[lit-ideas] Where Did It All Go Right?
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2004 11:34:45 EDT
I was reading A(l) Alvarez's memoir, "Where did it all go right?". The title
is an adaptation of the "The Producers" line: "Where did it all right?"
(having the right cast, the right score, the right book, etc.).
Alvarez recalls with candour his Oxford days -- at Corpus, where he earned
his B. A. --:
"Freddie [his tutor] must have had a high threshold of patience for
opinionanted undergraduate bullshit because he paid you the compliment of
arguing
with your seriously." (p. 113).
Without the 'bullshit' bit, it reminded me of H. P. Grice's memoir ("The
life and times of Paul Grice", in PGRICE, ed. R. Grandy, Clarendon), where he
recalls his tutorials with his tutor Hardie -- with whom Grice learn to
'argue'.
Alvarez expands a lot on the personality of his father, Bertie Alvarez:
"He loved travel books, daydreamed constantly about chucking everything and
getting out, Gaughin-style, and yet he never left home. His passport, which I
still have, is as unmarked as it was the day it dropped through the letter
box." (p. 14).
Alvarez would go on to write lots (loads?) of books, yet as he ironically
notes: "It is one of the ironies of my life that although I helped change the
way poetry was read in Britain during the fifities and sixties by speaking up
for American poets like Lowell, Berryman, and Plath, and introducing the poets
of Eastern Europe to British readers, the only place where I am truly famous
is Las Vegas, Nevada." (p. 274).
This has to do with his book on poker.
The role of Al Alvarez is played in the recent film on the life of Sylvia
Plath (with Gwynneth Paltrow, _Sylvia_) by A. Molina. Great performance, too.
Cheers,
JL
ps. D. Ritchie may be interested to know that Alvarez spoke highly of
the maternal side of his family: "The Levys were not strong on the life of the
mind, but they were lavish and generous and slightly disreputable, and their
cheerful, noisy pubs plugged me into the energy of cockney London." (p. 27).
"For a time, Levy & Franks were up there with Henry Irving and Sainsbury's.
Advertisements for their pubs were carried on the of London buses ... [and]
the name was co-opted in the vernacular. Partridge's _Dictionary of Slang and
Unconventional English_ has 'a Levy and Frank' -- 'a levy for short' --
rhyming slang for 'male masturbation' (p. 27). (I wonder what the Cockney
rhyming
slang for the _female_ equivalent was?)
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