Al Alvarez

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 10:08

The programme was originally broadcast in the year two thousand, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:30

My Castaway this week is a poet and critic. His most successful book, The Savage God, was a study of suicide, and included a description of his own failed attempt. At first it seems a surprising subject for a man who, with his taste for rock climbing and poker, has otherwise displayed an energetic appetite for living.

Presenter0:48

His first love, though, is literature. A brilliant student, a successful academic, and a highly influential poetry editor of The Observer, in the fifties and sixties he helped to success some of the best known writers of the post war era, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Robert Lowell among them. Reflecting on all this, he says My first thirty years, when almost nothing went right, were purgatory. The last forty have passed in no time at all. Here's Al Alvarez. Does the um the suicide attempt then, Al, which seems to have been the watershed, if you like, between these two sections of your life, does it now seem like a ghastly aberration, or can you still touch into the desperation?

Al Alvarez1:25

No, I find it very difficult to get to that. I I don't think the depression went away. I think I was probably depressed for a long time, um, before and after. But it does seem as though it was done by somebody else. I s I think I said in the Savage God that um

Speaker 11:39

Etc.

Al Alvarez1:42

You know, it was as though uh you know some I I had died, for all I knew I had died, and this was someone completely different.

Presenter1:49

And I think you also say that it's as if the boy owl swallowed the pills. It was the the man owl who survived.

Al Alvarez1:56

That's right. Yeah. I do think that happened to some extent.

Presenter1:57

So it it was

Presenter1:59

So I mean, perhaps do you think looking death in the face made you grow up? Is that the implication of all of that?

Al Alvarez2:06

Yeah, I think so was something had to make me grow up. It was it was taking an awful long time. I was I was thirty, I had a child, I had a d I was already s most of the way to a divorce. You'd think at that point you'd start growing up, not me. No, it took a much, much, much longer.

Presenter2:21

You were also at that time uh and many would say have gone on being a a brilliant critic. Um

Presenter2:27

Tell me something. You've written that when you first began to be a critic, you know, you you went to it because it was a kind of vocation. It sounds like a kind of missionary zeal that you had about it.

Al Alvarez2:37

Well you've got to remember th I'm an old man, I'm seventy years old, and I'm talking about late forties and so on when literary criticism was thought to be a kind of decent profession. It was something, you know, my son the literary critic was not quite as good as my son the doctor, but maybe on a par with my son the dentist, you know. It was not an altogether disreputable way of earning a living. Now of course it's a nightmare. There are hacks who just write whatever comes into their heads and are paid very little for it. And they are the standard reviewers, with one or two notable exceptions. And then there are the university people who are only interested in their own activity. They're not interested in the works of art. They're interested in the process of criticism, which is a specialized thing.

Presenter3:28

But that's the salt mine of intellectualism, according to you.

Al Alvarez3:30

I I think that is yeah.

Presenter3:32

Out of touch with reality.

Al Alvarez3:33

Yeah, there is a great quote in Joyce Carey's

Al Alvarez3:37

uh Gully Jimson's Horse's Mouth, where he's he he is talking about a piece of abstract uh art. Um and he says it's all very clever, he said, but it's it's like farting Anning Laurie through a keyhole. It's very clever, but is it worth the effort?

Presenter3:54

Tell me about your first record.

Al Alvarez3:56

My first record is the slow movement from Beethoven's Opus 132 quartet, which for me is the most beautiful piece of music that's ever been written. And Beethoven calls it a holy thanksgiving for recovery from a long illness. And it is about kind of rediscovering the world, I think. It has this extraordinary combination of

Al Alvarez4:25

Earthiness and unearthliness um it seems to me the the basis of all great art.

Presenter5:31

The Hungarian quartet playing part of the slow movement of Beethoven's Quartet Opus one three two. So you've never been an establishment man, it has to be said, Al Alvares. Um didn't you begin your Oxford career by handing out broadsheets telling them how deplorable the lit crit there was?

