The Mind Has Mountains: a.alvarez@lxx. - Review - book review

Anthony Holden and Frank Kermode, eds. The Mind Has Mountains: a.alvarez@lxx. Cambridge (U.K.): Los Poetry Press, 1999. 139 pp. $23.00 paper.

During the 1960s and 70s Alfred Alvarez, known as "Al," was an influential broadcaster and reviewer of poetry in the intellectual British newspapers and magazines. In his weekly columns appearing from 1959 to 1977 in the Sunday Observer he molded opinion: poetic reputations hung in the balance. Praise from the pen of Alvarez meant that a poet was important. Being ignored by him or, even worse, condemned, diminished many a poetic talent. It was Alvarez who bought eastern European talents such as the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, and the Czech poet Miroslav Holub, to public attention in English-speaking countries. It was Alvarez who unwaveringly pleaded the cause of his friend Sylvia Plath's poetry.

Alvarez's 1961 study The School of Donne is a useful application of ideas subsequently labeled "New Historicist" to the poetry of John Donne and his contemporaries. For undergraduates, such as the present reviewer, coming to Donne and his contemporaries' poetry in the mid-60s, Alvarez's study provided a breath of fresh air alongside duller and esoteric but no doubt more scholarly endeavors. Alvarez's influential Penguin anthology The New Poetry (1962, 1966) reshapes the map of postwar critical responses to British poetry. In his brilliant introduction, "Beyond the Gentility Principle," Alvarez takes issue with attitudes towards poetic "value." For Alvarez, criticism of poetry, and of what is expected from poetry, is too inhibited and too provincial. Alvarez favors poetry which lives on the edge psychologically of the extreme. He champions poetry that tackles directly personal or historical situations rather than sweeping them under the carpet or refusing to deal with them. He was one of the most politically involved critics during the 1960s and 70s. This does not mean that Alvarez advocates the cause of a political party, but he is aware in his critical writing on poetry of the circumstances reflected in poetry. His The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (1971) focuses upon the work of Plath and the study of psychotic states and their relationship to creativity. Not holding a university position, Alvarez illustrates the power of the critic as public figure, capable of determining the reception of literature.

Al Alvarez was born in London in 1929. His family was of Sephardic Jewish origin. He was sent away from home to an English public school where he reacted to anti-Semitism by becoming an excellent rugger-player and boxer. He got into Oxford to read English, went to Corpus Christi College where he took his first degree in 1952, and gained his M.A. in 1956. Never one to do anything by halves, passionate about D. H. Lawrence to the point of obsession, he did the next best thing marrying the daughter of Lawrence's wife in 1956. The divorce came five years later, followed by a second marriage in 1966. In his autobiography Where Did It All Go Right? (1999), Alvarez observes that the decision not be an academic was a personal choice. Alvarez tends to gloss over the difficulties that someone with his background and temperament faced in the groves of British academe. Very few Jews found positions in British departments of English during the 1950s, 60s, or 70s. Moreover, Alvarez was, in British terms, too clever by hal f. He is extremely bright and controversial. Further, such cleverness, honed on Oxford and British academic traditions, does not automatically transfer to the academic world of North America where it is frequently misunderstood. So for whatever reasons Alvarez's professional path was one of uncertainty and risk. Removed from poetry editor of the Observer to poetry editor of Anthologies, to broadcaster, to journalist, to mountain climber, to professional poker-player (and writer on the subject).

The Mind Has Mountains is a "liber amicorum" of tributes to Alvarez on his seventieth birthday. The first contribution is a poem written by the great pianist and musicologist Alfred Brendel to celebrate the achievement of having "survived all those visits to the Hampstead pond, oil rigs, poker games and private recitals" (9). The second is by the creator of George Smiley and his secret world of intelligence networks, John le Carre, who always dresses up "a little" when he calls on Alvarez: "With the profound pessimism that haunts old poets out of hours...he honours the stranger in you, loves the friend and resolutely ignores your shortcomings" (14). Anthony Holden, the journalist, who has coedited this volume, first met Alvarez at Oxford in 1968. Holden edited the Oxford magazine Isis and put forward Alvarez's name for the Professorship of poetry. His nominee was defeated by the poet Roy Fuller but, as Holden recalls, "pulled more votes than Ted Hughes, John Betjeman, and Bob Dylan, not to mention Jean-Paul Sartre and Mao Tse-Tung" (15). In his tribute Holden draws attention to his subject's critical "rejection of mere wordplay, passion-free verbal fireworks" (16). Holden also puts his finger on what motivates Alvarez: it is risk that "turns Al on." It is no wonder then that Alvarez has written novels and studies of "poker, climbing and oil rigs."

