Lives in Writing (14 page)

From the memories, some of them revisited several times, a kind of autobiography emerges. Gray and his older brother were taken to Montreal at the beginning of the Second World War when they were three and four years old, and left there with their grandparents by their mother, who one day said she was going out for some milk and didn’t come back. He was bullied at school for one terrifying year, after which he became a bully himself, began to smoke at the age of seven and to con money out of people by crying outside the post office and pretending he had no money for stamps to write home to his parents. A certain tendency to delinquency continued after he and his brother returned to England towards the end of the war and he attended Westminster School. His father was an aloof pathologist who cheated when playing chess with his son and was chronically unfaithful to his wife, as Simon discovered in adolescence, and as his mother confided in him a little later. It is tempting to apply Philip Larkin’s well-known poem on mums and dads to Gray’s case.

‘During the period of my own adultery,’ he reports, ‘I frequently hovered on the verge of suicide – no, not suicide, something more violent, more of a sort of self-homicide – what I wanted really was to seize myself by the back of the neck and dash and dash my head, until my brains were out and I was over and done with.’ He adds characteristically, ‘On the other hand I didn’t want to be dead.’ After an extended affair with a colleague at Queen Mary College, Victoria Rothschild, he left Beryl, his wife of many years and the mother of his children, to marry Victoria. He was to the end of his life deeply in love with Victoria and deeply ashamed of his infidelity to Beryl, with no hope of resolving or reconciling these conflicting emotions. ‘Through it all the moral toothache is throbbing away until it is all I really think about, why am I not a good man, why have I not done better, why am I sitting here chain-smoking in a rehearsal of my play . . .’ This reference in
The Year of the Jouncer
is to
The Old Masters
, which Harold Pinter had generously agreed to direct in 2004 in spite of his own grave health problems, but the passage could come from anywhere in the later diaries, including – indeed especially – the last one,
Coda
, published posthumously in November 2008.

A coda is a concluding part of a musical or literary work that is additional rather than aesthetically essential, and Gray’s
Coda
has this relation to the
Smoking Diaries
trilogy. The formal differences are relatively slight, but the tone and content are markedly more sombre. It begins with the writer taking two sleeping pills at 4 a.m. and promising himself that tomorrow he will write ‘an account of what you’ve been told, on good medical authority, is the beginning of your dying’. But he fails. ‘I keep sitting down to go on with this, again and again, night after night, but it’s no good . . . one night I sat for a long time at my desk in my study without doing anything at all until I suddenly began to beat myself about the head.’ It’s not until he goes to Crete with Victoria for a two-week holiday in October 2007 that he is able to describe the bad news he received in July of that year and its sequel. A routine scan to check the state of a long-standing aneurysm revealed the presence of a tumour on a lung, soon followed by a tumour on his neck. Investigative surgery indicated that this was a secondary cancer and that the disease was spreading. The prognosis, which he didn’t want to know, but which was pressed on him by an over-eager oncologist, was that he had a year to live – or nine months by the time he started to write about it.

Gray spares himself and his readers nothing in his account of the fear, depression, despair and self-reproach the knowledge of his condition generates, and the physical discomfort and personal indignities entailed in the medical consultations and investigations he undergoes. There are amusing anecdotes and sardonic observations, especially about the extraordinary insensitivity of the medics he encounters, but the humour is for the most part of the gallows variety, e.g. ‘I’ve never needed cigarettes more than when getting the news that I’m dying from them.’ In spite of that, he does cut down, and finds that the smell of other people’s cigarette smoke disgusts him. The endless deferral of the last cigarette was a kind of running joke in the three preceding diaries, but Gray’s plight now is no joke, and inevitably he broods on:

what in my nature made me a smoker? 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.

