DOMINIC CAVENDISH
The Smoking ng Diaries by Simon Gray In this daily series, our arts critics choose comforting works for these tough times
Much like smoking, the playwright Simon Gray became increasingly frowned upon from the Nineties onwards.
An inamorato of the cigarette, puffing up to 65 a day – refusing to desist despite the lung cancer that claimed him in 2008 – he was also held to incarnate a dying breed of theatre animal: literate, middlebrow, middle-class, safe.
Compared to his pal Harold Pinter, he entered the millennium looking like a footnote.
Yet in his diary writing, which began in 1985 with a wryly bemused account of the premiere production of The Common Pursuit (directed by Pinter) and reached its apotheosis with The Smoking Diaries trilogy (plus the valedictory Coda), he proved a giant.
Although the broad accusation that his plays were too conventional might stand, even if it’s far too sweeping, his closing round of diaries – moving away from detailing his adventures in theatreland – betrays a dazzling experimental zest.
At one level, they’re exactly what you need from lockdown in terms of warm reassurance. The writing has a breathy intimacy, as one wry thought tumbles out after another, like an indiscreet postcard (indeed there are a lot of dispatches from holiday trips and treats).
But the off-the-cuff style glints with genius: he dives into the past, grapples with it, gropes to define the present moment too, finding it elusive. And thereby he hits the mark.
Contemplating others’ foibles and his own fallibilities, he catches something about his life and the human condition per se; throwing off syntactical constraints, he bares his complex synaptic activity.
Whether recalling the urges of adolescence or noting the privations of Alzheimer’s in the pitiful sight of a fellow beachgoer, the prose bubbles with spontaneity and terrier-like tenacity, throwing down the gauntlet to other writers, refusing to toe any PC line.
On the page, it’s compulsive stuff but it reaches perfection in the recording by Gray himself (available on Audible.com).
The rapid, plummy voice is a husky delight, as if marinated in an ashtray. Years after his death, there he is, keeping you entertained, offering a shareable stoicism.
Furthermore, you can bask in bygone holiday escapes of the kind that lockdown prevents while being made freshly acquainted with the joy of cogitation, our ability to alchemise nothings into talking points. I’ve only revisited the first volume, but once again I’m totally addicted.