Going under

As someone slightly older than Al Alvarez, and also a regular swimmer — although not in the ice-edged Hampstead Heath pools into which he dived for over 60 years — I was initially disappointed by this book. For the first half it repeats too often the pleasures of extremity-numbing, cold, outdoor swimming when one is old. Alvarez’s outer and inner selves, in the first five or six years of this ten-year journal, rejoice with the ecstasy of swimming almost daily in water preferably just a few degrees above freezing, feeling the zing when he climbs out pink as a lobster and banters with the lifeguards.

But then, slowly and horrifyingly, he charts the not-so-gradual collapse of his once super-fit body. ‘What began as a swimming diary is turning into a chronicle of ageing.’ Although he still swims, ‘it seems to take longer to get my body working, my balance isn’t quite right… it’s a steady reminder of the sorry state I’m in and when I stagger in public… I feel like a sad old fool.’

When I admitted to The Spectator’s literary editor that I had never read Alvarez, who has written at least 25 books, he remarked gently that Alvarez and I might have something in common. Actually, apart from encroaching old age, swimming, writing for the New York Review of Books, and wearing green corduroys, there’s not much we share. What a life! I listened to Alvarez’s interview on Desert Islands Discs (long ago, with Sue Lawley) and admired how deftly he punctuated his life story with apt quotations. Pondlife is full of them too, including the heartbreaking one (from Pancho Villa!) standing alone under ‘Vale’ on the very last page: ‘Don’t let me die like this. Tell them I said something clever.