Review
A NEW YORK TIMES CRITICS' TOP BOOK OF THE YEAR •ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, Vogue, Kirkus
"[Stoppard] emerges from Lee’s book as a magnetic figure to whom others cluster and swarm, and around whom happy accidents, chance encounters, new loves, and worldly goods are heaped like iron filings. . . . Lee steers us through each play, major or minor, with a sturdy account of the background, the plot, the production, the casting, the reviews, the transfers to other theatres, and the intellectual grist. . . . To his battalions of fans, as to his detractors, Stoppard is the cerebrator-in-chief, whose plays dispatch you into the outside world with a pleasantly spinning head. (‘Oh, do keep up!’ an actor suddenly said, addressing the audience, at a matinée of ‘Travesties.’) Part of Lee’s mission is to demonstrate that this constricted view of him will not suffice. She’s right; Stoppard is no more Tin Man than he is Scarecrow, and to treat the emotional impact of The Real Thing as an unprecedented jolt, as some critics chose to do, is to ignore the heartaches and pains that suffused what had come before.”
—Anthony Lane, The New Yorker
"[Tom Stoppard] is widely considered Britain’s greatest living playwright. But this triumphant tale had its origins in tragedy and dislocation, as we find in Tom Stoppard: A Life, by the empathetic, meticulous biographer Hermione Lee. . . . Mr. Stoppard’s works have always combined dazzling theatricality with heavy intellectualism and Big Subjects: the nature of knowledge in "Jumpers"; mathematical theorems, Romantic poetry and landscape gardening in ‘Arcadia’; textual scholarship and artistic ideals in ‘The Invention of Love.’ He has managed to reap great commercial rewards without deigning to dumb down his material for middlebrow theatergoers—a rare achievement in show business. ‘I know half the audience may not understand this,’ he remarked of one of his scenes, ‘but I’m writing for the other half.’ . . . Tom Stoppard: A Life is an authorized work; in fact, Mr. Stoppard chose Ms. Lee as his biographer and accorded the author scores of interviews over several years. Ms. Lee [is] a formidable literary scholar.”
—Brooke Allen, The Wall Street Journal
"In this near-perfect combination of author and subject, Hermione Lee crafts a biography of one of the greatest living playwrights. Stoppard’s work includes not only plays (‘Arcadia’) but also films (‘Shakespeare in Love’). The book will surely be the jumping-off point for all future studies of Stoppard."
—Christian Science Monitor
“The adjective ‘Stoppardian’—to employ elegant wit while addressing philosophical concerns—entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1978. His plays are trees in which he climbs out, precariously, onto every limb. These trees are swaying. There’s electricity in the air, as before a summer thunderstorm. . . . He’s led an enormous life. In [her] astute and authoritative new biography, Hermione Lee wrestles it all onto the page. . . . It’s been a charmed life, lived by a charming man. Tall, dashing, large-eyed, shaggy-haired; to women Stoppard’s been a walking stimulus package. . . . Lee tracks the arc of Stoppard’s politics over time. Most people turn to the right as they age; Stoppard went the other way. One reason this book entertains is that Stoppard has had an opinion about almost everything, and usually these opinions are witty.”
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times Daily Review
“Hermione Lee [is a] literary life-writer par excellence. . . . Stoppard doesn’t believe in a “definitive” text, and Lee proceeds accordingly, documenting changes, in draft or revival, alive to his provisional spirit. . . . In writing about Stoppard while he’s alive, Lee is not just keeping up with new output. She’s conveying the ways in which his past work remains potentially in progress—and the ways in which his own life, as becomes clear in his latest play, is a window onto the vagaries of history.”
—The Atlantic
“A cause for celebration among the many fans Lee has garnered with her other biographies; she’s previously focused on Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf, Penelope Fitzgerald, and, most magnificently, Edith Wharton. A big new book from Lee is always a happy event for readers of biography. . . . Lee perceptively discusses Stoppard’s work – her analyses of his major plays are some of the most invigorating examinations they’ve ever received.”
—Steve Donoghue, Christian Science Monitor
“The key test of an artist’s biography is how well it handles the art, and Lee gets good marks here. . . . Lee’s thorough exegeses of his plays make palpable the intellectual and artistic aims that unify them. She weaves these commentaries into an equally thorough chronicle of Stoppard’s personal life. . . . [An] intelligent, admiring tribute.”
