Tom Stoppard frequently and approvingly quotes Cecil Rhodes’s remark, much ridiculed by those in a position to take their own culture for granted, that “to be born an Englishman is to have drawn first prize in the lottery of life.” It’s a view Stoppard’s stepfather, Kenneth, instilled in the boy from a young age. Born Tomáš Sträussler in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, Stoppard did not arrive in England until he was eight, having had his life upended first by Nazi Germany and, on the other side of the globe, Imperial Japan. Other men might have taken on a hunted or insecure personality from such early traumas, but Stoppard, on the evidence of Hermione Lee’s definitive authorized biography, Tom Stoppard: A Life, is a case study in the joy and gratitude that comes, or ought to, with being English.1
Stoppard, now eighty-three and still a major force in theater—just last January, his play Leopoldstadt, about generations of Austrian Jews before and after the Holocaust, debuted to acclaim in London before the hammer of coronavirus struck—has never stopped marveling at the lucky accident of his being raised in England. It’s the most spoiled segment of English society that overlooks the country’s value. Consider the bristling disgust of, say, Emma Thompson, the London-born, Cambridge-educated, Academy Award-winning writer and actor who sees her native land as a sort of fetid prison camp of the soul, its culture an infection best dealt with by opening all doors and windows as widely as possible to the world. Arguing for the United Kingdom to remain in the European Union in 2016, Thompson famously described Britain as a “tiny little cloud-bolted, rainy corner of sort-of Europe, a cake-filled misery-laden grey old island,” adding, “I feel European even though I live in Great Britain.” Thompson was born swathed in the prejudices of the self-hating cultural aristocracy (both her parents were actors) and has worked as an entertainer her entire adult life.
Stoppard’s background differs slightly. All four grandparents and many other relatives were slaughtered in the Holocaust, while his father, Dr. Eugen Sträussler, is thought to have died along with many others trying to flee Singapore in 1942 when his ship was sunk by Hirohito’s invading forces. Stoppard was by age nine the world citizen his cosmopolitan colleagues pretend to be. Far from dismissing his good fortune as his due, he is keenly aware of how differently everything could have turned out. “For every thousand people,” he said in 1973, “there’s 900 doing the work, ninety doing well, nine doing good and one lucky bastard who’s the artist.” Staggeringly appreciative, that. It’s a wonder he didn’t get his artist’s license revoked on the spot. Is any group more afflicted with dyspepsia than the successful portion of our creative class? Certainly no other group seems to maintain a higher ratio of status—or income—to upbeat thoughts. Professing woe, especially about one’s country and culture, is the default position for Western cultural elites, and has been for at least half a century.
Still, Lee’s slab of a book now stands as the definitive life of the leading playwright of his time.
Sir Tom (he was knighted in 1997), however, is a joyous contrarian, as the emeritus Oxford professor Lee shows in her exhaustive (if sometimes exhausting) nine-hundred-page literary biography. Writing with the full cooperation of her subject and his circle, Lee is sometimes thorough to a fault. I could have done without the five-page description of one of Stoppard’s houses, nor did I see the point of an almost equally long digression detailing his work on a screen adaptation, never used, of Philip Pullman’s atheistic fantasy allegory Northern Lights, known in the United States as The Golden Compass. (Another writer started from scratch, and the film was released to a collective shrug in 2007.) Still, Lee’s slab of a book now stands as the definitive life of the leading playwright of his time. (Ira Nadel in 2002 published an honorable but unauthorized shorter biography, titled Double Act. Stoppard, who objects in principle to biography on the reasoning that literal facts obscure deeper truths, claims he never read it. As one of his characters put it in Indian Ink: “Biography is the worst possible excuse for getting people wrong.”) Lee delves with equal vigor into both life events and literary analysis, devoting considerable space to each major work and the details of their earliest productions, in addition to sensibly explicating the various texts. A small-type listing of Stoppard’s credits covers nearly two pages, yet Lee makes room for at least a brief discussion of seemingly every project, even some of no consequence.
from "The Most Grateful Englishman" by Kyle Smith (The New Criterion, March 2021)