Tom stoppard, p.15
Tom Stoppard, page 15
The joy of If You’re Glad I’ll Be Frank, which he always called Glad/Frank, is the internal voice of Gladys the Speaking Clock (who once wanted to be a nun) brooding on the silence of infinity and how it can’t be confined by ticks and tocks, by “routine-checking, schedule-setting time-keeping clockwork.” The voice of the clock is on the right of the page:
And they count for nothing
measured against
the moment in which a glacier
forms and melts…
At the third stroke it will be At the third stroke it will be
too late to catch up, far
far too late, gentlemen…
Silence is the sound of time passing.
Don’t ask when the pendulum
began to swing.
Because there is no pendulum.
Gladys starts by sounding like Prufrock, and ends up like Molly Bloom: “and at the third stroke I will/yes I will yes at the third stroke I will…” Asked a few years later if the play represented a tragic sense of mortality, Stoppard replied warningly: “The play is not the result of an apparent obsession with time. The obsession is the result of the play.”
Mortality haunts another radio play of this time, originally based on the idea of “odd jobs,” but which broke free from the series and grew into a longer life of its own, first on the radio, then on the stage. He started to write Albert’s Bridge, alongside Glad/Frank, in the summer of 1965 (for a £50 advance), but got stuck with it, rewrote it endlessly, with much encouragement and cajoling from Imison, and delivered it to the BBC a year later than promised. It was first aired, post-Rosencrantz, at 9:30 p.m. on 13 July 1967, directed by Charles Lefeaux (a change for him from Dick Barton, Special Agent) on the highbrow channel Network Three, a branch of the Third Programme. The Radio Times coverage said that “Stoppard can be claimed as a radio discovery.” The play won two international awards in 1968, a Czech International Radio Plays prize and the Prix Italia, in the same year as Ken Loach’s Cathy Come Home.
Like Gladys’s modernist interior speech set against the pips of real time, Albert’s Bridge counterpoints Albert’s self-absorbed stream of consciousness with the real world below, as he paints his way along the “Clufton Bridge,” first as part of a team, then on his own—a wonderfully satisfying, solitary, unfinishable job: “I’m the bridge man/web-spinning silvering spiderman…” The busy, worried town councillors of Clufton (straight out of Brennus’s Bristol), Albert’s demanding mother and domineering father, Kate the working-class girl he gets pregnant, marries and then ignores, all dwindle and grow tiny in his imagination when he’s up on the bridge. He doesn’t want to be “content in his obscurity,” any more than George Riley does: he wants to be “sublime.”
Albert’s moony, dreamy, artistic monomania is not the only aberrant point of view in the play. There’s a member of the council driven mad by his own ever-elaborating statistics, and there’s a would-be “jumper” intent on suicide who can never make up his mind to jump: somehow the crazy world looks more orderly and manageable when he’s up on the bridge. “Come come, don’t procrastinate!” says Albert, who just wants the bridge to himself. Compared with these other lunatics, Albert seems quite sane and endearing.
As often, Stoppard makes raids on the real world to bolster a strange, topsy-turvy invention. He does this with the moon landings in Jumpers, or the state funeral of Winston Churchill in his novel, or the death of Monroe in “M” Is for Moon. The Forth Road Suspension Bridge had been opened in 1964, and it was being said that by the time they finished painting it, they’d have to start painting it again. Albert wants to see it on his holiday. (Second choice, the Eiffel Tower.) Clifton Bridge, of course, was also an inspiration. He used bits from favourite films—Harry Lime’s deadly, scornful view of the world from the top of the Ferris wheel in The Third Man, or the men in The Bridge on the River Kwai, whistling “Colonel Bogey” as they march. That’s like the army sent to paint the bridge, catastrophically, at the end of the play, which involves a terrific final sound effect. There may be a glimpse of his own life, too, in Kate’s lamenting at her neglect and Albert’s bafflement: “I did want her to be happy, too.”
