The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Ash on a Young Man's Sleeve, by Dannie Abse
reviewed by Nicholas Birns

 

Dannie Abse, born in 1923, is known as the doctor-poet among the poets of Wales, much as the late R. S. Thomas was the priest-poet. Yet he has also written fiction, laced with the emotional insight and clinical poise we might expect from someone who has practiced Abse’s two professions. This reprint, originally published in 1954, exemplifies the Modernist bildungsroman, as practiced, to cite other Celtic writers, by James Joyce and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. The Modernist bildungsroman differs from the nineteenth-century paradigm in being more about inner feelings than about the inner self as a unity; it differs from postmodernist versions such as Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy in having less of an emphasis on place and identity, and also unafraid of practicing bare realism when the needs of the tale require it. Yet place and identity do matter in this book, in a refracted way. The protagonist is Jewish in Wales, but feels intensely Welsh: Having a best friend named Keith Thomas, feeling devastated when Wales faces the prospect of losing to England in rugby, yet going to synagogue every Saturday morning and feeling the draft of the ill wind for the Jews blowing through twentieth-century Europe. The novel departs momentarily from its Welsh setting and from realism as a genre in telling the story of Grynszpan, who reenacts the story of Ehud from the Bible in a daring contra-Nazi gesture. The personal is also the political: courtship of young women is juxtaposed with vigorous, working-class, left-wing politics as the plot builds grimly to maturation and war.  Abse uses his own name and those of his two brothers, Wilfred and Leo, who became eminent figures in politics and psychoanalysis respectively. Abse captures the mixture of aesthetics, politics, and healing which characterized, in different degrees, the lives of all three brothers, and the century in which they made their careers.