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The Smoking Diaries
By Simon Gray
Granta £7.99
243 pages
Dateline: 12th February, 2006
If you fancy a rattling good read then you could do far worse than
The Smoking Diaries. In telling much about the life of Simon
Gray, albeit in oblique ways, they might be regarded as companion pieces
to his major work - the drinking plays.
Gray has an addictive personality and even having achieved the normal
retirement age, daily manages to smoke one cigarette for each year of
his life. The drinking though stopped dead as he almost achieved that
state, falling into a coma in a restaurant, the main consequence of
which was abstinence from alcohol, replaced by Diet Coke.
The Smoking Diaries is something of a misnomer for these stream-of-consciousness
memoirs detail not only the life of an ageing playwright with something
of a block but also look backwards candidly to memorable and often amusing
events from his colourful life.
The subject-matter is certainly widespread, covering the period from
early childhood, as the middle son of an adulterous pathologist and
his athletic wife, through a burgeoning career as a juvenile fraudster
to tales of love and death.
This is all intermingled with diary entries from the early 21st century
in which prominent figures include the ailing Harold Pinter with his
wife Lady Antonia Fraser, the Grays' best friends and biographer Ian
Hamilton who is sadly recollected, becoming a major character in the
book only after his premature death.
The diaries themselves were written either late at night in Holland
Park, on holidays in sunny Barbados o, at the end, on a disastrous speaking
trip to Canada.
In a very relaxed style, Gray reveals much about himself, his life,
family and friends. On occasions too he demonstrates an interest in
people and sharp observation of their foibles that show through in his
plays and he also provides off-beam insights into that unusual life-encompassing
vocation.
In many ways, Simon Gray is a throwback to an earlier age. His resentment
at being forced to travel economy class as he becomes a senior citizen
is one thing but his statement that he had rarely if ever done so before
seems amazing to those of us who have never experienced such luxury.
It is good to know that a playwright can get wealthy enough to live
like this and rather sad to find that dodgy accountants first allowed
him to be cheated out of one part of his fortune and then helped him,
along with so many others, to invest in Lloyd's and thus lose a great
deal more.
However, a man who has drunk and smoked his way through a life of sophisticated
leisure should not complain too much and Gray does not. His wry sense
of humour ensures that however badly things go, and his late discovery
of incipient cancer - a disease shared with Hamilton and Pinter - is
pretty bad, he never despairs.
The Smoking Diaries would make a perfect holiday read or a good
present for anyone who enjoys sophisticated, comic writing.
Philip Fisher
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