Ladies’ man: Tom Stoppard’s love life revealed

Gilbert in Oscar Wilde’s dialogue ‘The Critic as Artist’: ‘Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.’ Not here. Hermione Lee’s immensely long Tom Stoppard: A Life is expert, engrossing, entertaining and sympathetic to its subject. At its heart is a writer steely in his determination to entertain, an inexhaustible mine of mots, a non-stop genius of jokes, capable of winning the Nobel Prize for the interview as an art form.

It comprehensively replaces Ira Nadel’s Double Act (2002), a biography which Stoppard hoped would be ‘as inaccurate as possible’. (Indian Ink and Arcadia are both explicitly hostile to biography and its hubris.) One example: as a young reporter on the Western Daily Press, Stoppard fell in love with a colleague, Isabel Dunjohn. In Nadel’s account, she is his girlfriend, until summarily displaced by Jose Ingle, Stoppard’s first wife. They were never lovers. Fatally, Stoppard introduced Isabel to Peter O’Toole and they became lovers (until, after 18 months, O’Toole dumped her for the actor Sian Phillips, whom he married). Stoppard was left holding his torch, writing hopeless poems (in both senses) and sharing pleasurably agonising holidays with Isabel.

Lee has undeniable advantages over Nadel, who spoke to Stoppard only once: many interviews with her subject; access to the extensive journals he kept for his son Edmund; the weekly letters he wrote to his beloved mother; Isabel Dunjohn’s cache of yearning letters from the young Stoppard. (‘The only drawback to fame was that strangers might eventually read your love letters.’) And she can write well: Stoppard’s anti-Semitic step-father, Kenneth Stoppard, was ‘implacably uninterested’ in his wife’s Jewish Czechoslovakian past.

There is only one instance where Nadel is better. In April 1962, Stoppard, with his friend and fellow journalist Anthony Smith, goes to New York for the first time and they stay in the apartment of someone with connections to the Village Voice.