Rik Mayall's nickname for him was Mr Drinky. We adored him and he appeared to adore us. 'I know nothing of your generation,' he would say. 'I don't watch television so I haven't seen "The Young Ones" or "Blackadder" or whatever the things you do are called. They told me to audition you, and so I did. You all seem absurdly young and confident, and I am assured that you will bring an audience into the theatre.'
That we seemed young to him I can imagine, but that we gave the impression of confidence seemed extraordinary in any of us except of course Rik Mayall. Rik was a force of nature who appeared charismatically invincible and fearlessly uninhibited from the moment he burst on to the comedy scene with his friend Ade Edmondson in the early eighties. I suppose that I too, as ever, emanated waves of looming self-confidence that I most certainly did not feel.
The title of Simon's play came from a phrase coined and used as the title of a collection of essays by the critic and academic F. R. Leavis, who founded a whole school of English-literature studies whose high seriousness, attention to detail and earnest moral purpose were legendary. Simon Gray had been taught by Leavis himself at Cambridge and remained hugely influenced by him. For myself, I'd always thought Leavis a sanctimonious prick of only parochial significance (my own brand of undergraduate sanctimoniousness at work there, I now see) and certainly by the time I arrived at Cambridge his influence had waned, he and his kind having been almost entirely eclipsed by the Parisian post-structuralists and their caravanserai of prolix and impenetrable evangels and dogmatically zealous acolytes. Stories of Frank Leavis and his harridan of a wife, Queenie, snubbing, ostracizing, casting out and calumniating anyone who offended them went the rounds, and those English academics at the university who had been in their orbit were callously dismissed by the elite as dead Leavisites.
Leavis's intense, suspicious propensity to explode in wrath and to anathematize anyone who dared disagree with him I saw again in Harold Pinter, whose close but combustible friendship with Simon Gray and Simon's wife, Beryl, was an eternal source of delight to me and John Sessions in particular, as ardent connoisseurs of literary eccentricity. I remember once John and I were sitting in the back brasserie of the Groucho Club. Harold, his wife, Lady Antonia, Beryl and Simon had a corner table. Suddenly Harold's booming voice burst out. 'If you are capable of saying such a thing as that, Simon Gray, it is perfectly clear that there is no further basis for our friendship. We are leaving.'
We peeped round to see Harold rise with massive black-polo-necked dignity, stub out a cigarette, toss down the remnants of a whisky and sweep past us, growling all the while. That massive dignity was a little punctured by his realization that the faithful Pakenham hound was not at his heels. He turned and barked across the room, 'Antonia!'
Lady Magnesia Fridge-Freezer, as Richard Ingrams liked to call her, jerked herself awake (her defence against the madness of Harold's tantrums was always simply to fall asleep. She could do this in the middle of a meal or sentence, a kind of traumatic symplegia, a condition known only to cats in P. G. Wodehouse, but which I think refers to what we would now call narcolepsy) and softly gathered up her coat. By this time the whole back brasserie was watching the scene unfold and greatly enjoying the embarrassed lacunae, charged glances and menacing exchanges that one associates with the authentically Pinteresque. Antonia smiled seraphically at the Grays and went to join her husband. As she passed our table she stopped and gathered the loose wool at the shoulder of my pullover.
'Oh, what a lovely jumper,' she sighed, fingering it for a second.
'Antonia!'
And she drifted away. I can almost bring myself to believe that the room burst into applause, but I think that would be an instance of the wish being father of the thought.
I raise the issue of Leavis because the moral seriousness he inculcated into the study of letters left its mark on Simon Gray in strange ways. I remember an evening in the bar of the Watford Palace Theatre. We had performed the play for about a week prior to coming into the West End. That night's performance was a great success, and afterwards Simon dished out the few director's notes he had scribbled on tickets and taxi receipts while standing at the back of the theatre sipping Glenfiddich. The mood amongst us was good. He sighed something about how young we all were.
'Actually,' said John Gordon Sinclair, 'you remember when I auditioned and you asked me how old I was?'
'Yes,' said Simon. 'What of it?'
'Well, I said I was twenty-eight, but actually I'm only twenty-five.'
