The third volume of Simon Gray’s incomparable ‘smoking diaries’ opens with a bold statement of intent to drop the habit that has sustained and comforted him for more than six decades.
The third volume of Simon Gray’s incomparable ‘smoking diaries’ opens with a bold statement of intent to drop the habit that has sustained and comforted him for more than six decades. ‘This diary is going to be about my attempt to give up smoking,’ he writes on page 1:
It is also going to be my main help in giving up smoking. By the time I’ve finished it I will be a free man, able to leave the house without my two packets of cigarettes, and my two lighters, able to sit down and read without compulsively checking that I’ve got these four articles in place on the desk in front of me or on the little table beside me . . . I shall never again have to grope for a cigarette while watching television . . . nor worry that I might fall asleep with a cigarette burning on the brink of an ashtray, or while hanging from my lips.
To reveal the outcome of this endeavour may seem as bad as giving away the ending of a detective novel, but the signs that Gray is going to fail start appearing almost immediately — the rants against smoking bans, the constant deferrals, the feeble excuses.
On holiday on the Greek island of Spetses, he writes:
I’m not ready to give up smoking yet. Insufficiently settled. I tried yesterday, managed until dinner, but then sitting in the café, a coffee in front of me, the sea lapping softly a few yards away, and such a moon! — It was the moon that did it — the moon’s fault.
Then, as the book rolls on, there is less and less talk about giving up smoking, and more and more about its pleasures, until you suddenly realise as you approach the end that there’s not much time left for Gray to achieve his aim. And then, just before the finish, comes the terrible news that doctors have found a tumour in his lung, meaning
biopsies, scans, tests, consultations, more scans, an operation if I’m strong enough and lucky, otherwise radiotherapy or chemotherapy, or both, so forth and so forth, but absolutely certainly, one way or another, I’m coming up to the last cigarette.
I don’t know how he has fared since he wrote these words, but it is certainly true that, one way or another, we will all come up eventually to our last cigarette, and that seems to be what he is now counting on.
But if this book is a record of failure in what he proclaimed was its central purpose, it should strengthen the will of other smokers to give up by bringing home to them the misery of their enslavement and its potentially dire effects on their health.
That isn’t the point, however. As in Gray’s previous diaries, smoking is just the peg on which he hangs his thoughts, observations and memories of all kinds of things, woven seamlessly together with wonderful skill.
Gray is now well into his seventies, and his latest volume dwells largely on the same themes as his first, written when he was 65 — illness, death, sex, loss and the absurdities and frustrations of the modern world. It is no less funny, no less angry; but somehow rather sadder.
He spends less time mocking his own ailments and more writing with feeling about the friends that keep falling ill or dropping dead around him. Of Harold Pinter, suffering from cancer, he says:
One longs for one of his old rages, one would probably cry from joy at seeing the cheeks turning dark and red, the snarl back in his voice, his eyes glittering with venomous life.
His friendships are what seem to keep him going, and they, with the passage of time, are wasting away. So he increasingly relies on his ‘beloved wife Victoria’, to whom the book is dedicated, and on his pet dogs and cats to provide him with the secure platform from which to vent his hatred of the world around him.
He is brilliant at this, imagining some beer-swilling lout on a Greek beach as ‘on one of those therapeutic outings that the British prison or social services offer as an alternative to a prison sentence’; a delayed take-off at Athens airport as due to ‘a terrorist trying to get an upgrade’; or even himself as being put on a sex offenders’ list if the girl arriving to walk his dogs catches him pottering naked to the lavatory.
The examples are endless and afford so much enjoyment that we must pray that this diary won’t be his last.
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