SOURCE: Cohen, Joseph. Introduction to The Poetry of Dannie Abse, pp. 7-14. London: Robson Books, 1983.

The study of a poet's work normally begins with early work but I wish to start and end with ‘Funland.’ Firstly, because I believe ‘Funland’ to be Abse's masterpiece where his art appears at its most daring and assured; secondly, because a number of Abse's earlier and later themes, symbols and allegories—from those in Tenants of the House (1957) to his most recent collection of poems, Way Out in the Centre (1981)—are resumed or prefigured in this long poem; thirdly, because, through it, one can hint at the fundamental unity of Abse's works (poetry, theatre, prose)—at his unified sensibility.

His experience as writer and doctor finds in ‘Funland’ a richer expression than hitherto. Effectively exploiting the potentialities of the common use language, the colloquial syntax, the common rhythm of the phrases, he employs—through a more complex imagery—the homely and the esoteric in close, intense, witty juxtaposition. Although ‘Funland’ is, on an intellectual level, hard to comprehend, there is a massive emotional directness in it that one comes across. If we agree with T. S. Eliot's ‘genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood’ we may add that ‘Funland’ communicates something it has in common with dreams. For dreams also, as Freud puts it, ‘think in images.’

Abse has said of ‘Funland’ that ‘it is The Waste Land gone mad’: it is a desolate land, a civilization more savage, more psychotic than that described by T. S. Eliot; and in the introduction to his play, Pythagoras—which derives directly from ‘Funland’—Abse recalls that Freud once remarked to Wilhelm Reich, ‘the whole of humanity is my patient.’ He recalls also a conversation he had with Elias Canetti who said to him, ‘The man suffering from paranoia is correct. Someone is standing behind that door pumping invisible gas through the keyhole. For we are dying, right now, a little every minute.’ Abse in that introduction adds little else. To explain or comment on ‘Funland,’ he believes, would be to rationalize it post hoc, or to develop a kind of personal mythology out of it. Abse believes the poem must explain itself and that, besides, in every genuine literary creation each line means more than its author knows. ‘Every poem of mine which I think works’—he told me recently—‘contains much more than I thought I had put in it. Indeed you have sensed, perceived, something in the lines which I had not realized was there and that now I discover with you.’

Behind the euphemistic title of ‘Funland’—which because of its intricate symbolic-cultural structure may be considered the most cryptic and esoteric creation in Abse's Collected Poems—we find the surrealistic description of a mental hospital, in microcosm the society in which we live: wild atmosphere, absurd relationships, mazes of passions, voices from other worlds, fragments of life. An enunciating ‘I’ introduces, in the first three movements of the poem, all the essential dramatis personae that inhabit Funland: the Superintendent; a patient ‘whom the Superintendent has nicknamed Pythagoras’; and then further patients, Blondie, Marian, and an ‘atheist uncle.’ All these creatures find themselves part of a natural disorder along with ‘black-garbed priests’ and ‘scientists in long white coats.’

The enunciating ‘I,’ though psychically torn or dissociated like the others, is the fulcrum of every action. He is the unitary element of ‘Funland.’ He seems to guide the itinerary of a collective madness. This reaches, in the second movement, its climax in a kind of hallucinatory, ambiguous initiation where Dionysiac and Pythagorean rites mix with primitive taboos and false modern ones through an ironical anachronistic syncretism: ‘Members promise to abstain / from swallowing beans. They promise / not to pick up what has fallen / never to stir a fire with an iron / never to eat the heart of animals / never to walk on motorways / never to look in a mirror / that hangs beside a light.’ ([Collected Poems, hereafter cited as CP] 165) Vivid visual passages are summoned up in the third movement by a return to mythological expressions and by images—immediate, pervasive and haunting—which while suggesting an eerie menace, are also humorous:

At once the scientists take off
the priests hurry up
into the sky. They zoom.
They free-wheel high over roof tops
playing guitars;
they perform exquisite
figures of 8
but the old mediocre reprobate
merely shrinks them
then returns to his smelly coffin.
Slowly winking he pulls down the lid
slowly the coffin sinks into the ground.
(Bye brighteyes! Arrivederci brighteyes!)

