Where Did it All Go Right? Book

Poker player, novelist, critic, rock-climber, failed suicide--Al Alvarez is a man of many parts and they are all presented here with endearing candour. He records that "my first 30 years were purgatory"--but that in retrospect, the next 40 were so blissfully happy as to seem almost uneventful in comparison. So the greater part of this autobiography is occupied with those first 30, storm-tossed years. He was born in the1930s, into a family of wealthy Hampstead Jews who, though educated, were strangely ignorant of events in Germany. They had a nanny, a cook, two parlour-maids in mop caps, a chauffeur and an under-nurse--and they were always complaining that they didn't have enough money. They were assimilated Jews who ate bacon but Alvarez is very acute on the degree to which this assimilation really went. He states that he is a Londoner but not an Englishman. His early adult life is vividly chronicled as a struggling writer, unhappily married, stuck doing wretched theatre reviews of plays called things like The Amorous Prawn and teetering on the brink of self-destruction. Against this grim picture there are some delightful pen portraits of the famous people he has known: Iris Murdoch at Oxford, "with a bell of blonde hair, a broad face and a gruff, forthright manner, like one of Eisenstein's peasants"; Kingsley Amis, with "lips curling, eyes popping and rolling" at the very mention of the word "Modernism" and Alvarez's own tutor at Oxford, who habitually introduced himself to complete strangers at parties with the immortal words, "My name's Robson. I'm impotent." There is also a lengthy passage focusing on Alvarez's friendship with Sylvia Plath just before her suicide in 1963, which he originally wrote about in The Savage God. An acute, candid and often very funny self- portrait from a tough cookie of a writer. -- Christopher HartRead More