Simon Gray / Features / Untitled Books

'You don’t know what you’re going to remember, really, until you actually begin to write it. Memories are acts of imagination.'

Simon Gray

His reflective, moving and often very funny memoirs have brought Simon Gray a whole new readership outside theatre circles. The third volume, The Last Cigarette, is a triumph. He tells Viola Fort how memory is an act of imagination.

'It would have been a great success because we were sold out, but it got buggered up. Suddenly we weren’t doing so well and people wanted their money back.'

In the first volume of his memoirs, The Smoking Diaries, Simon Gray describes returning home to his parents after five years waiting out the war in Canada. He was only four when he had last seen his mother and held only the palest memories of her. It came as quite a shock, therefore, after the generally quiet, docile love of his Canadian guardians, to find himself on the receiving end of her frequent slaps and cuffs about the head.

These blows, alarming at first, soon came to be accepted as her own particularly boisterous brand of love, expressions of intimacy and a way of keeping in close contact with the children his mother had seen so little of. 'Conversations', he writes, 'were physically chaotic affairs, punctuated by laughter and exclamations of pain;' in fact, much like The Smoking Diaries themselves.

A lifetime later, Gray is sitting at the kitchen table in his Holland Park home. "Hello darling," he calls delightedly to a small dog as it trots past. He is still attractive at 71: tall and broad, with a handsome face and a thick curtain of hair tucked behind the ears. He carries a faintly professorial air and more than a hint of a life well lived, but ill health has caught up with him and he looks exhausted. He gave up drinking some years ago, after his customary four bottles of champagne a day finally put him in a coma, but he still misses it. More recently he has battled prostate cancer, and then of course there is a lifetime of smoking. However, he is not one given to self-pity, and if an interview is the last thing in the world he feels like on a Friday afternoon, he covers it with amiable charm. "Do you smoke?" he asks politely, tapping out a Silk Cut, and then playing with it for a minute before finally lighting it.

The Last Cigarette is the third volume of the playwright's wonderful, humane, meandering memoirs, which take as a loose stepping-off point his intention to give up cigarettes. Gray was a sixty-five-a-day man when he started the first diary, a habit nurtured since he was eight, ('the deep, dark swirling pleasures of the smoke being sucked in to fresh, pink, welcoming lungs, it took me just three or four cigarettes to acquire the habit'); which still endures, though it taunts and weakens him. But cigarettes are little more than occasional punctuation in a vast terrain of remembrances, observations and occasional mutterings that weave seamlessly through subjects as diverse as the inscription on his brother's headstone, the imagined life and fate of a woman passed on the street, or the painful sacking of a young actor on Broadway.

He seems a little bemused that these diaries have sparked so much interest, and at the flourishing of a late second career as a memoirist. Gray is the celebrated author of over thirty plays including Butley, A Common Pursuit and Quartermains's Terms, as well as the ill-fated Cell Mates from which Stephen Fry notoriously fled. Before the plays came novels, but he never settled to them; "I preferred writing plays because it avoided all the prose in between the speech. I never felt really comfortable describing people because I couldn't bare my own voice. Plays released me from my voice."

He has had a long working relationship with Harold Pinter, who directed many of his plays, and with the late Alan Bates who acted in them. Pinter remains a close friend and frequently appears in the diaries. His illness, famous rages and kindness as a friend are all discussed with characteristic candour. The Last Cigarette takes a conversational tone that in less capable hands would clutter and jar and Gray peppers his thoughts with artful asides and digressions which he succeeds in making spontaneous and entirely natural. "Its not difficult, as it happens, which is a fluke of nature." He looks almost apologetic that there's not more to it.

He writes through the night, diet coke and smokes to hand, filling pages of yellow legal paper. His tone is often coloured by the impending dawn, when mortal anxieties needle and obscure memories bob to the surface, and he is unflinchingly frank as he writes of his own fears, vanities, and humiliations: "The condition is to write anything I feel like writing so quite a bit has to be edited out because it involves things that are personal, in a way that I don't have the right to make public."