(CP, 168)

The return to the mythological and those images of indefinite sensation, strikingly phantasmagorical, introduce the fourth movement where the effect is not visual but aural: ‘Coughing and echo of echoes. / A lofty resonant public place. / It is the assembly hall. / Wooden chairs on wooden planks.’ (CP, 169) Verbal communication is fictitious. All the ‘inhabitants’ of Funland are incapable of communicating—including a poet who reads, or tries to read, his own poetry devoid of content: ‘He is an underground vatic poet. / His purple plastic coat is enchanting. / Indeed he is chanting / ‘Fu-er-uck Fu-er-uck.’ / with spiritual concentration.’ (CP, 169).

All the ‘patients’ mime plausible identities to escape from their own ‘diversity’; they offer simulacra of themselves to exorcise the mutilations of their bodies, the loss of their own identities (body and mind are all one thing wrapped up by a hostile world): ‘Fat Blondie stands inconsolable / in the middle of the goldfish pool. / She will not budge. / The musky waters have amputated her feet.’ (CP, 176) They draw near to the verge of the total nihil, but, owing to a kind of subtle self-deceit, they see only the contours of evil, protected as they are by ‘black glasses’: ‘As a result my atheist uncle / has fitted black lenses / into his spectacles. They are so opaque / he cannot see through them. / … There are rumours that next week / all of us will be issued with black specs.’ (CP, 172, 173) All human beings experience self-deceit and irrationality. The tension between blindness and vision, between light and dark, reaches its climax in the lines ‘a blind poet / reading Homer’ (CP, 172). The oxymoron (the sight-giving semantic component is subordinate to the sight-denying one) underlines the incapacity to see both physically and intellectually, since lack of sight combines with lack of reason.

The realistic elements, sensual and sexual, interplay with surrealist suggestions that break any trace of logical connection between thoughts; the fight between Eros and Thanatos develops and spreads out in a turgid metaphoric vortex. The ‘atheist uncle’ ‘retires’ to the silent geometry of the pillar box while Marian and Blondie display their repressed sexuality: ‘Marian eyeing the bard / maintains he is a real / sexual messiah / that his poem was not an expletive / but an incitement. / Fat Blondie cannot cease from crying. / She thinks his poem so nostalgic.’ (CP, 170) Moreover we perceive that death instinct is evoked in every downward movement and libido in every upward-going element: ‘Look how spitting on his hands first / he climbs the flagpole. / Wild at the very top he shouts / I AM IMMORTAL.’ (CP, 177) Indeed, moral problems and conflicts take on a scenic dimension without any special or temporal connection—the monologue becomes a dialogue or perhaps an eternal delirium, because the others are only the proliferating shadows of the enunciating ‘I.’ Empiric time and space are replaced by inner time and space.

Initially even the landscape is a maze of objects, of refuse that becomes threatening:

A harp with the nerves missing
the somewhat rusty
sheet iron wings of an angel
a small bent tubular hoop
still flickering flickering
like fluorescent lighting
when first switched on
that old tin lizzie banger
Elijah's burnt-out chariot
various other religious hardware
and to cap it all
you may not believe this
a red Edwardian pillar box.

(CP, 163)

In that overstuffed disorder bewilderment is ontological and deontological. One needs certainties: thus the moment of discrimination (where a group of people who are different—with ‘blue hair and red eyes’—are threatened with future persecution and diaspora) becomes, paradoxically, the emblematic moment of certainty and cohesion of this society.

The style is intentionally fragmentary—irregular, purposely inconsistent: the rhythm now diffuse, diluted, now dense and concentrated; the stanzas of different lengths split up the images, as in some of Picasso's paintings, to show us how ephemeral are the boundaries between oneiric and real space, between myth and science, between rational and irrational, between sane and unsound minds. The particular graphic solutions—the careful use of capitals and of visual rhythmic pauses; the scanty punctuation marks; the ellipses, logical and grammatical; the assonances; the onomatopoeic words; the alliterations;—all combine to dilate the verbal delirium of a diasporic odyssey: ‘Suddenly above us / frightful insane / the full moon breaks free from a cloud / stares both ways / and the stars in their stalls tremble.’ (CP, 181)