Al Alvarez5:48

Yeah, that was when I was an undergraduate. I I was obviously a stroppy little swine. Um, not a nice young man, I'm sure.

Presenter5:56

What were you kicking against?

Al Alvarez5:58

Well, English you you've got to remember that this we're talking now about at the end of the forties and English was not a subject that you know you did if you were smart. That i i English was a subject you read if you couldn't read classics or m maths or the sciences. It was the humanities version of doing geography.

Al Alvarez6:20

There w no one was willing to talk.

Al Alvarez6:23

kind of at all intelligently about about literature. It was you you responded to the magic of the thing and if you didn't you know, it was and the word magic was a kind of favoured term at Oxford. They were slightly tougher minded at Cambridge, but they Cambridge had other things going against it.

Presenter6:41

Well Cambridge had F R Levis, of course.

Al Alvarez6:43

And F. R. Levis and they'd had I. A. Richards, who w who was the guy who'd started off the idea, you've actually got to look at poetry, you can and if you look at it, you could actually discuss what's happening.

Presenter6:54

But they might have objected to being called the geography of the humanities. But nevertheless. You went to Cambridge at one point, didn't you, to to to talk about Hardy, about Jude the Obscure.

Al Alvarez7:03

That's right.

Presenter7:04

Not a good reception.

Al Alvarez7:05

Not a good reception. I was invited by something called the Doughty Society, which was the literary society of Downing College. And um

Al Alvarez7:16

I knew and the Levis had a code or had a

Al Alvarez7:20

Canon and part of and Thomas Hardy wasn't part of the canon, I and you weren't supposed to read Thomas Hardy.

Presenter7:28

So he didn't come to your lecture?

Al Alvarez7:29

He didn't come to my lecture, no. Um he gave me dinner.

Al Alvarez7:34

And then told me.

Al Alvarez7:36

That he was terribly sorry, he was busy.

Al Alvarez7:39

And I thought, well, at least one or two of them in the audience will have read the the book, although it's on the on Nevis's index as a banned book, nevertheless you'd think that one or two of them might just have glanced at it wrong, no, no, no, no. And it turned into kind of total farce. I mean, you know, that you you realize there was that moment when I was sitting there and I realized

Speaker 47:53

Wrong, na-da.

Al Alvarez8:04

You know, what am I doing here? The lunatics really have taken over the asylum.

Presenter8:09

Tell me about your second record.

Al Alvarez8:10

Well my second record is is very different. My the my second record is Alfred Brendel playing the Schubert um B flat sonata, the one of the la one of the one of his two last piano sonatas. Um

Al Alvarez8:27

Brend Law is a neighbour of mine and a very great personal and a great personal friend.

Al Alvarez8:33

When he plays, you don't feel he he's just a guy showing h how well he can get through the notes. You feel that he's actually gone into the head of the

Al Alvarez8:44

composer and is thinking the piece out as though almost as though he were the composer, as though while he's playing. So there's a kind of wonderful intellectual tension as one as well as a great emotional tension running through each recording.

Presenter9:58

Alfred Brendel playing the opening of Schubert's piano sonata in B flat, D nine six O

Presenter10:03

You talk about uh Brendel getting inside the head of the composer. Is there something of that is that that akin then to poetry criticism? Is that what you're saying, that you have to get inside the composer?

Al Alvarez10:12

I think so. It's um you've got to be both kind of

Al Alvarez10:17

Inside and outside. You have to.

Al Alvarez10:20

Try to be where to see where he's going, which you do a lot of the time just by listening. You know, the somebody I think was Harry Richards once said that the rhythm is the one thing that you can't fake, and when the poet is really upset, you can hear it. And by rhythm, he didn't mean and the Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, and his cohorts are gleaming and so forth. He didn't mean that. He meant that kind of subtle movement, you know. There's a great line in Merchant of Venice.

Al Alvarez10:53

Somebody says, Peace ho, the moon sleeps with Endymion and will not be awaked. All he really means is, oh look, they're necking. You know, but it's going it moves like water. Something really is happening. Something has to be happening inside the poet to get that rhythm. And you've got to be able to listen to that.

