by David Lodge
SIMON GRAY, WHO died suddenly in August 2008 – why do I say ‘suddenly’, implying that his death was unexpected, when as he knew, and all the world knew, all his readers anyway, he had been suffering from several life-threatening maladies for years, including prostate cancer, of which his doctor said that there was no point in worrying about it since he would almost certainly die of one of the other things that were wrong with him before the prostate cancer could kill him, which turned out to be true – and yet it was sudden, his death, even if not unexpected, which is not quite the same as expected, and was a shock to his friends, to me anyway, who counted myself among them, though not a close one.
Thus might Simon Gray himself have begun this essay, in the late style of his own diaries, a free-flowing stream of report and reminiscence which perpetually eddies back to question its own accuracy and authenticity. I first met him when I was Henfield Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia in the summer term of 1977. One of my duties was inviting other writers to come and talk about their work, and having greatly enjoyed his plays Butley, and Otherwise Engaged, and others written for television, I invited him. Gray was at that time combining his playwriting career with a lectureship in the English Department of Queen Mary College London, and I thought that he might, like myself, find it easier to talk about his creative work away from his academic home. Anyway he accepted, and arrived at my accommodation on the campus grasping a bottle of malt whisky, which was empty when he left the next morning. Perhaps because of the whisky, though he drank most of it, I don’t have a very detailed memory of his visit. It was agreeable enough, but no instant bonding occurred. He struck me as being either shy or guarded, I couldn’t decide which, and he had not at that date started publishing his very unguarded diaries.
We met occasionally after that, usually by accident – in a theatre bar, on a West End pavement, at a literary festival in Toronto – but exchanged mutually complimentary notes about each other’s work from time to time, more frequently in later years. In the summer of 2007 we realised a long-mooted plan to have dinner together with our wives in London, but Simon and Victoria seemed subdued that evening (with good reason – I learned later he had just been diagnosed as having lung cancer) and the background noise in the crowded restaurant was trying to my imperfect hearing, so it was a slightly disappointing evening. The last postcard I received from Simon, in the following year, urged that we should repeat the occasion in a more sympathetic venue. A few weeks later, before I could follow up the suggestion, he was dead.
It was, then, a tenuous relationship in terms of personal contact, and yet through the diaries I, for my part at least, acquired a sense of shared intimacy with Simon Gray. From the very first one, An Unnatural Pursuit (1985), I was a devotee of these books, buying them as soon as they appeared, and finishing them with a sigh of regret, having devoured them with the kind of trance-like pleasure that I associate with childhood reading, rather than the analytical attention of the professional critic. Rereading them after his death for the purpose of writing this tribute was enormously enjoyable, not least for the renewed laughter they provoked; but I was also made aware of their evolution into a wholly original style of journal-writing, and of their increasingly confessional nature.
An Unnatural Pursuit and its successor, How’s That For Telling ’Em, Fat Lady? (1988), were both written during, and mostly about, the production of a play – in fact the same play, The Common Pursuit (1984), a key work in Gray’s oeuvre. The title is that of a well-known collection of essays by F.R. Leavis, who took it in his turn from T.S. Eliot’s definition of the aim of literary criticism, ‘the common pursuit of true judgment’. It was to sit at the feet of Leavis that young Gray went to Cambridge to read English, and he stayed on there for many years as a postgraduate and part-time tutor, though not a devout Leavisite. (Gray’s complex relationship to Leavis and his position in the Cambridge English Faculty is wittily and frankly anatomised in two essays appended to An Unnatural Pursuit.) The title of the play may also echo Thomas Jefferson’s phrase, ‘the pursuit of happiness’, for it is about a group of Cambridge graduates, five men and one woman, who fail to fulfil their promise or their hopes through a combination of circumstance and character. The first scene shows them as students involved in the publication of a literary magazine of which one of them is the editor (a character based on Gray’s friend, the poet and critic Ian Hamilton); the second and third show him struggling with the same task nine years later in the real world of publishing, variously helped and hindered by the others; and the fourth and final scene poignantly returns them, by means of a revolve, to the hopeful high spirits of the opening scene.
