The Welsh writer Dannie Abse, who is coming to Ireland for the Bealtaine festival, has combined successful careers in poetry and medicine, writes Nicholas Wroe.
Dannie Abse, now nearly 80 and the best-known living Welsh poet, met Dylan Thomas, the best-known dead Welsh poet, just once. Abse was a medical student in wartime London when Thomas joined him at a table in a Swiss Cottage pub.
As a tyro poet and great admirer of Thomas's work, Abse introduced himself, mentioning that Thomas knew his cousin, the Swansea painter Leo Solomon. Thomas, shy and preoccupied, looked puzzled, even when Abse repeated Solomon's name. After an agonising few minutes of silence, Abse gulped down his drink and said goodbye. As he was leaving, Thomas half-smiled and rose from his seat to deliver the mortifying line: "Bye, Mr Solomon."
Abse later found out that Thomas did indeed know his cousin. "I think he was having me on," he says. "He must have been so sick of people coming up to him saying: 'Are you Dylan Thomas?' " But even this excruciating encounter didn't diminish Abse's admiration for him. Much of Abse's early work, largely to its detriment as he readily concedes, was heavily suffused with Thomas's language and cadence.
Abse eventually did shrug him off and has enjoyed a long and successful literary career, from the publication of his first volume of verse in 1948 to a 2003 volume, New And Collected Poems. Remarkably, most of this career has been conducted while holding down a full-time job as a doctor in a London chest clinic. He has also edited poetry anthologies and been a playwright, a literary journalist and a writer on medical affairs. There have also been several volumes of rather novelistic autobiography and a handful of equally autobiographical novels. Last year, his book The Strange Case Of Dr Simmonds And Dr Glas - drawing heavily on a 1905 Swedish novel but set in 1940s Swiss Cottage café society - was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
"Even without the poetry," says Tony Curtis, professor of poetry at the University of Glamorgan and author of a book about Abse, "he would be one of the most important Welsh writers of the 20th century. I'd rank Ash On A Young Man's Sleeve [his 1954 Cardiff-set Bildungs-roman\] with Cider With Rosie or Catcher In The Rye. But the poetry is astonishing, with some of the lyrical poems absolute gems. The new collection reminds us of the depth and longevity of his work."
Abse was born in Cardiff in 1923. His mother, "very warm and very volatile", was from a Swansea Valley Jewish family who spoke Welsh as well as Hebrew. His father was from a Bridgend Jewish family who owned cinemas in south Wales. Abse's father had tried to branch out on his own with a cinema in Cardiff, but it failed and he had to go back into the family business. "He was a wonderful failure all his life, and I loved him. He always backed the wrong horse and lived vicariously through his sons." One of Abse's most famous poems, In Llandough Hospital, was written after visiting his dying father - "as thin as Auschwitz in that bed" - in 1964:
'To hasten night would be humane,'
I, a doctor, beg a doctor,
For still the darkness will not come -
His sunset slow, his first star pain.
Abse has an elder sister, Huldah, but his brothers, Wilfred and Leo, are more influential on him, although nine and seven years older respectively. Wilfred is an eminent psychiatrist who has lived in the US for many years. Leo was a prominent backbench Labour MP instrumental in reforming the laws on divorce and homosexuality. It was Wilfred who determined his career path when he put 13-year-old Dannie's name down for Westminster Hospital. After a spell at Cardiff University - where Abse remembers the novelist Bernice Rubens laughing at him for never having read the London Times - Abse left for London in 1943.
From his arrival at medical school, much of Abse's energy was directed, as captain of the cricket and football teams, to non-medical matters. A contemporary, Dr Norman Kreitman, now a psychiatrist and poet himself, remembers him as very likeable, intelligent, well read and fascinated by poetry. "He wasn't too diligent as a student and was slightly more bohemian in those days than he is now. He took to the café society in Swiss Cottage like a duck to water."
Abse, lodging in Belsize Park, had gleefully stumbled across local refugee German and Austrian Jewish communities. "The bus conductors sometimes shouted out: 'Next stop Tel Aviv.' " He met the poet Erich Fried and the future Nobel laureate Elias Canetti. He also remembers a more relaxed sexual climate - "it didn't do any harm to say you were a poet in that kind of atmosphere" - and getting into a fist fight with the art critic David Sylvester.
As a medical student, Abse volunteered to work in the newly liberated Belsen but was not chosen to go. "I can't think of any other reason than that I was Jewish," he says. "But I'm glad I didn't go. We knew it was bad, but we didn't realise it was that bad." Years later, in Kraków for a poetry festival, he was given the chance to visit Auschwitz. He has said, "Auschwitz made me more of a Jew than Moses did," but he declined. "I've seen enough films and read enough books and talked to enough people. In the first World War, Wilfred Owen used to go round with these horrible photographs to show people how bad things were. The justification was there, but God knows what inner needs he had."