—Wendy Smith, The Washington Post
“Tom Stoppard is every bit as informed and intelligent as any Stoppard play. . . . Lee is an expert biographer . . . the expertise with which she’s assembled his bright materials is a testament to her own high and rightly esteemed gifts. . . . If you love his work, you need to read her book.”
—David Ives, The New York Times Book Review
"Lee delves with equal vigor into both life events and literary analysis, devoting considerable space to each major work and the details of their earliest productions, in addition to sensibly explicating the various texts…. The definitive life of the leading playwright of his time. . . . One finishes the book in a state of immense gratitude that Stoppard exists."
—Kyle Smith, The New Criterion
"If Leopoldstadt, a deeply personal piece that was hailed as a revelation by the critics who saw it during its truncated run, is indeed Stoppard’s last play, we now have Tom Stoppard: A Life, Hermione Lee’s magisterial biography, to remind us what we will have lost—and what a legacy Stoppard will leave behind. . . . In her authorized biography, Lee, who has previously written about Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and Penelope Fitzgerald, shows a keen understanding of Stoppard’s work, making long-ago productions come to vivid life on the page, and writes empathetically, but with unsentimental clarity, about Stoppard’s sometimes complicated personal life. . . . The saga of Tomás Straüssler, born in 1937, in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, a wartime refugee who later went on to be the celebrated playwright Tom Stoppard, is a story of almost novelistic proportions. In Tom Stoppard: A Life, we have an author up to the task of telling it."
—Stuart Emmrich, Vogue "Best Books of 2021 So Far"
“[Tom Stoppard: A Life] encourages the reader to return to Stoppard’s work in ways that are richly rewarding. Lee gives wise, learned readings to each major play (and a number of minor ones), teasing apart their themes, interpreting their theatrical gestures, and placing them cleverly in the context of their author’s life and work. . . . I came to the end of Tom Stoppard as impressed by the biographer’s craft as Stoppard has always made me of the playwright’s art. Much as the drawing of Septimus and Plautus is like a little emotional bulb planted near the beginning of Arcadia, blooming only at the very end, so Lee finds vivid details in Stoppard’s life and lets them grow quietly over decades. When they flower, the effect is startling.”
—Dan Kois, Slate
“In an ideal match of biographer and subject, Lee, who has taken on 20th-century writers Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, and Penelope Fitzgerald, now focuses her talent on the ‘playwright of ideas’: Stoppard, who first soared to critical and public acclaim in 1966 with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The Czech-born playwright, raised in Singapore and India before landing in London’s arts scene, provided Lee with access to his archives, friends, and records, and her biography is robust with detail on his relationships, creative processes, and influences on his plays, including Arcadia and The Coast of Utopia as well as screenplays like Shakespeare in Love. Sophisticated and lucid, Tom Stoppard: A Life captures Stoppard’s wit and curiosity, and explores the connections between his work and life, including his late-life discovery of his Jewishness, his anti-Thatcherism, and his creative genius.”
—The National Book Review
“Most biographies factually mirror the life and times of their subject in a chronological narrative. But few mirror the complexity and structure of the subject’s own work with the stunning faithfulness of Hermione Lee’s . . . epic examination of one of the greatest playwrights in English or any other language, Tom Stoppard: A Life. . . . Invaluable.”
—Florida Theater on Stage
“Renowned biographer Hermione Lee received an exclusive level of access to Stoppard’s archives and friends to write her exhaustively detailed, nearly 1,000-page account of the brilliant playwright’s life and work, and it shows. From the intimate details of his relationships with other celebrities and personal life to extensive analysis of his work, there’s certainly plenty here for Stoppard fans, but the book also serves as a sweeping history of the theatrical world itself over the course of Stoppard’s life.”
—Literary Hub
“An extraordinary record of a vital and evolving artistic life, replete with textured illuminations of the plays and their performances, and shaped by the arc of Stoppard’s exhilarating engagement with the world around him, and of his eventual awakening to his own past.”
—Harper's
"Hermione Lee’s exhaustively researched and detailed biography of the litterateur is empathic and intimate without trafficking in voyeurism, a consequence, no doubt, of having the cooperation of its celebrated subject. Within its pages are everything you could possibly want to know about the playwright who seemed to launch, full-blown, into upper atmosphere with the August 24, 1966 world premiere of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. . . . Tom Stoppard: A Life is an invaluable skeleton key, opening the works of one of the great literary geniuses of our generation to deeper interpretation than ever before."
