Morgan Entrekin on the Small Kindnesses of a Literary Giant
In London today there will be a memorial celebration for Tom Stoppard. When Tom passed away last November, he was acclaimed and eulogized brilliantly all over the world. To read some of those encomiums you can head here. But in honor of today’s celebration, I would like to offer a brief account of my experience with Tom.
I first met him at the International PEN Conference in Prague in 1994, the first PEN meeting in that city in more than 60 years during which the Czechs had suffered first under Nazi and then Soviet repression. Among those attending were Philip Roth, Arthur Miller and his wife Inge Morath, Rose Styron and many other writers and human rights activists who had supported the Czechs, and especially the Czech writers in their struggle against authoritarian regimes. It was an exhilarating few days opening with President Václav Havel (also a Grove author) welcoming his fellow writers for a conference on “Literature and Tolerance.”
A year earlier I had merged Atlantic Monthly Press with Grove Weidenfeld to create Grove Atlantic. Though Grove had published Tom from the beginning of his career, for some reason he had, in the years right before I took over, allowed his British publisher Faber and Faber to publish his new plays with their Faber North America imprint. Rose Styron introduced me to Tom and told him I was now the Publisher of Grove. I said to Tom I knew he was no longer publishing with us but that we had all of his earlier work in print and if he ever had questions or thoughts about the Grove editions he should please let me know. I also told him I was committed to keeping Grove Atlantic independent and that if he ever wanted to come back we would love to have him.
“I was so happy to look across the stage and see that you were getting my jokes.”
A couple of years later I heard from Tom’s agent that he would like to return to Grove. I received the manuscript of The Invention of Love. We published that wonderful play and all his work since. Tom’s return during those early years when I was working to re-establish Grove’s credibility and identity as a committed, independent literary house was hugely important to us.
Over the years I would see Tom in London or New York. I have worked with some accomplished writers in my 48 year career, but Tom was without a doubt the most dazzling, erudite and intellectually intimidating of them all. He was just totally cool. He was also so kind, so curious about what we were publishing and so supportive of our efforts to stay true to our mission and remain independent. One of the most memorable evenings was a snowy night at arts patron Drue Heinz’s beautiful Sutton Place house at a dinner arranged for Tom to meet Tom Wolfe. I reminded Tom of that night when he called to ask me if he thought we might be able to persuade Macmillan to allow Grove to buy the rights to the plays that had been published by Faber North America imprint which had been acquired by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. I suggested Tom write to Jonathan Galassi, who had been at the dinner, and ask him—which he did. I hoped that Jonathan, then head of FSG, and his boss John Sargent might respect the wishes of a writer to have all his work at one house. They did and we have been able to bring all the plays together at Grove.
So over the last two decades as we continued to publish Tom’s incredible new works from the amazing The Coast of Utopia to Rock and Roll and the late-career masterpiece Leopoldstadt our Deputy Publisher Peter Blackstock has worked with Tom to rationalize and update the text of all his plays and publish them in editions that he has signed off on so that we know that the works will endure in the versions that he approved.
And one final memory, in 2015 my good friend Sabrina Guinness who had married Tom the year before called to invite my wife Rachel Cobb and me to come to the opening of Tom’s new play The Hard Problem in Philadelphia. I asked if we could bring our nine-year-old son Allen. When the day came, we met Sabrina at a cozy Italian restaurant after the trip down from New York. Tom was still at the theater working with the cast on last minute adjustments, but he joined us a few minutes later. He proceeded to tell Allen what his play we were going to see was about, which is the question of how consciousness arises in the brain—the hard problem. Allen, who has always been intellectually curious, was fascinated.
When we took our seats in a theater with horseshoe-shaped seating, I looked over and saw that Tom and Sabrina were seated directly across from us. I was a bit nervous because it had been a long day for Allen, and I hoped he wouldn’t fall asleep during the play. On the contrary, he was fully engaged the entire time, laughing so loudly sometimes that I worried he was disturbing the people around us. Afterwards as we left Tom said, “Allen I was so happy to look across the stage and see that you were getting my jokes.”
So as we celebrate one of the most extraordinary, truly brilliant writers I have ever had the privilege of publishing, I can only say thank you Tom, for your friendship and your kindness to me and my family, for the incredible body of work you produced and gave to the world, and for your support of Grove Atlantic at a crucial time.