Literary Criticism In a recent interview Al Alvarez described himself, not without a rueful chuckle, as an old-style Modernist, and this little book is a ringing re-statement and defence of the Modernist aesthetic.
He reminds us, and probably by now we do need reminding, that before it was experimentation and the drive to follow Ezra Pound's directive to "make it new", Modernism represented a reaction against the exhausted Romanticism of fin de siècle art and a return to the classical virtues of restraint, detachment, concentration and simple hard work.
Alvarez is a veteran of what have come to be called the culture wars. He has no time for the contemporary pieties of the so-called literary world, and is a vigorous foe of the cant and hypocrisy which so often pass for informed opinion about writing and writers today. He is thoroughly sensible in his attitude to the business of the art of writing, this "laborious, unforgiving, sorry business" which, he suggests, is first of all "a craft, like a carpenter's or a stonemason's", and which elsewhere he describes as "a solitary pursuit, as monotonous as psychoanalysis, though more lonely because you don't even get to see patients". His book should be required reading for university students of English - and, indeed, their teachers - and for any neophyte about to take up a course in creative writing.
Alvarez does not mince his words in castigating the debased state of literature today, when even the word "literature" itself is likely to provoke an embarrassed titter. In a robust attack on the Beat poets he sets out the consequences of their "antics" with which, long after the Beats themselves have become "just another footnote in literary history", we are forced to live, one of which is poetry as feel-good entertainment and, above all, the belief that any old confession or self-revelation is intrinsically artistic because an artist is not someone who uses skill and insight to create a work of art with a life of its own; instead, he is a public personality, a performer whose primary work of art is himself and whose ambition is to make himself known.
Alvarez's credentials as a bare- knuckled literary Jeremiah are of the highest. He is not only a critic but a poet and novelist, and, not incidentally, a rock-climber and an ace poker player - like cards or mountaineering, writing is for him a matter of large stakes and high risk. Born in London in 1929 into an affluent Jewish family, he was educated at Oundle and Oxford. He has written books on John Donne and Samuel Beckett, and is one of the most perceptive and hard-headed commentators on the poetry of his friend Sylvia Plath, whom he wrote about with tender honesty in his study of suicide, The Savage God. He was poetry editor of the London Observer for 10 years from 1956, in the days when quality newspapers still took poetry seriously, and in 1962 edited the ground-breaking Penguin anthology The New Poetry, one of the aims of which, he says, was to attack "the British poets' nervous preference for gentility above all else".
He is an unashamedly old-fashioned critic, who served his apprenticeship in a time when criticism "had not yet become just another arcane academic discipline with a technical vocabulary and specialized interests of its own" and "before it was hijacked by extraliterary preoccupations such as theory, politics, gender, race, and, indeed, psychoanalysis", although he confesses to feeling sometimes about his trade as the poet Mayakovsky did about suicide - "I do not recommend it to others", the Russian said, just before blowing his brains out.
The Writer's Voice had its origins in three lectures Alvarez delivered a couple of years ago at that wonderfully enterprising institution, the New York Public Library, and incorporates material from a number of other sources, including an essay on 'Drugs and Inspiration' and an address delivered at the University of Michigan which was later published as Madness and Creativity in Literature and Culture. Alvarez has always been fascinated by, and suspicious of, those disjointures that occur along the way of literary creation when classically poised artists such as Coleridge and Sylvia Plath surrender to irrationality and states of Rimbaudian derangement in an effort to break through to new modes of feeling and expression. As a connoisseur of risk he recognises the sweetness of the adrenalin rush that a willed chaos of the emotions affords the artist, but he is in absolutely no doubt of the danger posed not only to the poetry but to the poet herself when she "allows in the darkness", as Beckett would say. Glancing at the self- destructive lives, and suicides, of John Berryman, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, he quotes Berryman, in a Paris Review interview, echoing Nietzsche by claiming that "The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he is in business". Alvarez writes:
This sounds like the old Romantic Agony buttressed by mid-20th-century theories: a theory of existentialist aesthetics and a simplified psychoanalytic theory of the therapeutic relationship of art to life. If you think about this kind of statement, then remember how Berryman died, how Sylvia Plath died, how Anne Sexton died - all of them passionately believing that this was how the game was played - you have to conclude that no poetry, however fine, is worth the cost.
This is refreshingly good sense, especially from a critic who prizes highly the best work of Berryman, Sexton and Plath. These were poets who had learned their trade, who had read, and studied, and pondered, and who came to the workbench with long years of apprenticeship behind them. All three of them, certainly Berryman and Plath, anyway, would have agreed, as Alvarez agrees, with T.S. Eliot's stricture that "Poetry is not the turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things".
