Tom Stoppard’s friends have nothing but good things to say about him

With full access, Hermione Lee has written the most authorized of authorized biographies of the British-Czech playwright and member of the literati. 

Beloved playwright Tom Stoppard, winner of countless accolades – including an Academy Award and a shelf of Tony Awards – first asked the great biographer Hermione Lee to write his life story in 2013, and that book, “Tom Stoppard: A Life,” has finally appeared. The book dresses out at almost 900 pages. This will be a cause for celebration among the many fans Lee has garnered with her other biographies; she’s previously focused on Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf, Penelope Fitzgerald, and, most magnificently, Edith Wharton. A big new book from Lee is always a happy event for readers of biography.

Stoppard, too, has armies of fans. Born as Tomáš Sträussler in Czechoslovakia in 1937 and raised in England by his mother Marta (née Becková) and his English stepfather Kenneth Stoppard, he began his writing career as a columnist and theater critic. It wasn’t too long before he turned to playwriting himself, achieving enormous national success beginning in 1967 for his play “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” which was immediately embraced by critics and theatergoers alike.

An unbroken string of successes stretched out from that auspicious event. Stoppard went on to write engaging stage works like “Arcadia” and “The Coast of Utopia.” He worked as a translator of other writers, including his friend Václav Havel. He co-wrote the screenplay for the hugely popular movie “Shakespeare in Love.” He was ubiquitous at gala events. He received the full battery of honors – president of the London Library, honorary fellow of the British Academy, patron of charities, the beaming face of the public Man of Letters. He has the stately home, the long vacations abroad, and the status of a literary institution; his plays are anthologized and taught in schools; his name is used as an adjective for describing delightfully playful and hyper-intellectual writing.

Along the way, he’s amassed a sizable archive, the primary sources of his own life and times. And although many old friends like Harold Pinter or Havel have died, a legion of friends still remains, and almost all of them share the same general feeling about Stoppard: that he’s a genuinely important figure in English literature, that he matters.

Lee gained access to all of this – the archive, the old friends, all the behind-the-scenes details – when she agreed to become Stoppard’s biographer. This is about as authorized as an authorized biography can be.

Stoppard tells Lee that he imagines his biography as something that exists parallel to his lived experience: “He would be living his life, and I would be writing about his life, and occasionally the lines would intersect,” he says. And, Lee tells her readers, “That’s exactly how it has been.”

“While I’ve been working in his archives, talking to people who know him and writing this book,” she adds, “he’s been getting on with being Tom Stoppard.”

Throughout the book, Lee perceptively discusses Stoppard’s work – her analyses of his major plays are some of the most invigorating examinations they’ve ever received – but it becomes increasingly clear that writing those plays has, for decades, been only a relatively small part of “getting on with being Tom Stoppard.” As so often happens in authorized biographies, readers are regularly subjected to appointment calendars in place of historical narrative. There’s a ceremony at Windsor for the Queen Mother, a trip to New York for Christopher Hitchens’ memorial, an awards presentation, hosting Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, at a dinner, attending Jade Jagger’s wedding, helping Prince Michael of Kent celebrate his birthday....

The word for all this is glamour, and the danger of it co-opting the narrative is the main reason why so many biographers prefer to write about subjects who are no longer living.

Stoppard’s acquaintances, seemingly without exception, tell Lee he’s a marvelous, significant figure. In a chance run-in at a theater, the actress Sinéad Cusack discusses Stoppard’s third wife, the producer Sabrina Guinness, with Stoppard’s old director friend John Boorman. “You know, Sabrina has always been looking for a good man; and now she’s got the best man in the world,” she tells him – and the comment somehow makes its way to Lee.

There’s virtually nothing in “Tom Stoppard: A Life” that reflects even poorly, let alone damningly, on its subject. Is that because Stoppard has no flaws? Or is it because Lee would rather not speak ill of her friends, several of whom she thanks in the book’s acknowledgements, including Stoppard’s third wife and his lawyer? Time will certainly tell.