When I first met Dannie, I hadn’t appreciated the depth of his passion for Cardiff City – his love of the Bluebirds must have run his love of poetry pretty close! Nor did I then know that while a medical student in London, a keen player himself at that time, he would return to Cardiff in the holidays and train at Ninian Park; nor that on one auspicious occasion the Cardiff manager, Cyril Spiers, invited him to play for the reserves against Oswestry. Here is Dannie’s rueful account of what happened:
On the day Oswestry turned up one short and Spiers asked me to play for them. So my dream of playing for City at home in front of 50,000 didn’t quite materialise – I played against City’s reserves in front of 150! I missed a ‘sitter’ at the Grange End, and whenever I watched matches in future years from my seat in the stand, I would look at the goalmouth, remembering that miss, and hear Cyril Spiers shouting from the side – ‘Now’s your chance, son.’
I was invited to speak and read again on 25 March 2015 at a grand ‘Remembering Dannie Abse’ evening in the Great Hall of King’s College in the Strand. It was a moving and momentous occasion, with much laughter as well as a few tears. There were readings and tributes by a number of distinguished poets including the Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, her predecessor Andrew Motion, Alan Brownjohn, Elaine Feinstein and Owen Sheers, as well as by Dannie’s daughters and by Lynne; there was a film of Dannie talking, music, and an entertaining excerpt from his autobiography read by Diana Hoddinott. Dannie would have been surprised and proud, as he would have been about the Cardiff City tributes. He would also have enjoyed the pizzas afterwards with Lynne and his daughters and a few old friends. Yet it didn’t seem real. We’d been close friends for over fifty years, he (and Joan) had helped form my early life and we’d shared so many experiences and happy times, stretching back to the historic Hampstead Town Hall concert in 1973. We’d swum in the sea at Brighton together like truant schoolboys before hurriedly changing to read at the university, and years later in the Sea of Galilee; we’d driven together up and down the M1 to read at this or that town; been together with Joan and Carole in New York, Princeton and Normandy; strolled together in Golders Hill Park, where the title poem of my new collection, Blues in the Park, was set and where Carole and I walked in silence when we knew he was approaching his end.
Dannie Abse pictured at Herod’s Fortress, near Bethlehem, during our reading tour of Israel. So many memories over so many years.
In many ways Dannie had shown me what it meant to be a poet. For him – excepting Joan and his family, and despite his medical commitments – it was the be-all and end-all. The next poem was the all-important thing, and his standards were exceptionally high. I don’t think I ever showed him a poem for which he didn’t suggest changes or cuts, but it was done with positive intent, and he was the first to acknowledge that he could be wrong, that we all have our own rhythms and heartbeats. In the early days, I’d generally show him my latest ‘masterpiece’ (just as he would send or show me his new poems). One thing he taught me early on was that poems shouldn’t be abstract, that images should always be concrete, exact. He maintained (and I heartily concur, despite our many public readings) that poems should be written for the page first and foremost, and not for reading aloud. Here are a few lines from a letter he wrote me in 1961, the year we met. I was twenty-two, and had just sent him a batch of poems – juvenilia, really. His criticism was gently couched:
I like ‘Strangers’ though thought it was written more for reading aloud than for the eye. I mean sometimes an author will rewrite a poem on the page, changing end-stops of a line for his own convenience and breath. All this seems to me a kind of weakness. Lines should not begin and end in an arbitrary way – though heaven knows I’ve been guilty of this.
Again, he advises, in his careful way, ‘To write in a given formal pattern brings the writer close to his poem as he is writing it. Words and the cadence of each word become magnified at the time of choice, and there are many choices and only one correct one.’ He goes on to say, ‘Poetry is certainly a fiction but it must appear to be real,’ and, referring to a phrase in a particular poem, ‘Some things will stay in the mind like your “ever present Pacifist newspaper-seller”. I’ve heard his piping, fading voice in the grumble of traffic down Charing Cross Road. This is a concrete reference, corresponding to actual experience, which is why I like it.’
