I was staying with my wife's family in
Trondheim the Christmas when Harold Pinter died. My father in law told me at
the dinner table that the playwright was dead. I instantly felt sick. I had to
go upstairs and take a minute to myself to process the news. While I was
sitting up there, I wondered how it could be that this news had hit me so hard.
I am no devotee of Pinter. At that time I had read maybe one of his plays and a couple of admittedly excellent short stories. I had read and admired his impeccable Nobel Prize acceptance speech and I knew of his relationship to Beckett, whose work I had loved since I was a teenager. But I wasn't someone who read Pinter. Not really. Not like the vast numbers of people who really read Pinter. So why was I so affected by his death?
And then I realised it was because of Simon Gray. Pinter was a close friend of Gray's, and as such he is a recurrent character in The Smoking Diaries, the series of supremely engaging and tangential autobiographical books Gray began writing when he had to give up alcohol and began to have sleeping trouble around the turn of the 21st century. In the books, Gray presents himself as somewhat in awe of Pinter. As a fellow playwright, Gray finds his own life's work far less valued both by public and critics than the work of his friend, and at one point in the series it becomes clear that a very famous publishing house are courting Gray only because they believe that a contract with him might lead to a subsequent deal with Pinter. Despite this, Gray draws his friend with such affection and clarity that when he died I actually felt I had lost a personal acquaintance.
Towards the end of the time that Gray was writing the third book in the Smoking Diaries series, The Last Cigarette, he was himself diagnosed with cancer. Lung cancer, appositely. He was trying to kick the habit at the time, and so he closes the book by reflecting that he'll soon be coming, one way or another, to his last cigarette.
Coda is the book Gray wrote after being given a one year prognosis from a doctor. The moment the news is broken is appalling, because neither Gray nor his wife has any wish to know. He is actually in the process of framing another question entirely, but only gets as far as "How long..." before the doctor jumps in with the predicted limit to his life. From that point on he is a man sentenced, faced with the task of consciously living his last days. He and his wife travel to Crete, and it is from there that he writes the majority of the book.
It's a running gag in Gray's memoirs that he always ends up writing around the topics he feels he really should be addressing. He will often break off in the middle of a childhood story to reflect, for example, on some perceived humiliation visited upon him by the staff of a local cinema. On the island of Crete he tries to write the story of his initial diagnoses, and of the subsequent medical treatment to establish the details of his illness, but he spends at least as much time discussing his hotel room, other tourists and the books he has brought with him. Where this style is one of the great joys of reading the earlier books, in Coda the habit takes on a new poignancy, because who wouldn't want to avoid thinking about the situation Gray now finds himself in?
The fact is, of course, that he can never really stop thinking about it for long. He interviews himself on the relative merits of his work, and discusses the feeling of shame which has dogged him through his whole life, a feeling which tempts him to view his cancer as something deserved, not just because of the abuse he has subjected his body to, but also on a more metaphysical level. At night his usual insomnia is augmented by panic attacks. When reading the newspaper he finds himself turning first to the obituaries. Yet, Coda is not a morbid book. In fact, it seems Gray might finally have mellowed towards the end of his life. There is a sense throughout that he doesn't want to waste his last days on bile or negativity, and as much as he can be brutally honest about the fear and anger he inevitably feels in his circumstances, he will just as often pause to reflect over the sheer pleasantness of a day gone by.
One of the great strengths of Coda is that Gray assimilates a subject almost impossible to write about into a style he has already made utterly his own. The book is constructed of his signature looping, discursive, virtuosic sentences and the incredible tonal balancing act will be familiar to readers of his earlier books. But this book is necessarily a unique creature. The most touching moments are often simple anecdotes, as when he visits an ailing Pinter, or speaks with a local beggar he knows well and discovers that her friend of seventeen years has recently died. He can't help but see everything through the prism of his diagnosis, and, though he never labours the point, neither can you.
Coda is quite a beautiful book. For a memoir of terminal illness it is surprisingly warm and positive. You could read this book without having read the other memoirs—Gray's voice is strong enough that the book would stand easily alone—but it probably functions best as the close of his work. It is always a tragedy when a gifted artist dies, and Gray certainly showed no sign of losing his skills, but his readers are blessed that he had the opportunity to make a final statement. A few pages from the end of Coda he writes that he will soon write his last words on the subject of himself. It's difficult to imagine how that knowledge must have felt to a man who had spent the last five years chronicling his life in the most impressively unflinching fashion.
On the same page however, just slightly earlier, Gray has already made what could be the definitive statement regarding the purpose and value of his work. Craftily, he hides it in a discussion of the writer Stefan Zweig. The weakness of Zweig's autobiography, submits Gray, is that he avoids the tackier, grimmer side of life. Zweig lived through a devastating period of history, and ultimately took his own life, yet his writing is clean, polite, almost saintly. "He was a good and honourable man," writes Gray, "in ways which we no longer know much about, but finally no man can speak for the turmoil of his time unless he speaks from the turmoil of himself."