—New York Theater News
"A comprehensive look at the life and work of one of the English language’s most accomplished playwrights. . . . With an easy style, Tom Stoppard tells the compelling story of a talented, beloved writer."
—DC Metro Theater Arts
"Lee (Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life) tackles the life and works of a playwright who started ‘without a cause, except the cause of good language and good art’ in this exhaustive biography of Tom Stoppard. To account for the prolific artist who “suddenly became famous in the late 1960s,” Lee makes use of diaries, drafts, and letters, as well as interviews. Stoppard was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937; two years later, his family moved to Singapore, then to India, and, finally, England. Lee sheds light on Stoppard’s relationship to his ‘Czech-ness’ (in the late 1960s he was indifferent, but in the late 2000s he ‘spoke with tender feelings about his origins’) and his Jewishness (he was unaware his mother was Jewish until 1993). His political activity is also covered, in particular his relationship with Václav Havel, a writer who became Czechoslovakia’s president and whose works Stoppard translated. Lee’s treatment of Stoppard’s plays (including 1966’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and 1974’s Travesties) break down the playwright’s process, detailing a play’s conception and production: Travesties, for example, was written in his ‘most intense period of fatherhood’ and took nine months. Lee’s account is a deeply detailed and valuable contribution to literary history."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"James Tait Black Prize winner Lee (emerita, English Literature, Oxford Univ.; Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life) is the perfect choice to write about Stoppard’s riveting life. She explores how his talky plays are filled with ideas, made human in the characters who give voice to them—Stoppard read Wittgenstein during the creation of Jumpers (1972); 2015’s The Hard Problem centers on the nature of consciousness. In the 1980s, Stoppard rediscovered his roots as a Czech and later a Jew—but he remains in his life and writing a committed, contented Englishman. Lee’s knowledge of all the key players and discussions of Stoppard’s writings are models of exposition, capturing a personality that is generous, supportive, and, well, fun. A major biography of a major, and appealing, literary figure, this study will jump off the shelves."
—Library Journal (starred review)
"Lee has triumphantly reached the full Stoppard."
—Mark Lawson, The Tablet
"He has entrusted his life to Hermione Lee and been spectacularly well rewarded . . . a highly readable eye-opener. . . . Lee skillfully interweaves the story of the life with analyses of the plays and suggests there is a far greater connection between the two than we had imagined. . . . This is a seriously good book and will remain the standard work for many years to come."
—Michael Billington, The Oldie
"This is a hugely impressive work. . . . He is a great playwright, and this is a great biography."
—Anthony Roche, Irish Times
"Stoppard is the latest in a long line of writers to undergo Lee’s forensic, critical, but lively and compassionate brand of literary biography. . . . Lee’s book is comprehensive and scholarly, but it’s very affectionate too."
—Anna Leszkiewicz, The New Statesman
"Impressive. . . . All those marvelous plays and now this prodigious book – how lucky can you get?"
—The Times Literary Supplement
"Informative, entertaining and empathetic."
—Colin Steele, The Canberra Times (Australia)
"Lee doesn't disappoint. . . . Lee hits home the now-unarguable truth that this most erudite and witty of scribes is also amongst the most psychologically penetrating. . . . Lee tracks with remarkable ease both the life and the art of a man resistant to undue examination who has submitted here to one of the fullest biographical excavations of recent times. And if you sometimes need to put the book to one side simply to absorb the density of material, you return to it as you might to a fresh Stoppard opening with unbridled avidity - not to mention, perhaps, a desert island wish to be a fly on the wall at one of his vaunted Chelsea Physic garden parties so as to watch the ever-exuberant ‘Stoppard carnival’, as this book so deliciously puts it, in full spin."
