Someone — I forget who — once described Thomas Hardy’s later poetry as the ‘harvest of the novels’. Simon saw himself primarily as a playwright and was ambivalent about the critical — and popular — success of the diaries, feeling it was somehow achieved at the expense of the plays, which attracted far more mixed reviews. He found the plays creatively more challenging, harder to write, and therefore rated them higher and hoped that at least the best of them would endure. As he writes in Coda, ‘I think I’m better than my reputation’.
I think so, too, and if I describe his diary/memoirs as the ‘harvest of the plays’, that is to take nothing away from the latter (after all, pursuing the analogy, no one would deny that several of Hardy’s novels are classics). It’s just that, in the final analysis that the death of a writer inevitably invites, the diaries not only benefit from his experience as a playwright in terms of dramatic immediacy and compression, but also provide the perfect vehicle for the expression of the full range of his unique personality and wit — I would say ‘genius’ were that not such a loaded word and I not in danger of appearing altogether too partial.
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