In all this he was nudging me, a very young would-be poet, in the right direction, and the fact that he took so much trouble when he hardly knew me is remarkable. He drew my attention to many poems and poets I hadn’t yet encountered, not all English, and to books too. I remember being particularly captivated by Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. But though poetry was lifeblood and breath for Dannie, once I had become involved in setting up my own publishing company there were conflicting loyalties and for me it could not be so all-consuming, given the organisation and responsibilities that publishing entailed. It is perhaps no great wonder that the writing dried up, while any creative energy and imagination I still possessed was absorbed into publishing and editing the work of others.
It always took Dannie about three years to write enough poems he was satisfied with for a new book. When I told him I had about sixty in my forthcoming collection, he was surprised, suggesting I should hold some over for the next volume, though when I pointed out that I hadn’t written for an eternity and that this was the equivalent of some thirty years’ work, he understood. He was wise, erudite, loved to laugh and had a rich store of entertaining anecdotes. He was always such uplifting company. As for Cardiff City, well, for some reason, I still feel a compulsion to check the results every week to see if they’ve won, and feel an uplift when they have. How thrilled Dannie would have been to see the Blues win their way back into the Premier League, as they did just a few months before this book went to press – though he would have been on tenterhooks for weeks as, in true Cardiff City style, they lost matches they should have won and everything was touch and go until the last ball of the season was kicked.
I remember Dannie once telling me – laughing as he did so – about some Orthodox rabbis who had knocked on his door, looking for a charitable donation, and going on to chide him for not belonging to a synagogue (they obviously hadn’t read his poem ‘Odd’). Finally, exasperated, as a last throw of the dice they had said, ‘If you don’t belong to a synagogue, you won’t be able to have a burial,’ to which Dannie had replied, the door already half-closed, ‘I’m not going to die.’
If only that had been true.
30
PACKING MY BAGS
Strangely, the new beginnings for poetry and jazz hinted at in the last chapter were brought about unwittingly by the legendary opera singer Jessye Norman, whose autobiography I had just signed up. We’d been alerted to the fact that, while being an artist of true greatness, Ms Norman could be difficult and demanding – a real diva – so, apart from the expense of bringing her over from America, we felt it would be wise to steer clear of any promotional involvements. But fate dictated differently, thanks to another exceptional woman, Sally Dunsmore, who directs the Oxford and Blenheim Literary Festivals and for whom it seems nothing is too ambitious. I’d first met Sally when we accompanied Leslie Caron to Blenheim, where she’d entranced a large audience with stories of Paris and Hollywood and the films she’d starred in. Now Sally wanted to discuss the possibility of inviting Jessye Norman to Blenheim as the guest of honour at their black-tie dinner, always a grand affair. And while we couldn’t even contemplate it, the resourceful and imaginative Sally somehow found a way, and Ms Norman came – behaving impeccably, I should add, and charming everyone – so much so that at Sally’s invitation she came again the following spring to the Oxford Literary Festival.
However, it was while we were discussing all this over a drink, along with Sally’s invaluable associate Tony Byrne, that the subject of poetry and jazz came up. Sally and Tony were intrigued by the history and, ever innovative, Sally proposed that I arrange one of our
concerts at Blenheim to tie in with my new book of poems. Alas, there was no Michael Garrick, and now, sadly, no Dannie Abse, so it could never be the same, but as I began to think about Sally’s proposal I remembered Jacqui Dankworth’s friendly collaboration in the tribute concert for Michael at the London Jazz Festival, and also Maureen Lipman’s generous offer to read with me as and when I had a new book of poems published. If they were both willing to join me at Blenheim, I felt we could fashion an interesting programme, and so we did, closing the festival with a full-house concert in the glittering Orangery. The format for that concert was straightforward, the sophisticated Jacqui, accompanied by a superb trio, singing between groups of poems from my book, read by Maureen and me, with Maureen performing a couple of her own hilarious monologues.
Encouraged by the response, Sally followed up by inviting us to the Gibraltar Literature Festival, which she was then also directing. For this, Jacqui was joined by her husband, the American pianist/composer/singer Charlie Wood, who sings the blues as only someone born and bred in Memphis and steeped in the music can. The response was equally gratifying, the original venue having to be changed to a larger one to cope with the demand. (No self-delusion here – I quickly learned that the Lipman and Dankworth names work wonders, and for me it was sheer joy to read alongside them.) The new venue was to be the ballroom of the very original five-star hotel in which we were staying – a permanently moored ship. When I heard of the switch, I crept down one evening to have a recce and was more than a little alarmed at the size of the empty ballroom – no chairs, no piano, which made it seem even larger – and I remember conveying my fears to Maureen, who had just flown in with Guido. Extraordinarily, that concert venue too was sold out.
