Editor of The New Poetry Al Alvarez Has Died

The Guardian reports that poet, writer, editor, critic Al Alvarez has died at the age of 90. John Sutherland writes that Alvarez "confronted risk head-on in his favoured recreations – rock-climbing and poker – and in his career as an academic without a permanent post." Reading on from there: 

Alvarez was also, he claimed, a man without full nationality. “I am a Londoner, heart and soul,” he protested, “but not quite an Englishman.” His Sephardic Jewish family had been resident in the country for 200 years. Enriched in the clothing trade on the side of his father, Bertie, and property on that of his mother, Katie (nee Levy), they had been assimilated for generations. Although they were no longer quite as rich as they had been by the time Al was born, the family’s mansion in Hampstead, north London, retained a full complement of servants and a high level of cultivation. Classical music was, Al said, one of the great joys of his life even if, like his father, he could play nothing but the gramophone.

Al went to Oundle school in Northamptonshire. A brilliant pupil and a pugnacious sportsman, he excelled but narrowly escaped expulsion in his last year for wilfully breaking rules. In 1949 he went as a scholar to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, to read English. There, with like-minded rebels, he founded the Critical Society, whose manifesto opened: “In Oxford current literary criticism is both vague and ineffective.” Alvarez would be saying something along those lines all his life.

He took a first – the first undergraduate to do so in English at his college. But he disdained the conventional academic career his achievement made possible. He couldn’t take the “high-table chat”, he would airily explain. In more serious mood he felt that English, as practised at Oxbridge, was like “geography” – a discipline for the clever but not the brilliant.

In his most serious mood Alvarez detected discreet institutional resistances. This was a period when Jews could find a niche in philosophy, as had Isaiah Berlin (who got the first “first” ever in his subject at Corpus Christi), or physics, but not the “national” subject. English was closed to the “not quite English”.

He chose to be an outsider. His adopted forename, “Al”, evokes the gunslinger rather than the Hampstead intellectual or the don. Free from “all that fiddle” (a term he borrowed from the admired US poet Marianne Moore) he embarked on a career in which he would do more to shake up English studies from outside than he ever could have done as a company man.

Continue reading at The Guardian.