Not much balm in Swiss Cottage
Alan Wall
THE STRANGE CASE OF DR SIMMONDS & DR GLAS by Dannie Abse
Robson Books, £14.95, pp. 195, ISBN 1861055048
Dannie Abse has a number of identities, and he's never seemed in much of a hurry to amalgamate them. It's as though he instinctively realised that the conflicts and overlappings of his various selves would provide him with his sustenance as a writer. So the Welshman looks askance at the Londoner and receives a quizzical appraisal in return; the doctor examines his patients but is all too aware that they are examining him while he's about it; and the urbane medical man of letters never forgets that he's a Jew, whether he's in Cardiff or Finchley.
In the poetry and autobiographical writings this bumping up of one identity against another produces a spate of wry observation and also, notably, of humour. Abse is a writer of urbane humanity with a seeming interest in every aspect of life, and he is also very, very funny. The humour is a complement to his humanity, not a contradiction of it. So when he gives us his account of a meeting with an aged and cantankerous Robert Graves in Southwark Cathedral, we sense Abse's own meticulous observation of life's daily absurdities. He does not, like so many humorists, burlesque the proceedings, nor does he caricature the protagonists. The careful presentation of the events in their surroundings is sufficient. It supplies what Eliot called the objective correlative, and we smile with him. He could never be a satirist, for he lacks the savage and efficient unfairness needed for that genre.
Dr Simmonds & Dr Glas is a case study, and what it studies is the murderousness inside the human heart, bred there through frustration and the factions of desire. There's not much love in Robbie Simmonds' life, but it's a species of love that finally does for him. Or desire anyway; he's never given the opportunity to find out what love might have done for him instead. A disfigured face from a fireworks accident is the emblematic bruise life has bestowed upon him. He is a doctor, but the coldness of his heart escapes his own diagnosis. He's a physician who finds that there's no balm
in Gilead, and not much in Swiss Cottage either.
As we hear more and more of his voice we realise that he is also an anti-Semite, without realising that that is what he is. Indeed he protests that he isn't. What Abse is pursuing in this subtle and compelling book is how category mistakes, the erroneous alignment of the human mind with the human heart, are not mere details of the human personality: they can kill. It gradually dawns on us as we keep turning the pages (and it's very difficult not to) that Dr Simmonds is in error, that his antiSemitism is making him blind to the realities he must confront both as a doctor and as a human being. The full horror of his misconception and its results is only revealed to us at the very end.
This short novel probably ranks as one of the subtlest studies of prejudice ever written.
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