Someone who had read an amusingly candid article of Gray’s called ‘Flops and Other Fragments’ published in 1982 suggested that he should keep a diary of his next production, and that was how An Unnatural Pursuit and all its successors came into existence. He recorded notes on the progress of The Common Pursuit almost daily on a tape recorder, and lightly edited the resulting transcripts, adding corrections and afterthoughts in footnotes. The diary begins on 25 November 1983 when, after working through the night, fuelled by cigarettes and malt whisky, he ‘finishes’ the play, i.e. finishes a draft with which he is sufficiently satisfied to try and get it performed. ‘This, for me, is the only moment of pure happiness I ever experience in the playwriting business,’ he notes, well aware that the path to production is never a smooth one, especially in the commercial theatre where he mainly worked. Of all the diaries this is the one most fully focused on a single play, and I know of no better account of the highs and lows, the suspense, frustration, elation, and volatile personal interaction, involved in putting on a play, as seen from the writer’s point of view. Finding a producer, finding a director, finding a theatre, casting the play, developing and revising the play in rehearsal, showing it to an audience for the first time, showing it to the critics at press night, waiting to see if it is going to be a hit or a flop: every stage in the process is fraught with potential euphoria or despair.
In this case only the attachment of a director was unproblematic. Harold Pinter, who had directed several of Simon’s previous plays, liked The Common Pursuit and was willing to direct. Surprisingly, nowhere in the diaries does the playwright explain how they first became friends and collaborators, but it was the most important relationship in his professional life – and perhaps in his personal life too, outside his family. In background and character they were very different, as were their plays – but this was probably the foundation of their partnership. Pinter wouldn’t have wanted to direct imitations of his own distinctive and innovative form of drama, but he appreciated the wit and craftsmanship of Gray’s plays and enjoyed bringing them to life on the stage.
The stage in this case was the Lyric, Hammersmith, from which they hoped to transfer the play, if it was successful, to the West End. It pleased its audiences, and a majority of the critics, but the project failed for lack of a theatre and because of some treachery, Gray thought, on the part of the producers. The story ends with an emotional and rather drunken dinner party for the cast after the last performance at the Lyric, at which Pinter and Gray get into a furious argument based on a mutual misunderstanding, and the latter concludes: ‘Perhaps the problem with keeping a diary, and the reason I’ll never keep another one, is that one records only the things one would prefer to forget.’ Fortunately for us he did not keep this resolution.
An Unnatural Pursuit contains many slyly amusing asides (as when Pinter blames a hangover on the dyspeptic effects of white wine, and Gray comments, ‘I’ve observed that quite a few people, amongst them myself, consider that white wine is an alternative to alcohol, which is probably a mistake’) but no hilarious comic set-pieces like those in its sequel, How’s That For Telling ’Em, Fat Lady? Its title is the punch line of a joke which has no particular relevance to the narrative. Subtitled A Short Life in the American Theatre, it tells the story, by the same tape-recorded method as before, of Gra
y’s participation in American productions of two of his plays, The Common Pursuit in Los Angeles, and Dog Days in Dallas, Texas.
