Where Did it All Go Right?: Al Alvarez

by Al Alvarez (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1999

  $8.25

  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 ).