Dr Peter Lawson has edited a book of postwar British Jewish poetry. He says Abse and Jon Silkin are the two most significant poets of the period. "Abse was quite avuncular and benign, whereas Silkin was more angry and campaigning. Silkin was self-consciously difficult; he wanted poetry to be complex. Abse is much more about accessibility and passion." Lawson says Abse's self-conscious hybridity is interesting. "His verse conveys a sense of being marginal while reaching out from that marginality to the mainstream. Perhaps this is why he strives to be popular and accessible. It's all very well being hybrid, but if that means being marginalised, then one won't speak to many people."
Abse says his literary ambitions when he started out as a poet were simple enough. "Initially, I wanted to write poetry with a political coloration, but later on I just wanted to write good poetry. I've always disliked the word career, because I've never thought poetry is a career. I know it sounds romantic, but I think poetry is a destiny, certainly a vocation."
His 1957 collection Tenants Of The House was an important book in Abse's development. He seemed to have finally thrown off the smothering embrace of Dylan Thomas; a stronger influence was now T. S. Eliot, the title coming from a line in Gerontion. Abse cites Eliot and Auden as the most significant poets of the 20th century, identifying Auden's Another Time, Eliot's Four Quartets "and maybe Dylan's Deaths And Entrances" as the best single volumes of poems published. The critic Barbara Hardy says: "Auden is an influence he has absorbed very creatively and very fruitfully. He's kind of a domesticated, married, Jewish Auden in some ways. And so he was able to write more openly about his loves than the early Auden could; he's also been preserved from the conventional move from young Marxist to elderly conservative, because he has been kept in touch with the political world through his Jewishness."
Abse was by now enjoying an increasingly high literary profile. His 1962 collection, Poems, Golders Green, was the Poetry Society book choice that year - the judges were Ted Hughes and Anthony Thwaite - and he was a regular reader at jazz and poetry concerts with the likes of Laurie Lee, Hughes, Stevie Smith and Vernon Scannell. There were also appearances by Spike Milligan and music from the jazz pianist and composer Michael Garrick, although Abse would never allow his readings to be accompanied by music.
The key development in Abse's poetry during this period was the introduction of medical subject matter. The critic M. L. Rosenthal claimed medical practice was to Abse's poetry what trench warfare was to Owen's. Abse admits he found his medical training painful and had come close to giving up, but under pressure from his brothers and father he carried on. "And I'm glad I did. I've enjoyed sometimes wearing a white coat and sometimes a purple coat."
The Abses began a formal reintroduction to Welsh life when they bought a cottage in Ogmore by Sea in 1972, which among other things allowed Abse to see his beloved Cardiff City play more often. When he taught at Princeton the following year, the only British journal he subscribed to was the South Wales Football Echo, and he arranges poetry readings and board meetings at Seren Books, where he is a director, around the Cardiff fixture list. His career as a full-time doctor finally ended in 1982, when the chest clinic closed, although he continued to work part time until 1989. In the year after, he stopped full-time work, Hardy, in an essay about his narrative poetry, picked up on Abse's ambition to "write poems which appear translucent but are in fact deceptions", and left the reader "puzzled when he cannot quite touch bottom".
Looking back over his life's work, Abse says, "sometimes it was a case of: 'Did I write that? Oh God, I did write that!' I do see that initially I was writing in a very symbolic way and starting from ideas. Later on, I can see that my poetry became more conversational and usually drew on an actual or an imagined experience. If I was a critic, I'd say that I had two and a half voices: one that goes towards song, another pitched towards conversation and one somewhere in between. When you are young you reach for large concepts, but now I'm much more happy to talk about small, insignificant things. And although I sometimes revert back, I now know what I'm doing, at least most of the time, and so one continues to write".
- Guardian service
Age & Opportunity in association with Poetry Ireland presents Dannie Abse as part of the Bealtaine festival. Public reading by Abse and Anthony Cronin, with discussion on Writing And Time, Liberty Hall, Dublin, Thursday, May 29th at 7 p.m. (free). Poetry workshop, Irish Writers' Centre, 19 Parnell Street, Dublin, Friday, May 30th at 3 p.m. (limited places, booking essential - Poetry Ireland, 01-6714632). Public reading June 1st, 8 p.m., Imperial Hotel, Eyre Square, Galway (€5, free for older people). Western Writers' Centre for details 091-533595. Poetry workshop, June 3rd, 11 a.m., Bank of Ireland Theatre, NUI Galway (limited places, booking essential. Details 091-524411 ext 3040. Galway events in partnership with the Western Writers' Centre and NUIG.
There are still more than 200 events all over the country this month as part of Bealtaine, the arts festival that celebrates creativity in older age. Details from www.olderinireland.ie or 01-8057709
