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Friday 5 December 2008

Life and Letters

Allan Massie remembers Simon Gray (1936-2008)

Ten, eleven weeks ago I had an email from Simon Gray to say that the tumour on his lung hadn’t grown; so he was all right till his next scan in four months time. Now he is dead and I wonder if they didn’t tell him the truth then, or if the thing took a sudden spurt. The latter, surely; he wasn’t someone to conceal bad news from. ‘I am always eager to acknowledge the worst,’ he wrote in the last published volume of his diaries, ‘and often in advance of the evidence.’

A day or two later came another email. ‘Now that I know I’m not going to die for four months I’ll have to find something to write. Any ideas?’ I replied that there was an episode in that last diary, about having to sack a talented young American actor from the cast of the New York revival of Butley, which might make a short play. ‘Why don’t you write it?’ he said. Perhaps I’ll try to, if only ‘in memoriam’.

I hadn’t seen him for years, nevertheless always thought of him as one of my real friends. There were many, some themselves now dead, like Alan Bates and Ian Hamilton, others like his beloved wife Victoria and Harold and Antonia Pinter, who were, obviously, very much closer to him. They shared his life, as I didn’t. Yet our friendship, dating from Cambridge days, was kept alive by occasional letters, postcards, latterly emails. A couple of weeks ago I wrote here about Malcolm Lowry, of whom one of his friends said, ‘even a sight of the old bastard cheers me up for days’. A note from Simon had the same effect on me.

He was a couple of years older, had spent time teaching, hilariously, in retrospect at least, at a French school before coming to Trinity, and at first I was a bit shy, even wary of him. He was bigger, burlier, sharp-witted and much more intelligent. The shyness soon abated and I delighted in his company. I picture him most clearly at the poker table, black lock of hair falling — not exactly like James Bond — over his left eye, smoke curling into the blue-grey air, a glass of whisky (Glenfarclas) by his side, as he successfully bluffed me and scooped the pool. He was the funniest man I knew, with such a vein of fantasy and laconic wit. ‘I wonder,’ he wrote recently, ‘if we knew at Cambridge what good times we were having.’ Perhaps we didn’t, but they glow in memory.

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