Tom stoppard, p.91
Tom Stoppard, page 91
Even if German directors and theatres, according to Kehlmann, underrated Stoppard, calling Arcadia a piece of light boulevard entertainment whenever it was put on, Stoppard was in demand elsewhere in Europe. In 2010 he attended a “Tom Stoppard Festival” in Madrid, alongside a Spanish production of The Real Thing, but warned the organiser about being overloaded: “Past experience makes me cautious…I arrive somewhere thinking I’m coming for a treat in a nice place, and find myself locked into a solid programme of interviews, formal engagements etc., so the whole thing becomes exhausting.”
At home, in May 2011, he gave the Richard Hillary Lecture at Trinity College Oxford, in the Sheldonian, on “Pragmatic Art.” (He was still writing it, smoking and sitting in his car in Trinity, scribbling on small cards, ten minutes before the lecture was due to begin.) In June he lectured on “The Privilege of Artists” in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle for the St. George’s House Annual Lecture, to an audience which included the Duke of Edinburgh and the Dean and a Canon of Windsor. When the alarmingly formal invitation arrived, he felt he had to say yes, but said to Jacky ruefully: “I should have turned down my OM!” He took Will with him as his guest, and “tried to live up to the occasion.” He talked again about the value of what an artist does, the relation of aesthetics to morality, and where the artistic impulse comes from, with some of his favourite quotations from Travesties and Coast. He asked his audience to “make a thought-experiment” in which they imagined a world “in which every manifestation of the artistic impulse, good or bad, is removed; and then to meditate on what’s left. What’s left is dystopia.”
Meanwhile, his work went on for the Belarusians, for the London Library and for the Donmar Warehouse. He still took the trouble to explain, via Jacky, why he was saying no to a million other things, like an invitation to attend a five-day Italian retrospect on his work (“It’s high time I tried to get into a new play, and talking about my past work is a bad reason for more delay and interruption, from which I suffer continually!”) or a request from Havel’s agent to read a book for a recommendation: “I’d have to empty my head of what I’m trying to keep in it, probably for a week, and I can’t do it…there’s water slopping into my boat from every side every day. I have to change my life!” To his new friend Daniel Kehlmann, who asked him for a blurb, he gave a truthful account of why this, at least, was one thing he always said no to:
I boxed myself in years ago by telling publishers I never do it. Yours is the second one this week and it’s only Wednesday. I recommend this policy to you. Firstly, it enables you to respond to friends’ books without looking over your shoulder. Secondly, it gets you out of a difficult situation with friends who write ordinary decent books or mediocre or rotten books.
Very occasionally, he would find himself with a day where he could just please himself. He wrote a short piece about this, commissioned for a 2010 Faber collection called Modern Delight, inspired by J. B. Priestley’s idea of writing about what gave him “delight,” and published on behalf of Dyslexia Action and the London Library. (Other contributions included Clive James on second-hand bookshops, Richard Eyre on the perfect vodka-tonic, and Christopher Ricks on misquotes and mistakes.) A day of “Undelight” was when he had to be woken up too early by the alarm clock, get on a plane or go to a meeting, deal with his in-tray and try to write while feeling tired. A day of “Delight” was when he woke up alone and late, and then spent ninety minutes with two newspapers (delivered to the door of his flat six floors up) with “tea, toast, four choices of orange marmalade, and the first cigarettes of the day”: “complete delight, completed by not having to speak, listen, wash up or put the cap back on the toothpaste.” If that beginning could be followed by uninterrupted work, starting “no earlier than noon,” possibly delayed by looking at a periodical or two and by anything in the post with a handwritten envelope, and then some afternoon reading and perhaps a nap as the sun set, and then something “delightfully micro-waved,” and then working till one or two in the morning and reading until sleepiness set in, “not having spoken to or seen a living soul,” that would be “unadulterated delight.”