Simultaneous and multiple echoes, such as Reich's orgonic energy (as opposed to nuclear energy) and Pythagorean harmony (the unity of the manifold, the concordance of discordance) link up with further magical and mythological suggestions of literary allusions to accumulate and interplay and grow into a complex that is rich with intellectual and emotional associations. Through Shakespeare's line, (‘we are but shrubs not tall cedars’) or the echo of the insane Ophelia's farewell (‘Goodbye Blondie, goodbye uncle, goodbye’) to precise biblical references to Passover and Elijah (‘What about Elijah I asked / … Why else each springtime / with the opening of a door / no-one's there?’) Abse would lead us to the most frightful lunacy of our century, the Nazi fury: ‘smashed smashed years ago like the rest of them / gone with the ravens gone with the lightning.’ (CP, 181)

In Funland life is, therefore, characterized by precariousness and opaqueness, it is degraded to absurd nonsense. It is an existence distorted by cold human relationships, cultural consumerism: ‘His purple plastic coat is enchanting’; undisputed acquiescence and forced conformism: ‘Most of us laugh / because the others are laughing / most of us clap / because the others are clapping.’ (CP, 169) Moreover it is an existence warped by the terror of a coercive authority and by the threat of nuclear energy. The only comfort lies in the sweetness of a dream, the only catharsis in fancy, the only redemption in the loving gesture of a hand. The only sanity lies in the conjugation of the verb to love, in the first elementary love-words so difficult to express but so capable of reconciling any antinomy: ‘“Love read this though it has little meaning / for by reading this you give me meaning” / I wrote or think I wrote or meant to write / and receiving no reply I heard / the silence. …’ (CP, 172)

Oh love I write
surely love was no less
because less uttered or more accepted?

(CP, 179)

Then one may stop and say ‘Sometimes Funland can be beautiful,’ (CP, 182), may feel in this statement an affirmative note, a message of reassuring wisdom, and take courage again.

According to some recent theories the ‘demons’ in ourselves are precious to us. They are part of human existence: if we learn to live with them they may allow us to find a psychic balance that may be called ‘eudemonistic morals.’ Abse seems to possess this patrimony—‘eudemonistic morals’—which enables him to take a balanced view of the positive and negative aspects of life. Before a deceiving world he is watchful observer, anxious and sensitive, one now painfully wise, one now deeply bewildered by and concerned about common reality: ‘I start with the visible / and am startled by the visible.’ (CP, 128) The poet affords the joy of a passionate openness before experience; the doctor is aware of the limits of science, of the inevitable merciful lies of doctors (‘Miracles,’ CP, 159; ‘A winter visit’ and ‘The doctor,’ [Way Out in the Centre, hereafter cited as WOC] 18, 19) and is vulnerable like everyone else (‘because when sick I'm still a doctor,’ WOC, 22). He voices the eternal wonder before the miracle of creation at the moment of the scientific and emotional auscultation of the rhythms of life—from the resonant ‘The smile was’ (CP, 121) to the more controlled and calmer mood of ‘The stethoscope’ (CP, 204). He celebrates the events of everyday life, his sufferings and his affections, his being a son and a father. (CP, 136; WOC, 53)

Some of Abse's poems have an almost visible brilliance; they involve the senses and the feelings equally and strongly. Through the powerful impact of his tropes Abse makes us see pogroms and concentration camps, taste the bitter irony of Yiddish tales, hear the sad music of the shtetl life and the aphorisms of apocryphal rabbis. (CP, 194, 195; WOC, 26, 28) His metaphors are quite daring: they throw two particles of the world so surprisingly and accurately upon each other that, for the reader's imagination, they become one; as in the second part of ‘Ghosts, Angels, Unicorns,’ that is dedicated to the angelical species: Most are innocent, shy, will not undress. / They own neither genitals nor pubic hair. / Only the fallen of the hierarchy / make an appearance these secular days. // No longer useful as artists' models, / dismissed by theologians, morale tends / to be low—even high-class angels grumble / as they loiter in our empty churches. (CP, 184) Almost completely without a surprising use of words, the two images—the one sensual, the other spiritual—convey the idea of the endless ambiguity of existence, allude to the transitoriness of things, displaying ironic humour, and are also balanced in what Arnold called poetry's two ‘interpretations’—natural magic and moral profundity.

