It is as the man who declares Sylvia Plath a genius and gave her what seems her unassailable seat in the pantheon that A Alvarez is probably best known as the man who declared Sylvia Plath a genius and gave her what seems her unassailable seat in the pantheon. This was in the 1960s when Alvarez was poetry critic of the Observer and making waves because of his antipathy to the Movement poets, whom he regarded as a cosy cartel on the English poetry scene. In supporting Plath, he could be said to have founded a movement of his own.
But he is also the author of several books, one of which, The Savage God, has not been out of print for over thirty years. A meditation on suicide, and written after his own suicide attempt, The Savage God goes a long way towards explaining his identification at that time with Plath's fraught poems. Whether the older and happier A. Alvarez who has written Where Did It All Go Right? would cut to the chase with such acuity now is questionable. Where Did It All Go Right?, his autobiography, is strangely unsatisfying. It has little of the intimacy, confessionalism or engagement you feel entitled to expect from one who responded to these qualities in others during his illustrious time as a critic. Take the A. before Alvarez, for example. Some will know it stands for Al, but others may not and they won't be told it in this book. The section about his childhood is the most interesting and felt, but is more a biography of his family than an examination of himself when young.
Al grew up in the glamorous and slightly raffish world of the wealthy Jewish business class, which was also the pre-war world of nurseries, parlour-maids and cooks. But the Alvarez family was beset by money worries as well as by his parents' unhappiness with each other. Al, in his turn, was an unhappy boy, and he continued to be more or less unhappy through public school and Oxford.
His first marriage was unhappy, too, and culminated in the suicide attempt - but we are told little about this, as it is covered in The Savage God. Much of Alvarez's trouble, and why it all went wrong for him for so long, was that he was not in sympathy with what he calls the English "principle of gentility". When, as an academic, he discovered America, he fell for it. He loved its ugliness and the way it was alright there to be Jewish, but especially he loved the adrenalin rush it offered at every turn.
Alvarez describes himself as an "adrenalin junkie" - the big passions of his life have gripped him because of the adrenalin-high they provide. These passions are poker and rock-climbing and we are brought on a brisk canter through his experiences of both. He is an habitue of the poker dens in Las Vegas and has played in the World Series. Once he nearly died on an Italian mountain. Both of these passions have been seminal in his development and self-knowledge, and he has learned more from them and enjoyed them more than he has books or the writing of them.
Although Alvarez's life revolves around writing, he gives the impression that the writing life merits no great passion or even respect. He doesn't like the doing of it since there's no rush to be had, for him anyway. Also, he may have internalised his parents' attitude. To them, writing was not a real occupation, certainly not for an Alvarez.
He does discourse on writers he has known, some of whom he has loved, such as V.S.Pritchett and Ian Hamilton, and some of whom he has not, such as William Empson and Jean Rhys. But it's all rather perfunctory and dutiful, sketching each as if he's doing it because it's expected. An exception - and maybe this is because we know so much about her - is his description of the white sterility of Sylvia Plath's flat in her last cold week, and his failure to respond to her plea for company. There's a sense, implied in his clever title, that Alvarez has been hampered by happiness. He found it in his thirties when he met Anne Adams, his second wife. In fact, he turned down Plath's advances in the week of her death because he had a date with Anne, which seems like a very neat renunciation of the despair towards which he used to tend. After this point you can't help feeling that he has little interest in what he's writing, certainly about himself, and the book runs out of steam.
Montherlant's "Happiness writes white. It does not show up on the page" is one of his favourite quotations. Another is Yeats's about the necessity to choose perfection of the life or of the work. Alvarez has made his choice - or perhaps happiness has chosen him. Either way, he's not complaining. But it does make you wonder - if someone isn't driven to write, should they write at all?
Anne Haverty's most recent book is a collection of poetry, The Beauty Of The Moon