One damned funny thing after another
Alexander Chancellor
THE SMOKING DIARIES by Simon Gray Granta, £14.99, pp. 230, ISBN 186207688X Simon Gray is 65 and is unwell. It's not clear from this brilliant book quite how unwell he is. At some point he had prostate cancer, he tells us. But he doesn't say if he has it still. What he does say is that he still smokes about 65 cigarettes a day. (He started smoking at the age of seven, and the best he seems ever to have achieved by way of giving up has been to reduce this briefly to 30 a day.) He also used to drink four bottles of champagne a day, though he is now a teetotaller. I am impressed.
But a lifetime of overindulgence, he tells us, has taken its toll on his health. He is fat and flabby. He spends much time 'belching, farting, dribbling, wheezing'. And although as a schoolboy he was a star at football and cricket, the only physical pursuit he can still enjoy is swimming. What never seems to have suffered, however, is his productivity as a writer. He has written more than 35 plays for stage, radio and television, not to mention various novels and memoirs. He may feel horribly old, but who could not envy him his energy? This book is a catalogue of misfortunes. Despite his considerable success as a writer (even if he merited more), and despite being married to Victoria Rothschild (whose family name suggests wealth), he has ended up broke. On the advice of a whizz-kid accountant, he put his money into Lloyds and lost nearly all of it. He was left with a house in London, which he gave to his first wife Beryl when they were divorced, and with his copyrights, which he sold to pay a disastrously overdue tax bill. 'I have therefore nothing left in the way of worldly goods except my books, five Olympia typewriters, two computers, two television sets plus videos, two desks, two chairs, and my honour — for which so far no takers.'
On top of all that, he has been constantly in the presence of illness and death. His brother, Piers, died young of drink. His good friend Ian Hamilton died of cancer, bequeathing him a straw hat that he now constantly wears. Another good friend, Harold Pinter, had a frightening attack of cancer, but mercifully made a good recov
ery from it. Then the expensive W11 restaurants in which Simon Gray used to eat regularly with these friends — Chez Moi and Orsino — have both closed down (Orsino after this book was written), depriving him, it seems, of all his comforting rituals except for his regular bus trips (on his old-age 'freedom pass') from his home in Holland Park up to Queensway, where he sits alone smoking at Whiteley's, watching the multicultural world go by. And even people he doesn't know keep dying on him — an old man in a next-door hotel room on the Italian Riviera, another man on a British Airways flight from Britain to Canada. The most terrible things are always happening to him. Yet he seems happy. He loves his wife, his children, his friends and his animals. He is tremendously curious and observant. And he writes wonderfully. It is all most encouraging to those of us who are getting on a bit.
The Smoking Diaries, though seeming to ramble, don't really ramble at all. They dip backwards and forwards into his life, apparently at random, but have some hidden structure that perhaps even he doesn't understand, just as he doesn't understand why he was a 'natural' as a teenage footballer.
He takes you, the reader, away from where you are before you are ready, but then returns — often much later in the book — to answer the questions that have been nagging at you. You might not think it possible to generate suspense in a book like this, but he does it all the same.
I should add that he is also extremely funny, not least when lamenting, as a selfappointed old man, the way that times have changed since his youth. Early in the book, he describes how he failed to answer a knock on the door by Antonia Fraser, imagining he had heard the heavy tread of a policeman. But then he remembers that policemen these days
don't have a heavy tread; for one thing they don't wear constabulatory boots, they wear light, smart shoes that probably cause them to pitter-patter lightly along, in twos or threes or even little packs of four or five, towards some pop star whose Internet habit they are investigating.
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