Indeed, in most of his poems, Abse links tale to confession, gnomic statement to uninhibited expression; he finds the exact, humorous, colloquial accent to be joined to his esoteric language.

In some of his earlier poems—‘The trial’ (CP, 17), ‘The ballad of Oedipus Sex’ (CP, 100)—polyphonic stanzas and throbbing rhythms counterpoint dramatic images, while reiterations or refrains, indicate and determine a development of themes to give the poet the certainty of a formal discipline. In his most recent compositions, too, the duality of tone, or rather the dichotomy between form and content, may be emblematic not only of a deep personal conflict, but also of emotional involvement and empathy. ‘Cousin Sidney’ is one such poem. Here Abse constructs a series of stanzas mainly in monosyllables—which provide the necessary control to the shifting emotion—without giving an effect of monotony; besides, the verbid ‘unswinging’ (one of the two words in the whole poem that are more than a disyllable) which conveys the idea of stillness, states as it were, the theme itself of the poem—death.

Actually, the variety of the diction, the union of the common word and the more formal one (‘Through it / over young women's abdomens tense, / I have heard the sound of creation / and in a dead man's chest, the silence / before creation began.’), the conversational and the remote (‘Should I / kneel before it, chant an apophthegm / from a small text? Mimic priest or rabbi, / the swaying noises of religious men? / Never! Yet I could praise it.’), the precise and the suggestive (‘night cries / of injured creatures, wide-eyed or blind; / moonlight sonatas on a needle; / lovers with doves in their throats; the wind / travelling from where it began.’) is made possible by the flexibility of the metres that Abse uses. Besides, all the above quoted lines—from ‘The stethoscope’ (CP, 204)—show us that Abse's poetry is made of men, not of things or fetishes. ‘Creative attention’—as Simone Weil wrote—‘means really giving our attention to what does not exist. Humanity does not exist in the anonymous flesh lying inert by the roadside.’ Such is the quality of Abse's concern; he makes himself and his readers human in that sense by his creative attention. ‘Writing poetry is an immersion into common reality not an escape from it,’ ([A Poet in the Family, hereafter cited as PIF] 198) he observes; and he portrays life in its transparent gestures and simple details never trying to escape the obduracy of people, things and situations, but with an intellectual tautness often associated with a quiet irony, expressing instead the complexity of human contradictions—in poetry, prose and theatre, from Ash on a Young Man's Sleeve and Poems, Golders Green to Dogs of Pavlov and from ‘Funland’ to Pythagoras.

The episodes which in his prose works provide material for comedy are deeply explored in the poems and bring forth a transformation of memory into vision. Indeed the single poems become more intelligible in the light of the compositions belonging to the same collection and each collection opens up to new possible interpretations when examined in the entire context of the Absean production—which is an organically interrelated whole. Moreover, if, on one hand, the familiarity with the stage helps Abse, in his poetry, to shape a scene, to sketch characters and present dialogue, on the other hand, in his plays, he manages to combine his prose gift for humorous fantasy based on realistic observation with his poetic gift of evocative language.

The Dogs of Pavlov is one such play. It is based upon the well-known psychological experiment carried out during the 1960s by Professor Stanley Milgram at Yale University and exhibits once more the close connection existing for Abse between his medical professional concern and his literary works. Abse uses the experiment—which was devised to show how far people would go in obeying evil commands—as a point of departure: he questions human guinea-pig experiments, denounces manipulation of power and racial prejudice while pointing out the dangers of conforming—political and / or cultural—submission.

