Stoppard's liberalism

a commitment to the individual

Although Tom Stoppard, the great English playwright who died this week, was not a political writer, as such—unlike many of the left-wing “agitprop” authors who were his contemporaries (agitprop means “agitation and propaganda”)—he was well-known for his “small c” conservatism, his anti-communist writings, and his praise of Margaret Thatcher.

This set him firmly apart from his contemporaries like Harold Pinter. The Royal Court had an unofficial policy to not perform his plays.

Stoppard once, famously, said he was in favour of “Western liberal democracy, favouring an intellectual élite and a progressive middle class and based on a moral order derived from Christian absolutes.”

What can we make of this apparent contradiction? Was Stoppard a political writer or wasn’t he?

I propose that Stoppard was a liberal. He was not a liberal writer in the sense that he polemicized for party or platform. But he was a dedicated liberal individualist—his work is suffused with the liberal idea that the individual is paramount and must be respected, protected, and encouraged.

Writing to the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan in the 1970s, discussing how he was going to stage a debate about moral philosophy in a play (Jumpers) that was going to be funny, Stoppard said: “it is a mistake to assume that plays are the end-products of ideas (which would be limiting): the ideas are the end-products of the plays.” Stoppard, that is, thinks as a playwright; he does not write plays as a philosophical thinker.

Stoppard’s plays are especially playful and his humor is his first essential liberal commitment. What will get you killed or locked up in an authoritarian country can be mocked in a liberal one. Liberalism allows the individual to laugh at the state. Liberalism allows free play.

At the end of Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Stoppard’s 1977 television play about Soviet political prisoners, the “Colonel-Doctor” visits the mental hospital where two political prisoners are being held as “patients”. One is actually insane, and hears an orchestra wherever he goes; the other is deemed to be insane because he spoke out against the regime and refuses to state that criticizing the authorities is a sign of madness.

Both prisoners have the same name and the “Colonel-Doctor” gets them mixed up and asks them the wrong questions: the lunatic tells him it is insanity to criticize the regime and the sane man tells him he hears no orchestra. Thus they are both released.

It is a brief but splendidly funny scene. And it reinforces the basic message: you who are watching this play can laugh at Soviet totalitarianism: the ordinary people living under the regime cannot.

In Professional Foul, written at about the same time, Stoppard exhibited another crucial sense in which he is a liberal writer. He is not governed by ideology or theory. He believed in the moral obligation to individuals as individuals.

In Professional Foul, two philosophers attend a colloquium in Czechoslovakia. They discuss moral theories which allow them to wriggle out of basic moral commitments. The main character, who is the J.S. Mill Professor of Ethics at Cambridge, tells a former student of his—a Czech man, who works as a cleaner—that he cannot smuggle his dissertation back to England. That would be a breach of the “rules” of his visit to Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia, which would count as an immoral act.

Later on, the Professor drops in to see his pupil and is detained by Soviet authorities. He experiences for himself the terror of being at the mercy of an authoritarian regime. Something he said earlier becomes newly relevant: “the essentials of a given situation speak for themselves and language is as capable of obscuring the truth as revealing it.”

Under the interrogatory gaze of Soviet officials, the moral philosopher has to face the facts: rules and manners are very different from morals and principles. Call it what you will—not smuggling the dissertation would be wrong; it would be a sort of acceptance of the communist repression. He cannot hide behind words and relativism.

Or as Jan (a Czech exile returning to Prague) says about England in Rock ‘n’ Roll, “A thousand years of knowing who you are gives a people a confidence in its judgement. Words mean what they have always meant.” From his early play Jumpers, which satirized moral relativism in the work of A.J. Ayer, to Rock ‘n’ Roll, a play about the “Prague Spring” in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard remained committed to the idea that right is right, wrong is wrong, and words mean what they mean.

So the professor decides to help. But, he is now being watched, and his bags will be searched at the airport. So, he hides the dissertation in his colleague’s bag, knowing that man is much less likely to be searched. And so it goes. He broke the rules in order to achieve a higher good.

This play was broadcast internationally and Stoppard was making a very clear point about oppressive regimes that imprison writers. His principles are liberal principles—free expression, individual rights, artistic integrity. The professor even delivers a short lecture about the importance of individual rights, which is so offensive to the Soviets that they set off the fire alarm to interrupt him.

But Stoppard is not taking sides in UK politics. These are Stoppardian plays, not political plays.

Stoppard was honest when he said he had no political agenda and honest when he said he was a “timid libertarian.” Stoppard has the liberal’s pre-political commitment to the individual.¹

This liberalism is a particular literary commitment, too. Harold Bloom used to tell his students: “The only method is yourself.” He was warning them against the sort of literary criticism that started from ideological commitments, be they feminist, Marxist, post-modern, structuralist, deconstructionist, or anything else.

Bloom was expressing the liberal idea—that we are individuals, and it is as individuals that we form groups, hold beliefs, and make judgements. As Stoppard once said, our beliefs “owe their existence to individual acts between individuals, which themselves are derived from an individual’s intuitive sense of what is right and wrong.”

It is in this sense that Stoppard was a liberal writer and it was his abiding commitment to individuals—be they Soviet dissidents or English writers that made his ideas the end-products of his plays and gave him the capacity to surprise, entertain, and delight his audiences.

1. You can hold such views and vote Conservative or Labour, depending on conditions. Stoppard himself voted for both at different times. He was anti-communist and pro-West without being a political partisan.