A risk junkie since boyhood, the poet, critic and academic Al Alvarez, who has died aged 90, loved rock climbing, rugby and poker. As poetry editor of The Observer he championed the work of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, and his 1971 study of suicide, The Savage God, generated speculation about an affair with Plath, which he denied.
Alvarez was born with a leg abnormality, which may have conversely triggered an addiction to danger. He was undeterred after breaking his ankle while mountain climbing, and his nose while boxing. He claimed to be a man without full nationality – “a Londoner, heart and soul, but not quite an Englishman.” Descended from an established, wealthy Sephardi family, Al was born in Bloomsbury but his parents soon moved to a mansion in Hampstead because -- “It was full of their kind of Jews – comfortably off and thoroughly anglicised.” His father Bertie, a businessman who loathed business, and his mother Katie née Levy was indulgent and generous.
After Oundle School in Northamptonshire he won a scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Oxford and armed with a first in English he became a research fellow. But a subtle resistance to Jews in the English department triggered a move to Princeton, followed by New Mexico University on a DH Lawrence fellowship.
Love affairs, alcohol and fast driving marked his his academic farewell. He published two books of literary criticism during his decade at The Observer from the 1950s: The Shaping Spirit (1958) and The School of Donne (1961). He also edited the best-selling anthology The New Poetry (1962). But the man described as one of Bloomsbury’s most glamorous authors had a slim poetic output, apart from 20 books of non fiction and three novels. He published poetry on love, separation and death, acclaimed for their lyricism and weight, but which failed to attain their anticipated reputation.
At The Observer, he was among the first to attack “the gentility principle”, expounded by the poetry of Philip Larkin in favour of poets he called the Extremists, i.e. Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Thomas Gunn. The last time he saw Plath was on Christmas Eve, 1962, when she read a few lines which foreshadowed her suicide a few weeks later. He described it as -- a “horrible irony,” claiming –“she only really hit her peak in the last year or so of her life.”
He published her late poems at a time when few British publications would take them. The anguish of Plath after being abandoned by Hughes resonated with Alvarez. He had attempted suicide himself just two years after his first marriage to the 20 year old Ursula Barr, granddaughter of Frieda, widow of D. H. Lawrence, failed. That “disastrous marriage”seemed to have cured Alvarez of his obsession with D H Lawrence, which had triggered his best known book The Savage God. In its prologue he discusses Plath’s suicide and the epilogue, his own failed suicide attempt.
He became passionate about poker during a trip to Las Vegas where he went to write an article on it for the New Yorker. His regular visits to London’s Victoria Casino were book-ended by an annual month in Las Vegas where he even reached a final of the world championship. In 1983 he published a study of poker called The Biggest Game in Town, and described the addiction in his 1991 book Feeding the Rat. He gave up chain smoking for a pipe and swam regularly in Hampstead Heath ponds, which became the subject of his final book, Pondlife, written when he was wheelchair-bound following a stroke. “Heavenly presences are hard to come by in London,” he wrote, “so what with the terns and birdsong and shining day, I go home feeling blessed.”
In 1999 a tribute book The Mind Has Mountains was published by Los Poetry Press to celebrate Alvarez’s 70th birthday. In it John le Carre wrote: “His entire life, I suspect, has been a rolling Poker duel with the god whose existence, for all I know, he vigorously disowns. Is it a Jewish god? Sometimes – I believe it is.”
Alvarez’ marriage to Ursula was dissolved in 1961 and their son Adam died in 2016. He married Canadian psychotherapist Anne Adams, who survives him with their son Luke and daughter Kate.
GLORIA TESSLER
Al Alvarez: born August 5, 1929. Died September 23, 2019.
