Library of Wales: Goodbye, Twentieth Century

Dannie Abse was born in Cardiff in 1923. While still a student his first book of poems was published and his first play performed. Further poetry volumes followed over the decades, culminating in his New & Collected Poems(2003) and Running Late(2006). His first novel, Ash on a Young Man's Sleeve appeared in 1954 and his most recent, the Booker long-listed The Strange Case of Dr Simmonds and Dr Glasin 2002. His three prize-winning plays were collected in The View from Row G (1990) and his autobiography, Goodbye, Twentieth Century, was published in 2001. He is president of the Welsh Academi and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Dannie Abse’s Goodbye Twentieth Century might appear cumbersome (weighing in at 500-odd pages), but I hardly noticed that I lost a whole Saturday, deeply engrossed as I was, following Abse around the streets of south Wales and London, America and Israel. ‘Lost’ is hardly the right word actually. The book is conversational in tone, candid and warm. My Saturday was greatly augmented by the book’s presence.I’d like to clear something up right away. Although this is a ‘poet’s’ autobiography (in the overused sense of ‘beautifully and inventively written’), it is not exclusively a poet’s book. I was rather new to Abse’s work, having only discovered it at the beginning of last year, but this was in no way an obstacle to my enjoyment of the volume. Abse has lived a very full life. In addition to writing poetry, prose and plays, he also qualified as a medical doctor (after dreaming of playing for Cardiff City or, alternatively, becoming a musician or singer), joined the RAF during the Second World War, and edited literary journals. He taught at Princeton University, travelled to Italy with Simon Armitage and Elaine Feinstein, and was once stopped by security at Heathrow Airport because his companion, Ted Hughes, was carrying a tiger’s tooth in his pocket. At a time like this, when the world and their dogs are busy flogging their memoirs, here is a story that deserves to be told.Alongside his amusing anecdotes about meeting a soldier en route to Vietnam or living next door to Bob Monkhouse (‘I learnt that people in Hodford Road, Golders Green, did not need numbers on their houses. They lived “five doors away from Bob Monkhouse” or “three doors away from him”.’), the reader is also treated to Abse’s rich vernacular, as one would expect. The winter of 1969 brought ‘snow falling on snow with all its deletions’, and ‘in the green ordinary world [...] God only existed because He was absent.’Abse is also very funny and, as a writer myself, I more than once winced with a vague (deeply buried?) sense of familiarity at his earnest teenage attempts to gain recognition. Of his first poems he writes that his ‘arrogance was only matched by ignorance’, but still he would force his brothers and parents to listen to him as he performed for them with all the conviction of a master of literature (to which his father responded ‘I don’t care if he’s Homer. He’s got to earn a living’). His pinioning of the published writer and professor, S. L. Bethell is also amusing. On summoning the courage to approach this revered person, Abse ‘ambushed’ him with his notebook of poetry: ‘Suddenly, as he read down the page, his mouth opened slightly and he made a quiet noise. “Pardon, sir?” I asked. The noise became louder, and his body seemed to shake. I stood there blushing and heard him distinctly: “Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha HAHAHAHAHA. Oh ha ha, well, boy, well, there you are, boy”.’Abse tells us in his gleeful footnote that he had a moment of ‘triumph’ years later when an anthology published four of his poems, and only two of Bethell’s. Luckily for us, incidents like this provided Abse with a steep education and he persevered to be the writer we know him as today. Or, as his mum once put it to a salesperson in a book shop, ‘the Welsh Dylan Thomas’.Goodbye Twentieth Century is a touching read. Abse is an empathetic figure. His tragedies (particular the unexpected and appalling incident towards the end of the book) are heartbreaking for the reader and his successes felt in equal measure. In the Queen’s New Year’s Honours 2012, Dannie Abse was recognised and awarded a C.B.E. for services to literature. This timely re-release of Goodbye Twentieth Century (originally published in 2001) is well worth the investment of your Saturday, or any day for that matter.Jemma King