Al Alvarez

Alvarez, A.  (2005)  The Writer’s Voice.  London, Bloomsbury.

Al Alvarez is British despite his Spanish surname.  He was born in in London in 1929 and was privately educated; first at The Hall School in Hampstead and then at Oundle in Northamptonshire.  Predictably, some might say, he went up to Oxford and gained a First in English at the end of his time as an undergraduate of Corpus Christi College.

He worked as the poetry editor for The Observer newspaper and is credited with introducing the British literary public to writers such as Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar/Ariel) and Miroslav Holub (Vanishing Lung Syndrome/The Rampage) and others.  His own literary contribution is diverse, writing as a poet, author and critic.

‘Poet, author and critic?’ I hear you say.  Well, yes – he has written a lot of non-fiction stuff including extensive tomes on suicide of all things.  His platonic (I think) relationship with Silvia Plath following her estrangement from Hughes and her own subsequent suicide lent his work The Savage God an added if unwelcome interest.   As a poet he is probably best thought of as an anthologist (The New Poetry 1962.) I suppose this duality, as an anthologist and a journalist lent itself naturally to his metamorphosis into literary critic.

His book The Writer’s Voice is praised and condemned in equal measure and comprises of what can be considered an extended essay.  The content is overarching in terms of the diversity of poets and prose writers that he considered in a series of lectures during his brief sojourn in the USA.

Two things become obvious from reading the book – his unbounded admiration for John Donne (‘genius for opening line/stops you in your tracks’) and his equally unbounded contempt for the Beat generation (‘because they lacked the talent that art requires they had to make do with drugs and fancy dress’).

The book is a mixed bag containing as it does a few golden nuggets amongst pages of sententious ranting, think of it if you will as an intellectual, paper version of Tim Clare’s blog.