Albert is a lapsed philosophy student, and has an already recognisably Stoppardian riff about what it would be like to be a philosopher’s clerk: “It’ll be a matter of filing the generalisations, tidying up paradoxes, laying out the premises before the boss gets in…” His philosophy of life takes the long perspective. Only from afar can he have a sense of completion, but that entails complete narcissism and a chilling distance from other individuals: “Is it a fact that all the dots have names?” The popular songs he croons to himself up on the bridge are love songs to himself: “I’ve got me under my skin…I get a kick out of me…” Ah, says the jumper, “the egotist school of song writing.” But there is another way to live one’s life, involved with others, buried in detail and reality. Kate, in a telling line, says to him: “Well, life is all close up, isn’t it?”
Albert’s lyric soliloquies dominate the radio performance, with a magnetic performance by John Hurt. But the play also makes an aural pattern out of the ordinary words of everyday work, so that cliché and banality get turned into a memorable comic tune.
Dad: Watch your feet, Albert. Mind your head, Charlie.
Charlie: You mind my head. Take care my feet, Bob—
Bob: Watch your feet, Charlie—
Charlie: Mind your feet, Dad—
Dad: That’s my head, Albert—
Albert: Coming down…
It suited him to be given the germ of an idea—the seven deadly sins, eccentric occupations, minor characters in Hamlet—and then jump off with it and turn it into something surprising and original. He often said that he loved to be given something ready-made to start with, and that eighty per cent of his time as a writer was spent looking for something to write about. Two ideas proposed to him around this time were the germs for television plays. Like Albert, they both played with the idea of a man who tries to keep himself separate from the world. A Separate Peace was meant to be a matching half for a documentary about chess players, and part of a series on “the pursuit of happiness.” But it ended up—as a 1966 BBC Thirty Minute play—not having anything to do with chess, and everything to do with a desire for a quiet life. A wealthy Mr. Brown, who is perfectly well, checks into a nursing home because he wants to live there always. Like Albert, he spends his time happily painting, in this case a mural for his room. But the staff can’t cope with a mystery patient who isn’t ill, and a sympathetic nurse is set up to wheedle his secrets out of him—which are that he’d been at the nursing home as a child, and later been a prisoner of war, and wants to return, as a lot of Stoppard’s characters do, to that childish sensation of helplessness, safety and passivity.
There’s another two-faced informer in Neutral Ground. This was commissioned by Granada TV late in 1965 for a series reworking classical myths, but the series collapsed and the one-hour television play was not broadcast until 1968. Neutral Ground, a reworking of Sophocles’s Philoctetes, was a Cold War spy story with Marlowe’s Dandy in Aspic, John Le Carré and Greek tragedy in mind. He’d also been reading Edmund Wilson’s book on the relation of art and psychic pain, The Wound and the Bow (the play’s working title), and Norman Mailer’s Barbary Shore. He wanted to do “Shavian dialogue,” pitting differing moral and ideological positions against each other.
In the original, Philoctetes, voyaging to Troy with the other Greeks, and owner of an invincible bow, is abandoned on a remote island, because of his disgusting suppurating wound, which no one can bear to live with. But the Greeks can’t win the war, they need the bow, and they come back to get him, with a trick of wily Ulysses’s, who uses an idealistic young warrior to pretend that he too has turned against the Greeks and to persuade Philoctetes to go with him. The young man succeeds, but at a cost to his own integrity. A version by Euripides thickens the plot by having the Trojans also in pursuit of the bow. Euripides, though, was deeply buried by the time Granada got to work on the play, rather to Stoppard’s regret.
Neutral Ground was his first spy story, pointing ahead to The Dog It Was That Died and Hapgood. It was also his first foray into classical sources, and into writing about Eastern Europe. It’s set in a no-man’s-land village in Yugoslavia, where “Philo” is rotting away. He is a double agent from a Soviet-dominated Eastern European country, whom the British have cast aside. His wound is his alcoholism. Bitter and hopeless, all he wants is to go home to die. The Odysseus figure, Otis the cunning American Cold War pragmatist, sends a young English agent, Acherson, to trick Philo into returning. The Russians are also after Philo, in the shape of two assassins called “Laurel and Hardy,” who are “killers but fairly relaxed about it.”
