.) Of course, one can also spot Western influences. The sight of two bewildered men playing pointless games in a theatrical void while the real action unfolds offstage inevitably recalls Beckett. Stoppard has said, "When 'Godot' was first done, it liberated something for anybody writing plays. It redefined the minima of theatrical validity. It was as simple as that. He got away. He won by twenty-eight lengths, and he'd done it with so little—and I mean that as an enormous compliment." When Guildenstern says, "Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are . . . condemned," we think once more of Beckett's doom-laden slogan "Something is taking its course." The debt to Eliot's "Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock" is equally transparent:
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two . . .
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
"Prufrock and Beckett," Stoppard has said, "are the twin syringes of my diet, my arterial system." But has anyone noticed another mainline injection? Consider: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are unaccountably summoned to a mysterious castle where, between long periods of waiting, they receive cryptic instructions that eventually lead to their deaths. They die uncertain whether they are the victims of chance or of fate. It seems to me undeniable that the world they inhabit owes its atmosphere and architecture to the master builder of such enigmatic fables—Franz Kafka, whose birthplace was Prague, and who wrote of just such a castle.
Stoppard is nothing if not eclectic. His play even bears traces of Wittgenstein, according to whose "Philosophical Investigations" (1953) it is conceivable that:
. . . two people belonging to a tribe unacquainted with chess should sit at a chessboard and go through the moves of a game of chess. . . . And if we were to see it, we would say they were playing chess. But now imagine a game of chess translated, according to certain rules, into a series of actions which we do not ordinarily associate with a game—say, into yells and stamping of feet. And now suppose these two people to yell and stamp instead of playing the form of chess that we are used to. . . . Should we still be inclined to say they were playing a game? What right would one have to say so?
Stoppard's twin heroes are clearly involved in "a series of actions which we do not ordinarily associate with a game." They are caught up in a strict and ferocious plot—both onstage and off, people are being killed—but the total experience, however unplayful it looks, may still be a kind of game, as formal in its rules as chess.
Again, Oscar Wilde (a good fairy, in the elfin sense of the word, who has more than once waved an influential wand over the accouchement of a Stoppard work) supplies an apt quotation, from "De Profundis":
I know of nothing in all Drama more incomparable from the point of view of Art, or more suggestive in its subtlety of observation, than Shakespeare's drawing of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They are Hamlet's college friends. They have been his companions. . . . At the moment when they come across him in the play he is staggering under the weight of a burden intolerable to one of his temperament. . . . Of all this, Guildenstern and Rosencrantz realise nothing.
Which they prove in the funniest speech of Stoppard's play, when, having been told to "glean what afflicts" Hamlet, the two spies quiz each other about his state of mind and come up with the following conclusion:
ROSENCRANTZ: To sum up: your father, whom you love, dies, you are his heir, you come back to find that hardly was the corpse cold before his young brother popped on to his throne and into his sheets, thereby offending both legal and natural practice. Now why exactly are you behaving in this extraordinary manner?
Wilde goes on:
They are close to his secret and know nothing of it. Nor would there be any use in telling them. They are little cups that can hold so much and no more. . . . They are types fixed for all time. To censure them would show a lack of appreciation. They are merely out of their sphere: that is all.
Despite its multiple sources, "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern" is a genuine original, one of a kind. As far as I know, it is the first play to use another play as its décor. The English critic C. E. Montague described "Hamlet" as "a monstrous Gothic castle of a poem, full of baffled half-lights and glooms." This is precisely the setting of "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern": it takes place in the wings of Shakespeare's imagination. The actor-manager who meets the two travellers on the road to Elsinore says that in life every exit is "an entrance somewhere else." In Stoppard's play, every exit is an entrance somewhere else in "Hamlet." Sometimes he writes like a poet:
We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.
And at other times with fortune-cookie glibness:
Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end?
But we are finally moved by the snuffing out of the brief candles he has lit. Tinged perhaps with sentimentality, an emotional commitment has nonetheless been made. To quote Clive James:
The mainspring of "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" is the perception—surely a compassionate one—that the fact of their deaths mattering so little to Hamlet was something that ought to have mattered to Shakespeare.
"The Real Inspector Hound," which joined "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern" on the London playbills in June, 1968, need not detain us long. It is a facetious puzzle that, like several of Stoppard's minor pieces, presents an apparently crazy series of events for which in the closing moments a rational explanation is provided. Two drama critics, Birdboot and Moon, are covering the première of a thriller, written in a broad parody of the style of Agatha Christie. At curtain rise, there is a male corpse onstage. Stoppard unconvincingly maintains that when the play was half finished he still didn't know the dead man's name or the murderer's identity. (How did he find out? "There is a God," Stoppard says when he is asked this question, "and he looks after English playwrights.") Toward the end, the two critics implausibly leave their seats and join in the action. In the dénouement, Moon, who is the second-string critic for his paper, is killed onstage by the envious third-string critic, who, posing as an actor in the play within a play, has previously slain the first-string critic (the curtain-rise corpse) and rigged the evidence to frame Moon. (A general rule about Stoppard may be stated thus: The shorter the play, the harder it is to summarize the plot without sounding unhinged.) People sometimes say that Stoppard, for all his brilliance, is fundamentally a leech, drawing the lifeblood of his work from the inventions of others. In "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern," he battens on Shakespeare, in "Inspector Hound" on Christie, in "Jumpers" on the logical positivists, in "Travesties" on Wilde, James Joyce, and Lenin. The same charge, of course, has been levelled against other and greater writers; in 1592, for example, the playwright and pamphleteer Robert Greene accused Shakespeare of artistic thievery, calling him an "upstart crow, beautified with our feathers."
Allegations of this kind do not ruffle Stoppard's feathers. "I can't invent plots," he admitted in a public discussion of his work which was held in Los Angeles earlier this year. "I've formed the habit of hanging my plays on other people's plots. It's a habit I'm trying to kick." Apropos of borrowings, I may as well reveal my suspicion that a hitherto undetected influence on "Inspector Hound" is that of Robert Benchley. At one point, when the stage is empty, a phone rings, and the critic Moon gets up to answer it. Surely this calls to mind the legendary moment during a Broadway première when a phone rang on an empty stage and the critic Benchley, remarking, "I think that's for me," rose and left the theatre. Nor is Stoppard's play the first in which a drama critic has been seen dead onstage. Back in 1917, seeking material for a newspaper article, a writer lately employed as the drama critic of Vanity Fair played the role of a corpse in "The Thirteenth Chair." His name, guessably, was Robert Benchley.
"Jumpers," produced in 1972, was the next milestone in Stoppard's career; but something should first be said of his work for radio, a medium he has used more resourcefully than any other contemporary English playwright. In "Albert's Bridge" (1967) and "Artist Descending a Staircase" (1972), both written for the BBC, he explores two of his favorite themes. The first is the relativity of absolutely everything. (It all depends on where you're sitting.) The second is the definition of art. (Is it a skill or a gift? Is it socially useful? Or does that, too, depend on where you're sitting?) Albert, in the earlier play, is painting a lofty railway bridge that will have to be repainted as soon as he has finished painting it. Despite the repetitious and mechanical nature of his job, he loves it, because it has a symmetry and coherence that are lacking in his life on the ground. He is joined by Fraser, a would-be suicide, who has climbed the bridge in order to jump off. The world below, Fraser explains, is doomed:
Motor-cars nose each other down every street, and they are beginning to breed, spread, they press the people to the walls by their knees, pinning them by their knees, and there's no end to it, because if you stopped making them, thousands of people would be thrown out of work, and they'd have no money to spend, the shopkeepers would get caught up in it, and the farms and factories, and all the people dependent on them, with their children and all. There's too much of everything, but the space for it is constant. So the shell of human existence is filling out, expanding, and it's going to go bang.
