There are certain people in the world who make you think: how lucky I am to be here, talking to you. Sir Tom Stoppard was one of those, and although I did not know him well, and really only as a journalist, he was also a person who remembered who you were, who took an interest, who listened as much as he talked.
He was so thoughtful, so funny, so charming – in the truest way. And there was his height, his striking handsomeness, his voice just bearing the trace, it always seemed to me, of Tomás Straüssler who was born in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, and who came to Britain in the immediate aftermath of the second world war.
The first image that springs to mind, is the way he once helped me to put my coat on once, really making sure it was on my shoulders and my arms were in the sleeves, because we were on the Southbank and the wind was coming hard off the river and he didn’t want me to be cold. We had several conversations around the time of his 2015 play, The Hard Problem, one of them in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo murders. Stoppard only learned of his Jewish heritage in middle age; he did not confront that knowledge directly until he wrote his final play, Leopoldstadt, first staged in 2020.
But in response to those dreadful events in Paris, he spoke to me of the “moral genius” of Jesus. He said simply that in the face of appalling violence, “forgiving and turning the other cheek is what you have to do. You have to take the hit.” And right away, he considered what it would mean to address such terror in his chosen art form. “If one were to write a play about the events of last week, one’s aspiration would be to write in such a way that it would survive as a work of art rather than as a work of commentary,” he said. “I realise that’s not actually very realistic, but that’s my angle on the world of writing.”
I recall the sincerity in his voice: and, of course, I wanted to say, Tom, you’ve got this. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Arcadia, The Real Thing, and The Coast of Utopia, not to mention the screenplays he created for films such as Brazil and Shakespeare in Love: these are works of art for the ages, not commentary, though we may also see the world we have lived in through the bright lens of Stoppard’s gaze.
He was an avid newspaper reader. “Time is short, life is short, there’s a lot to know,” he said to me. He knew I was writing a book about the Brooklyn Bridge: so, he wanted to talk to me about Frank Harris, who claimed in his notorious autobiography My Life and Loves, to have worked as a labourer on the bridge. Was it true? Did I know?
With as much skill as I could muster, I turned the conversation back to Tom. At 80, in 2017, he won the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime’s achievement. He wasn’t sure then if he would write again. “I’d rather be silent than dwindling,” he said. And then came Leopoldstadt – no, not his greatest work, but a reckoning he needed. And the mark he made on literature, on all of us, will never dwindle, never fade. The real thing, indeed.