'What? What? Why?'
'Well, I knew that you'd cast Stephen and Rik and Johnnie; they were like twenty-nine and thirty and thirty-two or whatever, and I didn't want you to think I was too young ...'
'You lied?' Simon stared at him aghast.
'Yes, well ...' Gordie had clearly imagined that Simon would be amused. It was all over now: he was safely cast in the play, we could all share in the charm of his anxiety to be cast and the little white lie he told to make it more likely. If anything the story was a compliment to the play and his desire to be a part of it. The smile vanished from Gordie's face as he realized that Simon was far from amused.
'You lied.' A characteristic slump and a grimace of pain and despair swept over Simon. 'You lied?'
Poor Gordie was bright red now and wishing he was dead.
'Well, I thought ...'
'But to lie ...'
Fond of Simon as I was, I thought this was a strange reaction. To disapprove of lying is one thing, but to disapprove of so benign and amiable a lie and so relentlessly to bear down on its perpetrator struck me as being bullying, priggish, mean and grotesquely out of proportion. We all tried in our own way to defuse the moment, but Gordie felt rotten for the rest of the week, convinced that Simon was going to sack him or at the very least hate him for ever, and I was left wondering whether the malignant influence behind it all was whisky or Leavis.
The play we were there to put on chronicled the life of a group of friends who collaborate as students on the founding of a literary magazine called The Common Pursuit. Over the course of the play's action, hard real life with its loves, infidelities, compromises and betrayals scuffs away the gloss and sheen of the group's noble ambitions and high Leavisite ideals. John Sessions took the leading part of Stuart, the magazine's editor, opposite Sarah Berger, who played his girlfriend, Marigold. Paul Mooney was Martin, the best friend endowed with enough private means to keep the magazine going, and John Gordon Sinclair played Peter, a likeable serial philanderer endlessly snared in a tangle of lies and evasions as he tries to run his chaotic seraglio of mistresses. My role was that of a broodingly intelligent, sexually constrained, waspish and socially awkward philosophy don called Humphrey Taylor, who ends up being murdered by a piece of rough trade, a la James Pope-Hennessy and (perhaps) Richard Lancelyn Green. Rik took the part of Nick Finchling, a brilliant, slapdash and entertaining historian who trades his academic promise for an easy career in the media. Nick is a heavy smoker and towards the end of the play he develops emphysema. At one point my character Humphrey upbraids him as he watches him light up and dissolve, for the umpteenth time, into a terrible coughing fit.
'You should give up.'
'Why?'
'For one thing, you'll live longer.'
'Oh, you don't live longer. It just seems longer.'
That was Mr Drinky's view of his addictions, and now it was mine too. The previous year I had told everyone that I was going to give up smoking on 24 August, my thirtieth birthday. I managed ten nicotine-free days at my house in Norfolk before a group of heavy-smoking friends arrived to stay, their presence soon bending and then snapping my puny will. I would not try again for almost twenty years. Instead I adopted Simon Gray's guilt-free acceptance of the addiction. No, it was more than guilt-free acceptance: cigarettes were proud banners to be flown. Objections to smoking in Simon's eyes were contemptible and bourgeois. He was always getting in terrible rows for lighting up in minicabs and those parts of theatres and public spac
es which, even back then, were given over to non-smokers. The diaries he wrote and published throughout the eighties, nineties and into the noughties reveal a baleful champion of tobacco barging belligerently through an increasingly intolerant and hostile world. The titles of his final journals make this explicit - The Smoking Diaries Vol. 1, The Smoking Diaries 2: The Year of the Jouncer and The Last Cigarette: Smoking Diaries 3.
Of course the body can take chronic assault from alcohol and tobacco for just so long. The time came for him to give up first one and then the other.
I remember that Paul Smith shirt. My birthday.
*
I am in a quiet residential Notting Hill street in 2006, filming for a documentary on manic depression. The director, Ross Wilson, positions the camera at one end of a long, straight pavement. I walk to the other end, turn round and wait for his cue. All I have to do is walk towards the camera. No acting or speech required. It is one of dozens and dozens of such shots that are filmed all the time in documentaries. Something to fill the screen for a voiced piece of commentary to be laid on later: 'And so I decided that a visit to the Royal College of Psychiatry might prove useful ...' - that sort of thing.