He concludes that he must have inherited a sense of sin from the Scots Presbyterians and Welsh Anglicans in his ancestry, but as a ‘great-great-grandchild of the Enlightenment’ he cannot seek absolution or justification from institutional religion. He records with admiration the courage and stoicism with which non-religious friends like the actor Alan Bates, Ian Hamilton and Harold Pinter,
¹
faced the prospect of imminent death, but is unable to emulate them. All he can do is engage in painful self-examination, dramatised sometimes as a debate between two voices in his head, dubbed Thicko and Sicko, the first of whom jeers and accuses while the second wriggles uncomfortably and feebly defends himself. At times he sounds like one of Kierkegaard’s angst-ridden personae, unable to embrace the Absurd of faith, but with no other relief – except writing itself.

There are moments of calm and evocations of simple available pleasures, especially the pleasure of swimming in the sea, which Gray describes in an earlier book as his ‘favourite thing in life’, and now as the way he would most like to leave it. ‘I wish there were a way of just dissolving in the sea,’ he writes, and finding himself overtired and out of his depth one day he would have let himself drown if it were not for the distress it would cause to Victoria. The book is dedicated to ‘Victoria – without whom, nothing’ and the tender but unsentimental way Gray records his dependence on her support is one of the elements that makes
Coda
a not unrelievedly harrowing book. There is a characteristic episode, both funny and poignant, where he worries about the large number of shoes, many unused, he possesses. Thinking she will find their disposal upsetting after his death he considers taking them secretly, pair by pair, to the Oxfam shop. ‘But supposing she went into Oxfam, as she sometimes does, and saw all the shoes lined up against the wall there – what would she think? But why secretly? Surely I could say, “Darling, don’t you think it’s time –” No. Stop there.’

The Grays return to England to learn the result of the radiotherapy he received earlier. Setting off for the appointment with deep foreboding Gray resolves, ‘Whatever it is . . . they will be my last words on the subject of myself.’ To his stunned relief Dr Rootle (as Gray has prejudicially nicknamed him) reveals that the radiotherapy has been remarkably effective, and prognosticates possibly two years’ remission. These are the last words of the book: ‘I mean, two years, two whole – well eighteen months then, yes, let’s keep it at eighteen months, in order to avoid disappointment.’

In the event Simon Gray lived for only nine more months, but felt relatively well during them, and what killed him – suddenly – was not the direct result of his drinking or smoking, but the rupture of the aneurysm, a fact which if, against his expectation, his spirit survives somewhere, will give him some ironic satisfaction. Whether by accident or inspired design there is a larger than normal number of blank pages – fifteen – at the back of the book, so as I approached the end, reading slowly to make the most of it, a diminishing but substantial wad of pages under my right thumb, I turned one and suddenly there were the last words – ‘to avoid disappointment’ – with only a few brief acknowledgements on the facing page and then a flutter of white leaves. Nothing could express more eloquently the abrupt removal of this writer from the world of the living, to the dismay of his friends and fans. But his brilliantly witty, searingly honest diaries will live on.

1
Harold Pinter died on 24 December 2008, five months after Gray’s death. His impressive fight against cancer, first diagnosed in 2002, and his determination to lead as full and as public a life as possible in spite of setbacks and complications, are reflected in many scenes and episodes of
The
Smoking Diaries
trilogy.

AFTER THEORY. BY
Terry Eagleton. Anyone who served on the academic front of the culture wars in the closing decades of the twentieth century is likely to be arrested, or at least intrigued, by that conjunction of title and author.
¹
For non-combatants a little contextual information may help to explain why. ‘Theory’ (usually printed with a capital T, and/or scare quotes, though not by Eagleton) is the loose and capacious term generally used to refer to the academic discourses which arose out of the impact of structuralism and post-structuralism on the humanities (or ‘human sciences’ as academics in Continental Europe, where it all started, prefer to call them). Key figures in its evolution were a brilliant generation of French intellectuals, including Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, who turned upon the methodologies of the founding fathers of structuralism, such as the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and the work of earlier seminal modern thinkers like Marx and Freud, a scrutiny that was at once critical and creative. To simplify drastically: structuralism offered to explain the meaning of all forms of cultural production by identifying the underlying systems of signification they employed, using the model of language; whereas post-structuralism argued that this pursuit of scientific objectivity is vain because culture is saturated in ideology and language itself provides no foundation for interpretative closure. One might say that Theory began when theory itself began to be theorised – or, in the buzz word of the day, ‘deconstructed’.

