Memoir: Simon Gray, the author of such well-made plays as Quartermain's Terms and The Common Pursuit, had the misfortune to emerge as a creative force at precisely the time - the early 1970s - when his variety of apolitical, middle-class introspection was at its least fashionable.
The coming theatrical generation - bearded men named Howard who wrote lengthy triptychs in which Tories raped nuns to the accompaniment of Marxist dirges - couldn't quite see the point of Gray. Hadn't all that Oxbridge tomfoolery been done away with in 1956? He could write a bit, they admitted. He certainly knew his way around a joke. But somebody like Gray could never again be, well, necessary.
Happily, The Smoking Diaries, which isn't really a diary but does feature plenty of smoking, suggests that the older Gray gets the more useful he may become. Though the author regards this poignant, hilarious memoir as a mere diversion from the important business of writing plays, it establishes him as the latest in a long line of cantankerous English prose masters who, in their later years, make an art out of being unable to look out the window without seeing something disgustingly and unnecessarily modern. But unlike most other titans in the field of geriatric disgust - Kingsley Amis, Alan Clark, Kenneth Williams - Gray cannot write a sentence without betraying a generous and sensitive temperament. (And, unlike them, he admits to an unaccountable affection for the loaf-headed American film star, Steven Seagal).
Cancer, treated with disbelief and terror when it attacks others, and resigned good humour when it visits the author, is a subsidiary character in the book. The Smoking Diaries was written in the aftermath of the death of Gray's good friend, the poet and critic Ian Hamilton, and details the diagnosis and (it is to be hoped) successful treatment of Harold Pinter, another celebrity buddy, for a tumour of the oesophagus. Towards the close Gray is discovered to have a smidgen of the disease ("a little cancer, apparently - like a little pregnant?" he muses) in his prostate, but his urologist calmly tells him not to worry as his liver and stomach, ravaged by a recently abandoned Champagne habit of Churchillian proportions, are sure to give in before the malignant gland gets him.
Meanwhile, he jets around the world for disappointing holidays and irritating literary shindigs. Perhaps the funniest passage concerns the jealousy that overcomes him when signing books alongside novelist David Lodge, another guest at a Canadian event, who "was faced by a queue that seemed to stretch right out of the lobby on to the pavement, and beyond that possibly all the way to the airport, where planes containing David Lodge fans were even now banking".
But the present is really just distracting background noise. The book is mostly taken up with unreliable recollections of more distant events - adventures with a lascivious teacher, his father's affairs, psychoses triggered by guilt at his own adultery - all expressed in long, elegantly twisty sentences, brilliantly structured so as to give the impression of slipshod, chaotic thinking.
In recent interviews, Gray has admitted that, when transferring the journal from notepad to computer, he was forced, not least because he has trouble reading his own spidery scrawl, into substantial rewriting. The result is carefully disciplined disorder.
Gray might not enjoy hearing it, but The Smoking Diaries, alongside the four volumes of reminiscence that preceded it, may come to be viewed as his greatest literary achievement.
We await the next instalment (the author's prostate, liver and stomach permitting) with eager anticipation.
• Donald Clarke is a critic, journalist and film-maker. His film reviews appear regularly in The Irish Times
