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The editor asks him if he is interested in politics. Oh yes, he replies. “Who, for instance, was the Foreign Secretary?” Musing on the interview afterwards, he decides this wasn’t a fair question. “He had only admitted an interest in politics, he had not said he was obsessed with the subject.” (In
and drew
He was interested in Muriel Spark’s first (and, as it turned out, only) play, Doctors of Philosophy, which he reviewed alongside Saroyan and described as “a thoroughly entertaining failure.” A farcical, surreal satire on academic aspirations, it has a well-read cleaning lady, three male characters all called Charlie (including a lorry driver and a nuclear physicist), and what Stoppard described as “literate, spiky, concise” dialogue.
Saunders’s Next Time I’ll Sing to You. Saunders’s play didn’t have Beckett’s rigorous concentration, where “everything counts, nothing is arbitrary.” But he admired the play very much. Saunders’s characters, Dust and Muff, actors trying to work out the meaning of the play they are in, who “kill time” waiting for a climax, Rudge the rhetorical writer-producer who starts
up word games like cricket matches, all three trying to solve the mystery of the hidden life of Jimmy Mason the hermit, played by an actor who wants to know what kind of person he’s supposed to be, made a lasting impression. So did the way Saunders “left no stone unturned, expecting to find the truth not beneath any one of them but in what the stones look like the wrong way up.”
“I don’t want the moon, Alfred, all I want is the possibility of an alternative, so that I know I’m doing this because I want to instead of because there’s nothing else.” Alfred has reached
But he retains a vestige of idealism. “In some ways it’s such a dreary awful job that you’ve got to retain a few illusions to go on liking it—that and vanity—the vanity of seeing it in print. The thing is to keep one jump ahead of disillusion.”
collapsed and the one-hour television play was not broadcast until 1968. Neutral Ground, a reworking of
“Half of what he said meant something else, and the other half didn’t mean anything at all.”
“No point in looking at a gift horse till you see the whites of its eyes.”
He splits himself between the two: Guildenstern seeking information, examining scientific solutions, wanting logical answers, and in the end grimly facing reality: “We move idly towards eternity, without possibility of reprieve or hope of explanation”; Rosencrantz dreamy, vulnerable,
“Rosencrantz is about the principle that every man is the centre of the world—and there are as many worlds as there are men.
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.
What repelled me was the implied conflation of two categorically different cases. The “free West,” God knew, was all too often disfigured by corruption and injustice but the abuses represented, and were acknowledged to represent, a failure of the model. In the East, though, the abuses represented the model in full working order.
“In different ways we all go through good times and bad and with luck we end up okay. If not not.”
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus aimed to solve the problems of philosophy by showing how language works. His much later Philosophical Investigations (which contradicted a lot of the Tractatus) asked “how we attach meaning to language.” This appealed to Stoppard, forever delighted “by the way language and logic can be used or misused.” In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein said that language has “a single underlying logic.” But in Philosophical Investigations, he argued that “language has no single essence, but a vast collection of different practices each with its own logic.” He called the different ways we
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that dogged him over many years—such as why he hadn’t boycotted
This is the dilemma. If all statements are either interim judgements, or tautologies, or intuitive assertions, or propositions awaiting their contradiction, then the man who waits to act from certainty will never act at all. Yet he does act, we all act, we have to act…We have to act on intuitive assumptions, an instinctive sense that one course of action is better than another, that one value judgement is nearer the truth than its opposite. The quest for certainty has to stop. And what is left when we try to justify our choices is an appeal to a set of standards which can never be
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“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.”
“Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.” But
the counted days, the hollow fear of inconsiderable matters,
But Donner, as an old man who has suffered, converts to traditional realism. He and Sophie both speak out against “the child’s garden of easy victories known as the avant-garde.” This argument for well-made art against nonsense and randomness will recur in Travesties and will develop into later debates about the artist’s responsibilities, in The Invention of Love, The Real Thing and The Coast of Utopia. Why shouldn’t art be easy, Martello asks Sophie. “The more difficult it is to make the painting,” she replies, “the more there is to wonder at.” Donner rejects Beauchamp’s tapes as rubbish. Art
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An artist is someone who is gifted in some way which 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. To speak of an art which requires no gift is a contradiction employed by people like yourself who have an artistic bent but no particular skill…Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
When Galileo says that his discovery of Jupiter’s moons means that “we are just another planet, whirling through space, no longer the apple of God’s eye,” or when his assistant mourns, in spite of his scientific rationality, “Poor moon. She was a goddess once. Now she is a moon like other moons…,” they sound like Dotty.