I ask him about his university days at Cambridge, when he first started writing seriously. He laughs, partly that anyone should be interested and partly at the thought that he might remember those days clearly. "I'm 71 you know, its all rather a long time ago." But he does write of a disastrous affaire conducted at the time, which led him to a small flat on Harley Street above his paramour's office when he should have been abroad writing - a condition of his fellowship. "You don't know what you're going to remember, really, until you actually begin to write it. Once you start remembering, it grows. It happens in the writing I think." Does he find it's a question of pinning memories down as he writes, or reimagining them? "I don't think you can pin down memories, actually. I think that memories are acts of imagination. When I pick up one of the diaries I'm quite surprised at what I've remembered because they're not things I think about much. I think remembering is an imaginative act."

The Smoking Diaries are not Gray's first memoirs: they follow a series of theatre diaries. What precipitated the jump from plays to non-fiction? "It was accidental. The first diary I wrote was commissioned by Robert McCrumb, who was then at Faber and had edited my novels, and he suggested that next time I had a play on I keep a diary." The next play happened to be A Common Pursuit, which Harold Pinter directed, and he kept a day-by-day account of what went on in rehearsal, published as An Unnatural Pursuit and Other Pieces. "When the play went to America, Robert asked me if I'd do an American account. I had ended the first diary saying I'd never write another one, so I had to begin the next one by apologising."

"The third one I wrote was about Stephen Fry running from Cell Mates, and that was a very different sort of book - it wasn't a day by day account, it was recollected." Fry, you might remember, very publicly deserted the West-End production just after it opened in 1995. Suffering from depression, and spooked by poor reviews, he fled to Belgium leaving a trail of wildly speculative headlines and a furious playwright, producer and cast. Fat Chance is the blisteringly angry but very funny account of the fallout.

Was it a necessary catharsis after the huge anticlimax of the play's failure? "Something like that, yes. The play had been killed off; it was terrible what had happened, truly terrible. It would have been a great success because we were sold out, but it got buggered up. Suddenly we weren't doing so well and people wanted their money back. The play only lasted a few weeks and then we went down the tubes. It was such a frustrating experience, and I thought I wanted something permanent to come out of it."

Did he ever make it up with Fry? "Oh yes, yes, we're okay now," he says cheerfully, and then pauses before adding, "It was weird, really weird. Who would have thought of an actor leaving a production like that? And the more publicity it got, the more it killed the play. The more he was absent, the more we were absent."

If cigarettes underpin the diaries, however loosely, it is his wife Victoria that brings a backbone of warmth to them. She is seldom written of directly, in fact hardly described, but she is always there, a background presence. She is his second wife, for whom he left his family following an eight-year affair that so wracked him with guilt he suffered arboreal hallucinations and fantasies of suicide, which were no doubt aggravated by his alcoholism. Gray's deep love for her tempers any anger, regret or self-disgust that might leak from his pen, and is the reason why, after so many tumultuous years, he can stand still and look back. Whenever her name appears on the page, interpolating the past with the present, one feels Gray taking pleasure in simply writing it.

Will he write for the theatre again? "I've got a new play which is actually based on the diaries which Hugh Whitemore (a friend of mine) and I have adapted together, which we're casting at the moment." The Smoking Diaries on stage makes perfect sense: his is such a clear, present voice, it would make a wonderful monologue. Given the success of other recent monologues like My Name is Rachel Corrie at the Royal Court, and The Year of Magical Thinking at the National Theatre - an adaptation of Joan Didion's memoir - the timing is just right. Will he be involved in the production? "No I'm too tired really, I can't do it any more. I would love to be, but I don't think I can be. No, Anthony Page* is going to direct it, who is very good."

And will he write another diary? He has declared each one so far to be the last and I expect to be told the same thing again, but instead he says, "I have done. Its called Coda, it's coming out in November or October." Does it follow the same pattern as the previous three? "No, it doesn't, it's more immediate than that. Its about having lung cancer actually, so it's slightly shorter than the others and it's about a precise event rather, it doesn't stray far from the course." He says this without a trace of rancour and in the same breath moves seamlessly on to the Balzac novel he is struggling to enjoy, A Harlot High and Low. "It has a new plot every page, the only book I've ever read which is over-plotted, in fact I think it's a very bad novel."

He walks me to the end of the road and a little way up the next street towards the tube station, in the late afternoon sun. He relaxes visibly once the tape recorder is switched off and displays the easy company of the old raconteur. He tells me that he is thinking about writing a new play.