Howard Morland

The way I met Tom Stoppard was unforgettable – over twenty years ago: a producer wanted to make a movie of one of my earlier books, Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar and he said he wanted me to meet the script writer. I was already wildly overexcited because the producer was Mick Jagger but when I arrived at dinner, imagine my almost dizzy bedazzlement when I found out the screenwriter was… none other than Tom -who himself looked like a rockstar, Byronically handsome, with rocknroll hair that he never lost and who approached the Stalin idea with what I gradually learned was his usual manner which was both brilliant and erudite but also self deprecating and playful, incredibly warm and generous – all delivered in a beautiful velvety voice with that Mitteleuropean accent. Those slightly rolling-rrr always reminded you that behind his cricket-loving English glamour was a cerebral Bohemian intellect in exile who treasured the English language and a very unEnglish genius for the light, almost careless deployment of serious ideas in a way no English writer ever would. That was part of his brilliance. But he also talked in a flow of sublime epigrams. He had been famous since the sixties but was utterly unspoiled. Of course we immediately plunged into his special land of Travesties discussing the vision of Stalin in Vienna with Hitler, Freud, Trotsky and he emphasized Emperor Franz Josef – how Stoppardian ( yes and who got their own adjective except Shakespeare Shaw Pinter Rabelais – not bad company!) Needless to say, that film never happened but imagine Stalin written by Stoppard. From then on we sometimes met - once on a long trip between Delhi and Galle in Sri Lanka when faced with chaotic airports and endless traffic he was astonishingly modest travelling with a tiny leather satchel and just enjoying talking about books & freedom. Freedom of ideas and words and people that he defined ruggedly within his elegant vernacular but with the east european understanding of someone who grew up amidst destroyed cities liquidated peoples and world wars and understood what was worth fighting for and hard - naturally with a disdain for the foolish but vicious witchhunts of fashionable ideologies ; the last time I saw him he was discussing Belarus’s dictatorship. He knew the costs and joys of living: ‘The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.’ When he married my friend the lovely Sabrina Guinness i saw him more. To her and his family I send love and condolences. Sometimes his philosophies appeared in his plays: “Life is a gamble, at terrible odds. If it were a bet you wouldn’t take it” and yet: “We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.” We have lost our greatest playwright but the plays are very much immortal. (ps this is reposted hopefully with less typos)