Dannie Abse

Dannie Abse0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Disc's Archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen seventy seven, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:32

For this week, our castaway is the poet Danny Absey.

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Have you ever daydreamed about being a Robinson Crusoe?

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No, never. I you know, I think it was Dunn who said, uh, each man is an island, so I dreamt I'm

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A whole man, so I suppose I'm in Ireland in that sense. Does music play a big part in your everyday life? Uh more than it used to. In latter years I I find myself listening to records much more than when I was uh more restless as a boy.

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Have you any musical skill? Do you play the piano? No, alas, no. When I was when I was a boy, uh there was a a Miss Crouch, a piano teacher, used to come in the front door and I used to be leaving at the back door she came in. Oh, dear.

Dannie Abse1:09

Yeah

Presenter1:12

You were never caught and put to it. No, I used to bunk over the wall and play football with a tennis ball rather than uh do those exercises, I'm afraid.

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What's the first record you have on that small pile of eight? Well, I I've come to like piano music a great deal since, so I'd like uh Beethoven's Piano Sonata in D major, if I may.

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Part of the second movement of Beethoven's piano sonata in D major, opus ten number three, played by Alfred Brendel.

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You're from South Wales, Danny. A member of a large family?

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There are four of us, uh my eldest sister and my brother Wilfrid and Leo who's the Empian and myself the youngest. And your your father was a Sherman?

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Well, he managed a a cinema in Aberaman that's near Aberdare and uh he was full of uh ideas and uh hopes and aspirations that never came off. He failed marvelously. But you saw plenty of films? I did every Saturday night.

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As a youngster, what did you want to be?

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Uh, first of all, I suppose I wanted to play Cardiff City and uh

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play cricket for Glamorgan. Uh my ambitions weren't that great. I never wanted to play for Wales and and England in cricket so much as for Cardiff uh in football, I guess. Were you particularly bright at school?

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Um

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Well, I didn't do too badly in school. You won a prize for an essay on the evils of drink, I'm delighted with. That's right. I'm not sure if I'm too proud of that.

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There was a medical tradition in the family. Yes, um I've got about five cousins who are doctors. Indeed, my brother, my eldest brother, is a doctor, and uh my uncles are doctors. So a career in medicine was ordained for you? Yes, my brother Wilfrid put my name down when I was thirteen years of age to go to Westminster Hospital because he thought that Westminster Hospital was the best hospital in the world. It's not a bad hospital, as a matter of fact. And you you've never protested about that. That fitted in with your own ideas. Well, I was put on the rails and just went down them. I never have thought very much into the future. I haven't had life insurance, for example. I hope people are not going to come after me now, but I'm not interested. I can't believe in tomorrow too much.

Dannie Abse4:13

No, but I'm not

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Your second record, what's that? I'd like Schubert's Quintet for two cellos in C major. Why'd you choose this?

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Well, uh it was really

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In the uh

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late forties that I knew a friend called Jack Ashman and uh people came into his studio in Saint John's Wood, uh among them the Amadeus Quartet, and uh I was introduced to chamber music there, and I think there was the first piece of chamber music that I really enjoyed.

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The end of the second movement of Schubert's Quintet for Two Cellos in C major, The Amadeus Quartet, plus William Pleith.

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Your family is Jewish, Danny, but you went to a Catholic school. How did that work out?

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It worked out okay. It it it in fact um it had greater number of advantages. For instance, uh when people went into uh prayers in the first lesson of the day, uh I was uh left on my own to um to do anything I liked.

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When did you develop your love of words?

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That's difficult to answer. I began to write poetry in the sixth form i in school in Cardiff. I didn't show it to anybody in those days. Uh but uh when I went to university I started to show my poems around. Was there any particular person who introduced you to it?

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No. Uh nobody at all. I my brothers Wilfrid and Leo gave me every encouragement when I started to write. Wilfrid in particular. And your parents? They thought it was a bit odd, I think. I think my father thought it was an odd kind of hobby.

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He once said to me, I don't care if you're a Homer, you have to make a living.

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You started your medical studies in Incard. This was during the war, of course. That's right. And then to London. And then I came to London.

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I I was uh in an air raid in Cardiff, I um and I went to a hospital in Cardiff and my parents

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Uh were a little worried about me coming to London because of um those Air Aid experiences, but um they needn't have been worried.

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Record number three.

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Could it be Surabaya Johnny, uh, sung by Lotte Lenya? Yes. Why?

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Well, I I like the tune, I like uh Kurt Wahl's uh music and uh I like Brecht's lyrics, though uh I must say uh the fact that she sings in German, a language I can't just to it, as it were.

