Simon Gray, who 'found a whole new set of readers through his wonderful diaries'. Photograph: Linda Nylind
I liked Simon Gray. I liked, as everyone did, his confessional diaries in which he owned up to his everyday vices and his professional angst. I also liked his robust attitude to critics: he never took us too seriously, always designating us "as the man from the Guardian" or "the man from The Times", as if to remind us that the organ was far more important than the individual.
And, although I didn't know him well, he was very helpful to me when I wrote Harold Pinter's biography. I remember a happy lunch hour sitting in Simon's favourite watering hole, the Halcyon in Holland Park, talking about Pinter, cricket, literature, westerns and everything else under the sun.
But I also liked many, if not all, of Gray's plays. What he did, at his best, was carve out his own special territory: the arrested adolescence of the educated Englishmen. It was there in his first big hit, Butley, which dealt with a self-destructive academic whose whole life was based on a notion of male friendship deriving from schooldays and was dominated by "abuse, jokes and games".
Gray took the idea much further in Otherwise Engaged, which remains, by some way, his best play. The hero this time was a successful publisher who shielded himself from reality through a mix of calculated detachment, stony irony and verbal pedantry. As he found his privacy interrupted by a succession of visitors, he did his best to remain emotionally impervious. As his wife, returning from a tryst with her lover, said to him: "You're one of those men who only give permission to little bits of life to get through to you." It was a devastating insight that not only summed up Gray's hero but a whole tribe of emotionally undernourished Englishmen.
Gray pursued his theme through a whole succession of plays including Quartermaine's Terms and The Common Pursuit, both of which have been successfully revived. And he found a whole new set of readers through his wonderful diaries, which recorded his wrestles with booze and cigarettes and with intransigent West End managements.
One of the saddest episodes was the failure of his play, The Late Middle Classes, to make it beyond the other suburbs into central London. But "sad" is perhaps the wrong word. There was something bitterly hilarious about Gray's account of his professional misfortunes. Which is ultimately why one liked him: he was as honest and unsparing about his own failings as he was about the wicked ways of the theatrical world or the English vice of emotional detachment.