Ross waves for action, and I start the walk. From out of one of the houses shuffles an old man in a dressing-gown, blocking the shot. I stop and return to my mark. This is always happening when we film in the street, and we are very used to it. Well, not old men in dressing-gowns particularly so much as members of the public, or civilians, as some people in the film and TV business call them, or, wince-inducingly these days, 'muggles'. TV documentary is not major movie-making, where you have policemen and assistant directors to help marshal the citizenry. In such situations we wait patiently and grin inanely. The man in the dressing-gown slowly and painfully approaches, and I see that it is Simon Gray. His hair is almost white, and his face is sunken in. He looks dreadfully ill and much older than his seventy years.
'Hello, Simon.'
'Oh. Hello.'
We have only spoken to each other once since the terrible trauma of 1995 in which I had walked out of his play Cell Mates and fled to Europe. As it happens, the documentary I am filming this very day seeks to find out, amongst other things, what had propelled me to that flight.
'So. What are you doing?' Simon asks.
'Oh. Filming.' I indicate the camera behind him. I think it wise not to mention that the events of 1995 are central to the film.
He slowly turns, looks at it and then comes round again to me. 'Ah. Well. There we are, aren't we? A comedy of some kind I suppose. Well then.' Never has comedy been made to sound so low, vulgar and pitiful. Simon had never forgiven me for leaving Cell Mates. Initial worry and concern for my well-being at the moment of my leaving had rapidly been replaced by resentment, fury and contempt. All of which was very understandable. The show should have gone on.
I see him just once more. It is July 2008, and I am in a box at Lord's cricket ground, watching Pietersen and Bell put on nearly 300 runs for the fourth wicket against South Africa. The next-door box is filled with distinguished playwrights: Tom Stoppard, Ronald Harwood, David Hare, Harold Pinter and, sitting quietly in a corner, Simon Gray. Playwrights and cricket have always gone together. Samuel Beckett remains, I believe I am right in saying, the only Nobel Laureate to have had an entry in the cricketer's almanac, Wisden.
At tea, the nubiferously chain-smoking pair of Tom Stoppard and Ronnie Harwood visit our rather showbizzy box. David Frost is the host and he wonders aloud if there might be a collective noun for a group of playwrights. Stoppard suggests the word 'snarl'. The particular snarl of playwrights assembled next door has collected a pair of Oscars, a dozen BAFTAs and Olivier Awards, a CH, three CBEs, two knighthoods and a Nobel Prize for Literature. I am happy talking to Stoppard and Harwood, both of whom are as engaging, charming and friendly as Pinter and Gray are obstreperous, cantankerous and unstable. Pinter's capacity for explosive hostility and liverish offence at the tiniest imagined slight is legendary and, while he has never displayed any animosity towards me, I have always been very wary of speaking to him for more than a few minutes at a time, just in case.
At the close of play I make my way out of the box and walk straight into Simon, whom I have not seen since that afternoon in Notting Hill.
'Hello, Simon!' I say. 'Gosh, you look well.'
Which, compared to two years ago, he does.
'Do I?' he says. 'Well, that's terminal cancer for you. As a matter of fact I'm dying. That was my last cricket match. Well. There we are. Goodbye.'
He died three weeks later. Whether the prostate cancer that killed him was in any way related to his smoking I have no idea. I suspect that his alcoholism and sixty-five a day were not the cause of his death. At any rate Simon Gray did die and was justly mourned as one of the most individual, intelligent and comically desperate voices of his time. I was not invited to the funeral.
Rewind to 2006. I had decided, I am not quite sure why, that it was time for me to stop smoking. Actually, I think I do know why. I had managed finally to give up the big thing, the thing we will turn to at some other time, and it annoyed me that I found it so hard to do the same with cigarettes. If I could abandon the systematic and heavy use of a Class A forbidden substance, surely I could fight off nicotine addiction with the merest snap of the fingers?