After a while, however, he changes his mind. Seeing it all from above, at a distance, he finds order in the chaos. "Yes," he says, "from a vantage point like this, the idea of society is just about tenable." So he descends; but shortly afterward he returns, convinced that he was right the first time. The bridge finally collapses, with both men on it, when a massed phalanx of assistant painters marches across it without breaking step. It is a fine catastrophe, but also a neat escape hatch for Stoppard, who is thus absolved from the responsibility of telling us which view of life we should espouse—the long-shot or the closeup.
"Artist Descending a Staircase" has a plot that starts out backward and then goes forward. I shall not take up the challenge to summarize it, except to say that it concerns the careers and beliefs of three artists, one of whom is dead and may have been murdered by the others, either of or by both working in cahoots. The title derives from Marcel Duchamp's painting "Nude Descending a Staircase," and the play contains plenty of evidence that self-cannibalism is not alien to Stoppard. For example:
The artist is a lucky dog. . . . In any community of a thousand souls there will be nine hundred doing the work, ninety doing well, nine doing good, and one lucky dog painting or writing about the other nine hundred and ninety-nine.
Slightly compressed, this superb speech reappears in "Travesties;" and there are references to Lenin and Tristan Tzara (and their joint sojourn in Zurich during the First World War) which look forward to the same play. Stoppard leaves us in no doubt about his attitude toward twentieth-century art in its more extreme manifestations, which he calls "that child's garden of easy victories known as the avant-garde." Again:
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
He also takes a sharp sideswipe at an artist who, having gone through a period of making ceramic food, realizes that this will not help to fill empty bellies. The artist decides instead to sculpture edible art out of sugar. One of his colleagues says, "It will give Cubism a new lease of life." I think we can take it that Stoppard is expressing his own feelings in the following definition, which recurs unchanged in "Travesties":
An artist is someone who is gifted in some way that enables him to do something more or less well which can only be done badly or not at all by someone who is not thus gifted.
I once told Stoppard that, impressive though his dictum sounded, it could equally well be applied to a jockey. He wandered out of the room for a full minute, presumably to ponder, and then wandered back. "That's exactly what I meant," he said. "In other words, a chap who claims to be a jockey and wears a jockey's cap but sits facing the horse's tail is not a jockey."
During the four years that separate "Inspector Hound" from "Jumpers," the total of new work by Stoppard consisted of three one-acters and a short play for television. This apparent unproductiveness was due partly to distracting upheavals in his private life (the collapse of his first marriage, the cementing of his new relationship with Miriam) and partly to an ingrained habit of preparing for his major enterprises with the assiduity of an athlete training for the Olympics. Or, to use Derek Marlowe's simile: "For Tom, writing a play is like sitting for an examination. He spends ages on research, does all the necessary cramming, reads all the relevant books, and then gestates the results. Once he's passed the exam—with the public and the critics—he forgets all about it and moves on to the next subject." Moreover, the second play is always a high hurdle. Although "Inspector Hound" came after "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern," it didn't really count, being a lightweight diversion, staged in a commercial theatre. The real test, as Stoppard knew, would be his second play at the National.
Early in 1970, he told me, over lunch, that he had been reading the logical positivists with fascinated revulsion. He was unable to accept their view that because value judgments could not be empirically verified they were meaningless. Accordingly, he said, he was toying with the idea of a play whose entire first act would be a lecture in support of moral philosophy. This led us into a long debate on morality—specifically, on the difference between the Judeo-Christian tradition (in which the creator of the universe also lays down its moral laws, so that the man who breaks them is committing an offense against God) and the Oriental tradition represented by Zen Buddhism (in which morality is seen as a man-made convention, quite distinct from God or cosmogony). Only with Stoppard or Václav Havel can I imagine having such a conversation about a play that was intended to be funny. A few days later, Stoppard sent me a letter in which he said that our chat had "forced me to articulate certain ideas, to their immense hazard, which I suppose is useful," and went on, "All that skating around makes the ice look thin, but a sense of renewed endeavour prevails—more concerned with the dramatic possibilities than with the ideas, for it is a mistake to assume that plays are the end-products of ideas (which would be limiting): the ideas are the end-products of the plays."
The theatrical image that triggered "Jumpers" came from an exchange in "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern," when Rosencrantz says "Shouldn't we be doing something—constructive?" and Guildenstern replies "What did you have in mind? A short, blunt human pyramid?" Stoppard subsequently told an interviewer:
I thought, How marvellous to have a pyramid of people on a stage, and a rifle shot, and one member of the pyramid just being blown out of it, and the others imploding on the hole as he leaves. . . . Because of the success of "Rosencrantz," it was on the cards that the National Theatre would do whatever I wrote, if I didn't completely screw it up. . . . It's perfectly true that having shot this man out of the pyramid, and having him lying on the floor, I didn't know who he was or who had shot him or why or what to do with the body. Absolutely not a clue.
Cf. Stoppard's virtually identical and identically unpersuasive statement about a similar situation in "Inspector Hound." However, play it again, Tom:
At the same time, there's more than one point of origin for a play, and the only useful metaphor I can think of for the way I think I write my plays is convergences of different threads. . . . One of the threads was the entirely visual image of the pyramid of acrobats, but while thinking of that pyramid I knew I wanted to write a play about a professor of moral philosophy. . . . There was a metaphor at work in the play already between acrobatics and mental acrobatics, and so on.
In December, 1970, I got a note from Stoppard saying that the new piece would not be ready until the following autumn. In the late summer of 1971, I called him and begged him to give us some idea of its substance, since within a couple of weeks we had to fix our plans for the forthcoming season. He replied that, although he had nearly finished the first draft, he could not possibly get it typed so soon. Might he therefore read it to us himself? Acting on this suggestion, I arranged a singular audition at my house in Kensington. The audience consisted of Laurence Olivier, John Dexter (then associate director of the National Theatre), and me. The time was late afternoon, and Olivier had come straight from an exhausting rehearsal. Stoppard arrived with the text and a sheaf of large white cards, each bearing the name of one of the characters. We had a few glasses of wine, after which Stoppard announced that he would read the play standing at a table, holding up the appropriate card to indicate who was speaking. What ensued was a gradual descent into chaos. "Jumpers" (which was then called "And Now the Incredible Jasmin Jumpers") is a complex work with a big cast, and before long Stoppard had got his cards hopelessly mixed up. Within an hour, Olivier had fallen asleep. Stoppard gallantly pressed on, and I have a vivid memory of him, desperate in the gathering dusk, frantically shuffling his precious pages and brandishing his cards, like a panicky magician whose tricks are blowing up in his face. After two hours, he had got no farther than the end of Act I. At that point, Olivier suddenly woke up. For about thirty seconds, he stared at the ceiling, where some spotlights I had recently installed were dimly gleaming. Stoppard looked expectantly in his direction: clearly, Olivier was choosing his words with care. At length, he uttered them. "Ken," he said to me ruminatively, "where did you buy those lights?" Stoppard then gave up and left. Next day, it took all the backslapping of which Dexter and I were capable to persuade him that the play was worth saving.
"Jumpers" turned out to be something unique in theatre: a farce whose main purpose is to affirm the existence of God. Or, to put it less starkly, a farcical defense of transcendent moral values. At the same time, it is an attack on pragmatic materialism as this is practiced by a political party called the Radical Liberals, who embody Stoppard's satiric vision of Socialism in action. They have just won an election (the time, unspecified, seems to be the near future), and no sooner are the votes counted than they take over the broadcasting services, arrest the newspaper proprietors, and appoint a veterinary surgeon Archbishop of Canterbury. A prominent Rad-Lib—and the villain of Stoppard's piece—is Sir Archie Jumper, vice-chancellor of an English university and an all-round bounder, who holds degrees in medicine, philosophy, literature, and law, and diplomas in psychiatry and gymnastics. Archie encourages the philosophers on his staff (mostly logical positivists) to be part-time athletes, and it is they who form the human pyramid, perforated by a bullet, with which the action begins.
