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One of Alvarez’s main arguments was that British poetry had suffered as a result of evading the challenges of Modernism and that even the most experimental writers, such as Auden and Dylan Thomas, still had to contend with what he called ‘the gentility principle’, particularly as manifested in ‘Movement’ poetry such as Philip Larkin’s. ‘I am wholly in favour of restoring poetry to the realm of common sense,’ Alvarez commented in his introduction to The New Poetry.
But there is always the delicate question of how common common sense should be .… I am not suggesting that modern English poetry … must be concerned with psychoanalysis or with the concentration camps or with the hydrogen bomb…. I am not suggesting, in fact, that it must be anything …. I am, however, suggesting that it drop the pretence that life, give or take a few social distinctions, is the same as ever, that gentility, decency and all the other social totems will eventually muddle through.
His pursuit of the opposites of gentility and decency, above all his much-vaunted love of risk, has taken him, like other writers for whom writing isn’t everything, into territory which perhaps only the desk-bound could find quite so thrilling. Poker and mountaineering may, between them, have a lot to say about life but they aren’t, after all, life itself. What they crucially provide Alvarez with, though, are ways of thinking about art. Measured in terms of danger and excitement, who would you rather have: Seamus Heaney or John Berryman?
Put that crudely, of course, the question wouldn’t yield much of interest. What makes Alvarez’s views powerful, and what forced younger writers such as Andrew Motion and Blake Morrison into arguing with him, is that — a few memorable phrases apart — he doesn’t over-simplify. Unlike Tynan, he knows that, in the arts, Premier League and First Division can be hard to separate and that individual players perform at different levels not only over a lifetime but month by month. His case about Heaney isn’t that he’s no good, but that the hyperbolic terms Heaney’s fans use about him harm ‘the fragility of [his] verse’, a fragility whose beauties Alvarez is eloquent about. Meanwhile, he reminds us that the greatest writers have often been uneven. Coleridge’s reputation ‘rests on five poems … less than ten per cent of his poetical works’.
Alvarez always cuts through to simple, neglected sense. Who else has noticed that although manned space travel has been going on for decades, we still know next to nothing about what it’s like? The reason, he asserts, is that none of those involved so far — by contrast, say, with Apsley Cherry-Garrard in Scott’s Antarctic team — has had any gift as a writer. To me, none the less, the macho side of this selection palls. There’s too much of it and inevitably there are repetitions. Besides, analogies between mountaineering and poetry are bound to break down at some points. Difficulty is a gauge which Alvarez wouldn’t apply in the same way to poetry as to climbing. And isn’t being funded by a magazine in a poker tournament a bit like walking the tightrope over a bouncy castle? Alvarez’s biographical portraits of artists, on the other hand, including his Hampstead neighbour Alfred Brendel, communicate both the heroism and the humanness of art with such intensity that his comparing a game of cards with it comes close to the disproportion which he’s critical of elsewhere. What’s best in these essays isn’t the tough talk but the hard-won intellectual and moral balance: in a word, taste. Alvarez writes wonderfully, for example, about his friends Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, separately and together, and with a tact and emotional maturity which are a rebuke to their partisans. ‘Naturally,’ Alvarez says, ‘both of them behaved badly as the marriage disintegrated.’ In going beyond gentility, he hasn’t left gentleness behind.
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