"LOVE AND BE LOVED" | August 21st 2008

Jillian Edelstein

Leo Abse, a colourful MP and author, died on Tuesday, aged 91. We remember him--and his life, richly lived--by republishing this profile, written by Maureen Cleave for the summer issue of Intelligent Life ...

Eight years ago, when he was 83, Leo Abse married for the second time. His first wife Marjorie had died four years before. His new wife, the gentle Ania Czepulkowska from Poland, 50 years his junior, was doing an MA at the Royal College of Art when they met over his garden fence. She was strolling along the Thames towpath with a friend; he was smoking a cigar and doing a bit of pruning.

The two most difficult stages in the human lifespan, he says, are adolescence and old age. "You grow out of adolescence, you grow into old age and what you need for a happy old age is love," adding in his saucy way, "someone in his 80s should not have roving thoughts. Ania married me for sex, I married her for her money!" He must add her practical skills: she had worked as a mechanic and electrician in the Gdansk shipyards, the only woman among 31 men. Now, she has just reglazed one of the windows in his sunny drawing room overlooking the Thames, where he reads his Guardian. He is at his desk by 10.30 every morning, after Ania has given him a light breakfast and a shave. He's very deaf but he can always hear Ania. She never raises her voice. Without her, he says, he would not have survived the stroke he had five years ago.

Looking back on his life, as a lawyer, MP and writer, he sees nothing but good. "I had two great advantages: I was born a Jew in Wales in the benign climate of Welsh non-conformity; we believed we had a covenant with God and God would look after us. Being in a minority within a minority, I had the benefit of being an outsider without feeling inferior. And I never went to university, which meant I wasn't groomed to conform."

The art of staying alive, he says, is never to repeat yourself. "Keep stretched. Once you just do what you can do, you repeat yourself. When I left school, I worked in a factory. After the war, with a government grant, I became a solicitor, then a criminal lawyer and, after I'd defended all the criminals and rapists, I moved into industrial accident and employment law."

He even sees some value in the short spell he spent in prison while serving with the RAF during the war, when he was arrested for standing up in the Forces Parliament and arguing that the Bank of England should be nationalised. "Very good experience for a politician to be arrested and put in prison. If people like Blair had worn uniform and had had experience of war, they might not have sent young men to Iraq. This gang--Blair, Brown and so on--they're too young, they have no capital, no hinterland. I find it ironic that these whippersnappers have made such a cock-up of governance. The finest governance we had was that of Clement Attlee which brought in the Welfare State. When the average age of the Cabinet was 60, these men recast the whole structure of Britain."

As an MP, Abse passed more private member's legislation than any man in the 20th century, all of it relating to human relationships: divorce, homosexuality, widows' damages and, most important of all, the Children Act of 1975, dealing with fostering and adoption. After 30 years, true to his principles, he got out. "Being in the cabinet never interested me. Margaret Thatcher vetoed me for the House of Lords and did me a good turn. Unlike the ageing opera star, you've got to know when to give up. I became Leo Abse, writer and former MP."

He wrote not his autobiography--"Write your autobiography and you're writing your obituary"--but books about Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. (The first edition of Tony Blair was called "The Man Behind the Smile", the second, "The Man Who Lost His Smile".) Then he wrote a major work, "The Bisexuality of Daniel Defoe".

Life, he says, is inevitably tragic, because we are born to die. "If you want to live a long time, love and be loved. I married two women who loved me. And you can continue living productively if you follow the rule of the Roman stoics--carpe diem. Don't live expectantly, live for the day."

What he calls his valedictory work is a collection of essays in which characters from the Bible are subjected to Freudian scrutiny, for instance the nakedness of Noah and the curse of Ham. There's another on Moses the Stammerer. "This is about speech defects in leadership. Demosthenes used to put a pebble in his mouth to conquer his speech difficulties. The most famous orator of my lifetime was Nye Bevan and he was a stammerer. He had a wonderful vocabulary because every night he would sit with a Thesaurus, looking for alternative words."

And there will be a very naughty essay about Abishag. "When King David is old and dying, the servants have a committee meeting and decide the way to get him better is to search Israel for the prettiest girl they can find--Abishag. Then it says, 'But David knew her not.' If you really read your Bible, you'll find she gave David new life. He knew her all right, just as I knew my Ania."

(Also see: Diana Athill, Betty Stevens and Brian Power.)

(Maureen Cleave was one of the first feature writers on the London Evening Standard. Her last feature was "Beggars can be orators" for the Spring issue of Intelligent Life. Jillian Edelstein, who took the portraits for this series, is an award-winning photographer whose work has appeared in the New Yorker and Vogue.)