E-Paper
The Smoking Diaries
Playright Simon Gray's thoughts put together "as he had them, honestly, turbulently, digressively expressed".
The Smoking Diaries
Simon Gray
Granta
2004
Memoir
Pages: 240
Price: £ 9.25
ISBN: 186207688X
Hardcover
On Page 1 of this dark, delightful memoir, you come across a sentence (the third in the book since we are crunching a few numbers here) that, at 21 lines, fills the better part of the opening page and spills on to Page 2. Then on Page 3, you come across a sentence that, at 22 lines, pretty much takes care of that page.
They hurtle towards you in breathless rushes, these sentences, dancing to the rhythm of thought and speech, filled with the inflections of pauses and the charm of asides. Between them, they cover subjects that range from policemen's boots, parental anxiety, bodily functions and nuggets of information about the author's age, status and health. Animated with the randomness of the best of stream-of-consciousness writing, these two sentences set the tone for the rest of the book. And the rest of the book, all 230 pages of it, does not merely live up to the promise of these first few pages: Things actually get better as they go along.
Simon Gray is not a terribly well known figure in India but he happens to be one of Britain's most acclaimed playwrights. An author of over 30 plays and several novels, Gray decided, when he turned 65, to keep a diary. It is not, his publisher tells us, "a careful honing of the day's events with a view to posterity but an account of his thoughts as he had them, honestly, turbulently, digressively expressed".
Gray writes with lyricism (about his schooldays); with humour (about pulp fiction writer Hank Janson: "the only writer who changes my life for the better in any practical and measurable way"); with weary sarcasm (about Auden: "how does he rate himself in terms of lowness and dishonesty?"); with self-deprecation ("I make almost no money from my plays, not even those from my golden past that are still sometimes politely referred to as 'classics' which of course they can't be because one of the attributes of a classic is that it is frequently to be found on the stage"). But despite its laugh-aloud moments, this is, more than anything else, an elegiac meditation on old age, infirmity and death.
Death is a constant, brooding presence. Ian Hamilton, Gray's friend, poet, editor and the man who is credited with nurturing an entire generation of writers, including like Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes, dies of cancer during the course of his book. Another of Gray's close friends, the playwright Harold Pinter, is diagnosed with cancer. Gray writes of his brother Piers dying from alcoholism at the age of 49. And before the book runs its course, the author himself has been told that he has cancer — but has also been told that he need not worry because his other organs will give up on him (a consequence of his four-bottles-of-champagne-a-day habit) before the cancer really gets to him.
"I will never... rewrite any part of this, on I go and on — feckless, thoughtless, cruel and stupid, it doesn't matter, because in this case you are only what you write, never what you rewrite," Gray writes to convince us of how spontaneous this book is. But of course it isn't. It is artfully artless writing, writing that seems to convey the smell of ink drying on the author's yellow pad. It is compelling and persuasive stuff. Gray does what the best of diarists can do: he convinces the reader that this is a first and only draft.