So what happened, that such sophisticated artists should have come to a point where they "knowingly cooperated in their own destruction"? Alvarez blames the "intense, competitive involvement with the media and the idea of fame" into which so many poets fell in the 1960s. Robert Lowell, of course, was the daddy of them all, asking "why not say what happened?" and using his life and the lives of those around him - wives, children, lovers - as grist to the poetic mill. To be fêted, to be lionised, to be, above all, known, was suddenly seen as the fit end of artistic endeavour. Thus Allen Ginsberg, shuffling about the public stage with bells and beard and chanting in a cloud of pot smoke, became the very model of the modern poet. Alvarez is unforgiving: "Having created myths of themselves as a by-product of creating art, they finished by sacrificing themselves to those essentially trivial myths".
The Ginsberg version of poetry would have been no more than a harmless and colourful spectacle, like Morris dancing, had it not fed the twin delusion which the public cherishes deep in its heart, namely, that art is for everyone and, a far more pernicious notion, that everyone is an artist. One has only to read the latest Arts Council hand-out or listen to the New Age ramblings of this or that creative-writing guru to know that this is now the prevailing conviction. In truth, of course, the majority of people can manage very well without art, while a moment's reflection will show us the fact, which might seem sad but is not, that if everyone is an artist, then no one is.
The image of the artist as a special being, a combination of wise man, high priest and self-destructive holy fool, and of art as, in Alvarez's words, "compensation and self-therapy", is both popular and safe. It allows for the complacency of the ignorant which is so prevalent today, when panels on television and radio arts programmes can feel free to boast of their ignorance, as if being ill-informed about the art forms they are discussing were a mark of authenticity and a declaration of solidarity with "ordinary people".
While Alvarez disapproves of the excesses of the Romantics, he points out that at least they believed, with Matthew Arnold, "that culture has taken over from religion and politics in the battle against anarchy, that the qualities inherent in great literature - sweetness and light, Arnold called them - were in themselves a source of morality, independent of the practitioner, a good you served impartially, as you might dedicate your life to God". Such notions would be held laughable today, not only by an ill-informed public, but by the very guardians of what passes for culture. Alvarez is well aware of the totalitarian intentions of many of those who today present themselves as bien-pensant champions of culture: "Socialist realism and political correctness are united in their distrust of highbrow art . . . The Marxists called it 'bourgeois and decadent'; nowadays the dismissive epithet is 'elitist'."
In discussing the importance for the writer of discovering his own voice, Alvarez emphasises the equal importance of the reader's receptivity to that voice, which is "unlike any other voice you have ever heard" and "is speaking directly to you, communing with you in private, right in your ear, and in its own distinctive way". A large part of Alvarez's intent in The Writer's Voice is to remind us of the necessity for good readers. "Reading well," he writes, "means opening your ears to the presence behind the words and knowing which notes are true and which are false. It is as much an art as writing well and almost as hard to acquire."
What exactly Alvarez means by "voice" is not entirely clear. He tells of finding his own voice, in both poetry and prose, quite late - in fact, by the time he discovered how he wanted to sound in prose he had already published a couple of books of literary criticism - but seems undecided as to how a writer's voice differs from his style. At one point he says that true style "is what I mean by voice", but on the following page declares that "tyle, as I've said, is different from voice". His own predilection is for plain speakers, in poetry as well as prose. He loves the knotty muscularity of Yeats and the poetic precisions of Beckett - as well as, alas, his schoolboy obscenities; less comprehensible is his championing of the likes of Philip Roth, a writer whose voice can so often sound like that of an angry man shouting oaths at the restaurant table next to yours.
Perhaps the word "voice" itself, as Alvarez uses it, is a veiled metaphor for something that does not have a ready name, but which is affirmed everywhere in these pages, as in this passage that closes the first chapter, 'Finding a Voice':
I am talking about the craftsman's obsession with detail - obsession in its least pathological form - and in poetry, as in all the arts, that is where the fascination lies. Yeats called it "the fascination of what's difficult," and it has nothing much to do with the trinity of motives - "fame, riches and the love of beautiful women" - which Freud believed spurred artists on. The fascination, as Yeats described it, is simply with getting it right - where "it" is a work with a life of its own, wholly independent of the artist and indifferent to him.
John Banville's new novel, The Sea, will be published in June
The Writer's Voice By Al Alvarez Bloomsbury, 126pp. £12.99