Ten, eleven weeks ago I had an email from Simon Gray to say that the tumour on his lung hadn’t grown; so he was all right till his next scan in four months time. Now he is dead and I wonder if they didn’t tell him the truth then, or if the thing took a sudden spurt. The latter, surely; he wasn’t someone to conceal bad news from. ‘I am always eager to acknowledge the worst,’ he wrote in the last published volume of his diaries, ‘and often in advance of the evidence.’
A day or two later came another email. ‘Now that I know I’m not going to die for four months I’ll have to find something to write. Any ideas?’ I replied that there was an episode in that last diary, about having to sack a talented young American actor from the cast of the New York revival of Butley, which might make a short play. ‘Why don’t you write it?’ he said. Perhaps I’ll try to, if only ‘in memoriam’.
I hadn’t seen him for years, nevertheless always thought of him as one of my real friends. There were many, some themselves now dead, like Alan Bates and Ian Hamilton, others like his beloved wife Victoria and Harold and Antonia Pinter, who were, obviously, very much closer to him. They shared his life, as I didn’t. Yet our friendship, dating from Cambridge days, was kept alive by occasional letters, postcards, latterly emails. A couple of weeks ago I wrote here about Malcolm Lowry, of whom one of his friends said, ‘even a sight of the old bastard cheers me up for days’. A note from Simon had the same effect on me.
He was a couple of years older, had spent time teaching, hilariously, in retrospect at least, at a French school before coming to Trinity, and at first I was a bit shy, even wary of him.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in