Golders Green poet Dannie Abse centenary remembered

The Cardiff-born writer worked for 30 years as a doctor, and published his first volume of poetry After Every Thing Green in 1949. A contemporary of Ted Hughes, he won numerous prizes for his verse, including the Wilfred Own Poetry Award, and lived for decades in Golders Green, during which he wrote a column for the Ham&High.

He died in 2014 aged 91. Here fellow poet and Hampstead resident Jeremy Robson remembers their long friendship.Jeremy his wife Carole and their friend the poet Dannie Abse (Image: Courtesy of Jeremy Robson)

December 1, 1960. There are days, events, that literally change your life, and meeting Dannie Abse on that Saturday evening was one of them.

As I nervously entered the Partisan coffee bar in Soho for a poetry reading, there he was, his thick mane of hair over his broad handsome face, his smile welcoming. He introduced himself and pronounced the words I was to hear many times, ‘Jeremy, you read first’.

No wonder I was nervous. I greatly admired his poems and had only read my own fledgling poems in public a couple of times. I later learned that of the few things Dannie disliked, reading first topped the list. Afterwards, he gave me his phone number, inviting me over for a coffee, which, plucking up courage, I eventually did, meeting his lovely wife Joan, an art historian and their three children.

Joan was Dannie’s touchstone, he never made an important decision without her. She was a very special woman. Dannie was in an up-mood that day, having learned that his play House of Cowards had won the prestigious Charles Henry Foyle Award.

Dannie Abse (Image: Pic by Nigel Sutton 17 Redington Rd London NW3 7QX 020 7794 3008 e.mail n.sutton@btinternet.com)

I had the idea of arranging a poetry and jazz concert at the old Hampstead Town Hall and invited Dannie to read, which he agreed to, after checking whether Cardiff City were playing at home that day. I hadn't then appreciated his passion for the Bluebirds, that he never liked to miss a home match, arranging his poetry readings accordingly.

While a medical student in London, the keen footballer would return to Cardiff in the holidays and train at Ninian Park. Years later, while we were holidaying together in France, Dannie surreptitiously phoned his daughter Keren to know if Cardiff had won that afternoon. Not only had they, but Keren gave him the exciting news that his novel, The Strange Case of Doctor Simmonds and Doctor Glas had been long-listed for the Booker Prize and the papers had been trying to contact him. That night we drank a lot of Champagne!

Dannie would have been proud to know that the week after his death, Cardiff City included a tribute to him in their programme, and the following spring planted a tree in their garden of remembrance.Dannie was a contemporary of Ted Hughes who once grabbed and saved him when a taxi door swung open in Jerusalem

Erudite, compassionate, socially relevant, entertaining, Dannie’s poetry is different from his contemporaries in its range, philosophical depth, and narrative quality, his vocabulary wide and precise. Whether it was his Welshness, his Jewishness, or the medical experiences he drew on, which strongly fueled his poetic voice is hard to say, for all were vital ingredients.

His links with Wales remained strong, and I was glad, when I started my publishing company, to reissue Dannie’s early autobiographical novel, Ash On a Young Man’s Sleeve, in which with humour and tenderness he recalled growing up in Wales in the 1930’s with his brother Leo, the future political firebrand, and eldest brother Wilfred, who became a professor of psychiatry.

Dannie was a superb anecdotalist with a repertoire of entertaining stories, as his volumes of autobiography confirm. He was particularly close to his mother, and loved to recall that when his first book came out she marched into Lear’s bookshop in Cardiff and asked for a copy. ‘I’m afraid we don’t have it in at present’ she was told. ‘However, we do have Dylan Thomas’s new book'. 'But,’ responded his mother indignantly as she left the shop, ‘ My son is the Welsh Dylan Thomas’.Jeremy Robson met Dannie Abse in 1961 and they remained friends until the poet's death in 2014 (Image: Courtesy of Jeremy Robson)

Dannie’s last autobiographical book, The Presence, was different in tone from anything he’d written before, as were the intensely moving poems in his final collection, Speak Old Parrot, hardly surprising since they were written following the death in 2005 of Joan in a car crash after a poetry reading in Wales, when Dannie was driving. Although his own physical wounds healed, the mental ones never did. It was a long time before he felt able to take up his pen again, but when he did what he produced was remarkable.

With Jeremy Paxman and Helen Mort judging the Forward Poetry Prize in 2014. (Image: Daisyhead Maisie)

During that bleak time the only excursions he made were to join us for fish and chips in our Hampstead kitchen - I’d collect him, driving slowly at his nervous request. It was a blessing  when three years later, he met the poet Lynne Hjelmgaard at a poetry festival and - gentle, admiring, caring - she brought comfort and love to his later years.

Always generous with his time and advice, in many ways Dannie taught me what it was to be a poet. We edited a series of anthologies for Corgi Books together, and several ‘Best of the Poetry Year’ annuals. I was privileged to read alongside him many times as the poetry and jazz concerts that started at Hampstead Town Hall blossomed into full-scale events including some for Arnold Wesker’s Centre 42 Festivals.

Dannie was a regular alongside other leading poets. Memorable moments included the traumatic night in Aberystwyth when, waiting in the wings to read we learned that President Kennedy had been shot, and were asked by the manager to observe a two-minute silence. Or the next night in Swansea when the mercurial Laurie Lee appeared at rehearsal with his  violin, leading the musicians in a lively rendition of ‘Dinah,' or the occasion at Rolle College in Devon, when Ted Hughes arrived with a beautiful woman he introduced simply as Assia. Assia Wevill, with whom he was to have a long involvement and a daughter, and who later took her own life, also killing their daughter Shura.

Some years later, Dannie and I embarked on another tour, to Israel with Ted Hughes, D.J.Enright and Peter Porter. I have a photo of Dannie entering the freezing cold Sea of Galilee with Peter and Israeli poet Yehudah Amichai - Dannie declaring as he braved the water; 'Now I know why Jesus walked on the water’. Israel’s drivers were pretty frightening, and when a door flew open on a Jerusalem bend, we might have lost Dannie had not Ted grabbed him and pulled him back into the car.

As anyone who knows his poem ‘Odd’ will appreciate, Dannie was not an observant Jew, though a proud one, and recent Jewish history weighed heavily on him. As he once remarked, ‘Hitler made me more of a Jew than Moses’. His feelings were enhanced by his visit to Israel where he was clearly  moved and gratified by the response his poems evoked.

Back in London I remember him laughing, about some Orthodox rabbis knocking on his door looking for a charitable donation and chiding him for not  belonging to a synagogue. Exasperated, they said, ‘ If you don’t belong to a synagogue you wont have a proper burial’. To which Dannie replied, the door half closed, 'I’m not going to die!’

If only that had been so.

Jeremy Robson’s latest book of poems, Chagall’s Moon, is published by Smokestack Books.