But this isn’t a comedy. Acherson’s conflict between the individual good and the good of the country, between a useful end and foul means, is painful. He has to acknowledge Otis’s ruthless belief that there are “no neutral corners in this world,” but he hates what he has to do. There’s also a touching small boy, like the boy in Godot, who tries to look out for Philo, the first of many vulnerable small boys in Stoppard’s work. At the dark heart of the play is Philo’s bitterness about what the Russians did to his unnamed country—“they have saved us out of existence”—and his memory of the small town he grew up in, before “all the things that changed when the Russians came.”
* * *
—
In between writing radio and television plays and working on the new version of Rosencrantz, Stoppard rushed at his novel. The sparking-point was the state funeral of Winston Churchill on 30 January 1965, a huge national event. The novel—whose working title was “The Funeral of the Year”—was delivered in August 1965, leaving him feeling very “post-natal.” His publisher, Ewing’s friend Anthony Blond—flamboyant, maverick, Jewish, independent-minded—was baffled by Lord Malquist & Mr. Moon, and didn’t think “there was going to be a reading audience which will understand it.” But he told Stoppard that he always “backed passion,” and Ewing sent a telegram in September saying that “Blond will publish and no doubt be damned.” He got an advance of £150. Lord Malquist & Mr Moon mixes up, as he loved to do, high and low culture, and steals from everything he’d been reading and seeing. He would describe it, looking back, as “magpie pickings from (mostly) other people.” It’s very theatrical, with chapters called “Dramatis Personae,” lots of farcical accidents and dramatic encounters, and characters leaving on the lines “Exit Butler” or “Exit Messenger.” Broken up with sudden cuts and shifts of view, it’s also like a movie, in the mood of cold-eyed, stylised mid-1960s films like Blow Up or Darling. Comic strips, Westerns, Carry On films, thrillers, tabloid headlines and newsreel solemnities are stirred in with tributes to modernists like Joyce, Conrad and Faulkner, nods to Waugh, Wodehouse and Wilde, Pepys, Tristram Shandy and Cervantes, de Montherlant, Genet and Burroughs, traces of Sartre’s La Nausée (in which the narrator, Roquentin, is trying to write the life of a marquis), comical allusions to Hamlet, and echoes everywhere of his hero Eliot.
Mr. Moon carries a bomb around with him, like the anarchist Professor in Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Like Joyce’s Leopold Bloom in Dublin, he criss-crosses the labyrinths of London while his wife is entertaining her lovers at home. And like Eliot’s Prufrock, he is perpetually embarrassed, uncertain, and unable to make himself understood. He earns his living by offering his services as a “Boswell” to people who want to have their lives memorialised: he’s “in the posterity business.” (This won’t be the last of Stoppard’s ironical jokes about biography.) At present he is working for Lord Malquist, an eighteenth-century-style dandy who rides about London in a coach and horses, dictating his pensées, when he isn’t making love to Moon’s wife, Jane, a crude early version of Dotty in Jumpers, who is also being attended to by two rival cowboys, dressed in full gear, who refer to her as Fertility Jane. There’s a lot of lipstick-and-undies bedroom comedy, with a nod to Joyce’s pastiche of Gerty MacDowell in Ulysses. To thicken the “plot,” there’s an escaped lion in St. James’s Park, a pathetic figure on a donkey who claims to be the Risen Christ, Birdboot the butler (to be saved up, with Moon, for The Real Inspector Hound), a murdered maid, the seductive, alcoholic Lady Malquist, and a coachman called O’Hara who changes race like a chameleon. That allows for Moon to ventriloquise the standard racist abuse of the time, which makes uncomfortable reading. The action culminates on the day that London has shut down for a great state funeral.