The killing takes place during a party thrown at the home of George Moore, professor of moral philosophy—a middle-aged word-spinner and resolute non-acrobat, who is implacably opposed to Archie's values, or lack of them. This is Stoppard's hero, and it is not the least of his problems that he bears the same name as the world-famous English philosopher (d. 1958) who wrote Principia Ethica. However, being one of Stoppard's unsinkable eccentrics, he does not let this mischievous coincidence get him down. On hearing that the veterinarian Clegthorpe is the new Primate, he ironically observes, "Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight. 'Archbishop Clegthorpe? Of course! The inevitable capstone to a career in veterinary medicine!' " (The use of a rare word like "capstone" instead of the more obvious "keystone" or "climax" is typical of Stoppard. Nabokov, another exile with a taste for verbal surprises, might have made the same choice.) George's role, one of the longest in the English comic repertoire, is devoted mainly to the composition of a hilarious, interminable, outrageously convoluted lecture designed to prove that moral absolutes exist—and closely analogous, as I've said, to the address dictated by Dr. Huml in Havel's "The Increased Difficulty of Concentration." Theatrically, it disproves the philistine maxim that intellectual comedy can never produce belly laughs.
Seeking to demonstrate that purely rational arguments do not always make sense, George cites the Greek philosopher Zeno, who concluded that "since an arrow shot towards a target first had to cover half the distance, and then half the remainder, and then half the remainder after that, and so on ad infinitum, the result was . . . that though an arrow is always approaching its target, it never quite gets there, and Saint Sebastian died of fright." To underline his point, George actually uses a bow and arrow, just as he employs a trained tortoise and a trained hare (both of which escape) to refute another of Zeno's famous paradoxes, "which showed in every way but experience . . . that a tortoise given a head start in a race with, say, a hare, could never be overtaken." Hare, tortoise, arrow, and bow come together at the play's climax, which is one of the supreme—tragicomic is not quite the word, let us say tragifarcical—moments in modern theatre.
George sums up his beliefs in a discussion with Archie:
When I push my convictions to absurdity, I arrive at God. . . . All I know is that I think that I know that I know that nothing can be created out of nothing, that my moral conscience is different from the rules of my tribe, and that there is more in me than meets the microscope—and because of that I'm lumbered with this incredible, indescribable and definitely shifty God, the trump card of atheism.
He dismisses Archie's supporters as "simplistic score-settlers." George versus Archie is Stoppard's dazzling dramatization of one of the classic battles of our time. Cyril Connolly gives a more dispassionate account of the same conflict in "The Unquiet Grave," his semi-autobiographical book of confessions and aphorisms:
The two errors: We can either have a spiritual or a materialist view of life. If we believe in the spirit then we make an assumption which permits a whole chain of them, down to a belief in fairies, witches, astrology, black magic, ghosts and treasure-divining. . . . On the other hand, a completely materialistic view leads to its own excesses, such as a belief in Behaviourism, in the economic basis of art, in the social foundation of ethics, and the biological nature of psychology, in fact to the justification of expediency and therefore ultimately to the Ends-Means fallacy of which our civilisation is perishing. If we believe in a supernatural or superhuman intelligence creating the universe, then we end by stocking our library with the prophecies of Nostradamus, and the calculations on the Great Pyramid. If instead we choose to travel via Montaigne and Voltaire, then we choke amid the brimstone aridities of the Left Book Club.
In that great debate there is no question where Stoppard stands. He votes for the spirit—although he did not state his position in the first person until June of this year, when, in the course of a book review, he defined himself as a supporter of "Western liberal democracy, favouring an intellectual élite and a progressive middle class and based on a moral order derived from Christian absolutes."
The female principle in the George-Archie struggle is represented by George's wife, Dotty. Some ten years his junior, she is a star of musical comedy who has suffered a nervous breakdown (and gone into premature retirement) because the landing of men on the moon has destroyed her romantic ideals. She says:
Not only are we no longer the still centre of God's universe, we're not even uniquely graced by his footprint in man's image. . . . Man is on the moon, his feet on solid ground, and he has seen us whole . . . and all our absolutes, the thou-shalts and the thou-shalt-nots that seemed to be the very condition of our existence, how did they look to two moonmen with a single neck to save between them?
We already know the answer. Captain Scott, the first Englishman to reach the moon, has a damaged spaceship that may not make it back to earth. To reduce the weight load, he has kicked Astronaut Oates off the ladder to the command module, thereby condemning him to death. What is moral has been sacrificed in favor of what is practical. Remember that we are still dealing with a high—a very high—comedy. In this context, Geoffrey Reeves' opinion is worth quoting:
"Rosencrantz" is a beautiful piece of theatre, but "Jumpers" is the play, without any doubt. The ironic tone perfectly matches the absurd vision. It's far more than an exercise in wit; it ends up making a fierce statement. Not necessarily one that I would agree with—politically and philosophically, Tom and I have very little in common. But it's a measure of his brilliance that in the theatre I suspend rational judgment. He simply takes my breath away. People sometimes say he has a purely literary mind. That's not true of "Jumpers." It uses the stage as a stage, not as an extension of TV or the novel.
"Jumpers" went into rehearsal at the Old Vic in November, 1971. Diana Rigg played Dotty, and Michael Hordern, as George, had the part of his life: quivering with affronted dignity, patrolling the stage like a neurotic sentry, his face infested with tics, his fists plunging furiously into his cardigan pockets, he was matchlessly silly and serious at the same time. Ten days before the première, however, the play was still running close to four hours. I begged Olivier for permission to make cuts. He told me to approach the director, Peter Wood, who said he was powerless without the author's approval. Stoppard felt that alterations at this stage would upset the actors. Faced with this impasse, I took unilateral action. The next afternoon, just after the lunch break, I nipped into the rehearsal room ahead of the director and dictated to the cast a series of cuts and transpositions which reduced the text to what I considered manageable length. They were accepted without demur, and the matter, to my astonished relief, was never raised again. "Jumpers" opened in February, 1972, to resounding acclaim. B. A. Young, of the Financial Times, spoke for most of his colleagues when he wrote, "I can't hope to do justice to the richness and sparkle of the evening's proceedings, as gay and original a farce as we have seen for years."
Two months later, the London Sunday Times, whose regular critic had given a rhapsodic account of the first night, unexpectedly published a second review of the play—written by Sir Alfred Ayer, Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford and, by general consent, the foremost living English philosopher. He had made his name (which was then plain A. J. Ayer) in the nineteen-thirties as the precocious author of "Language, Truth and Logic," probably the most masterly exposition in English of the principles of logical positivism. Thus, Ayer represented, in its most Establishment form, the philosophical tradition that Stoppard had set out to undermine. George tells us in the play that his next book will be entitled "Language, Truth and God," and Dotty summarizes the archfiend Archie's views on morality in a speech that might have been borrowed from Ayer:
Things and actions, you understand, can have any number of real and verifiable properties. But good and bad, better and worse, these are not real properties of things, they are just expressions of our feelings about them.
It seemed on the cards that Ayer-Archie would resent being cast as Stoppard's villain. But nothing of the sort: he "enormously enjoyed" the evening, and "came away feeling the greatest admiration for its author and for the actor Michael Hordern, who takes the leading part." If he identified himself with any of the characters, it was not Archie but George, in whom "I thought, perhaps conceitedly, that I occasionally caught echoes of my own intonations"—though not, needless to say, of his ideas. He analyzed the play's philosophical content with detached but devastating aplomb:
The argument is between those who believe in absolute values, for which they seek a religious sanction, and those, more frequently to be found among contemporary philosophers, who are subjectivists or relativists in morals, utilitarians in politics, and atheists or at least agnostics. . . .
