Jane Wright talks to the poet and writer Al Alvarez about his latest book, which he says nobody is interested in

The Writer’s Voice by Al Alvarez
Bloomsbury, £12.99

In a corner of Al Alvarez’s sitting room in Flask Walk, Hampstead, a bust of the poet and critic gazes out over a game of chess.
“I can’t stand it,” the real Mr Alvarez explodes with a twinkle. “The sculptor made me look all weedy and rabbinical, like a remote intellectual.”
Now 75, he had already given up his job as a university teacher by his mid 20s. “I’m a loner,” he says. “I hated the politics of having colleagues. And I wanted to write my own books, not books about other people’s.”
Then, in his 50s, he broke out of his academic box as a writer to produce a series of what he acknowledges became cult books on rock climbing (Feeding the Rat), life on a North Sea oil rig (Offshore) and The Biggest Game in Town, about his abiding anti-intellectual passion, poker.
But this year he is back in print with a new volume of literary criticism, The Writer’s Voice, which seeks to pin down what makes a writer great. As he explains in the preface: “Young writers often confuse voice with stylishness, but that is something quite different from a voice with the whole weight of a life, however young, behind it.”
This all sounds pretty intellectual.
“Of course I’m an intellectual,” he acknowledges. “Ideas are emotionally important to me. The Writer’s Voice is the usual Alvarez showstopper: a very short book about something nobody is interested in.”
He continues: “Writing is like talking. It’s a two-person activity. I write about what I’m interested in, then hope there’s someone out there to read it. By some miracle, even this book has hit a nerve.”
And it’s the contradiction between the popular and the intellectual, this wide-ranging refusal to be categorised, which make Al Alvarez’s work so intriguing.
He’s the same in person. One minute he is cracking jokes about being photographed that morning by the national press up at Hampstead Heath ponds. As a regular pond swimmer – five times a week throughout the winter – he is “disgusted” at proposals to close the ponds.
The next moment he is leaning back in his chair in an almost trance-like state, quoting from memory huge chunks of poetry by Yeats.
He says: “At my age, a lot of people I would like to read The Writer’s Voice are dead.” This clearly includes his hero among the poets, John Donne. But he hopes his “great friends”, fellow writer John Le Carre and musician Alfred Brendel, both neighbours in Hampstead, will do so.
Another friend, whose work he analyses in The Writer’s Voice, is the late American poet Sylvia Plath, his former neighbour in 1960s Primrose Hill. After Sylvia’s marriage to her fellow poet, Ted Hughes, broke up, she used to visit Mr Alvarez to read him her latest work. At the time, he recalls, she was “psychotically depressed” and her poems drew deeply on her black despair. This certainly lent her work an authentic voice, but was a high-risk road to travel which culminated shortly afterwards in Plath’s suicide.
Alvarez has himself attempted suicide during a period of depression and in 1967 wrote The Savage God, which examined the link between suicide and creativity, using Sylvia Plath as a starting point.
He says now: “Ted Hughes’s genius was his hot-line to whatever inspired him to write poetry. And he gave Sylvia the key to her cellar too, and she went down into it. But her own demons were too powerful. It would have been great for us if her attempt had failed. But as a writer, I don’t know where she would have gone from there.”
He continues matter-of-factly: “When I made my suicide attempt, I didn’t care whether I lived or died. This never occurred to me before, but I was like a snake shedding his skin. I didn’t want to get out of my life, but that life. Subsequently, my life has been terrific.”
He continues: “I’m profoundly irreligious. I don’t believe in God or following a leader of any kind, so I’m not into an after-life at all, but I’m very into this one. I get one shot at life on this planet, so I might as well try out what’s on offer and have a bit of fun.”
His most celebrated bit of fun is poker. Having become a high-stakes player of the card game in clubs all over London, he explains how it fed into his writing.
“I’d heard about the World Series poker tournament in Las Vegas and I really wanted to write about it,” he says. “So my American agent got hold of the greatest editor of all time, William Shawn of the New Yorker, who adored the off-the-wall marriage of poker and ‘this crazy English poet’. He fell in love with me and for ten years let me write anything I wanted. It made me a great deal of money.”
However, Mr Alvarez remains tight-lipped about whether poker itself did the same. He is happy to discourse at length on the “loucheness” of the game, explaining “it’s a totally democratic activity, which introduces you to all sorts of people you’d never otherwise know”.
Yet, despite writing extensively about poker, he refuses absolutely to tell about his own big wins and losses. As he warns in The Writer’s Voice: “Brit Art’s Tracey Emin aspires to the condition of a pop star and has made a cult of herself instead of her work. More people know about her sad early years – all booze and bad sex and abortions – than have ever seen reproductions of her works.”
Of his own work‚ he jokes: “I’m not a wonderful writer, but I’m a wonderful re-writer. Even letters to my bank manager go through ten drafts. You try to get it as perfect as you can.” This helps to explain the slimness of his – much admired – poetic output. But his wariness may also be linked to his experience of being a Jew in Britain.
Although the Alvarez family arrived here from Spain more than 200 years ago, he says: “I still feel like an outsider. There was a great deal of anti-Semitism here when I was growing up. Being a Jew was a social gaffe, like dropping your ‘h’s. As an undergraduate at Oxford, if I made a smart-arsed remark, people would say ‘That’s a clever Jew’. It’s why I fell in love with New York. If they’re not Jewish there, they think Jewish.”