LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

DANNIE ABSE (b. 1923) was born one year after the publication of Ulysses and The Waste Land. If Eliot – the real father of Modernist poetry and criticism (and more) – was the banker poet, Dannie Abse is the doctor poet. He has the delicacy of feeling of William Carlos Williams, though not at all his poetic diction. Dannie Abse is much more natural and conversational. But both are, as Abse calls himself, ‘gentle’ (The Moment).

Nostalgia is a feature that is typical for Desperadoes. Modernists cherished burning intensity where Desperadoes fear to tread. Return to Cardiff speaks about home, ‘first everything’, about childhood and youth vanishing like ‘smoke in the memory’. The poet conjures up an imaginary moment when the boy I was not and the man I am not met, hesitated, left double footsteps, then walked on.

This sadness caused by the death of the might-have-been (so different from Eliot’s flamboyant experience of the same notion) reminds us of Paul Valéry, who once wrote that we were born many yet died one. In the same way as the French poet and essayist, Dannie Abse has a passion of ideas and clothes them in poetic images. But it becomes more and more obvious as the poet advances in age that the idea comes first, that the mind rules the sensibility and that for Dannie Abse, ‘in the beginning was the word.’

Melancholy thoughts are pretexts for poems. A married man catches a glimpse of a pretty girl on a train bound for the unknown and, when the train has safely left, which means they can no longer be accused of flirting, he waves at her and she smiles back. A might-have been (Not Adlestrop). A funeral, a priest, grieving relatives, all ‘emotional as opera singers’ (Two Small Stones). The poet cannot share the drama. He picks up ‘two small stones /(bits of broken sky trailed on the gravel path)’, drops them in his pocket and refuses both epitaph and valediction. We wonder, but he will not put it more plainly than,

Why didn’t I cry,

and why won’t I throw these stones away?

The emotion is exasperatingly modest. Alan Brownjohn’s word for the Desperado modesty is ‘blank’. Dannie Abse’s word might be ‘gentle’.

One poem seems to have been written by William Carlos Williams (Portrait of the Artist As a Middle-Aged Man), though very different from him formally and in tone:

Pure Xmas card below – street under snow,

under lamplight. My children curl asleep,

my wife also moans from depths too deep

with all her shutters closed and half her life.

And I? I, sober now, come down the stairs      

to eat an apple, to taste the snow in it,                   

to switch the light on at the maudlin time.

Habitual living room, where the apple-flesh

turns brown after the bite, oh half my life

has gone to pot. And, now, too tired for sleep

I count up the Xmas cards childishly,

assessing, Jesus, how many friends I've got!

Written at ‘3.30 a.m., January 1^st’, the poem reminds one of several poems by William Carlos Williams at once: Waiting, This Is Just to Say, Perfection. Here are the last two:

This Is Just to Say

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

Perfection

            O lovely apple!

beautifully and completely

            rotten

hardly a contour marred –

            perhaps a little

shrivelled at the top but that

            aside perfect

in every detail! O lovely

            apple! What a

deep and suffusing brown

            mantles that

unspoiled surface! No one

            has moved you

since I placed you on the porch      

            rail a month ago

to ripen.

            No one. No one!

W.C. Williams is more dramatic and his use of words is more histrionic. Exclamation points, repetitions, shouts, the myth of the apple which goes the way of all flesh. The second poem by Williams is quite the opposite of Abse, but the first drowns in tenderness, as does the one by the British poet. Hard to draw the line. Reading all of Dannie Abse’s poems, I should say he is more reticent, a shy voice uttering modest words. Conversationalism means more to him than theatricality, and this is different from the half-Modernist, half-Postmodernist mixture in W.C. Williams. It is a pure Desperado feature.

A New Diary is a memento. The hero – the poet (the autobiographical note is such an endearing characteristic of Abse’s poetry) – on ‘this first January’ transfers names and telephone numbers to a new diary. Names are ‘computer-changed into numbers’. Some are crossed, ‘cancelled’,

‘one man dying, another mind in rags’.

Death and computers are a theme often combined by Desperado poets in their seventies today. The computer screen dehumanizes poetry, depersonalizes the act, the sacred ritual of writing. Virtual words kill the soul captured on paper by a hand and a pen scratching letters. The poem concludes in resignation:

who, perhaps, is crossing out my name now

from some future diary?

