PARTISAN REVIEW
151
till it hurt" and Camus, living his life backwards, "consenting to his
death in order to properly, knowingly, live now"; and centrally on Syl–
via Plath, about whose death and last poems he writes brilliantly and
with deep personal feeling.
Alvarez is in the best tradition of intellectual British journalism,
and it is a mark of his quality that he is profoundly restive in it. No
one is more aware than he of the danger of "relentless brightness" (for
which he sympathizes with Tynan) , or of "snobbishness," by which he
means snuggling in with "successful young executives who still guiltily
remember their university training." But he exploits the advantages of
the brief, adventurous critical foray: The posture of a knowledgeable
amateur contemptuous of specialized nitpicking, accepting the
charge
to
connect literature with all other aspects of culture, and maintaining
an aggressively personal voice that is, as it should be, a little outrageous
or even sometimes wrong - but never sounding like
The New York
Times.
The title of one of Alvarez's earlier books,
Under Pressure: the
Writer in Society
(a collection of interviews on BBC), indicates
his
values. He looks in literature as in life for a fundamental engagement
with reality - chiefly, in the absence of believable historical events,
death. What disgusts
him
is a talented writer like Ronald Firbank
"'d".,,,·
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