The Oxford University professor and award-winning biographer delves into the extraordinary life of the playwright behind Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Arcadia, revealing a dramatic childhood escape from the Nazis in Czechoslovakia to a British upbringing that brought him early fame and a lifetime of achievements in theater and film.
In the astute and authoritative new biography, Tom Stoppard: A Life, Hermione Lee wrestles it all onto the page. At times you sense she is chasing a fox through a forest. Stoppard is constantly in motion — jetting back and forth across the Atlantic, looking after the many revivals of his plays, keeping the plates spinning, agitating on behalf of dissidents, artists and political prisoners in Eastern Europe, delivering lectures, accepting awards, touching up scripts, giving lavish parties, maintaining friendships with Pinter, Vaclav Havel, Steven Spielberg, Mick Jagger and others. It’s been a charmed life, lived by a charming man. Tall, dashing, large-eyed, shaggy-haired; to women Stoppard’s been a walking stimulus package ... Her Stoppard book is estimable but wincingly long; it sometimes rides low in the water. The sections that detail Stoppard’s research for his plays can seem endless, as if Lee has dragged us into the library with him and given us a stubby pencil. Like a lot of us during the pandemic, Tom Stoppard: A Life” could stand to lose 15 percent of its body weight.
... empathetic, meticulous ... Ms. Lee, a formidable literary scholar, discusses the plays at length but warily. Not every line her subject wrote is golden, but she seems chary about delivering negative criticism. And it seems clear that the two of them agreed that certain personal subjects should be off-limits ... One feels that Ms. Lee, like Boswell writing about Johnson, might have stashed away a sizable file marked Tacenda—'things to be silent about.' But there honestly doesn’t seem to be much in the way of dirt to dig up. Mr. Stoppard’s romantic breakups have been amicable, and friends and colleagues speak of him in the highest terms. He appears to be genuinely kind, as well as self-controlled and well-behaved.
On nearly every page of Hermione Lee’s biography—the life as it has been, not as re-imagined—there is something arresting ... These things alone would be enough to make Lee’s account reverberate. In fact, her reach is longer and more surprising. Some writers would have gone in for frisky ventriloquy: firework phrases, overarching philosophical questions, a jostle of jokes, rug-pulling, slippage between time schemes. Lee has none of that. She is assured enough to seem ‘trad’ (a word Stoppard has used about himself), arranging her giant mass of facts chronologically over 977 pages, with no muddy sentences. Yet though the prose is free of theatrical frissons, the structure works like a play. The evidence is in the action. Arguments are thrown up by juxtaposition and contrast. Room is left for doubt—again in Stoppardian fashion ... Lee writes intensely about the way Stoppard’s late recovery of his family history disturbed his view of himself and what surrounded him. The significance of her book is more than theatrical: it is a chronicle of secrets, of refugees—and of England when it was a refuge ... Lee is not inclined to wrestle with the objections of critics: the choppiest notice she quotes comes from Stoppard himself, which doesn’t really count (he calls his Rough Crossing ‘almost tosh’). One of the achievements of her book—that of wiring the reader into Stoppard’s intentions—entails a limitation. It is almost impossible not to read the aim into the finished work: it has the same effect as reading a script just before seeing a play.