George needs not one but two Gods, one to create the world and another to support his moral values, and is unsuccessful in obtaining either of them. For the creator he relies on the first-cause argument, which is notoriously fallacious, since it starts from the assumption that everything must have a cause and ends with something that lacks one. As for the view that morals can be founded on divine authority, the decisive objection was beautifully put by Bertrand Russell: "Theologians have always taught that God's decrees are good, and that this is not a mere tautology; it follows that goodness is logically independent of God's decrees." This argument also shows that even if George had been able to discover his second God it would not have been of any service to him. It would provide a utilitarian motive for good behaviour, but that was not what he wanted. It could, more respectably, provide an object for emulation, but for that imaginary or even actual human beings could serve as well. . . .
The moral of the play, in so far as it has one, seemed to be that George was humane, and therefore human, in a way the others were not. This could have been due to his beliefs, but it did not have to be. Whatever Kant may have said, morality is very largely founded on sympathy and affection, and for these one does not require religious sanctions. Even logical positivists are capable of love.
After reading Ayer's review, Stoppard invited him to lunch, and the two men became close friends.
We now flash forward to an entry in my journal for October 19, 1976, when Stoppard and I motored to New College, Oxford, to be Ayer's guests for dinner at High Table. An English drama critic once said, "Stoppard, who never went to a university, writes more like a University Wit than any graduate dramatist now practising." The trip to New College would be Stoppard's initiation into Oxford life, and he would be going in off the top board, since, of all the dons currently teaching at the university, Ayer is the reigning superstar:
En route to Oxford, Tom and I lunch at the Waterside Inn, plush French restaurant forty minutes west of London by car. The Thames idles past our table, visible through plate glass and weeping willows. Tom talks of how, earlier this year, he lunched with the Queen at Buckingham Palace: "Everything you touch is beautiful, and the food is superb. The other guests were writers, athletes, accountants—all kinds of people. Don't expect me to knock occasions like that. I'm very conservative. As a foreigner, I'm more patriotic than anyone else in England except William Davis." (Davis is the German-born editor of Punch.) I ask whether there's any living person he especially longs to meet. Three names cross his mind: Marlon Brando, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Sugar Ray Robinson. We discuss his view of politics in general and British politics in particular: "I don't lose any sleep if a policeman in Durham beats somebody up, because I know it's an exceptional case. It's a sheer perversion of speech to describe the society I live in as one that inflicts violence on the underprivileged. What worries me is not the bourgeois exception but the totalitarian norm. Of all the systems that are on offer, the one I don't want is the one that denies freedom of expression—no matter what its allegedly redeeming virtues may be. The only thing that would make me leave England would be control over free speech." Of his plays he says, "My characters are all mouthpieces for points of view rather than explorations of individual psychology. They aren't realistic in any sense. I write plays of ideas uneasily married to comedy or farce." Has he got any manuscripts hidden away in a bottom drawer? He grins, and answers, "No—with me everything is top drawer." We talk about James Joyce's exuberantly erotic letters to his wife, which have recently been published for the first time. If Tom had read them before writing "Travesties," in which Joyce is a leading character, would he have made use of them? "I wouldn't have dreamed of it. I'm interested in Joyce the author of 'Ulysses,' not Joyce the husband. Nor, by the way, do I think of him as a biochemical parcel consumed by worms. I believe there is something of him that is still around, still capable of suffering because of the revelations made public by Faber & Faber."
After lunch, coffee at the large, nondescript Victorian house that Tom bought four years ago in the nearby village of Iver, in Buckinghamshire. The garden, though spacious, is a bit too close for comfort to a traffic roundabout. In his book-upholstered study, he shows me his most prized possessions, among them a first edition of Hemingway's "In Our Time" and a framed letter, written in January, 1895, at the Albemarle Hotel, London, in response to an insolent request for an interview, a photograph, and a job as the addressee's literary agent:
SIR,—I have read your letter and I see that to the brazen everything is brass.
Your obedient servant,
What would Tom do if he found a gold mine under his garden and never needed to work again? "Nothing spectacular. I love books—nonfiction for preference. If I had a gigantic windfall of bullion, I'd take a six-month sabbatical, pluck out of my shelves the two or three hundred books I haven't opened, and just read. The secret of happiness is inconspicuous consumption." For such a wealthy writer, he leads a comparatively simple life. He employed his first secretary only a year ago ("I got the idea from Harold Pinter") and knows little about his financial affairs, which are handled by his brother, a professional accountant.
Thence to Oxford, an hour's drive away, and the back quad of New College, where Freddie Ayer, scholastically gowned, gives us sherry in his rooms. A busy, bright-eyed man, short of stature and formidably alert, he tells me that C. S. Lewis, the great critic, novelist, and Christian apologist, described him after their first meeting as "a cross between a rodent and a firefly." He shares Tom's passion for cricket. "I used to captain the New College Senior Common Room XI," he says proudly. "The first time I played for the team, I was fifty-three years old and I scored seventy-five"—a highly respectable total. We then pass through the ritual stages of an Oxford banquet.
Phase I: We meet the Warden of the College at his lodgings, where the other dons and their guests are assembled, making about forty in all. More sherry is consumed, with champagne as the alternative option. "My taste in theatre is mainly classical," Freddie says, adding that the twentieth-century playwrights he most admires are Pirandello, Coward, Maugham, and Sartre. "I vastly prefer Sartre's plays to his philosophy. Existentialism works much better in the theatre than in theory."
Phase II: We march in procession to take our place at High Table, set on a dais overlooking hundreds of already seated undergraduates. Tom and I sit on either side of Freddie. Food forgettable; wines exceptional (hock, Burgundy, Sauternes). "Tom is the only living dramatist whose work I would go to see just because he wrote it," Freddie says. "There was a time when I would have said the same about John Osborne, but now—well, let's say I would wait to be taken by other people. With John, the rhetoric runs away with the context. Tom plays with words and makes them dance. John uses them as a sledgehammer."
Phase III: We move on to a panelled, candlelit chamber and are seated at tables where port, Madeira, and Moselle are circulated. Tom tells me a story of how he attended a performance of "Travesties," at the Aldwych Theatre, in London, in order to be introduced to the proposed French translator of the play. In the intermission, he presented himself at the manager's office, where a group of people were sipping drinks. Before long, they were joined by a foreign-looking stranger with flaring nostrils. Taking the newcomer into a corner, Tom embarked on a detailed explanation of the major linguistic problems posed by the text. The man seemed a little perplexed, but he nodded politely, and Tom pushed ahead for fully five minutes. Suddenly, a thought shot through his mind: What an odd coincidence that I should have a French translator who looks exactly like Rudolf Nureyev. At that moment, there was a knock on the door, and in came a little man in a beret, smoking a Gauloise. . . .
Phase IV: We end up in a common room for coffee and/or brandy. Here Tom amazes me. Either he has put himself through a refresher course (which is by no means impossible) or he is even cleverer than I suspected. He shows himself splendidly equipped to hold his own with Freddie and his colleagues in philosophical debate. With scintillating skill, he defends such theses as the following: (a) that Wagner's music is not as good as it sounds, and (b) that there are fewer things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in philosophy. I am also impressed by his ability, under whatever pressure, to quote Bertrand Russell verbatim, especially after five hours of steady alcoholic intake. At one point, I interject a tentative reference to Eastern philosophies, but Freddie pooh-poohs them with Hegelian vehemence, dismissing Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, and Buddhism in a single barking laugh. "They have some psychological interest, but nothing more than that," he adds. "For the most part, they're devices for reconciling people to a perfectly dreadful earthly life. I believe there were one or two seventh-century Indians who contributed a few ideas to mathematics. But that's about all." I expect Tom would agree.