We all enjoyed the festival talks and our days on that historic island. For me, it was rather like going to the university I never went to as we lined up to attend one talk after another by eminent writers and scholars on subjects ranging from philosophy to Christianity, politics to music and history, and much else. It was a treat to stroll from lecture to lecture – A. C. Grayling’s on ‘Friendship among Friends’ and Diarmaid MacCulloch’s on ‘Silence in Christianity’ being among the most stimulating – before we too had to sing for our supper. Talking of singing reminds me of a lovely evening listening to the fabulous Patti Boulaye in a spectacular concert hall deep in the Gibraltar caves. We also enjoyed the nightly dinners, each directed by a celebrity chef, which were made especially memorable by the guests we were lucky enough to share a table with, such as John Julius Norwich, who regaled me with stories of Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose travel writings I was not as familiar with as he seemed to think I should be. An extremely friendly George Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, was my near neighbour on another night, Sally sitting between us. He had been speaking at various Gibraltar schools about the importance of failure in life, and the publisher in me immediately rose to the surface, suggesting that this would be an excellent subject for a book.
On the last night, after our performance, we found ourselves on the same table as Ross King and Martin Kemp, two Leonardo da Vinci experts whose talks we’d been to. Despite her degree in art history (or perhaps because of it!) Carole was rather alarmed to find herself sandwiched between these two formidable scholars, but she needn’t have worried since the last thing they wanted to talk about was Leonardo – or art. Indeed, Martin Kemp, emeritus professor of art history at Oxford University, was far more interested in discussing jazz, about which he was a knowledgeable enthusiast. He not only attended our Gibraltar concert but came again the following year when we appeared at the Oxford Festival, and he clearly enjoyed meeting Jacqui Dankworth and Charlie Wood, and also Maureen, who was at her best that night. He later told me that as well as enjoying the music and the poems, he had loved watching Maureen for her great sense of timing, which, as a frequent lecturer, he thoroughly appreciated.
Reading with Maureen has taught me things, too. She is a perfectionist and likes everything to be well ordered (which is not to say she doesn’t improvise and inject humour as she goes along – she most certainly does!). When, sitting beside her on stage, with the fabulous Jacqui on my other side, who also never misses a beat, I fumble with papers or can’t find my place in the book quickly, I rather feel I’m letting the side down. Almost all my other readings over the years have been a matter of waiting my turn, then coming on to read for fifteen or twenty minutes before exiting or sitting at the side of the stage out of the spotlight while others read. What we have now is a kind of continuous performance, and while I like to be as prepared as possible and hopefully professional, I’m not an actor playing a part, and I need a licence to be myself – to hesitate, think carefully, say a few words between poems. Maureen understands this and, of course, as well as performing her brilliant monologues, she is also ‘performing’ my poems – a fact that continues to thrill me. If there is humour to be found in a poem, she will tease it out in a way I never could, yet when she reads a serious poem, such as ‘Vigil’, you can hear a pin drop. Maureen chose to include it in the anthology Poems That Make Grown Women Cry and read it at the book launch at the National Theatre. Whenever she reads it, my eyes fill with tears, too. When we read a poem together, alternating verses, I experience at first hand the sense of timing Martin Kemp so admires, and note the way she changes the expression in her voice and on her face, and her visual projection of the lines. She may rue the day she volunteered to read with me, but I most certainly do not!
Returning to Martin Kemp for a moment, it was interesting to discover when talking to him that he’d been a protégé of the great art historian Ernst Gombrich, who had lived in the same road as us for many years, where Kemp had often visited him. He clearly had a great regard not only for Gombrich but for the great contribution remarkable Jewish refugees like him had made to the world of scholarship.