In due course the movement’s centre of gravity moved from France to America where it was developed and promulgated by writers like Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, Jonathan Culler, Barbara Johnson, Gayatri Spivak, Fredric Jameson and Edward Said. In both continents it assimilated and theorised the nascent movement of feminist criticism. It extended the scope of traditional literary criticism to take in the whole range of cultural production, and it spawned a number of new, non-aesthetic approaches to this material under a bewildering variety of names – the New Historicism, post-colonial studies, subaltern studies, Queer Theory, and so on, each with its own jargon, periodicals and conferences. Most of these projects were seen, and saw themselves, as belonging to that even looser and larger phenomenon known as ‘Postmodernism’. In this context the word is not merely descriptive of formal developments in the arts (as in ‘postmodernist architecture’ or ‘the postmodernist novel’), but refers to family resemblances in a wide range of cultural attitudes and practices.

One very controversial effect of Theory on the academic study of literature was to undermine the authority of the traditional canon and to install in its place a set of alternative sub-canons such as women’s writing, gay and lesbian writing, post-colonial writing, and the founding texts of Theory itself. It had its warmest welcome among smart young recruits to the academic profession, eager to try out this bright new methodological gadgetry with which they could dazzle and disconcert their elders. Not surprisingly Theory met with considerable resistance from those with a vested interest in more traditional modes of literary scholarship. There were many struggles over the curriculum, appointments, and tenure.

In England the most celebrated of these was the so-called MacCabe Affair of 1981 when a young lecturer at Cambridge University, Colin MacCabe, who had written a book about James Joyce much influenced by the new Parisian ideas, was denied the Cambridge equivalent of tenure. He and his supporters broadcast their belief that an injustice had been done, and the case seemed to tickle the fancy of the media, who had heard a lot about this newfangled structuralism without quite knowing what it was and were now able to discuss it in terms of personalities. What began as a row between members of the Cambridge English Faculty became a serial news story in the national and even international press, and culminated in a two-day debate in the University Senate where much academic dirty linen was washed in public. The traditionalists won inasmuch as Colin MacCabe was not given tenure (instead he became the youngest full professor of English in the UK at the University of Strathclyde) but it was a pyrrhic victory which led directly or indirectly to the departure of several of Cambridge’s brightest stars, including Frank Kermode.

Eventually, and on a wider stage, Theory won, inasmuch as it had established itself by the early 1990s as a new orthodoxy in university humanities departments around the world, existing alongside the traditional practices of empirical historical scholarship and textual editing in a kind of uneasy détente, but definitely the dominant party in terms of influence, patronage, and prestige. The very success of Theory, however, eventually bred a kind of weariness in many of those who struggled on its behalf, and its institutionalisation deprived it of much of its original excitement and glamour. Disillusionment set in among some of its notable early supporters. Colin MacCabe, for instance, published a second edition of
James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word
in 2002 with an introduction that acknowledged the flaws in its theoretical apparatus, much of which, he said, ‘has become a paralysing orthodoxy, trumpeted by dunces almost identical to those who freed me from my much loved Cambridge’. Sir Frank Kermode, whose staff/postgraduate seminar at University College London was an influential conduit for the ideas and personalities of Continental structuralism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, expressed increasing dismay in his later publications at the distorting effect of Theory on the appreciation and understanding of literature, especially the literature of the past. Frank Lentricchia, exponent of a Foucault-influenced, post-Marxist brand of political criticism in books like
Criticism and Social Change
(1983), published a confessional article in the magazine
Lingua Franca
in 1996 in which he denounced Theory for killing the pleasure of reading, deplored its effect on his indoctrinated graduate students, and revealed that he now taught Great Books rhapsodically to undergraduates behind closed doors. Examples could be multiplied of formerly committed partisans of Theory who have changed tack, diversified into creative writing and autobiography, re-dedicated themselves to teaching in encounter-group style, or left the academy altogether to become psychotherapists.