By 1972, the year of "Jumpers," the voice of Václav Havel had been efficiently stifled. The ban on Czech productions of his work had remained in operation since 1969. Censorship had returned to the press and the broadcasting stations as well as to the theatre and the cinema; and in January, 1969, Gustáv Husák (Dubček's successor as Communist Party Secretary) made an ominous speech in which he said that the time had come to "strengthen internal discipline." He issued a strong warning to those who held "private meetings in their apartments for inventing campaigns" against the regime. Havel and Jan Němec, the film director, at once sent a courageous telegram to President Ludvík Svoboda, protesting against Husák's threats and predicting (with melancholy accuracy) that the next step would be police interrogations and arrests. Later in 1969, Havel received an American foundation grant that would enable him to spend a year in the United States. The Czech government responded by confiscating his passport. Productions of his plays outside Czechoslovakia had been effectively forbidden, because the state literary agency, through which all foreign contracts had to be negotiated, refused to handle Havel's work, on the ground that it gave a distorted picture of Czechoslovakian life. This meant that thenceforward there was no officially sanctioned way for anything by Havel to be performed anywhere in the world. The authorities, however, were far from satisfied. What irked them was that they could drum up no evidence on which to bring him to court. He had engaged in no anti-state activities, and nothing in his plays could be construed as seditious. They recognized in him a stubborn naysayer, a noncollaborator; but dumb insolence was not a criminal offense. One of the archetypes of Czech literature is the hero of Jaroslav Hašek's novel "The Good Soldier Schweik," who drives his superior officers to distraction by practicing passive resistance beneath a mask of pious conformity. Like many Czech dissidents before him, Havel had learned from Schweik's example.
He continued to write. In 1971, the first draft of his latest play, "Conspirators," translated by Vera Blackwell, reached my desk at the National Theatre. It is set in an unnamed country, conceivably South American, where a corrupt dictatorship has just been overthrown and replaced by a cautious and indecisive democratic government. A group of five staunch patriots (including the chief of police and the head of the general staff) hear rumors of a conspiracy to reinstate the deposed tyrant, now living in exile. Fearful that the new regime will be too weak to prevent a coup, they plan a countercoup of their own. One of them says, "In order to preserve democracy, we shall have to seize power ourselves." Their plot necessitates the use of violence, but whenever they meet they learn that their opponents are preparing to commit acts of comparable, if not greater, ferocity. This compels them to devise even more bloodthirsty countermeasures. The process of escalation continues until we suddenly realize what is actually happening. The rumors they hear about the exiled conspirators are in fact quite accurate accounts of their own conspiracy—reported by a government spy in their midst and then fed back to them by one of their own agents in the Secret Service. In other words, as Havel put it in a letter to me, "they have been plotting to save the country from themselves." He warned me not to suppose that because the play dealt with politics it was a political play:
I am not trying either to condemn or to defend this or that political doctrine. . . . What I am concerned with is the general problem of human behavior in contemporary society. Politics merely provided me with a convenient platform. . . . All the political arguments in the play have a certain plausibility, and in some circumstances they might even be valid. . . . The point is that one cannot be sure. For truth is not only what is said: it depends on who says it, and why. Truth is guaranteed only by the full weight of humanity behind it. Modern rationalism has led people to believe that what they call "objective truth" is a freely transferable commodity that can be appropriated by anyone. The results of this divorce between truth and human beings can be most graphically observed in politics.
I was ready to recommend the play for inclusion in the National Theatre's repertoire as a pirated, unauthorized production (thereby keeping Havel legally in the clear), but the script needed extensive revision, and the author, trapped in his homeland, could not come to London to work on it. For this reason, we decided regretfully, to shelve the project. Around this time, his German publishers (coincidentally, the same as Stoppard's) decided to thwart the Czech veto by acting as his agents in the Western world. The state literary agency retaliated by intercepting and withholding all royalties sent to Havel by Western producers of his work. As far as I know, "Conspirators" remains unrevised and unperformed.
In 1974, Havel's savings began to run out, and he took the only employment he could find—a post in a brewery at Trutnov, about eighty miles from Prague. Apart from the income it provided, he welcomed the opportunity of meeting Czech citizens who were not members of the secret police. Havel's job consisted of stacking empty beer barrels. This period of his life yielded two short plays, both of them patently autobiographical. In "Audience," thinly disguised under the name of Ferdinand Vanek, he is summoned to an interview with the head maltster of the brewery, a chain drinker and experienced compromiser, who jovially offers him a chance to better himself. Wouldn't it be more seemly for an intellectual like him to have a post in the stock-checking department, where no manual labor would be involved? All that Vanek has to do to be thus upgraded is to submit a weekly report on his thoughts and activities, and to bring a certain actress (much admired by the maltster) to an office party. Vanek is quite happy to invite the actress, but he politely explains that he cannot see his way to informing on himself. This provokes the maltster into a self-pitying alcoholic tirade against intellectuals and their so-called principles: "The thing is, you can live on your flipping principles! But what about me? All I can expect is a kick in the pants if I so much as mention a principle." And so on. Vanek gravely lets the storm pass over his head. The maltster then falls into a stupor, from which, a few moments later, he briskly recovers. Having erased the confessional outburst from his memory, he starts the interview over again as if nothing had happened.
"Audience" is Havel's vignette of life among the workers. "Private View," its companion piece, takes a similarly ironic look at life among the intelligentsia. Vanek/Havel is invited to dinner by a sophisticated middle-class couple who are eager to show off their newly redecorated apartment, with its stereo deck, its costly clutter of modern and antique furniture, and its crates of bourbon, picked up on a trip to the States. All this douceur de vivre, they point out, could be his. Why does he insist on burying himself in a brewery? If only he would stop associating with people who criticize the regime ("Communists," his hostess disdainfully calls them), he could easily get a well-paid job in a publishing house. Like the maltster, the couple feel personally affronted (and accused) by his perverse reluctance to make the few small adjustments that could gain him such shining privileges. "You're an egoist!" his hostess shrieks. "Disgusting, unfeeling, inhuman egoist! Ungrateful, stupid, bloody traitor!" But her diatribe, like the maltster's, ends as abruptly as it began, and when the curtain falls she and her husband are entertaining their guest with the very latest pop single from New York. (The two plays were broadcast on BBC radio in April, 1977. The role of Vanek was played by Harold Pinter.)
In 1974, the year Havel started stacking beer barrels, Stoppard's third major work, "Travesties," opened at the Aldwych Theatre, presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company and directed (as "Jumpers" had been) by Peter Wood. The play had its origin in Stoppard's discovery that James Joyce, Lenin, and Tristan Tzara, the founder of Dadaism, had all lived in Zurich during the First World War—a conjunction of expatriates that made instant comic connections in his mind. In addition, he had long wanted to write a leading role for his friend John Wood, a tall, aquiline actor who had a matchless capacity for delivering enormous speeches at breakneck speed with crystalline articulation. From Richard Ellmann's biography of Joyce, Stoppard learned that during his stay in Zurich Joyce had been the business manager of a semi-professional troupe of English actors, whose inaugural production was "The Importance of Being Earnest." The part of Algernon Moncrieff was played by a young man named Henry Carr, who held a minor post at the British Consulate. Carr bought a new pair of trousers to embellish his performance, and later sued Joyce for reimbursement. Joyce counterclaimed that Carr owed him the price of five tickets for the show, and, for good measure, accused him of slander. Stoppard sought to link this story, true but implausible, with the hypothesis, plausible but untrue, that Joyce, Tzara, and Lenin had known one another in Zurich. He hit on the idea of filtering the action through the faulty memory of Henry Carr in old age, a querulous eccentric in whose mind fact and fantasy were indissolubly blended. With Henry myopically at the wheel, Stoppard was off to the races. Clive James said of the play in Encounter:
Before John Wood was halfway through his opening speech I already knew that in Stoppard I had encountered a writer of my generation whom I could admire without reserve. It is a common reaction to "Travesties" to say that seeing it is like drinking champagne. But not only did I find that the play tasted like champagne—I found that in drinking it I felt like a jockey. Jockeys drink champagne as an everyday tipple, since it goes to the head without thickening the waist. "Travesties" to me seemed not an exotic indulgence, but the stuff of life. Its high speed was not a challenge but a courtesy; its structural intricacy not a dazzling pattern but a perspicuous design; its fleeting touch not of a feather but of a fine needle.