As Williams does, Abse draws upon his doctor’s experience when he writes and many poems cry out the pain of powerlessness in front of a sick fellow being (The Case, Miracles). In Miracles a priest is ‘my incurable cancer patient’ and he claims to have dreamt of seeing ‘a rainbow in the black sky’ at midnight. The dream is a miracle, recovery would be a miracle too, and both are equally impossible. Dannie Abse, unlike W.H. Auden (with his Miss Gee), comforts his reader with the little power he has. He may not be able to cure but he can definitely help us hope. Dannie Abse’s poetry is an endless hope.

The Silence of Tudor Evans is another poem about old age and death. Compared to W.B. Yeats’ ‘fastened to a dying animal’ (Sailing to Byzantium), Abse’s poem is a tame story. Gwen Evans is dying and asks her husband Tudor to bring Professor Mandlebaum, ‘ex-tennis player’ whom she ‘had once met on holiday’ in 1941. Mandlebaum

doodled in his hotel bedroom.

            For years he had been in speechless sloth.

But now for Gwen and old times' sake he, first-class,

            alert, left echoing Paddington for

a darkened sickroom and two large searching eyes.

She sobbed when he gently took her hand in his.

            'But, my dear, why are you crying?'

'Because, Max, you're quite unrecognizable.'

            'I can't scold you for crying about that,'

said Mandlebaum and he, too, began to weep.

The doctor-poet’s rending sympathy is obvious everywhere, just as much as William Carlos Williams’s, but less obtrusively, more decent and withdrawn. The story speaks more than the images. If Williams relied on landscapes and myth and mostly poetic paraphernalia, Abse refuses the background, even the tool of rhyme and rhythm, and professes speech. If Modernist poetry declaimed its revolt against tradition, Desperado poetry in the case of Abse whispers a story and avoids awkward drama, replacing it by pedestrian sentences, which the end of a line interrupts and the next continues naturally, like a pause in speech, for the reader to catch his breath and his thought.

Cousin Sidney tells the story – indispensable to a Desperado poet – by monologues. ‘Dull as a bat, said my mother/ of cousin Sidney in 1940’, ‘duller than a bat, said my father,’ and cousin Sidney goes to war after having lied about his age. ‘Missing, not dead please, God, please’, his uncle said. His aunt cried. And then ‘uncle and aunt also went missing’ and no one waited for Sidney any more, while the poet muses in his own little monologue:

till last year, their last year,                                                                                                     when uncle and aunt also went missing,                                                                               

missing alas, so that now strangers

have bolted their door and cut the string                                                                                  

and no-one at all (the hall so dark)                                                                                                waits up for Sidney, silly ass.

The difference between Williams and Abse is obvious in A Winter Visit. The poet walks with his ninety-year old mother, who is ‘so aged and so frail’. Like Eliot’s Sibyl in the motto to The Waste Land, the mother says ‘I would die’ and also ‘This winter I’m half dead, son’ while the poet wants to cry ‘because it’s true’. Williams was taking his grandmother to hospital and was extremely sensitive to the dramatic despair she experienced in front of death (The Last of My English Grandmother):

There were some dirty plates

and a glass of milk

beside her on a small trable

near the rank, disheveled bed –

Wrinkled and nearly blind

she lay and snored

rousing with anger in her tones

to cry for food,

Gimme something to eat –

They’re starving me –

I’m all right I won’t go

to the hospital. No, no, no

Give me something to eat

Let me take you

to the hospital, I said

and after you are well

you can do as you please.

She smiled, Yes

you do what you please first

then I can do what I please –

Oh, oh, oh! she cried

as the ambulance men lifted

her to the stretcher –

Is this what you call

making me comfortable?

By now her mind was clear –

Oh you think you are smart

you young people,

she said, but I’ll tell you

you don’t know anything.

Then we started.

On the way

We passed a long row

of elms. She looked at them

awhile out of

the ambulance window and said,

What are all those

fuzzy-looking things out there?

Trees? Well, I’m tired

of them and rolled her head away.