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In these years when he wasn’t writing a new play, he embarked on one major project which he found deeply interesting, an adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End for television. This wasn’t initially his own idea. It was suggested to him by Damien Timmer at Mammoth Screen production company, who thought it might make a good TV series—if written by Stoppard. He had been interested in Ford since reading Hemingway’s account of him in A Moveable Feast, and he already knew and admired The Good Soldier, Ford’s great modernist masterpiece of deception, desire, love and sadness. Now he read Parade’s End, and was fired up by it. He began work in July 2008, in, of all places, the Copacabana Hotel in Rio de Janeiro (while visiting the Paraty Literary Festival). It would be another four years before the completed series was aired, in August 2012.
Ford Madox Ford was an appealing figure to him. Wherever you look in the international world of modernism between the 1890s and the 1930s, a period that fascinated Stoppard, Ford is there, playing a vital part. He had links to Stoppard’s great literary heroes Eliot and Hemingway. He collaborated for years with Conrad. Beyond that, his cultural connections stretched from the Pre-Raphaelites and Henry James to Pound, Joyce, Wells, Lawrence, Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon, Jean Rhys, the Garnetts and their Russian anarchist friends. One of his admirers was the poet, critic and art historian Herbert Read, whom Stoppard had met in the 1960s through his son Piers Paul Read: a tangible link.
Ford (not unlike Stoppard) was a major English literary figure who wasn’t entirely English, and who had a changed name. He was born Ford Hermann Hueffer in 1873. His father was a German Catholic Anglophile music critic who died when Ford was fifteen, and his mother was the daughter of the painter Ford Madox Brown. He renamed himself Ford Madox Ford in 1919. Like Stoppard, he left school at seventeen to live on his wits. He thought of himself as an outsider, a “lonely buffalo,” even a “pariah.” He travelled widely, and had a scandalous and complicated marital and love life. Large and red-faced, he was attractive to women because he was interested in them. He was the author of seventy books, a novelist, poet, critic, historian and editor of two important short-lived literary magazines, the English Review and the Transatlantic Review. He was a generous encourager of younger writers, and a self-educated expert on literature, art, music, cookery, agriculture and all things French. A person of contradictions, he was a country-loving cosmopolite, an anarchist-socialist-Tory, a wobbly Catholic, and a patriotic Anglophile who left England to live in France and who had his biggest following in America. He was expansive and gregarious, reticent and private, an untruthful fantasist and great exaggerator, neurotic, sensitive and depressive. He had several breakdowns, and thought about suicide. The Great War, in which he enlisted at forty-one in poor health in July 1916 (partly as an escape from impossible personal and financial problems), broke his life in two.
As a writer he was a stylist of great originality, who wanted to communicate experience as vividly as possible, using techniques drawn from painting which he called “impressionism.” “Consciousness” was his subject. Especially in Parade’s End, he is a brilliant and disturbing writer of war. But Parade’s End was also about Ford’s favourite subjects of honour, betrayal, obsessive love, class, religion and repressed emotions. It’s told with Ford’s typically complex jumps through time, recurring motifs and broken phrases of speech. These often confusing modernist effects try to mirror (like Eliot’s fragmentary lines or Conrad’s time shifts) the unaccountable ways in which perception and memory work. The tetralogy owes something to Proust’s minute, epic account of French society in the years leading up to the war, to Tolstoy’s War and Peace and to Dostoevsky’s intense extremes.
The hero of Parade’s End, Christopher Tietjens, is both like and unlike Ford. He was partly based on his friend Arthur Marwood, a Yorkshire Tory squire with, as Ford put it, “the clear, eighteenth-century English mind which has disappeared from the earth.” But Ford also gives Tietjens some of his own experiences: of shell shock in the war, of being caught between a vengeful ex-mistress and a new, younger love, of feeling alienated from his English society.
