Full Stoppard

I think it must have been thirty-some years ago. I was walking with Kate Reardon, a pretty young thing who later on became editor of Tatler, the London monthly for people who can see but can’t read. We had just been to a grand shindig, the annual London bash given by Lord and Lady Black, Conrad being my boss at the time. We were looking for a taxi. That is when a curly-haired handsome man stuck his head out of a jalopy he was driving and said that we’ll never find a taxi this time of day. He offered us a ride. Kate gave me a questioning look. I jumped at the chance, as I had recognized the driver.

Once we approached Mayfair I asked the driver to join us for dinner. Kate continued to look puzzled. He said that he had maternity duties that evening and politely declined. “You mean to tell me that the world’s greatest playwright cannot afford a babysitter?” Tom Stoppard smiled at me and told me he read me every week: “I like that you write the way people speak.” It was typical of him. A great writer praising an average one with the supreme compliment one writer can pay another.

And it gets better. A year or so later, Tom Stoppard dropped in on my New York townhouse out of the blue. He wanted to meet my wife, an Austrian, and see how I lived “in the Bagel, as you call it.” We had a great chat, and he even offered a job to my then-20-year-old daughter, who was moving to London. She accepted with alacrity, and I have been extremely grateful ever since. Tom and I met many times, always at parties, alas, his or those of Paul Johnson, another polymath writer, also no longer with us. His widow, Sabrina, is a very old friend.

So what is there to say about the greatest playwright of modern times that has not already been said, written, and discussed ad nauseam? Well, just off the top of my head, he explored the science of consciousness, his trademark philosophical themes equaling those of the ancient Greeks, as was his insistence of mind over heartfelt matter. All this accomplished with a very light touch. I rank Jumpers, Travesties, The Coast of Utopia, and Arcadia among the greatest plays ever. In today’s society, whose purpose has been changed to accumulating credentials rather than learning, Tom’s plays are an education in itself. The last time I saw him was about a year and a half ago at a friend’s memorial service in London. He asked about my swollen eye and told me to stop kickboxing. He never mentioned that there was anything wrong with his health. It was typical. So long, Sir Tom, there will never be another one like you. And you can finally stop fretting over words. You were the master of them, punto e basta, as they say in the land of pasta.

It is, of course, ironic that the most intelligent and intellectual of playwrights should have lived during a period where humanity managed to dumb itself to an unimaginative degree via technology. A horror called Instagram has birthed a far greater horror called an influencer. The latter peddles a lifestyle to those with an IQ of single numbers. Once upon a time, very stupid people were tolerated and even helped by the state in order to survive the hurdles of life. Now the stigma of stupidity has been overturned, and the loudest and stupidest of the lot have prevailed. The least informed voices are the loudest, forcing the rest of us to learn to speak their language.

Again, once upon a time bad ideas used to stay local, repeated by other stupid people to their own kind. Now, thanks to technology, very bad and very stupid ideas are transmitted to everyone on this planet in a jiffy. Anyone, however useless, can advertise his uselessness ad nauseam and infect everyone connected to that damn machine. Like those idiotic women lining up to cheer the cold-blooded murderer Luigi Mangione in New York, we are all now stupider than ever, thanks to you-know-what. Time to go back to using papyrus like my ancestors in ancient Greece.

This article was originally published on Taki’s Magazine.

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