The Matrix in Los Angeles is a tiny theatre with only ninety-nine seats, which exempts it from Equity regulations. The actors and director and designers are unpaid because they are unemployed and would rather work for nothing than do nothing, while Simon Gray ‘will go anywhere, and do anything’ to get one of his plays produced, especially The Common Pursuit, and hopes this production might lead to one in New York. The disproportion between the small scale of the event and the immense amount of anxiety, conflict and paranoia it generates among those involved is one source of the comedy. Another is the persona of the homesick dramatist himself, who experiences as much ‘irritation, exhaustion, frustration’ outside the theatre as inside it. His baffled encounters with Californians in the most ordinary situations constantly illustrate the adage that England and America are two countries divided by a common language. Though living in the world capital of the movie industry he is unable to rent a VCR machine that works, a farcical saga that goes on for days and weeks. In Dallas, a wasteland of freeways and parking lots, punctuated by tower blocks whose glazed and exposed elevators give him vertigo, his only means of escape from a female interviewer made drunkenly libidinous by the champagne he orders is to allow her to drive him to a quickly invented appointment at the theatre, a vividly described journey ‘that in real time lasted only fifteen minutes, but in true time lasted a couple of months, to be deducted in due course, no doubt, from my account’. All the while Gray himself is consuming amazing quantities of booze – malt whisky at night and champagne by day from breakfast onwards. He does, however, give up smoking, by chewing nicotine gum in such quantities that he has permanent indigestion. The theatrical story for once has a happy ending – The Common Pursuit gets to New York and is a hit – but not before a crisis in one of the previews drives him to buy a pack of cigarettes. ‘I smoked my way through them, one after the other and sometimes probably two simultaneously, and felt – I suppose this is the worst part – such joy, such release to have the murderous old friend swirling about in the lungs again.’
It is likely that Gray was genetically disposed to these addictions. We learn from later diaries that his mother, though an Olympic athlete in youth, was a heavy smoker who died of lung cancer at fifty-nine, and his beloved younger brother Piers died of alcoholism at the age of forty-nine. The high stress level of Simon’s chosen profession (itself a kind of psychological addiction, as he was well aware) did not make it any easier for him to kick these habits, and their effects become an increasingly grim motif threaded through the comic reportage and ironic introspection of the diaries.
The Common Pursuit did eventually make it to the West End in 1988, where it had a successful run with a cast of young actors who had achieved celebrity via stand-up comedy and television, notably Stephen Fry and Rik Mayall, and it was through this connection that in 1995 these two actors were cast to play the leading roles in Cell Mates, which Gray himself directed, a play about the convicted spy George Blake and Sean Bourke, the petty criminal who helped him escape from Wormwood Scrubs. This production created a front-page news story when Fry disappeared two days after the opening night, leaving on his answerphone the cryptic message, ‘I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry.’ At first it was feared that he might have committed suicide, but in due course he turned up in Bruges, having suffered a catastrophic attack of stage fright apparently triggered by an unkind review of his performance.
Simon Gray told the story from his point of view in Fat Chance, published later that year. Although it belongs thematically with the previous diaries, it is not written in diary form. Nor was it dictated, a method which tends to string clauses together in a manner that resembles casual speech. Fat Chance is very much a written book, with a more complex syntax and temporal structure than its predecessors. The narrative shifts backwards and forwards in time to bring out foreshadowings of the disaster being prepared by fate for the unwitting playwright. ‘A very obscure place, the future. But let us dip quickly into it now, to when it’s become the past, to get it over with . . . there was far worse to come . . .’ That is a representative quote. It is hard to say which was worst for Gray – learning of the disappearance of his lead actor hours after he had been told the play was going to be a box-office hit, or the failure of heroic efforts to rescue it with a replacement actor, or the fact that the media unjustly attributed Fry’s breakdown to the quality of the play, making Gray responsible for the whole debacle. The playwright made public statements at the time which he later regretted, but Fat Chance is a powerful expression of controlled anger.
Enter a Fox (2001) reverts to the diary form, but in a new key. Gray ruminates wryly on the fate of his recent play The Late Middle Classes, which failed to move from its first production outside London to the West End although it was later revealed that the judges of the Evening Standard Theatre Awards would probably have given it the prize for Best Play if it had; confesses he is blocked on his work in progress; wonders if in fact he has another play in him; refers to a fairly recent emergency operation which removed ‘a yard or so’ of his intestine and obliged him to give up drinking (which of course has made him even more dependent on smoking); records symptoms of increasing general debility; and describes the rather aimless repetitive routine, almost like a Beckett character’s, of his daily life. The diary is written, not dictated, but it sounds as if it is spoken, or as if Gray is speaking to himself, an interior monologue. It was a prose style which he further developed into a brilliantly effective instrument of self-expression in the acclaimed sequence of books referred to collectively by the title of the first of them, The Smoking Diaries, which brought him a new and wider audience in his later years. They are available on DVDs, very well read by the author himself, and there is no better way to enjoy them.
