The Sigla Blog

There’s a much-held belief that Literary Criticism is on the wane, not what it used to be and a tad unfashionable. Reading Al Alvarez’ fascinating collection of esssays in his new book Risky Business: People, Pastimes, Poker and Books might help to change that view. London-born Alvarez has been writing critically for over 50 years and his non-fiction writing has covered topics as diverse as suicide (The Savage God), divorce (Life After Marriage), dreams (Night), and the oil industry (Offshore).

This book is mostly given over to his literary leanings and pastimes. The former he was able to indulge while Poetry Editor of The Observer from 1956 to 1966, where he introduced the British reading public to poets like John Berryman, Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell. He was a friend of Plath’s and she used to show him her writing after her marriage to Ted Hughes ended. There are essays . originally written for The New Yorker and The New York Review - on poets Les Murray, Czeslaw Milosz, Edward Lear, John Berryman (with his “gift for grief”), Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin and on the prose of Jean Rhys (who he greatly admires as a writer but is also “sodden, violent, mindless”), Alice Munro, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth and Joseph Heller. In a 1980 essay about Seamus Heaney Alvarez manages to be both generously complimentary and extremely cutting. While Heaney is described as having a “rich and sonorous rhetoric” and “a fine way with languageâ€?, Alvarez says “there are times when the urge to make a nice noise gets the better of him” and that he is “an ornamentalist, a word collector, a connoisseur of fine language for its own sakeâ€?. He tempers that again by saying his “originality lies in his aroused, free-floating sensualityâ€? only to conclude with this damning remark:

“In the circumstances, his current reputation amounts, I think, to a double betrayal: it lumbers him with expectation which he may not fulfill and which might even sink he were less resilient… If Heaney really is the best we can do, then the whole troubled, exploratory thrust of modern poetry has been a diversion from the right true way.â€?

I wonder if, 27 years later, he still feels that way.

Alvarez is also a man of passionate hobbies, which he has written about substantially, from his essays on flying (’Saint-Exupery’ and ‘High Flier’), exploration (’The Ulysses Factor’ and ‘The Worst Journey in the World’), books on mountaineering (Feeding the Rat) and poker (The Biggest Game In Town). This collection contains several essays on poker and gambling and in one, an interview with Poker king Eric Drache, the champion player explains how he reduces everything in the game to the laws of probability:

“If a girl’s got Aids, you’ve got to go to bed with her 700 times to have a 50-50 chance of catching it. Well, there’s no one in the whole wide world that a poker player is going to sleep with 700 times!”

If you’re fed up with novels and would like to read some quality, critical writing, Al Alvarez is highly recommended. He has a wonderful observational tic and a gift for writing impartially, even about people he knows. He’ll be talking about Risky Business: People, Pastimes, Poker and Books on The Eleventh Hour tonight on RTE Radio 1 at 11pm. If you miss it, thanks to the unfriendly scheduling of arts shows, there’ll be a handy podcast available from tomorrow.

Incidentally, last week the show also talked to Luke Clancy (of excellent theatre review blog The Loy) about blogging and the Blog Awards.

Presenter Páraic Breathnach described the word ‘blog’ as sounding like “throwing wet mud at a wall”, which I rather liked…

Update: Don’t know what I was thinking with my dates here - this will actually be broadcast on Monday, March 5th for anyone who’d still like to hear it. Last night, instead, there was a good interview with Hermione Lee about her new biography of Edith Wharton. Have a listen.

Links:
The Eleventh Hour
Al Alvarez Bloomsbury author page