A very smokable blend
Lloyd Evans
THE YEAR OF THE JOUNCER by Simon Gray Granta, £14.99, pp. 282, ISBN 9781862078963 ✆ £11.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Even the rubbish on the flyleaf isn’t rubbish. One of the astonishing things about Simon Gray’s new book is that the publishers’ claim that their author has ‘developed a new literary genre’ turns out to be accurate. This is the same blend of autobiography, anecdote and random reflection that made The Smoking Diaries a bestseller.
The new book is better. Less childhood memoir and more present-tense insight. The style is chatty and deliberately ‘unfinished’ and gives the impression that the book was dashed off during a few wet afternoons at the Renaissance café in Holland Park where Gray likes to smoke and muse and write notes over a double espresso. He specialises in great trundling sentences of six or seven hundred words or more, filled with rhetorical digressions and scenic by-ways. But the labours of selection and revision have been brilliantly disguised. This is a work of enormous and conscious artifice. If you dissect one of Gray’s monumental paragraphs you find an underlying design that gives his prose movement, rhythm and life. It’s a great achievement, a terrific read, every page crammed with jokes, philosophical observations and miniature portraits of Gray’s family and friends.
The Smoking Diaries crops up again when Alan Yentob makes a TV film about Gray’s unkickable tobacco habit. Filmed in a taxi, Gray is given a copy of a newspaper so that he can pretend to be reading it. It’s the Guardian, which he usually shuns, but he can’t help flicking through the pages and he finds himself reading ‘the sort of article that is precisely the reason I never read the Guardian’. During the filming, for continuity reasons, he has to smoke nonstop for days on end. This makes him feel so ill that he almost gives up smoking.
He remembers his friend Alan Bates in searching and unsentimental terms. He recalls the stout, big-boned figure, the body of ‘a Derbyshire peasant’ and the ‘agricultural hands’. What endeared Bates to audiences was that ‘he could take them into anarchy or despair without loosening them from their trust in his kindness’. His on-screen laugh was no match for the real thing, which convulsed him so violently that ‘his forehead met his knee’. Gray nagged him constantly to play Falstaff, and Bates would pretend to ponder it, but they both knew that his vanity wouldn’t permit it. ‘He couldn’t bear to play a fat man, however nimble-tongued and quick of wit, however gorgeous in his pomp, broken in his fall.’ Had Gray not been a playwright he would have made a great critic. He is one of those writers who can give an account of a film or a play that is almost as entertaining as the original. But he has a profound mistrust of critics and when he spots a gaggle of them chatting at the first night of The Holy Terror he assumes that they’re plotting a unanimous and damning verdict. He’s wrong there. Critics live by their opinions and to share them with the opposition would be madness. Gray never reads reviews, he tells us, he just phones the box office to ask about advance sales. Sensible chap. The Holy Terror flopped, but Gray’s next work, The Old Masters, ran for nearly a year in the West End.
Both were directed by Harold Pinter who emerges as a mesmerising personality with poor conversational skills. After the first night of The Old Masters, he is approached in a restaurant by a friendly director who asks if the show went well. Pinter takes umbrage and refuses to answer, and when the director has sloped away under a cloud Pinter furiously berates his fellow diners: ‘Went well? What did he mean? Went well? What did he think he meant by that? Went well!’ Like everything in this book, that recollection is perfectly mundane but strangely pleasing, strangely ‘right’. Volume III is keenly awaited.
Previous page