Speaker 47:26

Uh by Johnny.

Speaker 47:30

Warum bistu zoro surabay johnni mainkatum dihlib di so

Speaker 47:42

Surabaya Johnny Warum bini nit fro Du hast kind herd journey undi gh liberi sou.

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Lotalenia singing Sorabaya Yanni

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So to Westminster Hospital. You were still a a student, so this was rather putting you in at the deep end with air raid casualties.

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Yes, I went um in I think it was June or July nineteen forty four to Westminster Hospital and uh rather than September and this this wasn't a heroic

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act on my part. It was simply the fact that there was a a girl I was interested at the time and and wanted to remain in London.

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You had fainted at seeing your first surgical operation. This I gather is i is quite common in medical professionals. Yes, I did faint. It's quite so. Uh don't remember too much about that.

Dannie Abse8:34

Let's go.

Dannie Abse8:36

Yeah.

Speaker 38:36

It has to be.

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I didn't faint, however, in the first operation in which I assisted, thank heavens. Uh I don't know if you know that story about um where the surgeon says to the anaesthetist

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Why don't you keep awake? Because the patient is as well. Uh I wasn't quite in in that class, but I I wasn't much good uh with surgery, I'm afraid.

Dannie Abse8:56

I want to be able to do that.

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What was the first job you did when you were qualified?

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Well, I went back to Cardiff. Uh I uh th the first job I actually did was nothing to do with medicine. I owed uh money to people and uh I suppose I must have been the only doctor who ever took a job uh looking after a telephone while I um did some translations or rewrote translations of plays that I'd undertaken just before I qualified. You see, towards the end of my medical student days I had to earn some money and I did freelance writing. And just before I qualified I undertook to do things which I couldn't do because of the examinations.

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So just after I qualified I looked after this telephone and uh answered calls for a car hire service and wrote those players and later I went to Cardiff and did a locum uh as a general practitioner.

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Record number four.

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Record number four, I'd like to be Mozart's quintet for clarinet uh and strings in A major, please.

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And the reason

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Simply that it transports me.

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The beginning of Mozart's Quintet for Clarinet and Strings in A major.

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Once again the Amadairs Quartet and Gervais de Payer.

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Can your poetic muse be summoned at will, or is the urge likely to crop up at inconvenient moments? No, alas, I I don't know how to write the next poem. I wish I did. I have to wait for that old fashioned word inspiration.

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You began writing for small magazines.

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Um at what stage in your career did you assemble your first book of poems? Well, I had um a first book of poems accepted while I was a medical student. Uh it was a very poor book, but I didn't think so at the time. I thought it was the best first book in the world.

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And when I wrote a a second book I thought the first book wasn't so good and the second book was great. And then I wrote a third book and realized the second book wasn't any good. Uh the third one wasn't too bad, I don't think, and I think I've improved as a poet ever since. How many volumes now?

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Uh the third one was

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This is a part of the

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Oh, I uh six and I've had a collected poems published recently. Was that difficult, uh assembling a collection?

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Banishing some to the other darkness, is it? Well, it's it's a sort of a a backward look rather as uh as this is in a way, Roy. Um only I'm looking on that occasion, as it were, at spiritual x-rays.

Dannie Abse12:09

Yeah, yeah.

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How would you describe your verse? I i it isn't obscure, but then it's it's hardly crystal clear. It it it's not lyric, but certainly not um

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Well, it's it's more conversational than lyric, especially in in latter years, and I have said that I would like my poetry to be lucid, or apparently lucid, to be a deception in fact, to be as translucent as water, but when you got into the water you couldn't, as it were, quite touch bottom.

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Yes.

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We've got to record number five.

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I'd like uh one of Mozart's piano concertas and uh could I have number nine in E flat major? I I do like the

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Second movement in particular.

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The end of the second movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. nine in E flat major.

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with Daniel Barrenboim as soloist and conductor. You edited your own poetry magazine for a while.

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Yes, I I edited a magazine called Poetry and Poverty. The poverty referred not merely to our finances, but to the poverty of uh much of the writing that was going on at the time.

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And you've written about poetry. Of course, you invented a poet, an Israeli poet.

