A rich harvest

Coda, by Simon Gray

Were Simon Gray alive today, I could not have reviewed this book. Friends should not review each other’s work or reviewing becomes a form of puffery. But death changes everything. Coda, so named because it rounds off the trilogy of ‘Smoking Diaries’ (The Smoking Diaries, The Year of the Jouncer and The Last Cigarette), is a meditation on death, or rather dying, an account of living on borrowed time — how Simon would have pounced on that phrase, ‘borrowed time’, and subjected it to scrutiny: why borrowed? who from? can it be paid back? ‘and so forth’, as he might add. It is many other things besides: a touching love letter to his wife, now widow, Victoria; a far-from-reverential description of his encounters with the three doctors intimately involved in the diagnosis and treatment of his cancer; a celebration of life and friendships, of domesticity with cats and dogs; an attempt at an assessment of his work as a playwright; and an account of his enthusiastic discovery (and later cooler critical assessment) of the work of Stefan Zweig. All this in the context of a late summer holiday with Victoria in Crete, where his observation of people casually encountered and their behaviour is as sharp as elsewhere in the Smoking Diaries. It is, in short, Simon’s literary testament.

I had already read a draft of the book while Simon was still alive — so alive indeed that I found it impossible to believe (any more than he could) that he was dying. And for the record he did not die of cancer, as some have written. He was partly responsible for this misapprehension, since he made no secret of having lung cancer. Yet in the end the night thoughts and fears of further physical decline and dependency that he scribbled on the yellow legal pads he used for writing as he sat outside his Cretan hotel room, debating with himself whether or not to have one more cigarette, were unfounded: he collapsed and died quickly of a burst aneurysm.