You’d have to be Tom Stoppard to do justice to Tom Stoppard’s work: the wild but always disciplined invention, the fearsome intelligence, the complexity, the epigrammatic perfection, the wit and the often heart-rending humanity.
His plays were often criticised for lacking “heart”, but how could anyone watch Arcadia without being moved by the spectre of consolation set against the certainty of loss and the aching gulf between chaos and order? Or the unrealisable relationship between AE Housman and Moses Jackson in The Invention of Love?
Tom thought that knowledge and art weren’t negotiable commodities: there were absolute standards of good and bad. In his play Travesties, James Joyce says that “An artist is the magician put among men to gratify – capriciously – their urge for immortality.” There isn’t a better epitaph for Tom.
No account of his work could do justice to his character. He was simply the best of companions – warm, sometimes acerbic, funny, loving and self-deprecating. He always made you feel better for spending time with him. I saw him 10 days ago: he sat in a chair and I sat beside him holding his hand. With his longish white beard he looked like Tolstoy and, in his way, he was as great a writer.