Al Alvarez

Al Alvarez says God is the real risky business

Whether it’s poker playing or rock climbing, adrenaline has provided writer Al Alvarez with fantastic insights, writes Gerald Isaaman

Risky Business by Al Alvarez, Bloomsbury, £12.99. order this book

AL Alvarez is adamant – and throws in an expletive or two to ensure you appreciate his seriousness. “This comes from the heart,” he insists, as he ponders the Hampstead skyline through the window of his top-floor eyrie in Flask Walk, Hampstead.
“When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, I thought thank God I’ve lived to see the end of the last religion, because communism is just another bloody religion. Now what really depresses me is that, 10 years later, God is back.
“It’s not just Tony Blair and David Cameron, but all these madmen and Islamists. The fundamentalists are all over the Middle East and the East, you’ve got fundamentalists running the United States, you’ve got them in Israel with all these crazies. It’s the old world order while I really, truly believe in the Enlightenment.
“I really, really, truly do not believe in God. There ain’t no (expletive) saviour. The return of God is the least pleasant thing about getting old. And it will probably get worse.”
Life, he admits, is a risky business, the title in fact of his latest collection of almost 50 elegant essays he has written during a wonderful wayward career, forever testing himself, a wise and stimulating cocktail of delights to be drunk in small and large gasps, whenever you feel like imbibing in life.
He is a warm-hearted man full of chutzpah who was born with a dodgy left ankle, a true Achilles heel, and would have been what they used to call a cripple but for surgery. And that handicap became his challenge to overcome, the exultant adrenaline rush providing the drug that ensured an early career as a wild man.
Learning to dive as a lad off the top board at Finchley Road baths is one example, dangling thousands of feet up on a climbing rope when one sloppy move could spell his end is another. Then there were fast cars – and fast women – flying in ancient airplanes, playing poker with the big boys and his daring love of poetry, as an author and devastating critic, and enjoying the company of painters.
His sheer physical strength made him unafraid to tackle anything, amateur or professional, intellectual or emotional, including a failed first marriage and an attempt at suicide which, triumphantly, sparked his first significant book, a study of suicide called The Savage God, a cult tome which, along with his poker bible, The Biggest Game in Town, and Feeding the Rat, a profile of a rock climber, have become classics in their own distinctive class.
Would he, now 77 and had his time again, play for bigger stakes? “Not at all,” he says. “I’ve had a terrific life. If I dropped dead this minute, I would have had a very good life. Up to 30 it was kind of difficult, but I suppose life does begin at 40 when you’ve got the confidence from what has gone before.”
Kudos wins hands down, and you can feel that reading his impeccable prose – “What I love is the idea of making something perfect, I’ve written stuff I’m glad I’ve written,” he reveals – the epitome perhaps being his compelling essay on his celebrated neighbour, the pianist Alfred Brendel, written, like so much of his work, for the New Yorker.
He lost out when it came to big money, a mere £15,000 being his biggest hit at poker, whereas as the World Series poker champion walked off with $12 million last year. “Being a freelance is a risky business,” he explains with a grin.
He puts this down to the fact that he came from a well-heeled Jewish family and so had the educational opportunities denied others. Now he believes he fulfilled the ambitions of his businessman father, a romantic who loved music and would have enjoyed knocking around the world as a writer.
And that his own three children have emulated some of his passions, one son, Adam, being a successful painter now living in Italy and the other, Luke, immensely rich from the gaming business, and his daughter, Kate, a computer wizard. “They’re all very nice people,” he says proudly like a traditional Jewish father.
He regards himself as being skint. “One of the reasons I’ve called this book Risky Business is because for most of my life I felt I was like a tightrope walker, balancing over some abyss,” he declares. “Nowadays I feel that you’ve got to care about money if you want to make it.”
So, as luck – and the property boom – would have it, he paid £2,000 for his first pad in Belsize Park, sold it for £9,000 and, in 1957, paid £8,000 for Flask Walk, which is now in the £1 million-plus bracket.
That’s a price he would feel worth paying since it is 400 yards from his beloved Hampstead Heath, where he swims regularly, hobbling along the footpath with a stick because his Achilles heel has finally almost floored him doing anything more energetic outside a splash in Heath’s murky ponds.
Now he sees the world as a “weirdly dangerous place, a truly risky business” but recalls: “We were both brought up in the 1960s when everybody thought we’re going to be blown apart by Dr Strangelove.That was one of the things the 20th century brought us – a sense of ‘Drink up, Your time is up’.”
That proved untrue. He refuses, almost religiously, to accept that we are all doomed in a world filled with malevolent death and decadence. So he is working on a new book, prophetically about living to an old age.