Lord Malquist & Mr. Moon: A Novel

Lord Malquist and Mr Moon

P
LAYS

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

Dogg’s Hamlet and Cahoot’s 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
*

T
ELEVISION
S
CRIPTS

A Separate Peace

Teeth

Another Moon Called Earth

Neutral Ground

Professional Foul
*

Squaring the Circle

R
ADIO
P
LAYS

The Dissolution of Dominic Boot

“M” Is for Moon Among Other Things

If You’re Glad I’ll Be Frank

Albert’s Bridge

Where Are They Now?

Artist Descending a Staircase

The Dog It Was That Died

In the Native State

S
CREENPLAYS

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

Shakespeare in Love (with Marc Norman)

F
ICTION

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’.914—dc22                           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. I’m 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 don’t think I have ever seen a copy on anyone’s bookshelf but mine. I can’t 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 Blond’s
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 I’m aware of, and in tribute to Faber’s 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 you’re 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 ‘You’ve 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 Carré 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.

It’s 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 good’s 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. Liebling’s 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 Malquist’s purloined observation that ‘the captain of Surrey kept a pair of gold scissors in his waistcoat pocket for cutting his return ticket’.

Overtaken by nostalgia, I could go on in this vein. But, turning critical, I detect aspects of more interest. Years later, in the theatre, I had a director who used to berate me for what he called ‘retroactive exposition’, and I see that I was already up to my tricks in the first chapter – a series of disconnected ‘absurd’ episodes awaiting their rational explanation. In fact, after years of thinking of myself as an erratic writer whose plays had much more to disconnect than to connect them, I can’t help noticing the conscious and unconscious recycling. I remembered that I gave Moon’s name to one of the two critics in
The Real Inspector Hound
but I had utterly forgotten that the second critic, Birdboot, shared his name with Malquist’s butler. These facts have absolutely no significance. ‘We’re spectators,’ says Rosencrantz to Guildenstern, or the other way round, and the chapter heading ‘Spectator as Hero’ would have done well enough as a title equally for the novel or the play, and even for the author’s philosophy of art in those happy days.

ONE
Dramatis Personœ and Other Coincidences

TWO
A Couple of Deaths and Exits

THREE
Chronicler of the Time

FOUR
Spectator as Hero

FIVE
The Funeral of the Year

SIX
An Honourable Death

Dramatis Personœ and Other Coincidences