On the shelf by my desk in my London house there stood a strange object. Designed and built by the Dunhill company, it seemed to be an old-fashioned BBC radio microphone. Disassemble and reassemble it in the manner of Scaramanga and his Golden Gun, however, and it became a pipe. This fine trophy had been presented to me a few years previously when I was named Pipe Smoker of the Year. On account of this I now felt a slight twinge of guilt at the thought of quitting. I picked the award up and, like a child with a Transformer toy, twisted, snapped, prised and pushed it into its alternative shape.
It so fell out that my installation in 2003 was to be the last of these funny little Pipe Smoker of the Year ceremonies. The award was ruled by the health authorities to be a form of tobacco advertising by the back door and from that year on was mercilessly proscribed. In its heyday it had celebrated the great icons of the age, most of them a touch suburban and cardiganny perhaps, but, from Harold Wilson to Eric Morecambe, by way of Tony Benn and Fred Trueman, they had represented something rather splendid that has since gone out of British life. Neither smart, nor sophisticated, nor stylish, they were the kind of people you picture devoting their Sundays either to grappling with the garden hose and waxing the Wolseley or to brisk fell-walking, a canvas haversack on their backs and long woolly socks up to their knees.
Dunhill and the event's organizers went to great trouble to make me my special pipe, mix me my own blend of tobacco and embrace me as one of their own. Now there I was just three years later, planning to leave the fold. It seemed like a betrayal. As a matter of fact, I rarely smoked a pipe in public anyway. For the most part I was a Marlboro man. Not full-on Marlboro Reds, nor anaemic Marlboro Lights, but Mummy Bear Marlboro Mediums - for the compromiser in life. Middle aged, middle brow, middle class, middle rank, middle tar - that's me. I reserved the old briar pipes for winter months and lonely hours at the writing desk. Although there had been just one recent occasion when I did go out into the world with a pipe ...
I was being profiled in the Independent newspaper in the summer of 2003, I cannot remember the purpose; perhaps it was to coincide with the first series of the television programme QI. For no good reason I turned up at the appointed place with a pipe in my pocket. At some stage I must have run out of cigarettes and started in on it. A week later, to accompany the interview, there appeared a picture of me on the cover of the newspaper with the pipe jutting out of my face at an angle, a thick cloud of smoke artfully half concealing my smug features. Sadly my features know no other way of arranging themselves except smugly. Why had I taken the pipe along and why had I smoked it in the presence of a photographer? Looking back, I now wonder if at some entire
ly subconscious level I had recognized that a pipe would suit the rather professorial side to my character that QI emphasized and maybe that is why I had pocketed it when setting out to meet the journalist. What is interesting, or at least revealing, about the nature of twenty-first-century celebrity, is that it was only a few days after the publication of that interview that a letter arrived from the British Pipesmokers' Council advising me that I had been elected that year's Pipe Smoker of the Year. This charming absurdity came so hard on the heels of the article that it was bound to give me the feeling that, if it had chanced to be a bonobo who had been featured on the front page of the Independent smoking a pipe that week, then the accolade would surely have gone to it ... desperate is, I suppose, the word to describe the worshipful company of pipe smokers and tobacco blenders. And given the forthcoming demise of the award, perhaps their desperation had good cause.
Now there I sat, three years later, fiddling with my prize pipe and contemplating a betrayal of the smoking cause. 'Betrayal' and 'cause' are perhaps hysterical and self-important words to use, but smoking to me was a cause; it had always symbolized in my mind something enormous. I have mentioned Sherlock Holmes, but the fact is that almost all my heroes were not just figures who happened to smoke, but more than that, active, proud and positive smokers. They didn't just smoke in the world, they smoked at the world. Oscar Wilde was one of the pioneers of the cigarette. When he met Victor Hugo, the cher maitre's major obsession was as much with Wilde's abundant supply of fresh, high-quality cigarettes as with his equally abundant supply of fresh, high-quality epigrams. Wilde's first episode of real notoriety came when he took to the stage to make his bow after the triumphant first night of Lady Windermere's Fan with a cigarette between his fingers - a casual detail that enraged many present and was considered worthy enough to mention in just about every press report and in the letters and diaries of those who had been present.