Sacred Cursing: In Memoriam, Dannie Abse (1923–2014)

Dannie Abse, Welsh physician, poet, and for many years a Literature and Medicine contributing editor, died this fall, aged 91. Thirty years ago, when Abse was featured in an issue of the journal on physician-writers, editor William Claire called him “the finest and most diversified writing physician now working in the English language.”¹ Abse, who studied medicine at the University of Wales and King’s College London, more modestly called himself “an expert on the right apex of the right lung.”²

I first encountered Dannie Abse’s work when I heard him read a horror story of a poem. “In the Theatre” describes a 1938 brain surgery. As the surgeon, seeking a tumor, fingers the inside of the brain, the patient—or something—suddenly begins to speak, “a ventriloquist voice that cried, ‘You sod, / leave my soul alone. . . .’” As Abse read them, in a sonorous voice quite unlike his usual one, those words were utterly terrifying. It seems fitting to remember Abse in this theme issue on literature and medicine and religion, for his thinking appeared to be informed by an ambivalent religious patterning. His writing offers no religious certainties, but the images and language of both Jewish and Christian traditions inform and vivify his work, seeking the soul in the matter of the brain, or considering the stethoscope, in another poem, as a sort of agnostic-humanist icon at once divine and at odds with the “cold, mushroom-dark church.”³ He had an unsentimental seriousness and a critical wit, and clearly rejected the idea that poetry was meant to provide some uplifting and reassuring view of health care.

Instead, Abse offers a powerful argument for the work of writing poetry in the face of atrocity while refusing to make of it a panacea. The speaker of “Not Beautiful” distances himself from a poet whom some call “saintly” because he can find aesthetic affirmation in spectacles like “hiroshimas, . . . live skeletons of the Camp, flies hugging faeces, / in war, in famine.” The divine vocation of this poet is to look at horror and, “at the dying bedside, in the disrobing dead,” to see beauty.

Abse rejects this kind of aestheticizing, the medical-student speaker of the poem countering from his own experience: “once, while dissecting a nerve in a cadaver / my cigarette dropped, fell into its abdomen. / I picked it up. I puffed out the smoke of hell.”⁴ For Abse, they have it backwards who ask literature to smoothe over the morbid and disturbing. That is the work of medicine: to sterilize and sew up the wound, and cover it with clean bandages, and to numb appropriately with anesthesia and analgesia.

It’s the poet’s job, on the contrary, to stare into the wound with frank but outraged curiosity, and later to prise away the bandage and tell us what sepsis smells like, to hold up the tumor or the trauma, and to howl at what is found. For Abse, to “pretend by affirming” as the “saintly” poet did, is to “offend.” “Sometimes,” he says, “to curse is more sacred.”⁵

And to do so with very precisely chosen words, for Abse did seem to make an ironic beauty in the words themselves. Perhaps it is right to end with a poem that is almost a dark prayer: in “A Doctor’s Register,” the physician-poet falls asleep cataloging the names of girls he has loved, and stumbles, via a nightmare of medical failure, upon a poem by Robert Browning with a girl called Porphyria, murdered by her lover. Porphyria is, medically, an enzyme disorder that leads to, among other things, shocking purple discolorations of the skin. Abse’s speaker awakens imagining the murderous determination of the lover, and catalogs for us the bodily horrors that stir so close to the surface of prettiness:

‘I found a thing to do,’ said the lover of Porphyria. Porphyria? Awake you add the other pretty names too: Anuria, Filaria, Leukaemia, Melanoma, Sarcoma, Euthanasia, amen.⁶