I do not understand why perfection should be a state of rest rather than a state of change. I am very fond of this Earth; it is not, of course, perfect, but that which I find noble and admirable in it is all to do with change: the change of a bud to a flower, of a deer feeding to a deer running, the change of grape to wine, child to man, wood to flame; and the ash is thrown on the soil to help the buds change to flowers again. Alteration, novelty, decay, regeneration—these are not the blemishes of an imperfect world…
He “can’t seem to find the words…or rather, the words betray the thoughts they are supposed to express.”
Well, I keep looking over my shoulder. When I am asked whether I believe in God, my answer is that I don’t know what the question means. I approve of belief in God and I try to behave as if there is one, but that hardly amounts to faith.
“Things and actions, you understand,” as Dotty explains to George, parroting Archie, “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.”
“Beneath this carefully cultivated modest exterior I’m ravenous for vain publicity.
the much-repeated joke—a joke Pinter also enjoyed—about his interview for a job at the Standard: “He asked me who the Foreign Secretary was. I said I was interested in politics, not obsessed by it!” She
clerihew
Bennett seems to be showing alarming signs of irony. I have always found that irony among the lower orders is the first sign of an awakening social consciousness. It remains to be seen whether it will grow into an armed seizure of the means of production, distribution and exchange, or spend itself in liberal journalism.
Oh, they count as Tories. They dine with us.
politics is the displacement of private instability into the public arena.” How you choose to behave in your private life is replicated in the political sphere. And the neuroses, prejudices and obsessions that make up your private self are what drive your political acts.
sedition
And the real test of a man (his friend Jan Patočka taught him) “is not how well he plays the role he has invented for himself, but how well he plays the role that destiny assigned to him.”
He noted that Stoppard had “once said” that his favourite line in modern drama was from Christopher Hampton’s The Philanthropist: “I’m a man of no convictions—at least, I think I am.”
For one of these, he noted that “during a previous PEN effort to raise funds for the cause, an enthusiastic donor whipped out his cheque-book with the cry, ‘Writers in prison? Capital idea! Best place for them!’ ”
“Right and wrong are not complicated—when a child cries, ‘That’s not fair!’ the child can be believed.”
fusty. No more can these post-Freudian, liberal, agnostic middle-class
The cricket-bat speech is about authenticity: What does the job, what rings true? It applies to language: how good can it be, what are the tests for its authenticity? And it also applies to love. How do you know the real thing?
Does tcheistry do the job.? Whatsappje rings trui? Hoe God van it hé and Whatsappje are The tests of its authenticity? Clinical studies are meedeed To test The effort.
Nichols asked him if he wanted to say anything to the actors. Stoppard said: “I don’t have much to say—but I think it shouldn’t be in a rush—the characters should take it quite slowly.” And Nichols said, “Yes, absolutely—either that or very very fast.”
Descending…I know this is disappointing but I hope not incomprehensible.
“The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is…the smallest variation blows prediction apart.”
Mandelbrot liked to quote Jonathan Swift: So, Nat’ralists observe, a Flea Hath smaller Fleas that on him prey, And these have smaller Fleas to bite ’em, And so proceed ad infinitum.
When she is thirteen she notices, as a child might notice, that you can only stir the jam in your rice pudding one way: “If you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again.” Yes, says her tutor Septimus, the Newtonian, classical scientist, who at this point knows more than his pupil, time will only go one way, and “we must stir our way onward mixing as we go, disorder out of disorder into disorder until pink is complete, unchanging and unchangeable, and we are done with it for ever.” Thomasina
agrees with Septimus: “You cannot stir things apart.” Gleick calls this “entropy explained in five words.”
as Lady Croom approvingly describes them, “on which the right amount of sheep are tastefully arranged.”
Audiences and friends fell in love with it. Harold Pinter loved it best of all his plays. David Cornwell wrote a touching letter calling it “a most exquisite and magical play…beautiful, and very funny, and very remote, but with an accessible structure and huge artfulness…like a long, elegant corridor into mysterious and uneasy rooms. Did the past fall in love with the future, or the present fall in love with the past?”
