Abse family news

1. Exclusive: Slater & Gordon set to acquire Cardiff-based Leo Abse & Cohen

2. Dannie Abse, doctor, poet, novelist and playwright, born 22 September 1923; died 28 September 2014

Leo Abse: F&M

Abse was a prolific author. His publications included Private Member: a psychoanalytically orientated study of contemporary politics (1973), which sought to relate MPs' behaviour and attitudes to their childhood and sexual experiences; Margaret, daughter of Beatrice (1989), a "psychobiography" of Margaret Thatcher; Wotan, my enemy: can Britain live with the Germans? (1994), which won the Wingate Prize from the Jewish Quarterly; The Man Behind the Smile: Tony Blair and the politics of perversion (1996) and, in 2003, a new edition called Tony Blair, the man who lost his smile.
In 2000 he published Fellatio, Masochism, Politics and Love, which purported to be "an analysis of the repressed homosexual components of the relationship between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair"; and in 2006 The Bisexuality of Daniel Defoe: a psychoanalytic survey of the man and his works.

Leo Abse - lawyer, politician, and brother of Dannie - has passed on aged 91. Strange to remark, not one of his books has a berth in my library.

The Game

Here's a curiousity as the tension rises ahead of the FA Cup Final; a Dannie Abse poem from the Fifties about Cardiff City.

Follow the crowds to where the turnstiles click.
The terraces fill. Hoompa, blares the brassy band.
Saturday afternoon has come to Ninian Park
and, beyond the goalposts, in the Canton Stand
between black spaces, a hundred matches spark.

Waiting, we recall records, legendary scores:
Fred Keenor, Hardy, in a royal blue shirt.
The very names, sad as the old songs, open doors
before our time where someone else was hurt.
Now like an injured beast, the great crowd roars.

The coin is spun. Here all is simplified
and we are partisan who cheer the Good,
hiss at passing Evil. Was Lucifer offside?
A wing falls down when cherubs howl for blood.
Demons have agents: the Referee is bribed.

The white ball smacked the crossbar. Satan rose
higher than the others in the smoked brown gloom
to sink on grass in a ballet dancer's pose.
Again, it seems, we hear a familiar tune
not quite identifiable. A distant whistle blows.

Memory of faded games, the discarded years;
talk of Aston Villa, Orient and the Swans.
Half-time, the band played the same military airs
as when The Bluebirds once were champions.
Round touchlines the same cripples in their chairs.

Mephistopheles had his joke. The honest team
dribbles ineffectually, no one can be blamed.
Infernal backs tackle, inside forwards scheme,
and if they foul us need we be ashamed?
Heads up! Oh for a Ted Drake, a Dixie Dean.

'Saved' or else, discontents, we are transferred
long decades back, like Faust must pay the fee.
The Night is early. Great phantoms in us stir
as coloured jerseys hover, move diagonally
on the damp turf, and our eidetic visions blur.

God sign our souls! Because the obscure Staff of
Hell rule this world, jugular fans have guessed
the result half way through the second half
and those who know the score just seem depressed.
Small boys swarm the field for an autograph.

Silent the Stadium. The crowds have all filed out.
Only the pigeons beneath the roofs remain.
The clean programmes are trampled underfoot
and natural the dark, appropriate the rain
Whilst, under lampposts, threatening newsboys shout.

Dannie Abse: Return to Cardiff

I hope to be off for a long family weekend visit later today.

‘Hometown’; well, most admit an affection for a city:

grey, tangled streets I cycled on to school, my first

       cigarette

in the back lane, and, fool, my first botched love affair.

First everything. Faded torments; self-indulgent pity.

 

The journey to Cardiff seemed less a return than a raid

on mislaid identities. Of course the whole locus smaller:

the mile-wide Taff now a stream, the castle not as in

     some black,

gothic dream, but a decent sprawl, a joker’s toy façade.

 

Unfocused voices in the wind, associations, clues,

odds and ends, fringes caught, as when, after the doctor

      quit,

a door opened and I glimpsed the white, enormous face

of my grandfather, suddenly aghast with certain news.

 

Unable to define anything I can hardly speak,

and still I love the place for what I wanted it to be

as much as for what unashamedly is

now for me, a city of strangers, alien and bleak.