Abse  does not choose the very moment of death and he does not show any opposition on the part of the dying mother. He is, just like Williams, the doctor, the man who knows, but he rejects the noise of pain. He merely muses:

Yet must not (although only Nothing keeps)                                                                              

for I inhabit a white coat not a black                                                                             

even here – and am not qualified to weep.

He is the man in a white coat, never ‘qualified to weep’, always there to comfort mortals when they fall prey to their mortality. Williams burns his fear of death in fireworks. Abse is more soft-spoken and more Desperado at the same time: he just speaks of ‘small approximate things’, which does not take anything of the strength of his poems away from them. It simply makes them more believable to a 21^st century reader.

It is hard to say who is more the poet and who is more the doctor, Williams or Abse? Definitely, Dannie Abse draws more on his experience. He finds in it the poet’s main gift, that of comforting:

Now, coughing, the patient expects

the unjudged lie: 'Your symptoms are familiar                                                                           

and benign' – someone to be cheerfully sure,                                                                              

to transform tremblings, gigantic unease, by

naming like a pet some small disease  with

a known aetiology, certain cure. (The Doctor)

He treats his reader as he would treat his patients, with infinite care and pity, with a desire to alleviate the burden of everyday tragedies. He is not one of those ‘Men who’d open men’ (X-Ray): he looks at his mother’s X-ray and does not ‘want to know’. Williams was using death as a source of poetry, of dramatic show. Abse, typical Desperado, hates the show and takes refuge in pity, shyness, silence, unobtrusiveness. Today, Dannie Abse is the more convincing of the two, which is a sign that this new Desperado movement has made a difference.

The poet, like many other poets of his generation and the generation after – now in their thirties – , loves debunking. The instinct to mock is inborn in humans, but the pejorative use of tradition/convention is mainly a feature of Modernism. It existed before as well, only not to the same extent. Eliot and Joyce revelled in debunking. All myths and all literary forms were fair game. Abse is far more discreet, because Desperadoes are wary of Modernists and their sound and fury. He muses, ‘The lies of Once-upon-a-Time appal,’ and ends his poem with ‘All the rest is fiction.’ With his medical insight he reveals that Sleeping Beauty ‘married the Prince out of duty/ and suffered insomnia ever after’(Pantomime Diseases):

When the fat Prince french-kissed Sleeping Beauty                                                                     

her eyelids opened wide. She heard applause,                                                                               

the photographer's shout, wedding-guest laughter.                                                                   

Poor girl – she married the Prince out of duty                                                                      

and suffered insomnia ever after. 

Snow White ‘suffered from profound anaemia’, ‘The Babes in the Wood died of pneumonia’, then

Shy, in the surgery, Red Riding Hood undressed                                                                            – Dr Wolff, the fool, diagnosed Scarlet Fever.  

The nimble idea makes us smile, but it is a sad smile, which seems to say, Nothing is true any more, and noticing it does not make us any more privileged; quite the reverse, we have lost so much since the beginning of time. No Desperado is as vigorous as the Modernist theatrical writer. He is just the man behind the scenes, the hidden face, the language of sleep and dream. The Desperado text is so much dreamier than the keen psychological incision of the Modernist.

Some of the poems Dannie Abse has written deal with his Jewish identity (though not many): Red Balloon, A Night Out, Of Itzig and His Dog. He feels at ease and very much at home in Jewish humour and Jewish wisdom. Phew! is such a poem, uttered by a husband to his wife. No noisy words of love, no oaths of forever and a day, no grandiloquent reason for the encounter, just ‘because this, because that,’, because

you looked to the right, luckily,                                      

I looked to the left, luckily.

Each line breaks at the precise moment we need to catch our breath, and as we go on breathing so does the poem continue, apparently in a monotone, actually saying things that could send shivers up our spines if it were not for the soft tone of the lines. The poet imagines he might have missed the moment he was united with his wife:

Do you know that Sumerian proverb

‘A man's wife is his destiny'?

But supposing you'd been here,

this most strange of meeting places,

5000 years too early? Or me,

a fraction of a century too late?

No angel with SF wings

would have beckoned,

'This way, madam, this way, sir.'

Soft-spoken and tender-hearted, Dannie Abse writes on and smiles. The reader cannot but feel at ease.