Speaker 111:00

Or not

Presenter11:11

And you've got to be

Presenter11:12

And when you write it yourself, which you have done.

Al Alvarez11:14

But you have

Presenter11:16

Do you know when that happens? I mean, is there a complete right as well?

Al Alvarez11:20

Yeah, the I I think it's like one of those huge bank vaults, you know, where they they have one of these very elaborate locks with 185 tumblers in it, you know. And until every tumbler is clicked into place, the door won't open, yeah? And I think that's exactly what happens with a poem. Until every word is right in place, the poem isn't finished, and you know it.

Presenter11:44

Hmm.

Al Alvarez11:45

If you've got any kind of ear and any kind of critical intelligence, you know it's not right.

Presenter11:49

Next record. Tell me about that one.

Al Alvarez11:52

Uh the next record is I I I went to a um rather hearty

Al Alvarez11:58

Public school called Andel, where you had to be kind of good at games in order to survive, you know, and and therefore in order to survive I became good at games. But we the one cultural thing it had in those days was it had a very good music tradition and they used to do Handel and Bach's B minor Mats and so on, with the whole school c coming in. I think Handel is a great, great, great composer, you know, much better than even now he is reckoned to be. But what is extraordinary about this

Al Alvarez12:34

is that he wr he when when he wrote it, he was eighty odd and blind. And speaking of someone who's seventy odd and not blind, this gives me hope that I may not yet be finished.

Speaker 412:50

Dum dum dum dum dum dum dum

Speaker 413:11

Better refer to

Speaker 413:20

The golden legged tongue And the drop and every time

Speaker 413:35

Dancing in the trigger tree on the railway.

Presenter13:45

Michael Ginn singing All Let the Merry Bells from Handel's La Legro il Pensoroso ed il moderato with the English Baroque soloists conducted by John Elliott Gardner.

Presenter13:55

You were born, um, Alvarez, with with a kind of growth on your leg, which I think was another reason that you became kind of fearless Al at school, wasn't it? Somehow you had to take all the risks to prove you were

Al Alvarez14:06

I got a feeling that, yeah, I guess it's called compensation, isn't it? The other it's the word you were so politely avoiding.

Presenter14:06

I got a feeling

Al Alvarez14:14

Yeah, probably. I think one of the reasons I came out fighting.

Al Alvarez14:19

Was that I had this great nanny. You've got to understand that I was six months old, and it was a kind of major, major, major operation.

Al Alvarez14:29

And

Al Alvarez14:30

So it's six months old, it's nineteen thirty, yeah? This is like

Al Alvarez14:35

Twenty-five years before John Bowlby did all that research on on the effect of having caregivers, as they're called, with children i wi in hospital, how they how they you know, it helps them recover and so on and so forth. But for some reason or other, my nanny came with me into hospital, was there for weeks.

Speaker 114:47

Yeah.

Presenter14:47

Yeah.

Presenter14:53

But there's a a thread here too, I think, it seems to me. This what goes on to become a kind of recklessness at school and being a bit subversive at school, having a go, taking on the establishment. You can see, if you like, the kind of literary rebel in the making. In the end, by the time you get to Oxford, you're not frightened to take them on, because this is what you've grown up doing.

Al Alvarez15:13

What?

Presenter15:15

Yeah.

Al Alvarez15:15

Well, I ca yeah, I yeah, I think that is true. I be you know, and I don't think it was just being uh a sort of spoiled child, which I di I d wasn't necessarily. That I kind of

Al Alvarez15:29

Always been probably quite wrongly sure of my own convictions.

Al Alvarez15:35

you know, I I think that could just

Al Alvarez15:38

be another way of saying pig-headed or prejudice or

Al Alvarez15:43

blinkered or whatever. But I've c I think one of the things I like are people who know what they know. Who know what they think. Know what they think. Know what they know. Somehow or other. I know this is is this is no good or I I really know this is good.

