Where Did it All Go Right?

by Al Alvarez (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2002

  $3.28

  Al Alvarez, poet, critic, novelist, sportsman, and poker player, has for seventy years been hard to categorize. He is the author of the best-selling study of suicide, The Savage God , and as poetry editor of the Observer , he has known most of the leading poets of the second half of last century. For a time he was an influential critic and his anthology The New Poetry scandalised the literary community. Much of the liveliness of Alvarez's story is inspired by the ambiguous fate of being an English Jew. Although his family had been settled in London for more than two centuries, being Jewish always made them feel like outsiders. He went from Oundle, an English public school, to Oxford, where an academic career beckoned; instead he embarked on life as a freelance writer. Meanwhile he climbed mountains, played poker and wrote books about these pastimes which are now regarded as classics. Where Did It All Go Right? is his memorable, irreverent account of that journey.

• Used

  Hardcover
  1999

  $3.28

  Al Alvarez has been at the centre of British literary life for nearly 40 years. His 1969 study of suicide, The savage god , is recognised as a classic. As poetry editor of The Observer in its heyday, Alvarez knew, influenced and was friends with an extraordinary array of writers - Auden, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, John Berryman (who, like Plath, committed suicide), John le Carre (his next-door neighbour), and many more. He was born into a prosperous North London Jewish family of caterers. He went to Oundle and to Oxford where, unusually for a budding poet, he was a keen and successful sportsman. He went on to write poetry, novels, literary criticism and a host of non-fiction. So far so true. What such a description hides is the extraordinary array of characters that Alvarez vividly brings to life. Remember the two grandmothers in Cider with Rosie ? Al Alvarez had grandfathers too. His best friend flies aeroplanes upside down. His first marriage was a (highly entertaining for us) disaster, from which he emerged to write a compelling study of divorce (beginning with Sterne's epigram: When a man marries, he must realise he gives up forever the pleasure of lying diagonally in bed ).