I had no idea that sheets cost the same as a small BMW

The NYT Magazine profile of Tom Stoppard is, if less than enlightening about the man as a playwright, fairly smart in terms of dissecting the mystery of Stoppard as a man. Writer Daphne Merkin lets us know that “Stoppard strikes me as an inveterately bookish man, one more passionately taken up with the life of the mind than with his aversion to being mistaken for a Serious Issues kind of playwright would indicate,” which strikes me as rather similar to what Robert Brustein recently wrote about Samuel Beckett: “That this most solitary and unengaged of writers should have chosen the most social of the arts as his favored medium is also anomalous.” Now, as then, this strikes me as no surprise. Drama is very much the art of breaking down and critiquing relationships, and it makes sense that those most successful at it are thoughtful outsiders. Shouldn’t we expect those who are especially gifted at faking human interaction to be wily introverts?

And of course, this being the New York Times, Merkin is obligated to gush over Stoppard’s European refinement:

Stoppard seems to be a man of discerning and somewhat rarefied tastes; he writes with a fountain pen (no Uniballs for him) and has a house in the French countryside to retreat to when he’s not in London.

I believe it is true that nothing makes an NYT reporter swoon like fountain pens and French country homes. (That's you, Judith Warner.)