Doctor and magus in the work of Dannie Abse

Doctor and magus in the work of Dannie Abse Daniel Hoffman It was the novelist Margaret Drabble, appearing with Dannie Abse (1976) on "Three After Six," one of those BBC television shows which, to the American visitor's amazement, presents the conversation of intelligent and interesting persons, who, after Abse had read his poem, "In the theatre," said, "Dr. Abse, you are a very kind man." This is indeed the character of the poet, discernible on every page. What occasioned Margaret Drabble's comments were Dannie Abse's remarks, introducing and following his reading of the poem which describes a bungled attempt at brain surgery, patient under local anesthetic, the physician's fingers "rash as a blind man's," probing, probing "the growth / still undiscovered, ticking its own wild time," until, . . . suddenly, the cracked record in the brain, a ventriloquist voice that cried, 'You sod, leave my soul alone, leave my soul alone,'— the patient's dummy lips moving to that refrain, the patient's eyes too wide. . . . to cease at last when something other died. And a silence matched the silence under snow.* Dannie Abse, himself a physician, took pains to reassure his viewers that the occasion described in his poem had taken place way back in 1938, and, in view of medical advances since then, could not »Dannie Abse, Collected Poems 1948-1978 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977), pp. 160-61. Copyright © 1984 by Daniel Hoffman 22 THE WORK OF DANNIE ABSE possibly be repeated now. Ms. Drabble was struck by the sensibility of a poet who would resist a self-serving exploitation of the dramatic horror of the experience in the poem in order to calm the all too real fears of unseen members of his audience. If "In the theatre" is perhaps the most unforgettable of Abse's poems drawn from medical experience, its concerns typify much of his work. Here as elsewhere we find the claims of science and those of sensibility at odds with one another. Abse does not offer easy resolutions to questions about the relative merits of either set of loyalties; there is in his work an embracing of both possibilities, a sensitive and humane weighing of their claims. As a medical practitioner, Abse is sensitive to the dangers inherent in his own profession: facile optimism; uncritical acceptance of rationalistic explanations of behavior; the tendency among some medical colleagues to regard a patient as a case, a bundle of symptoms, rather than as a suffering person. The poet Dr. Abse is especially aware of these negative possibilities among the consequences of medical training and hospital practice. Thus he is in a unique position of being able to criticize from within failures of human sympathy among those whose obligation it is to succor and cure the sick. Dannie Abse, born in Cardiff, Wales, in 1923, is among the most prominent British poets writing today. He is the author of ten books of verse, three novels, five plays, and an autobiography. He received medical training at Kings College, London, and Westminster Hospital, as he recounts in his own chapter in My Medical School (London: Robson Books, 1978), a collection of essays he edited, and comically elaborated on in his knockabout novel, O. Jones, O. Jones (London: Hutchinson, 1970). Earlier on he had written a thoughtful survey of medical practice in Great Britain, stressing what is nowadays called medical ethics, in Medicine on Trial (London: Aldus Books, 1967). From his autobiography, A Poet in the Family (London: Hutchinson, 1974), we learn that the anomaly of its title hinges in part on the prevalence of physicians in his family. Abse is a chest specialist and after service in the RAF brought him to Central Medical Establishment, London—across the road from the Middlesex Hospital— he has stayed on there as a civilian physician in the chest clinic. The division within himself between the claims and methods of science and those of sensibility—it is one of several divisions which typify Abse's work—appears in an epistolary poem from his second book, Walking Under Water (1951), addressed to another poet who is also a physician. Abse's "Letter to Alex Comfort" predates by many years...