There were many such panegyrics, not only in London but on Broadway, where the play won Stoppard his second Tony award. (The first had been for "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.") I gladly concede that the grotesque rhetorical ramblings of Henry Carr, whether in soliloquy or in his long first-act confrontation with Tzara, are sublimely funny; but at the heart of the enterprise something is sterile and arbitrary. As Ronald Hayman, a devout Stoppard fan, put it, "there is no internal dynamic." Stoppard imposes the plot of Wilde's play, itself thoroughly baroque, upon his own burlesque vision of life in wartime Zurich, which is like crossbreeding the bizarre with the bogus. Following Wilde's blueprint, he gives Carr (Algernon) and Tzara (Jack Worthing) a Cecily and a Gwendolen with whom, respectively, to fall in love; while James Joyce stands unconvincingly in for Lady Bracknell. In an interview with Hayman, Stoppard said he was particularly proud of the scene in the first act between Joyce and Tzara:
It exists almost on three levels. On one it's Lady Bracknell quizzing Jack. Secondly, the whole thing is actually structured on [the eighth] chapter in Ulysses, and thirdly it's telling the audience what Dada is, and where it comes from.
All of which is undeniable, and the well-read playgoer will happily consume such a layer cake of pastiche. But cake, as Marie Antoinette discovered too late, is no substitute for bread. To change the metaphor, the scene resembles a triple-decker bus that isn't going anywhere. What it lacks, in common with the play as a whole, is the sine qua non of theatre; namely, a narrative thrust that impels the characters, whether farcically or tragically or in any intermediate mode, toward a credible state of crisis, anxiety, or desperation. (Even the two derelicts in "Waiting for Godot," so beloved of Stoppard, are in a plight that most people would consider desperate.) In "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern," "Inspector Hound," and "Jumpers," acts of homicide are committed—acts insuring that a certain amount of pressure, however factitious, is exerted on the characters. They are obviously in trouble; they may be killed, or, at least, be accused of killing. Trying, as Stoppard does in "Travesties," to make a play without the magic ingredient of pressure toward desperation is—to lift a phrase from "Jumpers"—"tantamount to constructing a Gothic arch out of junket."
The opening speech, for instance, is made up of words that Tristan Tzara has silently cut out of an unidentified newspaper and drawn from a hat. He arranges them at random, and recites them in the form of a limerick. It concludes:
Ill raced alas whispers kill later nut east.
Noon avuncular ill day Clara.
To French-speaking members of the audience, the lines sound roughly the same as:
Il reste à la Suisse parce qu'il est un artiste.
"Nous n'avons que l'art," il déclara.
Which means, roughly Englished:
He lives in Switzerland because he is an artist. "We have only art," he declared.
No translation or explanation, however, is offered in the text. Non-speakers of French are thus left in outer darkness, while French-speakers who have not read the published version are unaware that what they have just heard is a linguistic joke. The result is that nobody laughs. This seems to me unadulterated junket.
As for the arbitrary element in the play, I once asked Stoppard what he would have done if Joyce's company of actors had chosen to present Maxim Gorky's "The Lower Depths" instead of Wilde's comedy. He breezily replied that he would probably have based his plot on Gorky. I have since fed into his mind what I regard as a perfectly corking scenario. During the Second World War, Arnold Schönberg, Swami Prabhavananda, and W. C. Fields were simultaneously working in Hollywood. Cast that trio in "The Lower Depths," and who knows what monument of junket you might come up with?
The hard polemic purpose of "Travesties" is to argue that art must be independent of the world of politics. Carr says to Tzara, "My dear Tristan, to be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war." Tzara is the target for Stoppard's loathing of the avant-garde. He is made to describe himself as "the natural enemy of bourgeois art" (which Stoppard cherishes) and as "the natural ally of the political left" (which Stoppard abhors). By lending his support to the anti-bourgeois forces, Tzara has pledged himself to the destruction of art. At one point, he rounds on Joyce and says:
Your art has failed. You've turned literature into a religion and it's as dead as all the rest, it's an overripe corpse and you're cutting fancy figures at the wake. It's too late for geniuses!
What's needed, the zealous Dadaist goes on, is vandalism and desecration. Having set up Tzara in the bowling alley, Stoppard proceeds to knock him down with a speech by Joyce, which was not in the original script (it was suggested by the director) but which Stoppard now regards as "the most important . . . in the play." Joyce begins by dismissing Tzara as "an over-excited little man, with a need for self-expression far beyond the scope of your natural gifts." This, he says, is not discreditable, but it does not make him an artist: "An artist is the magician put among men to gratify—capriciously—their urge for immortality." If the Trojan War had gone unrecorded in poetry, it would be forgotten by history. It is the artists who have enriched us with its legends—above all, with the tale of "Ulysses, the wanderer, the most human, the most complete of all heroes." He continues, "It is a theme so overwhelming that I am. almost afraid to treat it. And yet I with my Dublin Odyssey will double that immortality, yes by God there's a corpse that will dance for some time yet and leave the world precisely as it finds it."
So much for any pretensions that art might have to change, challenge, or criticize the world, or to modify, however marginally, our view of it. For that road can lead only to revolution, and revolution will mean the end of free speech, which is defined by Lenin, later in the play, as speech that is "free from bourgeois anarchist individualism." Stoppard's idol—the artist for art's sake, far above the squalid temptations of politics—is, unequivocally, Joyce. The first act ends with Henry Carr recounting a dream in which he asked Joyce what he did in the Great War. "'I wrote "Ulysses," ' he said. 'What did you do?' "
The implication of all this—that Joyce was an apolitical dweller in an ivory tower—is, unfortunately, untrue. He was a professed socialist. And this is where Stoppard's annexation of the right to alter history in the cause of art begins to try one's patience. (A minor symptom of the same sin occurs when Carr says that Oscar Wilde was "indifferent to politics"—a statement that will come as a surprise to readers of Wilde's propagandist handbook "The Soul of Man Under Socialism.") In a recent essay in the New York Review of Books, Richard Ellmann has pointed out that Joyce's library in Trieste was full of works by leftist authors; that the culmination of his political hopes was the foundation of the Irish Free State; and that Leopold Bloom, in "Ulysses," is a left-winger of long standing who annoys his wife by informing her that Christ was the first socialist. Moreover, Ellmann quotes a speech from the quasi-autobiographical first draft of "A Portrait of the Artist" in which Joyce addresses the people of the future with oratorical fervor:
Man and woman, out of you comes the nation that is to come, the lightening of your masses in travail, the competitive order is arrayed against itself, the aristocracies are supplanted, and amid the general paralysis of an insane society, the confederate will issues in action.
The phrase I've italicized can only mean, as Ellmann says, "the will of like-minded revolutionaries." It is all very well for Stoppard to claim that he has mingled "scenes which are self-evidently documentary . . . with others which are just as evidently fantastical." The trouble with his portrait of Joyce is that it is neither one thing nor the other, neither pure fantasy nor pure documentary, but is simply based on a false premise. When matters of high importance are being debated, it is not pedantic to object that the author has failed to do his homework.
