Tom Stoppard - Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon: A Novel

Lord Malquist and Mr Moon

PLAYS

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Enter a Free Man

The Real Inspector Hound

After Margritte

Jumpers

Travesties

Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land

Every Good Boy Deserves Favour

Night and Day

Doggs Hamlet and Cahoots Macbeth

The Real Thing

Rough Crossing

Hapgood

Arcadia

Indian Ink

The Invention of Love

Voyage: The Coast of Utopia Part I

Shipwreck: The Coast of Utopia Part II

Salvage: The Coast of Utopia Part III

TELEVISION SCRIPTS

A Separate Peace

Teeth

Another Moon Called Earth

Neutral Ground

Professional Foul

Squaring the Circle

RADIO PLAYS

The Dissolution of Dominic Boot

M Is for Moon Among Other Things

If Youre Glad Ill Be Frank

Alberts Bridge

Where Are They Now?

Artist Descending a Staircase

The Dog It Was That Died

In the Native State

SCREENPLAYS

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

Shakespeare in Love (with Marc Norman)

FICTION

Lord Malquist and Mr Moon

TOM STOPPARD

Copyright 1966 by Tom Stoppard
Introduction copyright 2005 by Tom Stoppard

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including
information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from
the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of
the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission
to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to
Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

Printed in the United States of America
Published simultaneously in Canada

First published in 1966 by Ballantine Books

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stoppard, Tom.
Lord Malquist and Mr Moon / Tom Stoppard.
p. cm.
eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9537-1
I. Title: Lord Malquist and Mr Moon. II. Title.
PR6069.T6L6 2006

823.914dc22 2006040958

Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003

Distributed by Publishers Group West

www.groveatlantic.com

ON THE RE-PUBLICATION of his only novel The Rock Pool ten years after its first appearance, Cyril Connolly remarked somewhere that here was the proof that his novel had lasted. Im writing this from memory. It may be that Connolly merely observed that what was proven was that his novel had escaped oblivion, which would not be quite the same thing. But that was the gist. Lord Malquist and Mr Moon was published forty years ago (or thirty-nine and a bit) by Anthony Blond, and has turned up sporadically under different imprints a few times since. And yet it seems to me that my novel has spent its whole life in oblivion. Occasionally I meet someone who claims to have read it, but I always take this to be a form of politeness. I dont think I have ever seen a copy on anyones bookshelf but mine. I cant remember its ever having been reviewed, but I see that Panther disinterred an amiable paragraph by Isabel Quigly in the Sunday Telegraph, and that Faber was able to quote three provincial newspapers on the 1980 paperback and (significantly?) the same three the next time they went in to bat for me.

I have three copies of the first edition, which sold in double figures, speaking loosely; there was a moment when Blonds Lord Malquist and Mr Moon sold 67 copies, or some such number, in Venezuela a mystery I never solved. I have never been to Venezuela. I remember going into Foyles bookshop in 1966 and being gratified to see a stack of Malquist-and-Moons on the New Fiction table. I counted them; there were twelve. A week or two later I went in again; there they were. I counted them again; there were thirteen! I saw at once what was happening. People were leaving my book at bookshops.

And now this. Could it be that my innocent novel has been sucked into a money-laundering operation fronted by an apparently respectable publisher? Anyway, in the absence of any public demand that Im aware of, and in tribute to Fabers never-say-die spirit, I have offered to write an Introduction to yet another edition of this little known but highly imaginative and theatrical black comedy, with a cunningly contrived denouement whose absurdity is chillingly logical (Glasgow Herald). Furthermore, I have been looking into it.

*****

In 1964 I spent a few months in what was then called West Berlin in company with a handful of promising young playwrights, beneficiaries of the Ford Foundation. We lived in a house by the water at Wansee and were told we could spend our time doing anything we liked, preferably writing something. I spent a long time over a squib called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear. In another room, Derek Marlowe (envied author of a play called Seven Who Were Hanged, which I think was performed at the Royal Court) was writing a play with a scarecrow in it. Piers Paul Read was writing his first novel, Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx. This colloquium was my first major perk. I was impressed by Piers who seemed to be an old hand on the writers perks scene. I cut out a whisky ad from a magazine and stuck it on his door As long as youre up, get me a Grant. When we came back to England, we three shared a flat, once more each writing in his own room. In swinging London, it was Derek who seemed the most connected. He would tell us about his new friends who were in a rock band, The Who. He played Youve Lost That Lovin Feeling by the Righteous Brothers on repeat while writing a spy novel. Piers and I used to tell him he was far too late to jump on the le Carr bandwagon, but one day he came home with an advance from Gollancz which seemed like riches, and quite soon he sold the film rights. That shut us up. Derek is dead before his time, leaving several admired novels behind him, none of which, I think, sold as well as A Dandy in Aspic.

Anthony Blond was a friend of my agent Kenneth Ewing. One day, Kenneth said that Anthony was willing to commission a novel from me. Such things happened on Planet 1965. I had no novel to write but I definitely wanted to be a published novelist so, as soon as I had done with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (and in between writing a rent-paying serial for the BBC World Service about an Arab medical student in London), I got to work on my typewriter. To my amazement, Anthony at first jibbed at publishing the result but he relented and I remember receiving a telegram from Kenneth: BLOND WILL PUBLISH AND BE DAMNED. The book came out pretty much at the same time as the first production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at the 1966 Edinburgh Festival. I had high hopes for the novel and very few for the play.

Its years since I opened Lord Malquist and Mr Moon. In opening it now, the first thing that catches my eye is a flourish which I used in my play I clutch at straws, but what goods a brick to a drowning man?, Moon and Guildenstern ask in perfect harmony. Almost every random page brings back a memory of magpie pickings from (mostly) other people. I feel tolerably safe from discovery. Who would guess (as I instantly remembered) that when Malquist speaks of the mourning of (the unnamed) Churchill being imposed upon a sentimental people, I was consciously recalling a favourite and far superior sentence in A. J. Lieblings account of an English boxer years earlier: a fat man whose gift for public suffering endeared him to a sentimental people? My trick mind still retrieves such shiny objects intact even though I can never remember my mobile phone number. On another page I find a reference to the 13th-century Sir John Wallop who so smote the French at sea that he gave a word to the language. This came from a collection of pieces by John Squire with which I soothed myself during flu at that time. The book is on the shelves behind me, inscribed by Squire, and somewhere in it is Malquists purloined observation that the captain of Surrey kept a pair of gold scissors in his waistcoat pocket for cutting his return ticket.