June
15th. The phone went. ‘There’s been an accident.’
Then my stunned silence.
Always, from the start, it had been: ‘Come for coffee.’
And I would drive down to Ogmore-by-Sea, the estuary opening out into
all that sea-light that uplifted you whatever your mood. Park on the
hill, and walk into Green Hollows through the old, five-barred gate
set in the dense privet hedges, past the laurel bushes and buddleia
bordering the path, under the overhanging aromatic tree (was it an
exotic Korean or plain walnut?) and skirt the yew which almost completely
blocked the view of the house. After pausing for a second, for there
is no obvious front door, I would turn left, away from the annexe
where Seren had been based in its early days, and walk up the steps
between small ponds caught in the concrete sides, stop, and if it
was summer, look at the ponds full of yellow and white water lilies
under which dozens of goldfish darted about, disappearing when your
shadow fell over them. (It seemed miraculous they could survive in
there. But they had been there for years and seemed vitally connected
with the life of the place.) From the patio, I’d look out across
the steel grey Bristol Channel to Somerset and Devon, then call out
to Joan who’d be deep in the garden.
When I think of Joan Abse that is how I see her, secateurs in hand,
surrounded by colour in her garden with its wonderful mixture of flowers
in the beds between the privet and cotoneaster hedges: the orange
and blue geraniums, the aquilegia and irises, the yellow feverfew,
pinky-red valerian growing out of the walls, the tall, delicate Japanese
anemones, the golden rod and the luscious peonies, and the aromas
of the mature bushes of lavender, mint, rosemary and lemon balm, and
countless others. And it seems to me that there’s a clear thread
of interest in the relationship between making and beauty (art and
work) running throughout Joan’s life. Born Joan Mercer in September
1926, she grew up in St. Helens in Lancashire, studied politics at
the L.S.E. and, some years later, the history of art at the Courtauld
Institute. When she was still in grammar school she joined the Independent
Labour Party, became secretary of her local district and an admirer
of the politicians Fenner Brockway and James Maxton. A practical compassionate
socialism (Old Labour rather than New Labour ) informed her thinking
throughout her life and emerges clearly in her most important book,
her biography of Ruskin. Nothing more strongly revealed her deep humanism
than her opposition to war; she was a C.N.D. supporter, backed the
Greenham Common Women protesters, took part in demonstrations against
the war in Vietnam and in 2003 joined the march against the war in
Iraq. Yet, however passionately she held her cause, her kindliness
and gentleness of manner never deserted her; to argue with her was
to be listened to. At the end of the Forties, while working in the
library of the Financial Times in post-war London, she met Dannie
Abse who had just completed his first book of poetry and married him
in 1951. In 1957, after the birth of Susanna (Keren had been born
in 1953), the couple moved to a larger house in Golders Green where
their third child, David, was born in 1958.
Joan and Dannie had a wonderfully close and loving relationship which
many who knew them have spoken about. They also remained individuals.
Joan had her own strong and firmly held views which she did not compromise.
One of the pleasures of being with them was the discussions that ensued
at times when they did disagree, for example, Joan had a much higher
opinion of the value of fiction than Dannie (the novelist) had. Joan
was always busy. She had three children and eventually two homes and
gardens to look after. In 1972, Green Hollows was acquired. Ogmore-by-Sea
was a place full of childhood memories for Dannie
.
Would it be fair to say that Joan belonged to that generation of women
who put their family first? I’m not sure how useful such a generalisation
is. It could suggest that most of these women might have wanted their
lives to be something else - something that certainly would not be
true in Joan’s case. Nevertheless, when I look at her publications,
I wish that she had given us more. Her biography of Ruskin is a remarkable
achievement, scholarly (she seems to have read everything by that
prolific writer) and readable, without ever losing control of the
multivarious strands of Ruskin’s life. Her first book, ‘The
Art Galleries if Britain and Ireland: A Guide to their Collections’
(1975) had fulfilled a real need at the time and was marked by the
clarity and careful scholarship that came to characterise all her
writing. In 1977, she edited ‘My L.S.E.’, a collection
of essays by graduates and members of the university. Then her enthusiasm
for art and politics came together in the book she had been working
on during the Seventies, her magisterial ‘John Ruskin: A Passionate
Moralist’ published in 1980 in Britain and the United States.
There can be no doubt that in Ruskin, Joan found expressed many views
which she herself shared. Ruskin was concerned about the ‘nature
and function of art and the dignity and indignity of work …still
deeply relevant today’. She revealed the Christian Socialist
strand in Ruskin and his influence on the early ILP leaders such as
Keir Hardie, Tom Mann and F.W. Jowett. She argued that Ruskin still
has much to say that is relevant to modern debates about social justice
and that Ruskin has important things to say to us about education,
particularly about the value of the vocational and the value that
needs to be given to work and education that does not have an intellectual
base. How all the work that people do should allow them dignity. Her
account is balanced, giving equal treatment to Ruskin’s writing
about art, his own drawing and his work in education and his relationships
with his family, women and other artists. Typically the book benefits
from Joan’s empathy with the great Victorian. She treats his
marriage with Effie Gray with understanding and tact, fully exploring
Ruskin’s ‘complex sexual pathology’, and traces
the effects of Ruskin’s mother on her son without ever giving
way to crude psychoanalytical interpretations. She is particularly
strong on Ruskin’s passionate defence of Turner and shows how
essential his work was to preserving Turner’s art and to our
understanding of it. She gives a wonderfully clear account of the
development of Ruskin’s ideas through the five volumes of his
‘Modern Painters’. She draws attention to ‘blind
spots’ in his thinking about women and slavery, avoiding the
twin traps of exculpation and condemnation. Above all, Joan allows
Ruskin to speak to us himself; her book is full of wonderful, apposite
quotations which have the effect of making you want to read Ruskin’s
books yourself.
This huge achievement was followed by two collections jointly edited
with Dannie: in 1986, ‘Voices in the Gallery’ for the
Tate Gallery, in which poets responded to paintings ( Ruskin was a
published poet in his early days); in 1988, ‘The Music Lover’s
Literary Companion’ followed. In 2000, she edited ‘Letters
From Wales’, another work of considerable scholarship in which
all the ‘letters must come from Wales’ and which she saw
‘as a kind of biography of Wales’. Her useful annotations
make the book a delight to read and throughout it her feeling for
the salient and the human shine out; ‘always in this book, I
have tried to keep to the fore the feeling of the actual life being
vividly lived in Wales, the essential history, the struggles, the
suffering and indomitability of the people’.
Joan wrote of Ruskin’s ‘unified vision of life’.
It could be said of her too. Whether working in the garden, working
on her books, or making lunch for family and friends, she did it all
with dignity and respect. The other day, the engineer who had looked
after her boiler in Green Hollows for more than thirty years, speaking
of her death in that sudden crash on the M4 near Porthcawl in June,
talked about how good she had always been to him, how she had valued
his work.. Joan believed the beauties of art, poetry and nature should
enrich us all; her writings and her work illustrated this. Their effects
remain. ‘Man is the sun of the world; more than the real sun.
The fire of his wonderful heart is the only heat worth gauge or measure.
Where he is are the tropics; where he is not, the ice-world.’
(Ruskin: Modern Painters Vol. 5 Part9).