The second act of "Travesties" is dominated by Lenin. Stoppard quotes him fairly and at length but cannot fit him into the stylistic framework of the play. Somerset Maugham once said that sincerity in society was like an iron girder in a house of cards. Lenin is the girder that topples "Travesties." Stoppard fleetingly considered making him the equivalent of Miss Prism, the governess in "The Importance"—"but that," he wisely concluded, "would have killed the play because of the trivialization." On the other hand, he did think it would be funny to start Act II with a pretty girl (Cecily) delivering a lecture on Lenin. "And indeed it was funny," he told an interviewer, "except that I was the only person laughing." (I wonder, incidentally, what he found so comic about the idea of a pretty girl taking Lenin seriously.) At all events, the lecture stayed in, funny or not, together with the ensuing scenes, which deal with Lenin and his plans for revolution. Too frail a bark to bear such weighty cargo, the play slowly capsizes and sinks.
A footnote from Derek Marlowe: "With Tom, words always precede thoughts. Phrases come first, ideas later. The Stoppard you find in 'Travesties' doesn't sound any older than the Stoppard of 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.' You'd think that nothing had happened to him in the intervening seven years. But, by God, a great deal has."
After "Travesties," a literary circus of a play in which historical figures jumped through hoops at the flick of Stoppard's whim, it was clear that he had spent long enough in the library. The time had come to turn his attention to events in the outside world. Not unexpectedly, the field he chose to explore was the treatment of political dissidents in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. First, however, he had to fulfill an obligation to Ed Berman. Berman is an expatriate American, bursting with bearded enthusiasm, who came to London in 1968 and set up a coöperative organization called Inter-Action, which presents plays in schools, remand homes, youth clubs, mental hospitals, community centers, and the streets. Inter-Action also runs a thriving farm in the dingy heart of a London suburb and launched the Almost Free Theatre, in Soho, where the price of admission is whatever you think the show will be worth. Berman produced the world premières of two one-acters by Stoppard ("After Magritte," in 1970, and "Dogg's Our Pet," the following year), and not long afterward Stoppard, learning that Berman had applied for British citizenship, promised to give him a new play if the application was successful. It was, and "Dirty Linen," Stoppard's deadpan farce about sexual misconduct in the House of Commons, opened at the Almost Free Theatre in April, 1976. It was an instant hit. The Czech émigré had done honor to his American counterpart, welcoming him to membership in the Western European club.
Simple chronology may be the best way to set out the convergence that subsequently developed between the lives, and careers, of Stoppard and Václav Havel.
August, 1976: Stoppard addresses a rally in Trafalgar Square sponsored by the Committee Against Psychiatric Abuse, from which he joins a march to the Soviet Embassy. There he attempts to deliver a petition denouncing the use of mental homes as punishment camps for Russian dissidents. "The chap at the door wouldn't accept it," he told me afterward, "so we all went home."
October 5, 1976: Havel celebrates his fortieth birthday at the converted farmhouse, ninety miles from Prague, where he and his wife live. The next day, he is officially ordered to quit the place, on the ground, patently false, that it is unfit for human habitation.
January 11, 1977: "Dirty Linen" opens on Broadway, to generally favorable reviews. Walter Kerr, in his Sunday column in the New York Times, sounds one of the few discordant notes:
Intellectually restless as a hummingbird, and just as incapable of lighting anywhere, the playwright has a gift for making the randomness of his flights funny. . . . Busy as Mr. Stoppard's mind is, it is also lazy; he will settle for the first thing that pops into his head. . . . Wide-ranging as his antic interests are, delightful as his impish mismatches can occasionally be, his management of them is essentially slovenly.
One speech that gets an unfailing ovation, however, is the following tribute to the American people, paid by a senior British civil servant:
They don't stand on ceremony. . . . They make no distinction about a man's background, his parentage, his education. They say what they mean, and there is a vivid muscularity about the way they say it. . . . They are always the first to put their hands in their pockets. They press you to visit them in their own home the moment they meet you, and are irrepressibly good-humoured, ambitious and brimming with self-confidence in any company. Apart from all that I've got nothing against them.
On the thirteenth of the month, Stoppard flies from New York to the West Coast, where he is to undergo a sort of southern-California apotheosis. At the Mark Taper Forum, which is the fountainhead of theatrical activity in Los Angeles, "Travesties" and "The Importance of Being Earnest" are being staged in repertory for the first time. "Inspector Hound" is about to open at a new theatre in Beverly Hills. And the University of California at Santa Barbara is holding "a Tom Stoppard Festival, during which I will be carried through the streets and pelted with saffron rice," Stoppard has told me in a letter, adding, "That is if I haven't gone out of fashion by then." I hasten to southern California. Stoppard, whisked from the airport to a press conference at the Mark Taper, where I join him, fields every question with effortless charm. For example, "I suspect I am getting more serious than I was, though with a redeeming streak of frivolity." And "We get our moral sensibility from art. When we have a purely technological society, it will be time for mass suicide." What American playwrights does he admire? Sam Shepard, for one; and Edward Albee—especially for "The Zoo Story" and "A Delicate Balance." "But my favorite American play is 'The Front Page'—though I might have to admit, if extremely pressed, that it wasn't quite as fine as 'Long Day's Journey Into Night.' "
January 14, 1977: Václav Havel is arrested in Prague and thrown into jail. The real, though unacknowledged, reason for his imprisonment is that he is one of three designated spokesmen for a document called Charter 77, signed by over three hundred leading Czech writers and intellectuals, which urges the government to carry out its promises, made in the Helsinki accords of 1975, to respect human rights, especially those relating to free speech.
On the same day, leaving Los Angeles at dawn, I drive Stoppard to the Santa Barbara campus, which is preposterously pretty, palm-fringed, and moistened by ocean breakers. A silk scarf is knotted round his neck, and he wears flashy cowboy boots. We are met by Dr. Homer Swander, professor of English. A bronzed, gray-haired fan, he proudly informs Stoppard that no fewer than four of his plays will be presented at the university within the next week. In addition, there will be mass excursions to L.A. to see "Inspector Hound," "The Importance," and "Travesties." During the morning, Tom discusses his work with a class of drama students. "I'm a very conventional artist," he says when someone quizzes him about Dadaism. "I have no sympathy at all with Tristan Tzara. The trouble with modern art, from my point of view, is that there's nothing left to parody."
A girl asks him, "Which of your plays do you think will be performed in fifty years' time?"
He replies, "There is no way I can answer that question without sounding arrogant to the point of mania or modest to the point of nausea."
Lunch with the top brass of the faculty is followed by a tour of the campus. The Mark Taper Forum has paid Tom's round-trip air fare from New York; a thousand dollars is his reward for spending the day at Santa Barbara. His lecture that evening fills a nine-hundred-seat auditorium to overflowing. Dr. Swander introduces him as an author in whom Santa Barbara has long taken a proprietary interest. (This is his second visit to the place in two years.) "We claim him as our own," Dr. Swander declares, to applause, "and I personally acclaim him as the most Shakespearean writer in English drama since Webster."
Stoppard lopes into sight, detaches the microphone from its stand to gain mobility, and lights a cigarette. "I've been brought ten thousand miles to talk to you about theatre," he says, "which I find only slightly more plausible than coming here on a surfing scholarship." Solid laughter. "I should explain that my technique when lecturing is to free-associate within an infinite regression of parentheses. Also, it's only fair to confess that what you are about to hear is in the nature of an ego trip." To illustrate the problems of dramatic composition, he has brought along two dozen drafts of the blast of invective that Tzara launches against Joyce in "Travesties." He reads them out, from the first attempt, which begins, "You blarney-arsed bog-eating Irish pig," to the final version, which starts, "By God, you supercilious streak of Irish puke!" What isn't commonly understood, he adds, is that "all this takes weeks." He paces for a while, and then notices a heavy glass ashtray that has been thoughtfully placed on a table in front of him. "Writing a play," he continues, "is like smashing that ashtray, filming it in slow motion, and then running the film in reverse, so that the fragments of rubble appear to fly together. You start—or at least I start—with the rubble."