Presenter15:51

who know what they think.

Presenter15:59

Hmm.

Al Alvarez16:00

Um

Presenter16:01

And being prepared to say you know something's good when everybody else is saying it's no good.

Al Alvarez16:05

Yeah, well I can say this certainly happened, for instance, with Sylvia Pless's late poetry.

Presenter16:11

Tell me about your next record before we talk more.

Al Alvarez16:14

Yeah, well, um a great deal of my life for from the age of twenty to the age of sixty three was spent in the climbing world, climbing rocks. And it was extremely anarchic. I mean a lot of black humor and

Al Alvarez16:31

One of the guys whom I climb with a lot, um, guy called Mo Antoine, who was a seriously funny, um, disruptive element in everybody's life. He introduced me to

Al Alvarez16:45

Doctor Hook and his Medicine Map.

Speaker 416:48

The blow that'll get you when you get your picture on the cover of the Rollin Stone Wanna see our pictures on the cover Wanna buy five copies for our mother Wanna see my smiling face on the cover of the rolling stone

Speaker 417:09

Hey, I know how rock and roll

Presenter17:15

Doctor Fook and the Medicine Show singing cover of The Rolling Stone and you say as a result they did get their picture on it.

Al Alvarez17:20

Yeah, they actually did get their picture on the cover of the radio stage. What I love about that sort of thing is the business of taking the Mickey out of themselves. And that was what the climbing world was good about. You couldn't get away

Presenter17:27

Yeah.

Al Alvarez17:32

with pretension. Unlike the literary world.

Presenter17:35

Another part of your recklessness as well as this, the climbing though uh and the buzz is is poker playing, has been poker playing or still is a bit, but I mean we oh, I see.

Al Alvarez17:45

Yeah.

Presenter17:48

But we were talking at one point big time, gambling, hum?

Al Alvarez17:51

No, no. First of all, I don't gamble. I mean, see, I really I have

Presenter17:56

Before you won an E-type Jaguar one.

Al Alvarez17:57

I was playing cards. I never gam I never bet on anything I can't shuffle.

Presenter17:57

That

Presenter18:02

I see.

Al Alvarez18:03

Yeah.

Presenter18:03

It's it's skill that wins this money.

Al Alvarez18:06

Yeah. You know, that y you know, the cards go round, obviously, and so sometimes they go for you and sometimes they go against, but the the you know, the art is to lose as little when they're going as you can when they're going against and win as much as you can when they're going for you.

Presenter18:20

Tell me about being um poetry editor of The Observer, which you were from the mid fifties to mid sixties moving from ridiculous to sublime. In the main, it was the modern that you championed, as I said at the beginning, the the what have been called the doomed confessional voices of Plath and Lowell and so on. What was so revolutionary about their work then? What was different? Why did the establishment have so much trouble letting it in?

Al Alvarez18:47

Well, i this was a period when the so-called movement was the the style. Poems written in very plonking i most mostly written in plonking iambic pentameters, rhymed and poems eff effectively like

Al Alvarez19:08

kind of good literary essays. You know, they had a beginning, a middle and an end and they drew a moral and so on and so forth. And it was all very nice, but it didn't seem to me what

Al Alvarez19:20

was relevant. Um I mean say I was myself very unhappy. I was in a I was I was going through a very bad period of my life, which culminated, as you said at the beginning, in a suicide attempt. Um it didn't seem to me that this was what

Presenter19:37

It was all too genteel.

Al Alvarez19:38

It was much too genteel. You know, we've just had.

Al Alvarez19:43

two world wars, with millions dead, a holocaust. You know, we got the got the the bomb, everyone this was in the you know, around nineteen sixty. You've got to remember that nineteen sixty, height of the Cold War, everybody thought we were going to be blown up.

Al Alvarez20:00

And I felt that these people, Lowell and then Sylvia, were were very much

Al Alvarez20:05

writing about that strain.