—Matt Wolf, The Arts Desk
“A biographical masterpiece. . . . Thorough, sympathetic, and eminently readable. . . . As she has done in her previous top-notch books, Lee carefully unwinds autobiographical links between her subject’s life and works. . . . As Lee masterfully explores both her subject’s life and work, she portrays a uniquely talented writer fully in tune with a wide variety of influences. She pays close attention to his screenplays, as well, including Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun, Shakespeare in Love (‘one of his best-loved pieces of work’), and a TV adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End. . . . This expansive portrait of a significant 20th-century artist is a biographical masterpiece. Stoppard chose his biographer well. Authoritative and exhaustive—another jewel in Lee’s literary crown.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Until I read Hermione Lee’s life of Tom Stoppard, I didn’t know it was possible to bask in envy. . . . Brilliant. . . . The research couldn’t be more thorough. Stoppard’s decade in provincial journalism in Bristol is perfectly evoked, for example: jazz clubs, coffee bars, kids chain-smoking in polo-necked black jerseys. I was one of them and went to some of the productions at the Old Vic that Stoppard reviewed, such as Look Back in Anger with Peter O’Toole as Jimmy Porter, so I know. The narrative moves fluently between the raffish, impoverished life he was living there, his main love affair and friendships—most of them kept up for a lifetime—and his journalism. Lee is fascinating on his early pieces. . . . Terrific. . . . [Lee is] wonderful at people, being warmly perceptive but not without sharpness. Her accounts of the waning of love affairs are sophisticated, never cynical. . . . Indispensable. . . . It’s broadly chronological, sympathetic, sensitive, often moving and, as we would expect of its author and hope of any book about Stoppard, stylishly written.”
—Jeremy Treglown, Literary Review
“An astute study of the dazzlingly clever playwright, which details the parties and famous friends, but also identifies the emotions that drive much of his work. The life of the man behind the plays is familiar from countless interviews and profiles, but Hermione Lee has been allowed to go backstage, enabling her to tell the story in unmatchable detail. . . . Perceptive, knowledgeable, stylish.”
—Stefan Collini, The Guardian
“Hermione Lee’s masterly biography of the playwright argues that emotion is as vital to his writing as ‘mental acrobatics’ . . . ‘I simply don’t like revealing myself,’ Tom Stoppard once said. ‘I am a very private sort of person.’ It takes a persistent, unflappable and penetrating biographer to take him on. Hermione Lee is perfect casting and Stoppard himself was, it turns out, casting director, inviting her to write this biography in what was, presumably, a judiciously pre-emptive strike to see off less capable contenders. . . . Lee is calm, unofficious and benign in her scrutiny. . . . Lee’s studies of the plays are masterly—especially of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) and Arcadia (1993)—and her book will be a formidable resource for Stoppard enthusiasts. . . . The biography celebrates the talent of a self-taught man (the voraciously scholarly Stoppard never went to university) but is, above all, about a triumph of temperament.”
—Kate Kellaway, The Observer
“Hermione Lee’s Tom Stoppard is a prodigious achievement. . . . [A] formidable book.”
—John Carey, The Sunday Times
“Lee is no real intruder. For seven years she has shadowed Stoppard’s life, and the result is a scrupulously authorized biography. . . . Her research is encyclopedic, her hero charismatic, her scope expansive. She captures the essential morality of Stoppard, a man who puts his faith not in heartless theory, but in his belief that ‘all political acts have a moral basis to them and are meaningless without it.’ Hers is an essential contribution to theater history.”
—Kate Maltby, Financial Times
“Lee’s biography captures Stoppard’s humor and kindness, his voracity for knowledge and his sociability. It throws light on his early life in London and his taste. . . . Anyone who wants to know about Stoppard will find most of the answers here.”
—Nick Curtis, Evening Standard
“So compellingly does Lee convey the exuberant and unpredictability of both his plays and his life that I’m not yearning to see a Stoppard play in the theater.”
—Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Daily Mail
“From his Czech beginnings, through schooling in India and stopping at every piece of work he has created, this biography is a highly detailed account of Stoppard’s extraordinary life.”
—Radio Times
“Hermione Lee is the dream biographer. . . . She is a meticulous researcher, tracking down every piece of available information, helped by access to her subject’s journal and letters to his beloved mother and other family members. To complement the hard graft and good writing style, she also brings to bear the skills of a critic who is able to analyze and explain work but also evaluate it. If any book beats Tom Stoppard: A Life to the theatre book prizes and quite probably some of those for more general literature, it will need to be very, very special.”
—Philip Fisher, The British Theatre Guide
“Sparkling.”
—Martin Chilton, The Independent
About the Author
HERMIONE LEE was president of Wolfson College (2008-2017) and is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. Her work includes biographies of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, and Penelope Fitzgerald (winner of the James Tait Black Prize and one of the New York Times's 10 Best Books of 2014). She has also written books on Elizabeth Bowen, Philip Roth, and Willa Cather. Lee was awarded the Biographers' Club Prize for Exceptional Contribution to Biography in 2018. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature, and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2003 she was made a CBE, and in 2013 she was made a Dame for services to literary scholarship.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
First Acts
G: What’s the first thing you remember?
