free cigarettes
For some reason we make an exception of Simon Gray. This is not because I don’t find him masculinely threatening – he is, actually – but because he is not a marriage-breaking writer, as Roth most definitely is. I can only explain that by saying that Simon Gray doesn’t raise the ire of either sex against the other. On the stage sometimes, maybe, in earlier days, but in his diaries, no. The passage I want to read aloud to my wife, who has already read The Last Cigarette but doesn’t mind hearing it again, describes the diarist lying on a plastic bed on a cement beach in Greece, surrounded by bodies he doesn’t find attractive ("little strips of material between their legs"), listening to voices he loathes ("voices you could grate cheese on"), a free cigarettes jammed into his mouth, "the sun pouring through my straw hat like a molten headache". A wonderful image, a molten headache, partly because it enacts the condition of becoming molten which is continuous – the sun continuing to pour, the hat continuing to provide no adequate protection, the head continuing to melt. So you can go on reading and rereading the sentence, the ache getting worse with every read.
