More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
She understood him from the start. He reminded her of her own European Jewish ancestry. She saw how much “clarity of utterance” mattered to him, how he saw his texts as pieces of music and wanted the actors to look after the words. She appreciated his appetite for knowledge, his reticence, his moral nature, his complete absence (unlike many male playwrights) of condescension to women,
and went, with deep pleasure, to the Huntington Library, where he was allowed to touch a page of the Ellesmere Chaucer, the first book printed in England after the Bible. “I just got on to the fag end of the book age,” he reflected. And
Right into the following spring he was still trying to turn masses of notes into a play with a plot and to get himself started: “I keep making the first page longer, which is not the same thing as a second page,” he told her in May 1996. By
Some lines in his new play perhaps summed it up: Did they get married? No. They loved, and quarrelled, and made up, and loved, and fought, and were true to each other and untrue.
great energy, competence and charm, who had turned Chatsworth into a highly successful commercial operation in which she closely involved herself. She was a spirited, aristocratic doer, not a reader. “As a literary moll,”
Having no backbone, he was able to bend both ways”),
Stoppard told him, in the early stages, that he was still “looking for a style and a story.” He needed to get the play beyond “the status of an idle boast.” He was going to call it Housman. By the end, he
Charon remembers them well: “Theseus—trying to break the chains that held fast his friend, to take him back with him from the Underworld. But it can’t be done, sir. It can’t be done.” — On the first day of rehearsals, in August 1997, David West came to talk to the actors about Latin pronunciation. Richard Eyre noted his warning to them: “Don’t copy me exactly, I’m from Aberdeen.” Eyre was very nervous that day, starting work on his first ever Stoppard production. But Stoppard said to him: “This must be just another day for you, you do it all the time. I only have one of these every five
...more
the play is a memory play in which the protagonist has an unreliable memory; not a biography.”
Housman speaks fervently in the play (sounding as fervent as Hannah in Arcadia) in praise of “useless knowledge for its own sake…It’s what’s left of God’s purpose when you take away God.”
“If there were ever a title dreamed up to strike me dumb,” he began, “this one verges on inspiration.” It was
With the other two, it was different. Beckett and Pinter “broke” the usual contract between the play and the audience, that you would be given a certain amount of information. Unlike surrealism and Dada, which he thought “intrinsically worthless,” these plays were not “irrational” or “arbitrary.” They did what Shakespeare did: “the simultaneous compression of language and expansion of meaning.” He ended
decadence which got a lukewarm reception at
Berlin is always reminding us that for Herzen “personal liberty” comes first, “liberty today, the liberty of living individuals” as “an end in itself.” Often a scathing writer, Herzen was contemptuous of those who were prepared to sacrifice present happiness and liberty for the sake of “some remote and intangible Utopia.” In his essay From the Other Shore (on the events of 1848), a major source for Stoppard, Herzen says: If progress is the goal, for whom are we working? Who is this Moloch who…as a consolation to the exhausted and doomed multitudes…can only give the mocking answer that after
...more
Turgenev: You don’t believe in progress, or morality, or art? Doctor: Especially not in progress or morality or art. Only the authority of facts. Everything else is sentimentality.
It’s also a satire on ideologues who think they can organise the future of the world, but whose private lives are in chaos.
“It is actually one of Tom’s achievements that one envies him nothing, except possibly
his looks, his talents, his money and his luck. To be so enviable without being envied is pretty enviable, when you think about it.”
But at home, his era of revolutionary idealism (rather like the era of Herzen, which Stoppard had just been writing about) was giving way to the rule of “pragmatists, political managers and media experts.”
But, as Stoppard once said devastatingly to an actor: “It’s not so much that I can’t hear you, it’s that you’re not compelling me to listen.” That was what Russell Beale had to do as George.