The first volume, published in 2004, begins with the author attaining the age of senior citizenship, entitling him, he hopes, to
. . . a respectful attention when I speak, unfailing assistance when I stumble or lurch, and absence of registration when I do the things I’ve been doing more and more frequently recently, but have struggled to keep under wraps – belching, farting, dribbling, wheezing . . . Thus am I, at sixty-five and a day. Thus he is at sixty-five and a day, a farter, a belcher, a dribbler, and a what else did I say I did, farting, belching, dribbling, oh yes, wheezing. But then as I smoke something like sixty-five cigarettes a day people are likely to continue with their inevitable ‘Well, if you insist on getting through three packets, etc.’ to which I will reply, as always – actually I can’t remember what I always reply, and how could I, when I don’t believe anyone, even my doctors, ever says anything like, ‘Well, if you will insist, etc.’ In fact, I’m merely reporting a conversation I have with myself, quite often, when I find myself wheezing my way not only up but down the stairs, and when I recover from dizzy spells after pulling on my socks, tying up my shoelaces, two very distinct acts.
Classical rhetoricians had a catalogue of technical terms for the ways in which Gray incorporates into his text his false starts, mistakes, repetitions, digressions and self-critical reflections, instead of deleting or emending them as good prose normally requires, but you don’t have to know your apoplanesis from your aposiopesis to appreciate the effects of such tropes: spontaneity, comedy, honesty. It’s a style that reminds one occasionally of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and modernist stream-of-consciousness novels, but it is quite uniquely Gray’s, the verbal manifestation of the man himself, unprotected by any fictional mask, naked and quite frequently ashamed.
Always we are made conscious of the act of writing itself. Typically Gray begins a sequence by describing himself sitting in his study, or at a favourite table in a Barbados beach hotel, or on a terrace in Spetses, writing with a ballpoint on a yellow legal pad, and of course smoking, usually alone in the small hours, but sometimes in the midst of other people whom he describes and eavesdr
ops on, before dredging up some memory from the past. Always the prose seems inseparable from the meandering train of thought it articulates, and at one point in the second volume of the series, The Year of the Jouncer, Gray actually declares that he will never revise anything in future: ‘you are only what you write, never what you rewrite.’ Even if he kept this resolution to the letter (which I doubt) he eventually discovered for himself the deconstructionist catch-22: ‘as soon as I’ve written a sentence I’ve already changed my life, or at least added to it, so that it’s impossible ever to catch myself up into a state of completeness.’ Nevertheless he narrowed the gap to as fine a point as any writer I can think of.
Julian Barnes described The Smoking Diaries as ‘the funniest book I’ve read all year’, and Philip Hensher as ‘one of the funniest books I have ever read in my life’. It is indeed laugh-out-loud funny at many points, as are its sequels, The Year of the Jouncer (2006) and The Last Cigarette (2008), though it is hard to illustrate this quality without impracticably long quotation, since so much of the humour depends upon context and timing – the unexpected qualification, or the subtly delayed punch line to an extended anecdote, like the theatrical horror-story in The Year of the Jouncer about a drunken director who completely wrecks a production of one of Gray’s plays, concluding with the revelation that the director was Gray himself. He had a gift for exploiting the comic possibilities of more ordinary experiences, like travel and tourism, which makes a journey to Spetses via Athens in The Last Cigarette into a hilarious epic of frustration, discomfort and humiliation. Yes, these books are very funny, and will always be read for the liberating laughter they provoke. But rereading them in the shadow of Simon’s death I was struck by how dark they are too, how insistent is the underlying note of self-loathing and despair. ‘God, I hate myself’ he mentally exclaims early in The Smoking Diaries, and it is a note that is sounded with increasing frequency in these books. He became his own severest critic and judge.