R: Oh, let’s see . . . The first thing that comes into my head, you mean?
G: No—the first thing you remember.
R: Ah. (Pause.) No, it’s no good, it’s gone. It was a long time ago.
G: (patient but edged): You don’t get my meaning. What is the first thing after all the things you’ve forgotten?
R: Oh I see. (Pause.) I’ve forgotten the question.
The first thing he remembers, he thinks, comes from the winter of 1940 or 1941, when he was three or four. There was a man dressed up as a devil with a forked tail who was making the children frightened. They had to promise to be good, and all the children received a present: a tin boat, was it? This would have been St. Nicholas’s Eve, 5 December, when the Czech Santa Claus, Svatý Mikulāš, appears with two figures, an angel who rewards every good boy with favours and a devil who frightens the bad children to make them be good. He was Tomáš, or Tomik, Sträussler. His baby words would have been in his natal language, which he would soon forget. These children were not in Czechoslovakia. They were a little group of exiles, war refugees and survivors, in transit. They were in Singapore; and this is one of his very few memories of being in Singapore. Another was of being on a beach with his family. His father must have been there. But he couldn’t remember his father. He had disappeared from memory.
Children like these from Czechoslovakia were being scattered all over the world—to India, Kenya, Canada, Argentina, the United States, England. History seized them and chucked them about. Their lives would be shaped out of random acts of fate. Language, family, home, histories would survive, or be lost and erased, and sometimes eventually re-found, on the throw of a coin.
When asked, all his life, about his “Czech-ness,” Tom Stoppard’s answers have varied. When he suddenly became famous in the late 1960s, and all the interviewers asked him about his past, he said he was a “bounced Czech.” He told them he couldn’t speak Czech and he’d been speaking English for almost as long as he could remember. When the USSR invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, and his first wife thought he should be taking it more personally, he said that he “used to be Czech” but he didn’t feel Czech. When he went to Prague in 1977 to “do his bit for Charter 77,” he “felt no identification at all.” From then onwards, though, his friendship with Václav Havel, his involvement with human rights causes in Russia and Eastern Europe, his plays on those subjects, and, in the 1990s, his discoveries about his family, and his mother’s death, altered the way he talked about being Czech. In the 2000s, receiving an honorary doctorate at the University of Brno, and reminiscing with pride about his parents, he spoke with tender feeling about his origins: “I grew up far away, knowing that Moravia was where I come from and where my mother and father came from.” In a speech on the stage of the Czech National Theatre, when the Czech Republic entered the European Union in 2004, he talked about his “patriotic pride” in the Czech flag “when I and my elder brother and our mother were still a Czech family far from home.” And he ended the speech: “Some things are ineradicable.” Among these things, too, was his Jewishness, which, he came late to recognise, was also ineradicable.
As with the world histories that encircle and forge the destinies of characters in his plays, plays such as The Coast of Utopia, Rock ’n’ Roll and Leopoldstadt, behind his English life stands the history of Central and Eastern Europe: two hundred years of war, national conflicts, pogroms, exile and shifting borders. The ideological and national forces at work in the course of these centuries—imperialism, Nazism, Communism—also shaped the lives of his ancestors and his family, and composed his “ineradicable” origins.
The story goes back to territories right in the heart of Europe, the ancient lands of Bohemia (capital, Prague) and Moravia (capital, Brno), bordered by Poland, Germany, Austria, Hungary and Silesia. It goes back to a mixed ancestry of Czechs, Austrians and Germans, with Czech and German speakers living in the same towns, Jews and Catholics often linked in families by marriage. It goes back to generations of hard-working, bourgeois professionals, bringing up their families, keeping the peace, none of them artists or actors or musicians or philosophers, but earning their living on the railways or in shoe factories or in hospitals or schools, moving across borders between Vienna and Prague, Brno and Zlín, the city of Tomáš Sträussler’s birth in 1937.