Presenter20:08

I want to talk to you some more about Sylvia Plath, but let's pause for some music. What's it to be?

Al Alvarez20:12

Yeah, i well this

Al Alvarez20:15

is to be music, I suppose, which is quite the reverse of all that strain. It's one of the great beautiful pieces of music. It's m it's the letter duet for Mozart's Marriage of Figaro.

Speaker 420:32

Somebody gave their swords.

Speaker 420:42

Somewhere.

Speaker 420:50

Peter is the love of Check the Clara.

Speaker 421:20

Is what he was here.

Speaker 421:25

But they must be

Presenter21:30

Elizabeth Schwarzkopf and Iamgard Seyfried singing part of the letter duet from Mozart's Marriage of Figaro with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Herbert von Karian.

Al Alvarez21:39

What I love about that and

Al Alvarez21:42

Which is one of the reasons also where I

Al Alvarez21:45

Always prefer chamber music to orchestral music is I love that feeling of

Al Alvarez21:52

conversation. Um, because it it it th it seems to me that's what all art is about, you know, a a you look at a painting on the wall and you suddenly are in y you're having a kind of

Speaker 421:53

Hmm.

Speaker 121:56

Bip.

Speaker 421:56

B

Al Alvarez22:07

Exchange with it, and it's very, very much.

Presenter22:08

And it's fine.

Al Alvarez22:10

what the business of writing is. You are always

Al Alvarez22:14

Assuming there is some kind of ideal listener.

Presenter22:17

It's very much, of course, what I think you felt for Sylvia Plath and her work, wasn't it? Because she used to come to you and read it to you, her new stuff.

Al Alvarez22:25

Yeah, well

Al Alvarez22:26

She came to me originally with her new stuff for.

Al Alvarez22:31

Two reasons. I think and I don't think this is some piece of megalomania on my part. I think it seemed to her that I could hear.

Al Alvarez22:40

In that conversational way that we're talking about, that she could hear.

Al Alvarez22:46

what I could hear what sh she she was about, what she was trying to do. I was on the s same wavelength. Um the other reason she came to me was that um I wo I was a friend of Ted's and he'd come and stayed with me

Al Alvarez23:02

When he left the house, when he left her in the Devon house. And I think she kind of wanted to sniff around and see where he'd been, see if I knew.

Presenter23:09

In the CFI

Al Alvarez23:11

where he was, which I didn't.

Presenter23:12

But she perhaps also wanted you to hear what she was really saying, which was the personal message, which was that she was, you know, in desolation.

Al Alvarez23:21

Yeah, well, I failed her on that on that level, certainly. Um

Presenter23:25

Yeah.

Al Alvarez23:26

It was very difficult to do it. I mean, see, I tell you, it was difficult for two reasons.

Al Alvarez23:35

One, I was thirty years old and stupid. You know, what did I know about um you know, chronic y clinical depression, you know. Uh th that's that's the I'd been there, you know, I'd been clinically depressed, but I didn't know what it was when I was in it, as it were. Um and

Al Alvarez23:53

And the the the more subtle reason is that the poems were so good and they were so full of life. I mean there's more liveliness and energy and appetite in Sylvia Plath writing about death than there is in the collected works of Philip Larkin writing about what a bitch it is to be alive.

Presenter24:13

But when you went to see her, and it was the last time, as it turned out, that you saw her on Christmas Eve, nineteen sixty two, she read you Death and Co, the dead bell, the dead bell, somebody's done for.

Al Alvarez24:25

Well, at that point I realized I'd I I knew where she was, yeah, that and

Al Alvarez24:31

And she begged you to stay. She wanted me to stay. I think, you know, she wanted help.

Al Alvarez24:37

I

Al Alvarez24:39

I ducked out, uh, you know, that um it was

Al Alvarez24:44

You know, not a passage I'm particularly proud of, but my life was complicated. I had.

Al Alvarez24:51

Literally.