The play itself, dense, absorbing, engaging, both for the performer and for the audience is, in the ordinary sense, dramatic: the characters are confronted with moral choices. So is the audience. At one point the enfolding drama mounts to a great poetic climax—in a dream scene where the characters become caricatures of themselves and where literary allusions and references (to Macbeth, Sweeney Agonistes, The Waste Land and to Martin Luther King's speech ‘I have a dream,’) together with key-words reiterated, suggest ominous signs of an oncoming violence and death—despite a comical and satirical surface. A primitive religious rite is suggested, the rite of obedience: ‘Trust me. Pull the black lever. Pull the black lever. Pull the black lever. Trust me. Kill the nigger lover. Kill the nigger lover. Trust us. Kill the nigger lover.’ ([The Dogs of Pavlov, hereafter cited as DOP] 99)

One feels the sincerity of Abse's deontological concerns and appreciates his language that keeps the flavour and the dimension of everyday life, even when he blends medical terms and poetical tropes in the realistic dialogue of his characters.

But the close relationship between his gifts for poetry and theatre, his unified sensibility—as I defined it at the beginning of this essay—is most obviously illustrated in the connection between ‘Funland’ and his play Pythagoras. The images and symbols of ‘Funland’ recur here, their meaning deepened or expanded by new associations, by their new treatment on the stage. Most of the characters too are the same. They inhabit a mental home; they have gone through the torment of unaccepted or unreciprocated love, and the isolation that ensues; they have gone through the horror of life stripped of all illusion. There is one Tony Smith—a former stage magician—who believes himself to be Pythagoras reincarnated. He thinks he has supernatural powers. He can make telephones ring from a distance with a simple motion of his hand; summon up thunder and lightning by uttering puzzling Greek sentences and order even the celestial spheres to play magic harmonies with the help of a wand.

Facts are reduced to the least, to the advantage of an emotional and evocative concentration. A series of ludicrous misunderstandings and witty remarks—that contribute to the loosening of tension—edge the play towards its climax, towards the demonstration-show that the patients are forced to perform in front of medical students. If, in that scene—and in the whole play—doctors try to reduce every individual to a stereotyped homogeneity, Tony Smith, in believing himself Pythagoras may be trying to express his own frustrated intellectual ambitions or the fascination that mystical experience arouses in him. He tries to define what is perhaps a universal predicament: ‘human kind cannot bear very much reality.’ Also, that human kind should rediscover, re-establish an association of the Pythagorean kind, where religious ethics and science together might lead to a moral reform of society.

The subject may seem distressing, but there are moments of subtle humour, to prove that ‘the insane startle us with their searing truths’ ([Pythagoras, hereafter cited as PY] II), to point out how schizophrenia and paranoia may affect the so-called sane people, and how the genial lucid madness of Pythagoras is preferable to the hyper-rationalism in which scientists get lost as in the following dialogue: ‘SUPERINTENDENT—You don't think that, because of your … breakdown … you imagine that you are Pythagoras? PYTHAGORAS—No, it is because I'm Pythagoras restored to this discordant century that I've had a breakdown.’ (PY, 31)

The songs of a patient, Arthur, the poetic compositions and the curious formulae of Pythagoras scan the rhythm of the momentous scenes and extend the narrative time of the play. Pythagoras, with his mood and manner—mystical, magic and metaphysical—with his alchemies and philosophical intuitions is the magician of the play and, in one sense, its producer.

‘Don't call him Pythagoras. His name is Tony Smith’ (PY, 80) may be considered the concluding line of Pythagoras and ‘Do not wake us. We may die’ (CP, 183) is the last line of ‘Funland.’ The two lines, in spite of their apparent discrepancy, are coterminous. In fact, where does the imagination of reality end and where does the reality of imagination begin? We cannot answer. We should rather quote what Dylan Thomas wrote in a letter dated 1938: ‘The poem is, as all poems are, its own question and answer, its own contradiction, its own agreement … The aim of a poem is the mark that the poem itself makes: it's the bullet and the bull's eye; the knife, the growth and the patient. A poem moves only towards it own end, which is the last line.’ And the last line of ‘Funland’ may seem a contradiction, but it is also an agreement. It is the final chorus, to which the resonance of the line ‘Till human voices wake us and we drown’ from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ may provide contrast and counterpoint.

The inhabitants of Funland do not want to leave their reverie, because with their vision, fancy, dream, they can build a new dimension of life, devise an ubi consistam, a human immortality.