For an 85-year-old widower with a heart condition and a habit of saying “no
thanks” to social engagements, the writer Dannie Abse is remarkably busy. He
recently won the Wales Book of the Year award, is finishing a landmark
volume of his collected works, and now, he reveals, is starting a major book
of new poems. Retirement? It would mean death, says Abse, whose resilient
industriousness exemplifies the values that inspire The Times/Sternberg
Award for Active Life, a prize being run to celebrate older people in
Britain who still contribute to the flavour of our lives.
When Abse opens the door of his North London home, it's with a twinkling grin.
He is small, handsomely dark-skinned, with an artistically tousled white
cloud of curls. But his cheery affability belies the fact that his work
focuses on a loss that would have left many ageing men broken and
rudderless. One evening three years ago, when Abse and his beloved wife,
Joan, were driving home from a reading in South Wales, a car hurtled into
their rear and sent them spinning off the M4. Joan died instantly.
He is convinced that his deep sense of bereavement will never leave him. “All
my memories begin with ‘We',” he says. “Memory is the father of tears. I'm
still in love with my wife, and that's the trouble,” he adds, smiling
ruefully.
Abse knows full well the danger of becoming paralysed by grief, particularly
that ageing men who lose their partners suddenly are statistically at
serious risk of dying shortly afterwards. As well as being one of the most
important Welsh writers of the past century, he has also had a long career
as a hospital doctor. Now it is the memory of Joan, an art historian and
biographer, and his desire to celebrate their lives together in poetry that
drive his creative energies. Their close and happy partnership spanned more
than five decades, producing three children and a series of co-edited books.
To enter the house that the Abses bought in 1957 is to walk into a homely
shrine, a place of memory and quiet poignance.
As he settles into a favourite chair in his study overlooking the front
garden, he seems amused at my interest in his ability to keep going. “I'm on
extra time now,” he jokes in his soft Welsh accent. Throughout our
discussion he laughs and talks readily. But there are pauses... “If I was
not able to write, I would probably die,” he says at one point. In fact,
Abse was unable to pick up a pen in the months after the crash. “I was
injured in the accident and initially I had broken ribs, a thumb that's
still bent [he waves it in front of me] and I still have scars on my face. I
was traumatised and for the first three months I was in sloth. Then I roused
myself to start a journal.”
Writing as therapy
On his 82nd birthday, in 2005, he started writing down his thoughts, as he
believed it would be therapeutic. “After my wife died I was determined not
to fall ill,” he says. The diary became a journal of his grief, a portrait
of his relationship with Joan and a wandering litany of thought and
reflection. The return to writing marked his return to living.
“Words are sacrosanct,” he says. “You have to write, and sometimes you almost
have to have a neurosis of leisure, almost a feeling of being dead, and you
have to write a poem to be alive again. It's just as springtime has need to
come back.” He had no intention of publishing the journal until his literary
agent asked to see what he had been writing. It became The Presence, now
lauded as the 2008 Wales Book of The Year. Abse has worked his way into
another rhythm of life, post-Joan. “On a normal morning, I make myself
breakfast, struggle out of bed, make two pieces of toast and a cup of tea.
I'm in my pyjamas, and that's when I find it's the best time to write,” he
says. “I like to work in the mornings. My uncle Isadore was once asked, What
do you do?' and he replied, I don't do anything, and I don't do that until
after lunch.' I'm like Isadore after lunch.”
Hardly. Most of Abse's writing career was conducted while holding down a
full-time job as a doctor in a London chest clinic. He has also edited
poetry anthologies, been a playwright, a literary journalist and a writer on
medical affairs. There have been several volumes of rather novelistic
autobiography. In 2002, his novel The Strange Case of Dr Simmonds and Dr
Glas was longlisted for the Booker prize. Abse's work rate was surely
inspired by having grown up in a Welsh-Jewish family under the influence of
a pair of high-achieving older brothers. Wilfred was an eminent
psychiatrist. Leo was a prominent backbench Labour MP.