Al Alvarez24:53

just sort of started getting involved with

Al Alvarez24:58

Anne, who who became my second wife. Um and I could see that the you know, that if that the kind of

Al Alvarez25:08

The help S Sylvia needed was not just someone to listen to her poems, although that was important, but she kind of needed someone to

Al Alvarez25:16

Take her.

Al Alvarez25:18

take care of her. Yeah. And that wasn't not something I could do. She was anyway sti I still at that point married to a friend of mine that, um

Speaker 125:19

And that wasn't.

Al Alvarez25:28

I also I don't think it would have made a blind bit of difference.

Al Alvarez25:34

Um, you know, if she and I had got together, because um I think she and Ted were.

Al Alvarez25:42

absolutely eternally linked.

Presenter25:44

Two.

Al Alvarez25:44

Yoked together, yeah.

Presenter25:47

Record number six.

Al Alvarez25:49

Ah, well record number six is um

Al Alvarez25:55

It's it's it's a little bit of past and present in that um when I first went to America in nineteen fifty three, I was at Princeton and one afternoon I happened to go past this auditorium and I heard this

Al Alvarez26:12

ethereal, incredible music coming out. Um and it was a group called ProMusica Antiquur conducted by a guy called Safford Cape, who were the only people who were really playing in those days. And it was School of Notre Dame and it was Leonine, so it was something about it was

Al Alvarez26:29

quite extraordinary and I kind of went in and stood at the back while they rehearsed and I got a terrific

Al Alvarez26:36

Taste for this kind of music. But it it was very difficult because there was no, it wasn't, no one was recording it. And now recently.

Al Alvarez26:45

It has been rediscovered. Many early, early music has been rediscovered.

Presenter27:49

The Hilliard Ensemble with Jan Gobarek performing Pace Mihi Domine from Cristobal de Morales Offitium.

Presenter27:58

Again, all of that, Al, a lifetime ago now, uh since since all of that happened you've written numerous novels, climbed numerous mountains, married happily, had three children, but now you're you're seventy. Your climbing days are over because your right angles packed up and um you don't gamble, I understand, quite as much as big as you do

Al Alvarez28:16

I've never gambled. I've never gamble. I only play cards.

Presenter28:20

But what do you do for kicks now?

Al Alvarez28:22

Well, I play a little I play a little poker every week.

Al Alvarez28:26

And I go swimming in the

Al Alvarez28:29

Very icy ponds on Hampstead Heath. Every morning? No, about four or five times a week. All year round. All year round. And this is a new thing. I discovered it last year in my 70th year because what had happened was I'd been swimming in one of the ponds called the Mix Pond ever since I was 11. But they only open it on the 1st of May and they close it in mid-September. And because my ankle collapsed because of a climbing accident, the other ankle, I mean, it's what the critic Northrop Fry would call a fearful symmetry. I came in limping on one ankle and I'm going out limping on the other one. But when they closed the Mix Pond in mid-September, I thought, well, I'm enjoying this. I better go on and do it. So I then went on through the year. And use the word enjoy.

Presenter29:21

Use the word enjoy. I mean, it's it sounds like sheer masochism.

Al Alvarez29:25

Oh no, it's you come out feeling absolutely wonderful.

Presenter29:30

Record number seven.

Al Alvarez29:31

Well record number seven is my dear friend Zero Marstel who was really one of the funniest men.

Al Alvarez29:39

ever. And he ha he was one of these guys with a kind of permanently opened hotline to his infancy not to his childhood, but to his infancy. And this huge figure could become a sort of baby instantly. I was once in a pub um with Zero and Joan Littlewood and

Al Alvarez30:06

Zero.

Al Alvarez30:07

Got bored.

Al Alvarez30:09

So he shoved his fist into Joan's face and he said, Come on, Joan, blow me up

Al Alvarez30:15

So she took hold of his thumb and blew, and Zero, who'd been sitting kind of collapsed and deflated, s sort of gradually swelled up until he was apparently totally round and then floated, detached from gravity, round the bar. And then as he floated past me a second time round, I went my I poked him with my cigarette and he went

Al Alvarez30:37

collapse. He was a kind of genius. He couldn't do anything. He could become a coffee percolator, become a balloon, become an aeroplane, you know, aeroplane lost in the fog. He was became wallpaper. He was a most extraordinary man.

