Life is a risky business for writer Al Alvarez
A lover of climbing and poker, writer Al Alvarez has never shied away from risk, writes Bridget Galton
THESE days, the only head rush "adrenalin junkie" Al Alvarez gets is diving into a butt-freezing Hampstead pond.
The 77-year-old, who walks with difficulty following a climbing accident, takes the plunge around five days a week.
"I don't do it every day or else it becomes a job - but I love it. It's saved my life, kept me healthy. Fifty degrees is cold, 40 degrees is bloody cold. But when you get out, you feel reborn."
Alvarez is still good-humouredly cursing the folly of agreeing to go to hospital in Caernarfon when he broke his ankle 47 years ago.
"It was the worst hospital in Great Britain from quite a strong shortlist. They loathed climbers, they were incompetent, vicious and they set it wrong," he says, limping around his Flask Walk home.
In fact, the poet, novelist and critic is pretty good-natured about most things, inclined to seek out the amusing, quirky side of life in his lengthy essays for the New Yorker, the New York Review and other publications.
A collection of his favourite articles, entitled Risky Business, is published this month.
They cover Alvarez's well-documented passions for poker, mountaineering and flying - and articles on writers from Philip Roth to Sylvia Plath that remind you how rare it is to find beautifully written, lively, perceptive journalism.
But then Alvarez is several classes above most hacks. As influential poetry editor of the Observer in the 1950s and 60s, he championed the work of Plath, Thom Gunn, Robert Lowell and Ted Hughes.
He reminisces fondly of the days when The Observer devoted pages to work by unknown poets and the New Yorker would commission a 50,000-word article that consumed the magazine over two issues.
Describing himself as "an Englishman with a Spanish name", he still likes the way American publications allow him to write.
"They want you to write long, to take your time, which is good because I am such a slow writer. I couldn't do the kind of journalism where they say, 'I don't want it good, I want it Tuesday.'"
Oxford-educated Alvarez says he could have become an academic but was too curious about the wider world to spend his life "writing books about other people's books - I mean who
gives a shit?"
He adds: "I don't like closed worlds. I was a writer and I wanted to get out and do things. I thought, 'I am only going to get one shot at this life. I don't believe in the afterlife, I want to try my hand at what's on offer - whether that's hanging out with professional poker players in Las Vegas or adrenalin-junkie mountaineers. It's all part of getting as much as possible out of the experience, then writing about it."
Alvarez' books include The Biggest Game In Town, about poker, and The Savage God, an exploration of the taboo of suicide inspired by Sylvia Plath.
Alvarez, who was portrayed in the 2003 biopic Sylvia by Jared Harris, has his own place in the Plath myth as the man she turned to for literary feedback when Hughes left her.
At his Primrose Hill studio, she read Alvarez the likes of Daddy and Lady Lazarus and, on their last meeting, weeks before her suicide, he was shocked and frightened by her despair.
"She had been writing about this extreme stuff and there was nobody to hear. I was making critical sense of what she was doing. She came and read me those poems. She needed someone to respond when Ted was no longer available and I guess she trusted my judgement."
He confessed in his autobiography Where Did It All Go Right? that his own life was a mess at the time and, although aware she needed looking after, he couldn't take on the responsibility.
He says he let her down "unforgivably" - but he also vitally championed her work.
Two weeks before she died, he bumped into another newspaper literary editor, who had seen the final poems but returned them to Plath because they were "too extreme for my taste".
Alvarez, who loathed the "cult of gentility" in post-war English poets, did publish.
"The Observer was the only place that was publishing those late poems. They were hugely unexpected but emotionally violent. She turned every personal emotional domestic detail into her work," he says.
Alvarez believes if Plath had died a year earlier she would not be feted as she is today and says her final "glorious year" was down to getting in touch with her demons, which unlocked her creative genius but destroyed her.
But even while poetry editing, he retained perspective on the literary life by playing poker most weekends or climbing.
"If you hang around with real people who know what they are doing - poker players or rock climbers - you realise the world is full of really smart people who don't give a shit about literature."
Alvarez, who says he never reached a pro level at any of his pursuits, believes in remaining clear-sighted about your own abilities.
"It's not modesty, it's a sense of reality that stops you getting above yourself. It's good for the soul to understand how good you are - you mustn't let your ego get in the way. That works for anything in life - but especially poker.
"I have had bad runs and good runs. But I have put two kids through Westminster School largely supported by a really bad poker player I took money off.
"He was a sophisticated fellow, a wine merchant, multi-lingual. But he thought he was the cat's whiskers and he couldn't believe a gang of layabouts could possible beat him. The worst thing you can do in poker is let your ego get in the way.
"You have to judge the cards and assume that all sorts of weird people know more about the game than you."
As Alvarez told Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs: "I am not a gambler, I play cards."
"I am the reverse of a compulsive gambler. In 1981, I was in downtown Vegas for three weeks. It's pretty grim and there is nothing else to do but gamble. But I did not make a single bet. That's how much I am not a gambler."
He admits part of the language of poker is money: "You make statements about the cards you have with bets." But he advises "frightened money never wins".
"You must never play a game where you can't afford to lose because you always play too tight."
Alvarez, who has been with wife Anne for more than 40 years, has three children, including a son by a previous marriage.
Born to Anglo-Jewish parents who "have lived here since the 1770s", he moved to Glenilla Road, Hampstead, in 1929 when he was six months old and bought his current home in1966 for "the square root of f*** all."
"Hampstead has always been very pretty but it has stopped being a village," he complains.
"All the little shops are going. Now you have God knows how many shops where you can spend £1,000 on a dress but nowhere you can spend £1 for a needle and thread to mend it."
But he admits: "I am a Londoner before I am an Englishman. I could never live in the country - I like the comings and goings of the city."
Alvarez, who tries to write most afternoons, describes himself proudly as a "freelance writer".
"I like being independent. I have never ever been on the pay roll of anybody. It's been more of a tightrope walk which I much prefer."
He is currently working on a book about getting old, which for a man of such activity, who retains such irrepressible humour and curiosity about life, is immensely frustrating.
"It's a mega piss-off," he admits.
"You lose energy. After three or four hours of poker your concentration wavers. It's an irony that the more athletic you are in life, the harder you age. Isaiah Berlin never lifted a finger and lived well into his 80s."
The new book has no title but he tells me gleefully that his friend Philip Roth has suggested one.
"Humiliation," he smiles.
Risky Business is published by Bloomsbury priced £12.99.
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