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Alvarez’s is an intellect seeking a fresh outlet
• GREALD Isaaman’s review of Risky Business (Al Avarez says God is the real risky business, Feb 9), has Al Alvarez saying that God is the real risky business.
Alvarez’s poker playing and rock climbing are a release from suicidal boredom, not adrenalin-induced but manic.
I have read A Alvarez’s book on risk. It is what is nowadays called “a good read” but that does not necessarily mean I enjoyed reading it.
Shortly afterwards I acquired his autobiography, and have too the book on Voice, The Savage God, on suicide and the Rat One on climbing.
Armed with this plethora of background, I still admit to finding him bewildering, although, as Gerald Isaaman has stated his style is superb.
Perhaps the clue lies in the little work I did not mention – his long essay (as he called it) on Samuel Beckett. I think it was his friend Frank Kermode who wrote of it that, in all the countless corpus of the Beckett Industry, it was one of the best.
I believe that Beckett, particularly in Waiting for Godot, was writing on Boredom, and I believe that Alvarez, in his unresolved disillusionment and nihilism, with his unparalleled insight into despair and suicide, was able to touch the right chords and to get on the same wavelength.
Alvarez does write well, his vignettes on contemporary writers are disciplined. They come to life. He has taken incredible risks with his surmounted ankle injury, he flies upside down with his friend Mr Norman. Not content with the physical, he joins some of the most odiously depicted participants at poker in Las Vegas.
He calls these activities release of adrenalin. I would venture to call them release from boredom.
One of his pet hates, RD Laing, who found therapy in madness, would have had heyday.
Another figure of the 1960s, Allen Ginsberg, whom Alvarez castigates, finds his solution in drugs, at any rate probably cheaper than the dreadful lifestyle of Las Vegas. Why then “a good read” but not an enjoyable one?
Marianne Moore, who provided him with the title Beyond all this fiddle, like Robert Lowell , John Berryman and Ezra Pound, knew all too well the pressure of writing after TS Eliot.
They all knew that after the Holocaust and the changes in the media, something different must emerge. All of them, not least Geoffrey Hill, WH Auden and the gloomy Philip Larkin. They all did their best. What of Alvarez?
He purports to have an optimism – mainly from eastern Europe. You ask him how to get to Prague and he replies that there are no roads and the bridges have disappeared. His chutzpah is however such that he tells you that you’ll get there all the same.
When Alvarez’s next book comes out, I believe it will be on growing old. Maybe he will gaze at his climbing photographs and some betting chips. All manic adrenalin aside, he may give us some well articulated wisdom, and maybe find a less savage God.
Gerald Isaaman says that Alvarez refuses to accept that we are all doomed with malevolent death and decadence. He describes the next book as prophetic, but the Savage God is difficult to be a prophet to.
Incidentally, by “boredom”, I do not imply a lethargic indolence.
Much more Oblomov – a well-equipped mind seeking frustratedly to find an outlet in something different.
WILLIAM YOUNG
(Former archivist at St Martin in the Fields)
Southampton Road, NW3
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