Tietjens can be unbearable, which adds to the challenge of an adaptation. Like Marwood, he is a dinosaur, an old-school Tory English gentleman nostalgic for the feudal era. He despises the modern world of bankers, stockbrokers and string-pulling, incompetent politicians and bureaucrats. He is a brilliant mathematician working for the “Imperial Department of Statistics,” and his favourite hobby is annotating the errors in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He believes in honour, courtly love and integrity, while living in a society riven with corruption, scandal and ineptitude. He is emotionally repressed and socially awkward. He allows himself to be slandered, out of scorn for the slanderers—as a result of which his father kills himself on hearing vile, and false, rumours about his private life. He goes to war when he doesn’t have to. Out of chivalry and self-blame, he is passive about his wife’s infidelity, even though his son, whom he loves, may not be his. He is devoted to his ancestral Yorkshire house, Groby, with its old farming methods, its deep well and its Great Tree, a relic of pagan England. He loves England, horses, children, his employees and his soldiers, and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century art, music, poetry and furniture. He is the one good man, the “lonely buffalo.” But we can see how intolerable his high-mindedness can be, particularly to his wife.
The beautiful and self-hating Sylvia, an unhappy Catholic, perverse and manipulative, is driven mad by Tietjens’s passivity and saintly chivalry (“you forgave without mercy,” she tells him). Brought up to believe she can only wield power through attracting men, she is a victim of her times, as well as a monster. Her savage need to keep his attention, which sours into vengeful malevolence, is one of the driving forces of the plot. By contrast, the young woman Tietjens falls silently in love with, Valentine Wannop, offspring of a Latin scholar and a lady novelist, is a modern independent girl with a strong work ethic, a suffragette and a pacifist, athletic, passionate, virginal and true-hearted. This triangle of frustration is embedded in its social world. There’s a lot of comedy in Tietjens’s intractable relations with his government employers and his aristocratic and military family connections (especially the ever-indignant General Campion), and with his friend the aspiring literary critic MacMaster and his aesthetic mistress Mrs. Duchemin, the ambitious wife of a dangerously unhinged vicar with Tourette’s syndrome.
The war smashes across personal lives and social traditions, though it also magnifies, rather than distracting from, private anxieties. Ford used elaborate experimental techniques to give the sensations of a person in a war zone, as if we were there with him. In Tietjens’s shattering experience, which begins with concussion and shell shock, undergoes the endless bureaucratic demands of the work at base camp and ends with being blown up in the trenches, he is tested to extremes. In what Ford called that “Hell of fear,” Tietjens tries to behave courageously and decently. But, as in civilian life, he is dogged by bad luck, misrepresentation, Sylvia’s vendetta and the chaotic incompetence of the War Office.
Tietjens survives the war and, on Armistice Day, finally comes together with Valentine. In those scenes, and in the final novel, Last Post, set in rural England a few years after the war, with Valentine pregnant and Sylvia despairingly excluded, some happiness is rescued from the wreck. “Reconstruction” is the theme, even though the traditions of Groby, and the England it stood for, have been burnt away. But in most of Parade’s End, Ford, through Tietjens, expressed his horror of the war and his conviction that the soldiers were betrayed to their deaths by the incompetent ruling classes. Long after it was published, he said he had written it “with the intention of…bringing about such a state of mind as would end wars as possibilities.”
Parade’s End was greeted with admiration, if also some bafflement and shock, when it came out in the mid-1920s. By the 2010s, it was no longer much read (its afterlife not helped by Graham Greene’s omitting Last Post from his 1963 reissue of the book), and Ford was remembered above all for The Good Soldier. Stoppard sank his teeth into the challenge of bringing the novels back to life for a general audience. It was a process of double ventriloquism: Stoppard turned himself into Ford, as Ford had turned himself into Tietjens.