I am no devotee of Pinter. At that time I had read maybe one of his plays and a couple of admittedly excellent short stories. I had read and admired his impeccable Nobel Prize acceptance speech and I knew of his relationship to Beckett, whose work I had loved since I was a teenager. But I wasn't someone who read Pinter. Not really. Not like the vast numbers of people who really read Pinter. So why was I so affected by his death?
And then I realised it was because of Simon Gray. Pinter was a close friend of Gray's, and as such he is a recurrent character in The Smoking Diaries, the series of supremely engaging and tangential autobiographical books Gray began writing when he had to give up alcohol and began to have sleeping trouble around the turn of the 21st century. In the books, Gray presents himself as somewhat in awe of Pinter. As a fellow playwright, Gray finds his own life's work far less valued both by public and critics than the work of his friend, and at one point in the series it becomes clear that a very famous publishing house are courting Gray only because they believe that a contract with him might lead to a subsequent deal with Pinter. Despite this, Gray draws his friend with such affection and clarity that when he died I actually felt I had lost a personal acquaintance.
Towards the end of the time that Gray was writing the third book in the Smoking Diaries series, The Last Cigarette, he was himself diagnosed with cancer. Lung cancer, appositely. He was trying to kick the habit at the time, and so he closes the book by reflecting that he'll soon be coming, one way or another, to his last cigarette.
Coda is the book Gray wrote after being given a one year prognosis from a doctor. The moment the news is broken is appalling, because neither Gray nor his wife has any wish to know. He is actually in the process of framing another question entirely, but only gets as far as "How long..." before the doctor jumps in with the predicted limit to his life. From that point on he is a man sentenced, faced with the task of consciously living his last days. He and his wife travel to Crete, and it is from there that he writes the majority of the book.
It's a running gag in Gray's memoirs that he always ends up writing around the topics he feels he really should be addressing. He will often break off in the middle of a childhood story to reflect, for example, on some perceived humiliation visited upon him by the staff of a local cinema. On the island of Crete he tries to write the story of his initial diagnoses, and of the subsequent medical treatment to establish the details of his illness, but he spends at least as much time discussing his hotel room, other tourists and the books he has brought with him. Where this style is one of the great joys of reading the earlier books, in Coda the habit takes on a new poignancy, because who wouldn't want to avoid thinking about the situation Gray now finds himself in?
The fact is, of course, that he can never really stop thinking about it for long. He interviews himself on the relative merits of his work, and discusses the feeling of shame which has dogged him through his whole life, a feeling which tempts him to view his cancer as something deserved, not just because of the abuse he has subjected his body to, but also on a more metaphysical level. At night his usual insomnia is augmented by panic attacks. When reading the newspaper he finds himself turning first to the obituaries. Yet, Coda is not a morbid book. In fact, it seems Gray might finally have mellowed towards the end of his life. There is a sense throughout that he doesn't want to waste his last days on bile or negativity, and as much as he can be brutally honest about the fear and anger he inevitably feels in his circumstances, he will just as often pause to reflect over the sheer pleasantness of a day gone by.
One of the great strengths of Coda is that Gray assimilates a subject almost impossible to write about into a style he has already made utterly his own. The book is constructed of his signature looping, discursive, virtuosic sentences and the incredible tonal balancing act will be familiar to readers of his earlier books. But this book is necessarily a unique creature. The most touching moments are often simple anecdotes, as when he visits an ailing Pinter, or speaks with a local beggar he knows well and discovers that her friend of seventeen years has recently died. He can't help but see everything through the prism of his diagnosis, and, though he never labours the point, neither can you.
Coda is quite a beautiful book. For a memoir of terminal illness it is surprisingly warm and positive. You could read this book without having read the other memoirs—Gray's voice is strong enough that the book would stand easily alone—but it probably functions best as the close of his work. It is always a tragedy when a gifted artist dies, and Gray certainly showed no sign of losing his skills, but his readers are blessed that he had the opportunity to make a final statement. A few pages from the end of Coda he writes that he will soon write his last words on the subject of himself. It's difficult to imagine how that knowledge must have felt to a man who had spent the last five years chronicling his life in the most impressively unflinching fashion.
On the same page however, just slightly earlier, Gray has already made what could be the definitive statement regarding the purpose and value of his work. Craftily, he hides it in a discussion of the writer Stefan Zweig. The weakness of Zweig's autobiography, submits Gray, is that he avoids the tackier, grimmer side of life. Zweig lived through a devastating period of history, and ultimately took his own life, yet his writing is clean, polite, almost saintly. "He was a good and honourable man," writes Gray, "in ways which we no longer know much about, but finally no man can speak for the turmoil of his time unless he speaks from the turmoil of himself."
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