It seems to me that Sally Dunsmore’s special gift is not only to attract such distinguished figures to her festivals, but to bring them together over drinks and dinners in a convivial atmosphere in which friendships and associations are formed. (I signed up Ken Hom after meeting him at Blenheim, and it was also there that I first met the novelist and poet Ben Okri, with whom I have since given several readings.)
If it now seems that publishing had begun to take a back seat in this story, that, to an extent, is true, but by no means entirely so. Interesting authors continued to come my way, none more timely than Paul Gambaccini, with his exposé of the false accusations of paedophilia and the protracted police campaign against him. That important book came to me through Caroline Michel, after a lengthy negotiation which I often thought would falter simply because the author’s impassioned text was overlong and Caroline wanted it reduced before letting me see it. She is always firm but fair and eventually we struck a deal that we were both happy with. I’ve always greatly enjoyed my dealings, conversations and lively lunches with the captivating Caroline, for as well as our mutual publishing interests, she is also switched on to the world of poetry, her former husband, (Lord) Matthew Evans, having been the MD and then chairman of Faber & Faber and thus the publisher of Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney and many other gilded names, so she knew them all. Indeed, I recall her telling me that when Ted published his revelatory Birthday Letters and wanted to escape the press, he and Carol had gone to stay with her and Matthew in the country. I discovered, too, that after university, where, unusually, she had studied Sanskrit, Caroline had worked for the literary magazine Agenda, to which I’d subscribed in my younger poetic years. Even Michael Winner once sang Caroline’s praises to me, and praise from the intemperate Winner usually came in thimbles, if at all.
At that time, too, I found myself deeply involved in Freddie Raphael’s tour de force memoir of his Cambridge days, Going Up. That period had, of course, been the inspiration for his famous television series, The Glittering Prizes. Publishing the erudite, pithy-penned Raphael is always a joy, and besides the books themselves the by-product of his
emails from France is something I also relish – sharp, literary, entertaining and a real test of my vocabulary and knowledge – glittering prizes in their own way. However, as 2016 approached, I was feeling the tug of the poetry, the tug of starting to contemplate this book, and the tug of a close and growing family, and in February of that year I agreed with Iain Dale that come September I would stop working full-time for the company. I would continue as an editor-at-large, attending acquisition meetings and bringing books to the table – but, importantly, not going in to the office on a daily basis. It had been a five-year stint (indeed, for me, a fifty-year stint in all), and it was time, I felt, to draw back. For all that, it seemed rather theoretical at first and way off in the future. Bel Mooney and Maureen Lipman both had attractive books scheduled for publication that September, which kept my mind focused on the present while I worked on these. There was also a remarkable book, The Greatest Comeback, by David Bolchover, I’d taken on about the Hungarian footballer Béla Guttmann, who survived the Holocaust and went on to become one of the most celebrated football coaches of the modern era, taking Benfica to European Cup glory in 1961 – a book that was to receive wide acclaim.
* * *
Inevitably, the end of September came. I emptied my drawers, packed up the books I wanted to take home, and began to clear the many thousands of emails that had accumulated on my computer. When I’d originally left my own company, Robson Books, to join up with the Quarto Group, I’d found it a deeply upsetting emotional experience. This was not at all like that, and when I finally left the office I felt quite calm about it, on the surface anyway, and on the way home I decided to stop off at Ossie’s Barber Shop in Camden Town to have a long overdue haircut. I’d first met the amiable Ossie when he had a salon in Great Titchfield Street, near my old office. Old habits die hard. I always enjoyed chatting to him about Arsenal, and on occasion I’d bump into the newscaster Sir Trevor McDonald there, also an old Ossie regular, as I did that day. I knew from previous conversations that he’d been writing an autobiography for quite some time, and I asked him how it was going (old publishing habits die hard!). ‘Still at it,’ he told me, and while Ossie stood by his chair, waiting patiently for me to come under his scissors, Trevor told about the time he went to interview Yasser Arafat, a hair-raising story he was planning to write up that afternoon. It made a welcome distraction. Will he, I wondered, really get down to writing today after talking about it to me in such detail? Ossie’s is a happy meeting place – Alan Bennett is another Ossie regular, as is Jonathan Miller – and I left in good spirits, and rather less dishevelled.
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