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DANIEL F. HOWARD
addition feels isolated from the great events that have shaped his times:
he finds it hard to locate himself within events significant enough
to
justify the reaction he longs to give. Thus he talks eloquently about the
literature of the concentration camps, about the way those who
write
it and those who immerse themselves in it "stir mud from the bottom"
of their psyches, expose themselves to paranoia and suicide; yet beneath
his
talk is regret that his reaction is late and to the
literature
of the
camps rather than the experience in them. In the lives of writers he
admires he searches out crucial events that forge their distinction:
Robert Graves's horror at World War I, Robert Lowell's acceptance of
himself in a mental hospital, Sylvia Plath's confrontation with her
"violent unease." But there is no detectable equivalent of these moments
in Alvarez himself. Only the effort to seek them out is there; he himself
feels only possible, unrealized identifications. He regrets that for
him
World War II was not an event but a condition: "My own generation,
for instance - ten at the start of the war - grew up too late." Though
he mastered Oxford (like everything else) , and took a First, he never
felt part of its monkishness and genteel attitudinizing. Nor is he com–
fortable in what he calls the "bland Metropolitan knowingness" of
London and New York. A British poet, he hankers for the national
urgency available to Americans; but yet he chides Auden for copping
out, adopting America, and "channeling his deep neurotic disturbances
into light verse." He writes a brilliant essay on New York, perhaps
because it is a kind of metaphor for his excitement and unease at not
belonging. Certainly he has trouble in defining his Englishness - envy–
ing the (apparently easier) West-to-East translation of T. S. EHot and
Sylvia Plath, sympathizing with R. P. Blackmur, who he says went
to England at the end of
his
life only to be disappointed by the lack
of
"all those Jamesian subtleties the place no longer had."
The problem is that no nation, religion, or tradition can contain
the "reality" Alvarez seeks. What is impressive about
him
is precisely
the quest for something to be continually responsible to. He says of the
Beatles: "At the Royal Command Performance or the British Embassy
in Washington they still behave as though they might at any moment
be held answerable to one of those unimpressed toughies they were
brought up with in Liverpool." A beautiful insight into the Beatles -and
into Alvarez too, who wasn't brought up with Liverpool toughies but,
nevertheless, is determined to keep their faith.
Daniel F. Howard