Tomáš Sträussler’s name would change, and all the names have changed. Bohemia and Moravia were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, until its demise at the end of the First World War. In 1918, Czechoslovakia became an independent nation under its first president, Tomáš Masaryk. The Austro–Czech borders shifted. Part of Austria became Czech; place names were changed all along the border. When Nazi Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, it was renamed “The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.” Germany annexed the Sudetenland, the German-speaking borderlands of Bohemia and Moravia. When the Communists “liberated” the region at the end of the Second World War, in 1945—and expelled the minority German population—it became the Czechoslovak Republic. The town of Zlín, in Moravia, was renamed “Gottwaldov,” after the first Communist president of the Republic. Zlín stayed that way until 1990, after the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia and the fall of Communism in much of Eastern Europe. In 1993, Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Tom Stoppard’s father, Eugen Sträussler, born in 1908, had a quite common Austrian surname. A well-known early-twentieth-century Austrian neuropathologist, for instance, called Ernst Sträussler (no relation), was born in Moravia and worked in Prague and in Vienna. Eugen’s family, who were all Jewish, similarly crossed borders. His paternal grandparents, Lazar Sträussler and Fani (née Spitzer), and his maternal grandparents, Josef Bechynski and Hermine (née Stein), had a mix of Austrian and Moravian surnames.
Eugen’s father, Julius Sträussler, the son of Lazar and Fani, was born in 1878 in Březové, an ore-mining town in south-eastern Moravia. He worked on the rapidly expanding Austro-Hungarian railway network, and rose to be superintendent. He was, according to his future daughter-in-law, an autocratic and bossy character. He married twice, the second time to Eugen’s mother, Hildegard, daughter of Josef and Hermine Bechynski. They moved between Prague and Podmokly, in the north-west of Bohemia, on the Austrian border, where Eugen was born, and Vienna, where Eugen grew up and where his sister, Edit, was born. Julius Sträussler did his military service for the cause of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, from 1914 to 1918. (The future president, Masaryk, saw his people “answering the call-up in horror, as if going to the slaughter.”) Julius survived the war and took his family back to the newly independent Czechoslovakia in 1918, to live in Brno, on Francouzská Street, and take up the lucrative position of head of the Czechoslovak State Railways. In Brno, Eugen was a student in the newly established Medical Faculty of Masaryk University, and his sister, Edit, met and married Frantisek Hevelka, a law student who, decades later, would become a “Judge of the People’s Court” in Communist-ruled Brno. She worked in an office and had no children. The young Sträusslers were Czechs of the new, post-imperial, post-war world, full of aspiration and energy.
While Eugen was still a medical student, he took holiday jobs as a trainee doctor in the hospital at Zlín, about seventy kilometres away. There, on a skiing trip with some fellow students, he met a beautiful, dark, lively young woman called Marta (or Martha) Becková, who was training as a nurse and doing secretarial work for what she, and everyone else, called “The Firm.” They were both in their twenties; she was three years younger than him.
The Becks were less well established and comfortably off than the Sträusslers. Like the Sträusslers, they were Jewish Czechs, but they came from a different part of the country, and they made marriages, like many Czechs of the time, which intermixed Jewish and Catholic families. Marta’s father, Rudolf Beck, was a teacher, so the family had to move whenever he was appointed to another school. His parents, Marek and Anna, came from northern Bohemia, on the Sudeten–Czech border, near the town of Ústí, which when the Germans annexed the Sudetenland was renamed Aussig (and was infamous for a massacre of native Germans in 1945, at the end of the war). Rudolf Beck was born in 1874 in a town in the Sudetenland called Lovosice. Both parents died young, and he was brought up by an aunt and had to make his own way. His daughter Marta remembered him as a hard-working, kind and decent man, bringing “stacks of marking” home every day, smoking his pipe and doing the crossword for relaxation.
His wife, Regina Ornstein, came from a Bohemian family. Her three sisters lived in Prague and after her marriage she would visit them once a year; Marta remembered being told, as a regular item of family gossip, that “two of them did not speak to each other for years; they had a cat and spoke to each other via the cat.” But the eccentric Prague aunts were living in another world; the Becks hardly ever went there. Between 1898 and 1911, moving between small towns in the heart of Czechoslovakia, they had six children—one son, Ota (or Otto), and five daughters. Marta, born on 11 July 1911 in Rosice, near Brno, was the baby. When Marta was a teenager, the family moved to Zlín. Her mother, Regina, a much more demanding character than Rudolf, dominated the household; she was jealous of her husband, somewhat fussy and over-protective and given to making occasional scenes. By her sixties she was an invalid, suffering from heart disease. But for as long as she could, she worked non-stop, bringing up the children, doing the housework, cooking, and in her spare time reading the papers cover to cover—as her youngest daughter would, all her life.