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Yes, I I uh did invent a poet by the name of uh Dov Shamir. What happened was that I was asked to write um

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In nineteen forty eight or forty nine, after the State of Israel came into existence, an article about contemporary Hebrew poetry. And um I got fed up of um

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Writing this article, because most of the translations were done into archaic English, into Georgian diction, and I became bored, frankly, and I invented a poet, called him by the good Hebrew name of Dov Shamir, and wrote about him for two or three pages, seeing what a marvellous young celebratory poet he was. But having done that, I felt obliged to illustrate what he was doing and wrote a song for him. Incidentally, I extracted this poem from the body of the article, and in that time I was in communication with T. S. Eliot, and I sent this poem along with others to T. S. Eliot, and I'd had the it was I called it then song after the Hebrew of Dov Shamir. And I have a letter from Eliot in which he says that I should do more of these translations because he thought it was better than my own work.

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And he was right.

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You've done a lot of poetry readings to enjoy that.

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I enjoy about uh eighty percent of them. You've been on the university circuit in the United States? Yes, I I've done that as well. Um the the people in America are always very warm and open and generous.

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Danny, do you find as a Welsh poet that there's sometimes someone looking over your shoulder that every Welsh poet must be either a disciple of or behave like Dylan Thomas?

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Yes, I I suppose so, but uh though I think that Dillon Thomas's reputation is gradually receding. I think this was so at one time, so that uh indeed the first time I went to the United States of America, which was in nineteen sixty four, I was invited to go

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Thereby John Malcolm Brynnan, who in fact was responsible for Dylan Thomas's tours, and I think he asked me because he was

Dannie Abse16:31

I think

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Ten years after Dylan Thomas's death, as it were. You asked me in 1963 and I went in 1964.

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And uh I'm quite sure there I was billed as a Welsh poet and they wanted uh the second Dylan Thomas uh

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People said you look like Dylan Thomas and I don't. They said I read like Dylan Thomas, which I certainly don't. And they said, you write like Dylan Thomas, which I certainly don't.

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Your writings, of course, haven't been confined to verse. You've written a couple of novels.

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and some plays.

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And of course you've written your autobiography, A Poet in the Family. Yes. To write one's autobiography is a very strange...

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act because I think in a curious way you

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obliterate your past and uh

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Because however truthful you try to be, you can't be totally truthful. So it's um odd.

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In that um you have a new past when you finished an autobiography.

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Well back to music, number six.

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Could I have Bach's violin concerto in E major?

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I went to a film once in the Academie Cinema.

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of a Polish film by Monk, and it was the first time I really

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heard uh the double concerto and and then I bought the record and found on the same record this particular concerto and I've loved it ever since.

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Part of the second movement of Bach's violin concerto in E major with Isaac Stern as soloist. You're very fond of second movements, aren't you? Uh yes, I'm a second movement man. I I I only discovered that when I was um thinking about these uh records uh for this programme.

Dannie Abse19:00

BAM

Presenter19:08

Of course I like the whole piece of music I choose, but uh it since I can only have a little part of it, it's the second movement that I find I like most.

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How are you with open air pursuits? How are you going to manage on this island? Can you look after yourself?

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No, not really. I don't think so. But I'm an optimist. I I think uh somebody would uh look after me up there.

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We've never done anything like fishing or

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My father used to fish. I used to fish with him and uh I I suppose I could um force myself to to do these sort of things, but uh I I'm quite sure I would be rescued after uh quite a brief time. We've got to record number seven.

Speaker 319:31

My father used to fish, so

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Mozart string quintet in G minor. Which part of it?

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Well, since you call me a second movement man, can we have the beginning in this case? There was no element of criticism in that. Who would you like to play it? Well why not uh the Amadeus Quartet, since I uh know some of them and play chess occasionally with uh Ziggy Nistle, if that's not name-dropping. And uh I think they joined in this occasion.

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By Cecil Aronovitz, who I happen to know a little also. Yes, they are indeed.

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The opening of the Mozart string quintet in G minor, the Amadeus Quartet, and Cerse Laronovich.

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Now your last record. What's that to be?

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Beethoven's quartet in E flat major, that's uh one, two, seven, uh probably the most accessible of the late Beethoven quartets.

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The closing passage of the second movement of the Beethoven Quartet and E flat major, the Budapest Quartet.

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If you could take just one disk, which would it be?

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I think uh probably the Mozart quintet.

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And one luxury to take to the island with you? A bed, because I am an optimist. A bed. Right. You'd better build some shelter to keep it dry.

Dannie Abse22:40

Uh

Presenter22:41

And one book apart from The Bible and Shakespeare and big encyclopedias? Well, I'd like to know that I'm in the twentieth century uh and I'd like to take somebody who is various. So I think I'd take the collected poems of WH Orden.

Presenter22:55

The collected poems of W.A. Jordan, Wright. And thank you, Danny Absey, for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs. Thank you. Goodbye, everyone.

Dannie Abse23:13

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.