A philosophical debate is going on between the idea of style and the idea of order. Lord Malquist is a Wildean aesthete who believes in nothing but style. Like Albert on his bridge, he takes the distant view of human beings. People as individuals—other than himself—don’t engage him. He’s interested in the broad sweep of history. The state funeral, for him, marks the end of the age of heroism and great men. After that comes the age of style, in which the only role to play is that of the spectator, standing aloof. It would be easy to read the whole novel according to Malquist, as a youthful credo for aestheticism. Kenneth Tynan did so a few years on in his critical piece on Stoppard as a reactionary dandy, using Malquist’s line, “withdrawing with style from the chaos,” as his title, and arguing that the phrase reflects the author’s world view, one of “extreme pessimism and therefore of conservatism.”
But there’s a counter-view in the novel, equally dark but much less absolute. Moon argues with his patron that “it’s all people, isn’t it? That’s what the world is.” He can’t hold all these people at bay or be indifferent to them. Like the would-be “jumper” in Albert’s Bridge, he is horrified by the feeling that the world is running out of control. That’s why he wants to blow it, and himself, up. He views everything around him with bewilderment. His streams of consciousness are full of premonitions of disaster, for instance about the “big power station” over the road:
The whole thing was at the mercy of a million variables which might fail in some way—strikes, silicosis, storms at sea…a derailment at Slough…a toothache in the wrong man at the wrong time—and at any time…people might stop deciding to be dentists (why after all should anyone want to be a dentist?) and there would be no one to kill the agonising pain in the back teeth of the black shiny-skinned miners who dig the coal which is put on the train which is derailed at Slough (yes and who will promise to go on milking the cows for the children of those who make the rails for the underground trains packed with clerks who take dentists for granted?).
Moon squeezed tight his eyelids against the returning accumulated fear which he could not separate into manageable threads.
But this wildly garrulous writer is also a perfectionist with writer’s block:
He could not put down a word without suspecting that it might be the wrong one and that if he held back for another day the intermediate experience would provide the right one…Moon fearfully glimpsed himself as a pure writer who after a lifetime of absolutely no output whatever, would prepare on his deathbed the single sentence that was the distillation of everything he had saved up, and die before he was able to utter it.
That’s one of many contradictions. He’s a cuckolded husband who is still a virgin. He’s a Boswell with no life of his own. He has no religion, though “he sometimes wanted to be a Jew but had only the most superficial understanding of how to go about it.” What Moon really wants is to go back to childhood, when things felt safe:
“I think I’d like to go back to live in the country where I lived when I was small.”
“Catch beetles.”
“Press wild flowers.”
“Climb trees.”
“Make dens.”
“But it wasn’t always summer.”
“No.”
Unable to decide whether life is random or inevitable, absurd or commonplace, he passes the time by interviewing himself, telling himself jokes and contradicting himself. “I cannot commit myself to either side of a question.” He tells his wife: “ ‘I was trying to face one way or the other and I got confused and fell over.’ Let that be my epitaph.” He can’t act: “He could only watch. He was a spectator.” There is a lot of overlap between Moon and his author—and between Malquist and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. “Spectator as Hero,” Stoppard would note in 2005, would have done equally well as a title for the novel or the play.
Between 1964 and 1969, he kept a little black notebook of quotations, plot ideas, one-liners, poetry, reading lists, specimen titles and try-out pages of dialogue. It’s a seed-bed both for the play and the novel (with a few foretastes of Jumpers and Travesties), which sometimes overlap on the same page. Eliot is everywhere in the Black Notebook. Stoppard marks his death (giving it as 5, not 4, January 1965). He drafts a passage about Malquist not caring about anything, which ends with: “Till human voices wake us and we drown.” He tries out a line for Moon: “My aim in life is to read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.” He puts in a whole poem, heavily indebted to “Prufrock,” written during or just after his time in Berlin:
