Coda by Simon Gray

Or a memoirist. Or some never before heard of combination betwixt and between, a dramatic monologuist, we might say. And it's just possible that these autobiographical books are his best work.

Gray began publishing journals in the Eighties, to describe the staging of his plays, and didn't launch into a freestanding diary until the wonderfully funny Enter a Fox (2001). Three more volumes followed amounting to a loose trilogy: The Smoking Diaries (2004), The Year of the Jouncer (2006) and The Last Cigarette (2008).

In these books, Gray wrote about everything that came to mind, in a present tense stream of conciousness rendered in enormously long and lightly punctuated sentences, revising his thoughts by adding corrections and changes as he went on, rather than going back and striking out.

There was his current life in Holland Park and Suffolk, his holidays in Greece and Barbados, his friendships with Harold Pinter, Alan Bates, Ian Hamilton and others, his dogs, his irritation with all sorts of rubbish modern things going on around him & Then he also slipped constantly back into his past, his memories of his parents and his brothers, his misdeeds as a boy and a man, his love affairs & One of the consequences of reading Gray is realising afresh that not only is there no escape from oneself but that, since one's sense of one's self is the sum of one's past, the past is not even past either.

And then Gray also wrote about his own damaged health. He had been a tremendous drinker whose initial idea of cutting down had been switching from Scotch to four or five bottles of champagne a day. In Enter a Fox, he described his last drinking days, ending in an operation to remove a yard of intestine and only then abstinence.

Instead of the booze, he ravenously ate bars of milk chocolate in the middle of the night. But he carried on smoking, several packets a day.

The Last Cigarette began with his pledge finally to give up and closed with him, on New Year 2007, announcing: "I have a tumour in my lung, discovered by accident during the annual scan of my aneurysm, which itself has apparently grown or swollen apace and will have to be dealt with in due course & Absolutely certainly, one way or another, I'm coming up to the last cigarette.

Well &" Simon Gray died on 6 August this year, aged 71. It was widely reported to be of lung cancer but his GP and friend Dr Martin Scurr recently confirmed that in fact "he died when he was really rather well, quite suddenly, and of a cause unrelated to smoking" — an abdominal aortic aneurysm..

In Coda, Gray describes his life after the tumour had been diagnosed, mostly from the perspective of a beach holiday in Crete in autumn 2007, as he was recovering from radiotherapy, having been told he had a year to live. It's a more focused, less discursive book than the previous volumes, intently describing his encounters with doctors and nurses and then trying, sometimes in the form of a dialogue between two selves roundly christened Sicko and Thicko, to weigh up his life at last.

Throughout, Coda is a victory of tone.

Gray remains himself throughout, undiminished, always truthful, both observant and self-observant. Although describing terminal illness, it is an assertion of life, pleasurable to read, deeply companionable, despite the physical humiliations detailed.

This time, however, the smoking is beyond a joke. Gray doesn't stop even now, just cuts down. Against all the evidence, he says several times: "I don't believe that my cancer is the result of smoking." More intriguingly, he tries at one point — tentatively, feeling his way — to formulate how the smoking could be such an intrinsic part of himself.

"What in my nature allows me — sometimes it feels more like insistence — to go on smoking? The thought of dying terrifies me, the thought of dying of cancer particularly terrifies me, and yet — and yet — destiny is too grand a word, what I want is a word that has the meaning of a meeting up between the something in me that needs to smoke, call it a genetic disorder or call it original sin, and the something in me that needs the consequence, call it an effect, as in the law of cause and effect, or a punishment." It is just this sense of original sin that makes Gray so compelling a diarist, as well as so compulsive a smoker.

After this attempt at self-analysis, he suddenly remarks: "One of my fears in life has always been that other people Several-packs-a-day: compelling diarist and compulsive smoker Simon Gray are as bad as I am." He himself has no wisdom, no faith, no consolation, not even a personal philosophy, he admits.

But he does have the dramatist's faculty of human sympathy. In one of the internal dialogues, between Sicko and Thicko, Sicko defines sympathy thus: "It's the recognition of other people's feelings through the awareness of those feelings, or the possibility of them, in myself." And, as such, sympathy, he insists, is "a wondrous thing" — the dove in us, as opposed to the serpent. "Every good act comes from it, as do the feelings that cause us so much distress and so — sometimes — manage to stop us from doing bad things to people, or from doing them again — sometimes." "What feelings are those?" asks Thicko. "Guilt, shame, remorse — you know perfectly well," replies Sicko.

And that is why Gray writes so well about these feelings — and why, when he does, his diaries, however selfobsessed, bad-tempered and splenetic, reveal ourselves to us, too.

And Coda is as good as anything he ever wrote..

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

It's coming up to 4 am on a Friday morning, and I've just promised myself, a self loaded with and lightened by a couple of sleeping pills, that I will go on with this tomorrow.So begins Simon Gray's powerful account of the year in which he struggles to come to terms with terminal cancer. From heartbreaking reflections on his own mortality to characteristically outrageous asides - 'everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who was given six months to live, and here they are, only just dead, eight years later or, in exceptional cases, here they still are, eating oysters and boring the shit out of people' - Gray's self-proclaimed 'last written words on the subject of myself' records his extraordinary emotional journey.Darkly comic depictions of the medical team - there's the Chipmunk of Doom, who spells out Gray's woeful prognosis uninvited; the charming, floppy-haired neurologist, aka 'Mummy's delight'; the 'mortifyingly pretty doctor' who arrives to fit his catheter; and the elegant nurse who breezily observes he smells of urine - are set against joyful accounts of sunlit days with this beloved wife, Victoria, in Crete and a beautiful early summer in Suffolk. Woven into the narrative are arguments with himself, 'Dialogue between a Thicko and a Sicko', a shameful childhood memory and a masterfully tense 'distraction', written in real time while waiting for his final prognosis - and smoking one last cigarette.Written with exceptional candour and a poignant reluctance to leave this world behind, Simon Gray's "Coda" is as life-affirming as it is heartrending.