I have another thought for the intersection of bankers and culture…I wonder whether you, perhaps with one or two colleagues, might like to visit us for tea-and-tour one day soon. We are engaged in expanding and improving the fabric of the Library for future generations…You may like to be associated with this particular contribution to our culture—or may not—but either way it would be pleasant to see you and show you round. When the donations came in, he wrote again, by hand: “What a joy to be in the position of writing to you in such circumstances!…Your magnificent gift means so much to all of
...more
Stoppard continued: “It’s time to put my cards on the table and my heart on my sleeve.” In the same phrase he had used at Tynan’s memorial, he said: “Mike is part of the luck I’ve had.” He went on: “He’s good at comfort and joy, at improving the shining hour and lighting the dark one, and of course he’s superlative fun…To me…he’s the best of America.” In the context of the George Bush joke, this had a strong ring. Nichols wrote to thank him, saying how proud he was of his friendship. “What you did in that complex situation was beyond imagining. You told the truth and were so funny doing it
...more
But Plato, he maintained jauntily, was in a muddle, which he wanted to try and sort out. “There’s an itch there which hasn’t had a proper scratch.” Why
he made sure Pirandello got bigger billing than he did in the blurb, and reproved his editor at Grove Atlantic, Eric Price, for inflating his reputation: “I don’t like being called one of the 20th century’s greatest playwrights. It’s too soon to tell!”
At one point, during a heated misunderstanding between one of the Belarusians and Index’s legal team, Stoppard calmed everyone down: “Self-justification on either side would merely extend the moment, and is essentially irrelevant. What is required instead is a contest of generosity. From this point on, ladies and gentlemen: empathy, patience, kindness, action, communication—followed by more of the same.” It could sum up his own life’s policy.
You could be forgiven for asking: set against the scale and violence of the retaliation by autocracies in North Africa and the Gulf, don’t we have worse things to worry about than the crimes of Alexander Lukashenko and his bully boys? It’s the wrong question. Better to ask: are we going to let this village tyrant enjoy a respite from scrutiny and accountability because, for the moment, our attention is engaged by larger, louder, more sensational and more photographable news elsewhere?
It filled him with a powerful sense of mortality, Virgil’s “sunt lacrimae rerum,” “the tears there are in things.” And
We mustn’t deny audiences the compliment, indeed the satisfaction, of having to keep up.”
Writing in the Independent in March 2013, he said that such journalists had him down as “an all-or-nothing man on press freedom.” “ ‘No matter how imperfect things are,’ says my young reporter, ‘if you’ve got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable.’ ” As for what he calls “junk journalism,” that’s “the price you pay for the part that matters.”
Since then, reading Isaiah Berlin had taught him to think in terms of “positive and negative freedom.” He had little reverence for “positive” freedom, of the sort promised by a “centralised state”; he minded much more about “negative” freedom, by which Berlin meant “the freedom to think for oneself…to name things for what they are and not for what they purport to be, to apply common sense, and common humanity.” The horror of the Soviet Union was “the loss of autonomy, of the freedom to move freely.” By contrast to that, Stoppard had always had a sense of “comfortable national superiority.” But
...more
Guildenstern: We only know what we’re told, and that’s little enough. And for all we know it isn’t even true. Player: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. It’s the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn’t make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions. What do you assume?
Guildenstern: We only know what we’re told, and that’s little enough. And for all we know it isn’t even true. Player: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only a promise to pay the bearer. It’s the currency of living. One acts on assumptions. What do you assume?
Room for doubt is room for faith. The rehearsal room went quiet, taking that in. When they first met, Haig asked him if he thought more about death now than when he wrote the play. Well, Stoppard said, I quite look forward to awareness ceasing.
One of his favourite lines was the Player’s: “Life is a gamble, at terrible odds—if it was a bet you wouldn’t take it.” But occasionally you do win.
But “the question isn’t whether we deserve it; the question is how are we going to live up to it?” He went on to talk with passion about PEN and its service to writers.
could only explain what he meant by reading that much-cherished, deeply melancholy passage from James Saunders’s Next Time I’ll Sing to You: There lies behind everything…a certain quality which we may call grief. It’s always there below the surface, just behind the facade. Sometimes…you can see dimly the shape of it as you can see sometimes through the surface of an ornamental lake the outline of a carp…It bides its time, this quality…you may pretend not to notice…the name of this quality is grief.
Interviewed on his eightieth birthday, he said drily: “I didn’t mind being seventy-nine,” but added that eighty as an idea was older than eighty as a fact. Asked whether he thought he had exceptional energy,
One of the stories which most affected him was from Alexander Waugh’s The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War.
Nathan calls Leo an “accident of history,” and turns on him after he has talked about his charmed life and his lack of memory of his Jewish past: “No one is born eight years old. Leonard Chamberlain’s life is Leo Rosenbaum’s life continued. His family is your family. But you live as if without history, as if you throw no shadow behind you.”