Marta led a sheltered life, going to a bilingual and then a Czech school before starting work, and always accompanied by her mother as chaperone when she went out to a dance. The expectation was that the girls would live at home and then get married. The eldest, Wilma (or Vilemina), married a country doctor, Antonín, who died young. Berta married a German, Arnošt Kind, but the marriage did not last. Irma married Bartolomei Cekota, who would move his family to Argentina before the war, where he worked for Bata and became an extremely wealthy man. Only Anny, the middle daughter, stayed single.
Eugen kept coming over from Brno to Zlín to see Marta, on free first-class rail tickets provided by his father—who withdrew the favour when he found out his son was going to visit a girlfriend rather than for his medical education. But Marta was accepted by the Sträusslers—Hildegard, Eugen’s mother, was very kind to her. By the time Eugen graduated from Brno, in 1933, they had decided to get married. The custom was that the bride and her family paid for the wedding. Marta and her family were saving like mad, but Eugen knew there would be no dowry. A photograph of Marta in 1927, shown to her younger son many years later, made him understand what her standard of living had been: “The fact that my mother was beautiful had escaped me and the realisation was shocking, and then touching when I saw that the dress had obviously been run up at home, and the coat was a poor girl’s best.” Unlike many young Czech men of the time, Eugen was marrying for love, not for money. Looking back, she would consider this “heroic.”
Somehow her parents managed to provide them, as the custom was, with a furnished house, “carpets, curtains, everything from the first day, all table and bed-linen hand-embroidered.” Eugen got a job with “The Firm,” as a doctor in the hospital at Zlín, with the aim of becoming a heart and lung specialist. On 23 June 1934, he and Marta were married in Zlín. An enchanting photograph shows a warmly smiling, dark-eyed Marta looking joyously at the camera, wearing a lacy cream suit and jauntily tilted hat, with her husband gazing at her adoringly. He is wearing thick black spectacles and a formal suit, and has dark receding hair, a big toothy smile and huge ears. He looks very young, very intelligent and very much in love.
They settled down to a life in Zlín, living near the river Dřevnice on a pretty, leafy street called Zálešnà III, one of a grid of twelve identical, numbered Zálešnà streets, in a small square red-brick house (number 2619), with a flagstone path running through a little front garden, very like its neighbours, “with exactly 193 square feet for a living room, a bathroom and a kitchenette, and upstairs another 193 square feet for the bedroom.” There were minor variations—slightly larger houses for the doctors or managers, houses placed at an angle to each other for privacy and to break up the straight lines. But in each one there was a cellar for storage, a tiny kitchen and living room, two or three small bedrooms on the upper floor, and a garden. The houses were called batovky, because, like almost everything else in Zlín, they belonged to “The Firm.”
The Firm was the shoe-making company Bata, which owned, built, designed and managed the house, the street, the hospital and the town, and controlled the employment, income and lives of most of Zlín’s inhabitants. The Firm’s policies and administrative decisions dominated the life of the young Sträusslers and would play a part in their children’s journeys into the world, like those two children setting out on their long path in the advertisement of Bata’s English rivals, Start-Rite, with the motto: “Children’s Shoes Have Far to Go.”
Zlín, since the turn of the century, was Bata. This otherwise unremarkable Moravian town, 250 kilometres south-east of Prague (about four hours on the train), nestled in a deep valley between high hills, with a river running through it, surrounded by farmlands, mountains and forests, and once known mainly for its plum brandy, slivovitz, became the site of a social and industrial project with a global reach, a project which was, in its own way, as ambitious and unremitting as any empire or ideological movement.
The Bata shoe factory began as a cobbler’s workshop in Zlín in the 1880s. Through the next generations of the Bata family, it became a global enterprise and, in its home town of Zlín, a highly controlled community. “Bata-isation” became, after 1918, a symbol of the new independent Czechoslovakia. Amazingly, it survived two world wars, family feuds, the German occupation and the Communist regime. Tomáš Bata, the cobbler’s son who founded the Bata empire, modelled it on Henry Ford’s assembly-line theory. Everything was geared to speed, productivity, profit and competition. His factory survived the Great War by supplying thousands of boots to the Austro-Hungarian army. His half-brother Jan Antonín, who took over the business in 1932 after Tomáš’s death in an air crash (flying in his own aeroplane from Bata’s own airport), expanded the enterprise to Africa, Canada, France, South America, Singapore, Malaysia and India—where a city called Batanagar was founded. “Bata shoes conquer the world,” was the message. These Bata outposts would be crucial way-marks in the Stoppard story.
