A glittering party was given last Saturday by Sabrina Stoppard in the Chelsea Physic Garden to celebrate the 80th birthday of her husband Tom. Sir Tom Stoppard, OM, CBE, benign and dignified, mingled with his guests like the Sun King, Louis XIV, moving among his courtiers in the gardens of Versailles. The enchanting Sabrina seemed to have stepped out of a painting by Watteau; and among the guests there was a bevy of stars and celebrities, today’s equivalent of the noblesse de robe.
My friendship with Tom Stoppard dates from 1964 when we enrolled in an academy for creative writing in West Berlin, the Literarisches Colloquium. The idea of teaching creative writing was then almost unknown in Europe, but the director of the Colloquium, Walter Hasenclever, had come across it in the United States where he had taken refuge from the Nazis during the war. At the time, the Ford Foundation was funding an attempt to raise the profile of the then beleaguered West Berlin by enticing artists and writers with generous stipends to come and live in the city, and so make it a glittering centre of culture like Paris during the Belle Époque. Hasenclever persuaded the organiser of this enterprise, Shepard Stone, who happened to be his brother-in-law, that a school for creative writing should be included in the programme.