Strolling back and forth across the stage, meditatively puffing on his cigarette, he says, "Whenever I talk to intelligent students about my work, I feel nervous, as if I were going through customs. 'Anything to declare, sir?' 'Not really, just two chaps sitting in a castle at Elsinore, playing games. That's all.' 'Then let's have a look in your suitcase, if you don't mind, sir.' And, sure enough, under the first layer of shirts there's a pound of hash and fifty watches and all kinds of exotic contraband. 'How do you explain this, sir?' 'I'm sorry, Officer, I admit it's there, but I honestly can't remember packing it.' " He says he has addressed only one American campus audience apart from the present assembly; that was at Notre Dame, in 1971, and the occasion did not get off to an auspicious start. "I began my talk by saying that I had not written my plays for purposes of discussion," he recalls in Santa Barbara. "At once, I felt a ripple of panic run through the hall. I suddenly realized why. To everyone present, discussion was the whole point of drama. That was why the faculty had been endowed—that was why all those buildings had been put up! I had undermined the entire reason for their existence."
There are questions from the floor.
Q.: May I say, Mr. Stoppard, that I think you are less slick this time than you were two years ago?
STOPPARD: Oh, good. Or—I'm sorry. Depending on your point of view.
Q.: Why don't you try directing your own work? Or acting in it?
STOPPARD: Look, I spend only about three and a half per cent of my life writing plays. I'm trying very hard to build it up to four and a half per cent. That's all I can handle at the moment.
(Tom's modesty is a form of egoism. It is as if he were saying, "See how self-deprecating I can be and still be self-assertive.")
His act has a strong finish. For an hour and a half, he says, he has shared his thoughts with us and answered many of our questions. But what is the real dialogue that goes on between the artist and his audience? By way of reply, he holds the microphone close to his mouth and speaks eight lines by the English poet Christopher Logue:
Come to the edge.
We might fall.
Come to the edge.
It's too high. . . .
And they came
And he pushed
And they flew.
A short silence. Then a surge of applause. In imagination, these young people are all flying.
February 11, 1977: Stoppard has an article in the New York Times about the new wave of repression in Prague. It starts:
Connoisseurs of totalitarian double-think will have noted that Charter 77, the Czechoslovak document which calls attention to the absence in that country of various human rights beginning with the right of free expression, has been refused publication inside Czechoslovakia on the grounds that it is a wicked slander.
Of the three leading spokesmen for Charter 77, two were merely interrogated and released—Jiří Hájek, who had been Foreign Minister under Alexander Dubček in 1968, and Jan Patočka, an internationally respected philosopher. (Patočka, however, was later rearrested, and, after further questioning, suffered a heart attack and died in hospital.) Havel alone was charged under the subversion laws, which carry a maximum sentence of ten years. "Clearly," Stoppard says, "the regime had decided, finally and after years of persecution and harassment, to put the lid on Václav Havel."
February 27, 1977: Stoppard travels to Moscow with a representative of Amnesty International and meets a number of the victimized Soviet nonconformists, in support of whom he writes a piece for the London Sunday Times.
May 20, 1977: After four months' imprisonment in a cell seven feet by twelve, which he shared with a burglar, Havel is released. The subversion indictment is dropped, but he must still face trial on a lesser charge, of damaging the name of the state abroad, for which the maximum prison term is three years. He agrees not to make "any public political statements" while this new case is sub judice. The state attempts to make it a condition of his release that he resign his position as spokesman for Charter 77. He rejects the offer. Once outside the prison gates, however, he unilaterally announces that, although he remains an impenitent supporter of Charter 77, he will relinquish the job of spokesman until his case has been settled in court. He returns, together with his wife, to the farmhouse from which they were evicted the previous fall. (In October, when Havel's case came up for trial, he received a fourteen-month suspended sentence.)
June 18, 1977: By now, Stoppard has recognized in Havel his mirror image—a Czech artist who has undergone the pressures that Stoppard escaped when his parents took him into exile. After thirty-eight years' absence (and two weeks before his fortieth birthday), Stoppard goes back to his native land. He flies to Prague, then drives ninety miles north to Havel's home, where he meets his Doppelgänger for the first time. They spend five or six hours together, conversing mainly in English. Stoppard tells me later that some of the Marxist signatories of Charter 77 regard Havel primarily as a martyr with celebrity value, and didn't want him as their spokesman in the first place. "But they didn't go to jail," Stoppard adds. "He did. He is a very brave man."
Like Stoppard, Havel asks only to be allowed to work freely, without political surveillance. But that in itself is a political demand, and the man who makes it on his own behalf is morally bound to make it for others. Eleven years earlier, Stoppard's hero Lord Malquist said, undoubtedly echoing his author's views, "Since we cannot hope for order, let us withdraw with style from the chaos." Stoppard has moved from withdrawal to involvement. Some vestige of liberty may yet be reclaimed from the chaos, and if Stoppard has any hand in the salvage operation we may be sure that it will be carried out with style.
Nothing that he writes, however, is likely to give comfort to those who are not content to delegate the administration of liberty to "an intellectual élite and a progressive middle class"—the phrase, as I've already noted, that Stoppard has recently used to indicate where his deepest loyalties lie. He is not a standard-bearer for those who seek to create, anywhere in the world, a society like that which permitted the Prague Spring of 1968 to put forth its prodigious, polymorphous flowering. For that was a Socialist society, and, of the many artists who flourished in it, Václav Havel was almost alone in not being a Socialist. I wonder—or, rather, I doubt—whether Stoppard would seriously have relished living in the libertarian Socialist Prague whose suppression by the Soviets he now so eloquently deplores.
July 1, 1977: World première, at the Festival Hall, in London, of Stoppard's latest piece, "Every Good Boy Deserves Favour," acted by members of the Royal Shakespeare Company (including John Wood) and accompanied by the London Symphony Orchestra. Its subject: the use of pseudo-psychiatry to brainwash political dissenters in Soviet mental hospitals. With few exceptions, the reviews are eulogistic. Michael Billington writes in the Guardian.
Stoppard brilliantly defies the theatrical law that says you cannot have your hand on your heart and your tongue in your cheek at the same time. . . . An extraordinary work in which iron is met with irony and rigidity with a relaxed, witty defiance.
Bernard Levin, in the London Sunday Times, pulls out all the stops:
Although this is a profoundly moral work, the argument still undergoes the full transmutation of art, and is thereby utterly changed; as we emerged, it was the fire and glitter of the play that possessed us, while its eternal truth, which is that the gates of hell shall not prevail, was by then inextricably embedded in our hearts. . . . I tell you this man could write a comedy about Auschwitz, at which we would sit laughing helplessly until we cried with inextinguishable anger.
What is Stoppard's picture of happiness? Work and domesticity, of course, enlivened by friendship and the admiration of his artistic peers. But of the thing itself—pure, irresponsible joy—his work gives us only one glimpse. It is an image summoned up from childhood and scarred by the passage of years. In "Where Are They Now?," a radio play he wrote in 1969, a middle-aged man attends a class reunion at his public school and recalls a single moment of unalloyed delight. He was seven years old at the time:
I remember walking down one of the corridors, trailing my finger along a raised edge along the wall, and I was suddenly totally happy, not elated or particularly pleased, or anything like that—I mean I experienced happiness as a state of being: everywhere I looked, in my mind, nothing was wrong. You never get that back when you grow up; it's a condition of maturity that almost everything is wrong, all the time, and happiness is a borrowed word for something else—a passing change of emphasis. ♦