Abse's mother was from a Swansea Valley family who spoke Welsh as well as
Hebrew. I wonder if, in these later years of his life, he has begun to find
comfort from the religion of his birth. “I am a totally secular Jew,” he
stresses.
“I've said before, Auschwitz made me more of a Jew than Moses. I am a Jew as
long as there is a single anti-Semite alive.”
Instead, he is pushing himself back into the secular world. Every Tuesday Abse
goes to the gym at the Royal Free Hospital recreation club. “I started more
than seven years ago after I had the heart attack. My wife first made me go
there,” he explains, before relating the story of his coronary with a
physician's typical understatement: “It was very embarrassing. I was sitting
in the front row of a lecture at the Royal Society of Arts and started
feeling increasingly unwell. It got to the end and people kept asking
questions. Although I was desperate to go home, I felt I couldn't go until
the questions ended. I got back eventually and Joan insisted that I go to
the hospital and called an ambulance.” He laughs at the recollection.
He looks sprightly for an octogenarian, but then he had always been a sporty
youth, captaining his medical school's cricket and football teams. He even
got invited to play for the reserve team of his beloved Cardiff City
football club. “At the gym I go on the treadmill and try to do a mile in 20
minutes,” he says. “That's the distance between Cardiff's football ground
and the place where we have lunch on match days. Every other weekend during
the season I go down by train with a friend to watch home matches. We play
chess on the journey.”
He reports, fingers crossed, that his heart is currently fine. “Last April I
had a check-up and they seem very happy with me. I'm aware that I eat the
wrong things, so I don't eat so many of them. I don't have butter on the
table.” Abse gave up smoking at the age of 46. “I worked in a TB chest
clinic and it didn't look good telling patients to stop the cigarettes when
you were puffing away yourself,” he says. “It wasn't easy giving up. I found
that I read patients' chest X-rays a lot slower when I wasn't smoking. But
when I went to America to spend time giving readings, I didn't like the
cigarettes there, so that's when I stopped.”
“To write a poem is to say yes”
Since the accident, he hardly drives any more, and believes that he has become
more timid. “It took me a couple of years at least to start getting out of
that. I said ‘no' to everything, to reviewing things, to giving poetry
readings, to going away, to going to meetings and receptions. Right up until
18 months ago. I'm still reluctant to go to functions. But I started forcing
myself to say yes. Going to things is the same as forcing yourself to write
poems. To write a poem is to say yes.”
Hence his return to full busyness. His long-time publisher, Hutchinson, will
publish his selected poems this autumn to mark the 60th anniversary of his
first book with the company. Abse is editing it and writing an introduction.
“I'm also working on something that I don't want to talk about,” he says. “It
will come out next spring.” Then he pauses and shakes his head. “Oh, why
shouldn't I talk about it? During Joan's memorial I read some poems and one
was about two people meeting for the first time. Over the decades I have
written a number of poems that are scenes from married life. Now Hutchinson
wants to publish this, too. My wife would count magpies, so I think that I
will call the publication Two For Joy. The poems that I've written since the
accident, they aren't quite enough to fill the desired amount of pages. But
there is plenty of time for more.”
Lachrymae
(i) Later
I went to her funeral.
I cried.
I went home that was not home.
What happened cannot keep.
Already there's a perceptible change of light.
Put out that light. Shades
lengthen in the losing sun.
She is everywhere and nowhere
now that I am less than one.
Most days leave no visiting cards behind
and still consoling letters make me weep.
I must wait for pigeon memory
to fly away, come back changed
to inhabit aching somnolence
and disguising sleep.
(ii) Winter
What is more intimate
than a lover's demure whisper?
Like the moment before Klimt's The Kiss.
What's more conspiratorial
than two people in love?
So it was all our eager summers
but now the yellow leaf has fallen
and the old rooted happiness
plucked out. Must I rejoice when
teardrops on a wire turn to ice?
Last night, lying in bed,
I remembered how, pensioners both,
before sleep, winter come,
your warm foot suddenly
would console my cold one.
Reprinted by permission of United Agents Limited on behalf of Dannie Abse.
© Dannie Abse 2007