 

Unable to communicate I’m easily betrayed,

uneasily diverted by mere sense reflections

like those anchored waterscapes that wander, alter, in

      the Taff,

hour by hour, as light slants down a different shade.

 

Illusory, too, that lost dark playground after rain,

the noise of trams, gunshots in what they once called

     Tiger Bay.

Only real this smell of ripe, damp earth when the sun

       comes out,

a mixture of pungencies, half exquisite and half plain.

 

No sooner than I’d arrived the other Cardiff had gone,

smoke in the memory, these but tinned resemblances,

where the boy I was not and the man I am not

met, hesitated, left double footsteps, then walked on.

‎Rockonteurs with Gary Kemp and Guy Pratt

Tomorrow you can listen to our interview with @alicecooper joining @guypratt and @garyjkemp
Here is the great man talking about his fledgling band opening up for The Yardbirds back in the day. He sure can tell a story! #alicecooper #podcast
Link in bio pic.twitter.com/4mWqtAetzm

— Rockonteurs (@rockonteurs) February 27, 2021

I have been surprised to find that I haven't mentioned the ‎Rockonteurs podcast with Gary Kemp and Guy Pratt here before as we are already up to episode 24.

Episode 25 with Alice Cooper should come out in the wee small hours of the morning and I will, as usual, summon it via Alexa and listen as I potter through my tasks before setting off to meet the day. 

That Cardiff connection is that back on 1973 Leo Abse MP asked the Home Secretary to ban Cooper from the UK because of "his incitement to infanticide and his commercial exploitation of masochism is evidently an attempt to teach our children to find their destiny in hate, not in love." These days Alice comes across as one of the nicest men in the world in interviews as well as a first class story teller.

A Very English Scandal

Anthony O'Donnell (Icons passim) played Leo Abse (Icons passim) in  the tremendous A Very English Scandal tonight.

Too much perspective.

Heroes and Villains

I picked up a deeply discounted DVD of Cinderella Man not too long ago. I thought it was a great old fashioned movie, so it came back with us the last time I took my five year old to Cardiff, and I watched it with my Dad one night after the little one was asleep.

He enjoyed it as well as I did but said in passing of the reigning champion set up by the film as a murderous cartoon thug and nemesis of the saintly Jim Braddock, "I don't think Max Baer was actually like that."

I've done a little bit of research. (OK I've actually just looked in up in Wikipedia.)

In the film, Baer is presented as almost relishing the fact that he killed a man in the ring. Here is what his son said about it:

My father cried about what happened to Frankie Campbell. He had nightmares. In reality, my father was one of the kindest, gentlest men you would ever hope to meet. He treated boxing the way today's professional wrestlers do wrestling: part sport, mostly showmanship. If I were to make a comparison, he was more like Muhammad Ali than the Sonny Liston of his day. He never deliberately hurt anyone." He helped put Frankie's children through college.

In 1933, he decided he was a Jew and wore the Star of David on his trunks for the first time. Perhaps not uncoincidentally, his opponent was Max Schmeling, a reluctant Nazi poster boy. "That one's for Hitler," Baer snarled between blows as he defeated the stumbling Schmeling.

Despite the star on his trunks Baer was never a practicing Jew; his father was probably half Jewish.

(Let's cut him some slack though, as Dannie Abse - St Illtyd's alumnus, and now anointed Welsh Born Icon - said later, "Auschwitz made me more of a Jew than Moses did." And, while we are in a Welsh digression, I'm put out that Baer also beat Welsh Born Icon Tommy Farr.)

Baer is the villain of the Braddock story. What about Schmeling, villain of Baer's?

Joe Louis' defeat of Schmeling in their June 1938 rematch (Schmeling had knocked Louis out two years before) was probably the most politically and racially charged boxing match in history as America and Germany headed inexorably to war, though both the protagonists seem to have been reluctant figureheads.

In November 1938, less than six months after his defeat, however Ubermensch Schmeling came to the aid of Jewish friends in the wake of Kristallnacht, hiding, at great personal risk, two Jewish brothers in his Berlin apartment and later helping them to escape from the country.

An episode of which, as far as I can tell, he never told anyone. It only came to light in 1989, when one of the brothers invited Schmeling to Las Vegas to thank him for saving his life.

Heroes and villains.