Like Butley, he’s witty yet not so nice

The Smoking Diaries

Simon Gray

Carroll & Graf: 244 pp.,

$14.95 paper

*

British playwright Simon Gray, creator of Butley, that literature-loving, colleague-hating, disgruntled, underemployed academician whose motto might well have been “in vino veritas,” has never cared a whit for political correctness, fashions or other shibboleths. Brilliantly portrayed by Alan Bates (whom I vividly recall from the original 1971 London production -- it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the role, though Nathan Lane is to play him on Broadway this fall), Butley could talk a blue streak and still keep you listening, rapt, because so much of what he said -- whether witty, bitchy, outrageous, insightful, insouciant, ironic, snide or self-mocking -- was hilariously funny, strikingly honest and downright true.

Despite Gray’s own readiness to defy the received wisdom, “The Smoking Diaries” is (thank goodness) not one of those tiresome, retro whines about the so-called rights of smokers, although Gray, being Gray, has continued to smoke into his increasingly wheezy 60s. Like so many other writers who gained fame in the 1960s and 1970s, Gray (born in 1936) is now into the latter, less cheerful part of life, but he has come up with his own, very characteristic, way of writing about it.

A serendipitous amalgam of diary, memoir and digression, “The Smoking Diaries” is a wonderfully funny book, overflowing with energy, intelligence, opinions, anxieties, along with a healthy dose of self-criticism. The voice we hear in its pages, like Butley’s, might well be called breathless, bespeaking the more universal mortal condition of having too much to say and too little time to say it.

And in Gray’s particular case, the breathlessness comes from what might be called an overactive mind -- a present incident opens a vein of memory, one notion triggers another: all those provocative opinions to be expressed, all those connections to be drawn.

Describing his mother’s style of parenting, for instance, he notes:

“Mummy was a zestful slapper and cuffer ... for Mummy hitting was simply an instinctive reaction, that induced in us appropriately instinctive reactions -- we learnt to duck, bob, weave and skip, so that if she connected we came to accept it as our failure of reflex, just as if she missed she accepted it as her failure.... I suppose these days a mother like Mummy would be spending a lot of time in the courts and jail even, but we live in exceptionally stupid days, nasty and stupid, in which phrases do the work not only of thinking but of feeling -- ‘an innocent child,’ we invariably say, when we all know somewhere in our systems that there isn’t, and never has been, such a creature.”

Gray certainly doesn’t present his childhood self as such a creature, although one of his tales -- about pilfering money from his parents and cheating the London subway system -- is really much too long. Nor, on the other hand, does he exaggerate how “bad” he was simply to shock or amuse us. He’s funny about his stash of thrillers with luscious bound and gagged women on the covers, funnier still about the resemblance he felt between his plight and theirs when one of his teachers tied his 6-year-old self to a chair and gagged him to prevent his interrupting the class: “I mustn’t forget that I was an exceptionally pretty child, quite gorgeous ... and probably I was to her as the girl on the cover of ‘Sister, Don’t Hate Me’ was to me only six years later....” Gray’s repeated references to his own desirability, however, become -- how shall we put it? -- a bit much.

Back in his current, all too sagging skin, living in a harsher, more violent world, Gray watches the relentless onslaught of decline, disease and death besieging his close friends, from playwright Harold Pinter, valiantly struggling with esophageal cancer (and the effects of its treatment), to biographer, poet and critic Ian Hamilton, who dies.

Later, Gray himself is told he has prostate cancer, though he uses this mainly as a opportunity for wry humor and doesn’t tell us exactly what was done about it. His finances are also in a sorry state: being a once-famous playwright is not lucrative. At one point, he is struck by a thought as alarming as it is amusing: “My present circumstances have turned me into a sort of poor relation to my younger self.” Fortunately for us, neither the passage of time nor the weight of circumstance has rendered Gray any less sparkling a presence.

*

Merle Rubin is a contributing writer to Book Review.