But if graft is one part of genius, inky despair may easily be another. Alvarez admires graft, but he has come to wonder, in spite of his deep attraction to it, whether the other stuff, "in which artists deliberately push their perceptions to the very edge of tolerable," is ever worth the cost. So while he somewhat grudgingly acknowledges Lowry's "infinite tolerance for the boredom of hard work," he does not see why boozing should also be part of the deal; and while he thinks Jean Rhys has no peer as a novelist ("such emotional penetration and formal artistry"), she is otherwise a wasteful monster: "sodden, violent, mindless."
Throughout all of these profiles, the same question occurs, over and over: why would anyone want to be a writer? It is a question that Alvarez never quite manages to answer. Vocation, it seems to him, is so often "intolerable," an "unnatural strain." No wonder people need to escape from it now and again. As for literary life, that stinks, too. In a great essay on John Berryman, he writes, lip elegantly curled, that the poet was "jagged, ambitious, as touchy about other men's success as his own, and passionately absorbed in all that shabby gang warfare that makes the literary life peculiarly unspeakable." Hardly surprising that, for himself, Alvarez preferred Kinder Scout to warm wine and small talk.
Alvarez's conflicted feelings about his own status in the literary world — at once both insider and outsider — mean that he has always been generous to other writers (and never more so than when he was the poetry editor of the Observer newspaper in London in the 1950s); his criticism is equally kind. Reviewing Anne Sexton's biography of Sylvia Plath, famously, a kind of horrible co-production with Olwyn Hughes, sister of Ted, he lets quotation do his work for him, only rarely interjecting to point out the savage unfairness of this take on a woman whom he knew and liked. His mildness and his refusal to take sides do him great credit.
Bloomsbury, the publisher of Risky Business, has been buying up authors like there's no tomorrow; drunk on Harry Potter profits, until recently it seemed to worry less than some about sales. I'm glad if Alvarez has been one beneficiary of this. Literary criticism is not exactly where it's at in 21st-century publishing; no one cares for expertise or close reading. But these essays, so quietly revealing, deserve to lie between soft covers. And if lots of copies also happen to get shifted, so much the better. It would be nice to prove to their author that someone, somewhere, does notice the trouble he takes.
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