The Early Diaries [Paperback]

If you've read and enjoyed the Smoking Diaries series, then you will be equally entertained and enthralled by Faber's timely one-volume reissue of Gray's earlier 80's diaries, "An Unnatural Pursuit" and "How's That For Telling 'em Fat Lady?"

Overall, these are slightly different works to Gray's later Diaries. Both of these earlier 80's works take us through Gray's experiences as a playwright collaborating first with Harold Pinter in the original London production of the play "The Common Pursuit" and, in the second part, assisting a colourful American crew with a Los Angeles revival of the same work.

Gray depicted himself in his later Smoking Diaries as an enforcedly teetotal, ruminative character, and used this persona to take the events of his everyday life as spurs to go off on entertaining, sometimes bitter, frequently bemused and often very touching reflections about his current situation in life, his past, his work, and what he felt about the changing world around him. By contrast, these earlier works are blow by blow accounts of projects in progress, and give us a glimpse of Gray the working playwright.

This is quite a different Gray: sometimes combative, sometimes conciliatory; endlessly rewriting in pursuit of the right line in the right place; always swilling champagne or single malt. Stand out scenes in this book include an end-of-run meal intended as a celebration, but which soon sees Harold Pinter threaten to hit Gray with an ashtray in response to something the latter had said in his cups. In Los Angeles, meanwhile, we are treated to numerous accounts of run-ins with shop staff and theatre colleagues. One constant source of irritation that he turns into a running joke concerns a VCR that won't play and the annoying clerks he encounters at his hotel. Many of these scenes are added extra spice by their having first been spoken into a dictaphone in the early hours, when Gray was feeling either contrite, still angry or just plain hungover. If the Smoking Diaries were beautifully written and delicately constructed, then these Early Diaries have an equally distincitve charm in that they're rather like having Gray talk to you directly.

What unites the earlier and later Grays are cigarettes (at one stage he describes himself as chewing on nicorette gum while a cig burns away in his hand) and restaurants (clearly he was a very loyal patron, always going to the same place which gets mentioned again and again in his diaries, even if in the case of Musso and Franks in LA he largely takes a dim view of the place), not to mention his unflinchingly self-critical stance (the short essay 'My Cambridge' paints a particularly unflattering but illuminating pen portrait of the kind of figure he cut there as a student).

And then there's the paranoia. In all his prose memoirs there are moments of happiness, but overall I get the impression that Gray finds his best material in things going wrong for him. He revels in telling a tale of woe, and the prose sparks as a result. At times he comes across as a man for whom the glass is not only half empty, but is in fact lying on its side, the contents already running off the table and into his lap. Luckily for us, this ability to weave the trials and tribulations of his life into a good yarn makes for entertaining and genuinely funny reading, and as a narrator it's what makes him such great company. In my view it's also what makes him one of the great english diarists.

As the man himself says at the end of 'An Unnatural Pursuit', "perhaps the problem with keeping a diary, and the reason I'll never keep another, is that one records only the things that one would prefer to forget. At least if one has a temperament like mine". Thank heavens he never kept the promise.

Like Simon Gray's later diaries and memoirs, this is a delight from start to finish. Admittedly, he was still on the way to the extraordinary facility of, say, The Smoker's Diaries, where the writing is an apparently seamless, effortless flow of comic revery, when in fact it's a brilliant example of art concealing art. These are actually two books, plus a few bits and pieces, centring on productions of Gray's play The Common Pursuit. Admittedly, since they're all about casting, rehearsals and fallings in and out around them, they may be of slightly less interest to non-theatre people. I'm lucky: my background is in professional theatre and I know some of the people concerned personally. But I'd urge anyone to read this. It's often hilarious, even when he's not re-telling some killer jokes (the one about the brigadier in heaven is worth the price of the book on on its own). As with the other memoirs, putting this down is like parting with a very dear friend.

Yet more brilliant tales from the late sage of Holland Park - before he became the west london institution. Beautifully written, amusing, brutally self reflective, whose works always are more than the sum of their parts - in talking about having his plays produced in the US he is also saying something about the human condition. Funny, thoughtful, often painful but always engaging.