Frank Kermode, the distinguished critic, writes succinctly on the importance of Alvarez's study of Donne. He draws attention to Alvarez's comparison between Donne and Shakespeare. He praises Alvarez's bravery in speaking out against the ruling critical orthodoxies of the time embodied in the writings of Cleanth Brooks. Kermode rightly praises Alvarez's observations on "Lord Herbert of Cherbury, that neglected virtuoso on whose poetry nothing better has been written, and [on] Lord Herbert's greater brother George" (23). In one of the lengthier contributions, Philip French, the film critic of the Observer and a BBC radio producer, writes about Alvarez's impact as a radio broadcaster on such influential programs as The Critics. The program consisted of a panel of four intellectuals who sat around a microphone on a weekly basis and discussed the latest film, theater, ballet, opera, and exhibitions in London.

John Sutherland admits to never having actually met Alvarez, just to having read him. He regrets that Victorian literature appears to have passed Alvarez by apart from "a review of a book on A. H. Clough in the New Statesman in 1962, and an afterword essay on Jude the Obscure for the 1961 NAL edition of the novel" (48). Ian McNaught-Davis, President of the Union of Internationale des Alpinistes, on the other hand, writes about climbing rocks and mountains with Alvarez for more than forty years. There are two tributes by David Spanier, who contributes a weekly column to The Independent. The first, published on May 11, 1994, is an account of Alvarez's losing at the World Poker Championship held in Las Vegas. The second, dated May 26, 1995 relates "Al's Revenge" on the player who had bested him at Las Vegas. "Extremist Art" and Alvarez's observations on Plath and Lowell, are the subject of a contribution by Michael Payne, Professor of English at Bucknell University. What makes Payne's contribution especially in teresting is his brief analysis of a poem by Alvarez. The poem he chooses, "Mourning and Melancholia," illustrates Alvarez's preoccupation with "extremes." The poem, Payne observes, "provides an important insight into the cross-fertilization of biography and art" (94).

The Mind Has Mountains concludes with the reprinting of two lengthy interviews with Alvarez. The first, an interview with Ian Hamilton first published in 1978, ranges widely over Alvarez's early life, the years at Oxford, and the influences upon him. The second, an interview with the poet and critic Gregory LeStage, is the result of three conversations with Al held in 1996 and 1997 (published in a shorter version in Poetry Review in 1998). The main focus is Alvarez's impact as a poetry reviewer during the 1960s. LeStage in his final question asks Alvarez whether he "protected his 'poetic self by leaving academia and ranging far and wide" in his writing. Typically the response is straightforward, and revealing:

I am sure that real poetry only comes from a live core, a real voice, which one finds by living outside the self. Drawn from elsewhere, poetry is slightly confected. Besides ranging far and wide in my experience, what also helps is that I've always been broke. That has kept me writing, kept me hungry, kept the tension. (134)

Six of the tributes are in the form of poems. They provide a reminder that Alvarez has himself written some very powerful poetry. It may well be that he will be remembered for his formative role in molding critical reception to the landscape of poetry in the 1960s and 70s. He also will be remembered as a fine poet, who wrote at least one great poem. His 1958 poem "A Cemetery in New Mexico (To Alfred Alvarez, dead, 1957)" remains one of the great elegies written in English in the twentieth century. The wit, "the strong emotion," combined with the "strong logic" he so admires in Donne's poetry, is present. So are "death" and Alvarez's own present and past. For even in far-away New Mexico, London and the cemetery where his father lies buried cannot escape the poet. His father lies in "Willesden Cemetery, honoured, wealthy, prone / Unyielding and remote, he bides his time, / And carved above his head is my own name" (Twelve Poems 3). How many subsequent critics and theorists have written such fine lines? Certain ly not Jacques Derrida, or Stanley Fish. Perhaps Sandra Gilbert?

William Baker (wbaker@niu.edu) is professor of English at Northern Illinois University. Recently he has published (as editor) The Letters of Wilkie Collins (1999), The Letters of George Henry Lewes, Volume 3, with New Letters by George Eliot (1999), and (as coeditor, with Julian Wolfreys) Literary Theories: A Case Study in Critical Performance (1998). His current projects include a study of Post-Holocaust British Jewish writing and a descriptive bibliography of George Eliot. He has edited George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies since 1981.

Other Works Cited

Alvarez, A. The Savage God: A Study of Suicide. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971; New York: Random House, 1972; rpt. Norton, 1990.

___. The School of Donne. London, Chatto and Windus, 1961; rpt. 1970; rpt. New York: New American Library, 1967.

___. Twelve Poems. The Review 19.1 (1968).

___. Where Did It All Go Right? London: Richard Cohen, 1999.

___, ed. The New Poetry: An Anthology. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962; enl. ed., 1966.

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