He wanted to be true to the book’s deep meaning, its sense of an ending, of the passing away of an English tradition and a kind of English behaviour, and he also needed to make it accessible. He had five one-hour episodes—though he would argue, unsuccessfully, for more air-time. “I did have to unravel it all,” he told an interviewer, “and also invent a lot, as the book doesn’t actually provide the action that five hours of television requires.” He created a chronological structure running from 1908 to 1918, and unpicked Ford’s narrative complexity to make the story easier to follow. For instance, the first novel, Some Do Not, starts with a prolonged series of flashbacks spooling back from Tietjens and MacMaster going on a train to Rye to play golf. Through their interior monologues, we find out about their friendship, Sylvia’s infidelity, the probability that their child may not be his (“She’s bitched me”) and Sylvia’s request to come back to him after her latest escapade. Stoppard gets rid of all that and starts with Sylvia having wild sex with her lover the night before her wedding to Tietjens, then the wedding, then their intolerable home life. As the director Susanna White put it, he “filleted out” the love triangle from a huge, sprawling series of books. He gave a lot of time to the pre-war social and personal narrative, and condensed the war sections into parts four and five of the series. He made minimal use of the final post-war novel, Last Post, just taking from it a few crucial events, like Sylvia having Groby Great Tree cut down, or her last encounter with Christopher and Valentine on Armistice Day, and putting those back into the chronological sequence of events.
He was “partly proud and partly embarrassed” that he had written a lot of scenes which didn’t exist in the book. He sometimes couldn’t remember what was Stoppard and what was Ford. He provided some dramatic additions, like a suffragette slashing Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery, or an Eton-Harrow cricket match where Valentine is insulted by Sylvia’s posh friends. To emphasise Valentine’s emancipation, he invented a scene in which the schoolgirls she is teaching are secretly reading Marie Stopes’s Married Love, and she defends them to the other teachers.
But he wanted to be true to the tone and style of the books. So he did keep in some flashbacks, as quick surreal images breaking up the screen, like Tietjens’s first love-making with Sylvia on a train, just after they meet. (Ford loved trains, and so does this TV adaptation, with lots of scenes shot, entirely out of sequence, at St. Pancras Station.) He used some of Ford’s recurring images and motifs: a door handle slowly turning in a hotel bedroom, or the Edwardian turn of phrase used for Sylvia’s tricks, “pulling the strings of the shower bath.” Though he made the war scenes less hallucinatory, he tried to keep their sense of unreality. He was helped by the strong visual allusions—to Paul Nash, Ravilious, Christopher Nevinson, Vorticist photography—which Susanna White encouraged in Martin Childs’s production design. And he kept key scenes in the book, of Tietjens’s night ride in the mist through the English countryside with Valentine, or Sylvia’s destructive visit to the base camp at Rouen.
He piled on the comedy, especially with the Duchemin-MacMaster scenes, the novelist Mrs. Wannop’s self-promotion, and General Campion’s baffled exasperation at Tietjens’s behaviour. There are jokes that are more Stoppardian than Fordian, as when Sylvia’s socialite friend uses a holy water scoop in Sylvia’s religious retreat as an ashtray, or Valentine mishears Mrs. Duchemin (“I run a bath and think of Browning”—“Drowning?”), or General Campion makes a category error:
Campion (angrily): How dare he not get divorced! He told me his wife was co-habiting with—an Egyptian, wasn’t it?—some sort of dago anyway.
Colonel Levin: No, sir, an Egyptologist.
One joke seems made for his own private satisfaction: in a 1912 scene in the MacMaster-Duchemin salon, part Pre-Raphaelite, part Bloomsbury, the action direction reads, as if straight out of Prufrock: “Two women come and go, talking of Michelangelo.” And some of the comedy of the series owes its atmosphere not so much to Ford as to a satirical show Stoppard had hugely admired in the 1960s, Joan Littlewood’s Oh! What a Lovely War.
Ford’s novel, like many great modernist fictions (Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway), is written in “free indirect speech,” a flexible third-person narrative that can roam in and out of people’s minds and incorporate snatches of speech and allusions. All that had to be turned into dialogue. And so a character who doesn’t like self-revelation has to speak out about his own beliefs, and say things like: “We’ve seen the last of England…we’re all barbarians now.” Stoppard got round this, cunningly, by making Tietjens’s expressions of faith often hesitant or incoherent, and by having other characters tell him what he’s like:
