Alfred Alvarez, poetry critic and bestselling author, dead at 90
Alfred Alvarez, a critic and author who helped shape the modern poetry canon in his native England, has died at the age of 90.
Alvarez died Monday in London of pneumonia, according to his literary representatives, Aitken Alexander Associates.
Writing alternately as A. Alvarez or Al Alvarez, he had a long, productive and controversial career. He began as a highly influential critic, who as poetry editor of the Observer, was an early champion of Sylvia Plath, her then-husband Ted Hughes, John Berryman and others he believed would enliven contemporary poetry.
He would go on to write novels and poems and to complete non-fiction books about life "beyond the fiddle" of the book world, whether rock climbing (Feeding the Rat), swimming (Pondlife), the search for oil in the North Sea (Offshore) or poker (The Biggest Game In Town).
"People were continually asking me, in so many words, what a literary guy who knew about poetry was doing in joints like these," he wrote in the memoir Where Did It All Go Right? that was published in 1999.
"I went because I realized very early that I would only get one shot at the planet, so I might as well see for myself what was on offer."
His breakthrough work, published in 1971, was his most personal. The Savage God: A Study of Suicide traced the history of how society looked upon suicide — from the centuries of being treated as a religious taboo to glorification by the 19th-century Romantics to the randomness and plain despair of modern times.
The Savage God opened with one of the first extended accounts of the final months of Plath, who in 1963 was found dead at age 30 in her London kitchen after sealing the window and door, turning on the oven and sticking her head inside. Her death was ruled a suicide, although Alvarez would question whether Plath — who had two small children — had meant to kill herself.
In her lifetime, Plath was little known beyond fellow poets. But her fame rose through the 1960s thanks in part to the posthumous release of her Ariel poems, many written in after her marriage to Hughes collapsed in 1962.
In the book's most talked about section, Alvarez recalled Plath inviting him to her home on Christmas Eve 1962. She read to him poems from Ariel, notably Death & Co., that left him awed and startled by her stark references to death and inescapable sense of finality. Alvarez didn't know what to tell her and departed even as, he would write, she sobbed and begged him to stay.
"She must have felt I was stupid and insensitive. Which I was," he recalled. "I knew I had let her down in some final and unforgiveable way. And I knew she knew. I never again saw her alive."
Alvarez had wanted her to be known for her work, writing in The Savage God that "The pity is not that there is a myth of Sylvia Plath but that the myth is not simply that of an enormously gifted poet whose death came carelessly, by mistake, and too soon."
Alvarez's memories of Plath enraged Hughes, who accused his onetime friend of betraying their privacy that led to a years-long estrangement.
In the 2003 film Sylvia, which starred Gwyneth Paltrow as Plath and Daniel Craig as Hughes, Jared Harris played Alvarez.
At the time he knew Plath, Alvarez himself nearly ended his life. His first marriage, to Ursula Barr, was ending and he was haunted by childhood stories about his parents "half-heartedly" putting their heads inside gas ovens. He became so depressed that he swallowed 45 sleeping pills and fell into a coma. He awoke days later, and would look back on the experience as a death and a rebirth.
"I began gradually to stir into another style of life, less theoretical and less optimistic, less vulnerable. I was ready for an insentient middle age," he wrote in The Savage God.
Alvarez married Anne Adams in 1966 and with her had two children. He previously had a son with Barr.