Speaker 430:50

I knew the moment that I met her that it was forevermore Now I look back and see why my life used to be So empty for me before

Speaker 431:08

I was an ink I made a baby.

Speaker 431:12

And she was the girl next door

Presenter31:20

Zero Mostel and I Was an Incubator Baby from his album Songs My Mother Never Sang. So um Al Alvar is on a desert island. You've proved you're a survivor. You don't fall apart in a crisis. Well, not these days anyway. What will you do with yourself all day on this island?

Al Alvarez31:36

Well, it's a very interesting point. Probably.

Al Alvarez31:39

I don't know. I mean, see it's complicated. In the old days I would have done a

Al Alvarez31:45

uh you know, Robinson Crusoe and built myself a hut and done all that because I kind of like doing things. I

Al Alvarez31:51

I've always worked on the supposition that I'm only going to get one shot at this planet, so I want to s not merely see what's on offer, but I kinda want to see what I can do. And I like fixing things. A friend of mine once said, I can't think of anything more terrifying.

Al Alvarez32:08

Than the sight of Al with a screwdriver in his hand. But actually I'm quite good at stuff. I used to be able to fix cars and so on and so forth.

Presenter32:16

You might write a poem again.

Al Alvarez32:17

Ah, wouldn't that be nice? Wouldn't that be lovely?

Presenter32:20

Tell me about your last record.

Al Alvarez32:21

Well, I want Ella and Louie and I want They Can't Take That Away From Me because it was a song that my wife and I used to dance to in our youth a great deal. And since we kept on breaking up all the time, you know, before we actually had a lot of divorces before we finally got married, it saved having them after, you know. It's a kind of good solution. And it was a song that always seemed relevant. And also.

Speaker 132:47

Yeah, there's

Al Alvarez32:55

The thing about Ella and L Louis is that you can hear the buzz between them. You know, that that she's got this voice like sort of shot silk or velvet or something, and he's got this wonderful, mellow, subtle, witty sound.

Speaker 433:12

The way you wear your hat The way you sip your tea The memory of all that No, no, they can't take that away from me.

Speaker 433:33

Oh, they can't take that away from me No, they can't take that away from me Swing it, boys.

Presenter33:46

Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, and they can't take that away from me. If you could only take one of those with you, Al, which one would it be?

Al Alvarez33:55

That's an that's an unfair question. But I guess it would have to be the beta, the slow movement of focus one hundred thirty two.

Presenter34:03

And what about your book, as well as the Bible and Shakespeare?

Al Alvarez34:06

Yeah, well I originally thought, well, what I can't kind of live without is the b the the the poems of John Derne. But actually I've got one of those trick memories, and so I used to be able to read a poem two or three times and I know it by heart. So

Al Alvarez34:24

I tell you the book I want to take is Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. Now the thing about the Interpretation of Dreams is it's full of these kind of case histories which are like little Russian novels in themselves, aren't they? But what is also wonderful is it's full of thinking. This is a guy who thinks about every bit of information that comes to him. It would be good to have

Al Alvarez34:54

Such

Al Alvarez34:55

Sort of

Al Alvarez34:57

passionate and stringent intellectual companionship.

Presenter35:00

Then what about your luxury?

Al Alvarez35:02

Oh, my luxury. Well, it would be the reverse of that. I think that

Al Alvarez35:07

I could pass an awful lot of addicted, obsessed.

Al Alvarez35:11

Totally content hours with a um laptop computer with a bit of poker software on it.

Presenter35:19

But no gambling.

Al Alvarez35:21

No gambling building.

Presenter35:22

Al Alvarez, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you, sir.

Speaker 135:34

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts please visit bbc.co. uk slash radio four.