Pondlife: A Swimmer's Journal

April 27, 2013

Dear Al,

Pondlife. A beautiful incantation to life at its simplest and best. A repetitive prayer to the bracing sting of the cold water and to the wild fowl and to the everamazing sky. An American Indian would understand your book. It casts the spell of a cultic ritual while minutely recounting a cultic ritual — a healing ritual. What would I do without it?

And you come off as a wizard. You are a wizard — you even look like a wizard! — an enchanting old broken-down wizard who has suffered the ordeal and, through language and love, survived it. It may not feel like it these days, but believe it or not, you’ve come through.

Your friend of a lifetime,

Philip Roth

Praise for Pondlife:

‘Both beautiful and savagely angry, this elegy to the self comes from the pen of an author who, having once made an attempt on his own life, now loves it with fierce tenacity… For all the black comedy, Pondlife is gut-wrenchingly sad’     Daily Telegraph

‘A marvellous book. Even the title Pondlife is spot-on: unlaboured, light and right’     Observer

‘Nuanced and vulnerable… The plainness of Alvarez’s language works to his advantage; it lets us see the courage in restraint’     Andrew Motion, Guardian

‘Al Alvarez is a writer’s writer whose brilliant insight has illuminated everything from suicide to his love of poker… A miniature classic of a man’s defiant assertion against ageing’     Metro

‘It is the near-collapse of body and mind that change his prose from the gently poetic to the wrenchingly poignant… The final pages are an artistic triumph, and worth the reading alone’     Independent on Sunday

‘Eloquent and fiercely honest, Pondlife chronicles nine years of dips by this self-confessed lover of language with itchy feet’     BBC Countryfile

‘Pondlife is a welcome addition to a growing library of titles about the solace and balm of the natural world’     Evening Standard

‘Absolutely beautiful; clear as a cowbell’     Horatio Clare

‘The adrenalin still flows in lively extracts from eleven years of journals’     The Times

To Barbara Neil

By the Same Author

The Shaping Spirit (1958)

The School of Donne (1961)

The New Poetry (ed and introduction, 1962)

Under Pressure (1965)

Beyond All This Fiddle (1968)

Lost (1968)

Penguin Modern Poets No18 (1970)

Apparition (1971)

The Savage God (1971)

Beckett (1973)

Hers (1974)

Hunt (1978)

Autumn to Autumn and Selected Poems (1978)

Life After Marriage (1982)

The Biggest Game in Town (1983)

Offshore (1986)

Feeding the Rat (1988)

Rainforest (1988)

Day of Atonement (1991)

The Faber Book of Modern European Poetry (ed and introduction, 1992)

Night (1995)

Where Did It All Go Right? (1999)

Poker: Bets, Bluffs and Bad Beats (2001)

New and Selected Poems (2002)

The Writer’s Voice (2005)

Risky Business: People, Pastimes, Poker and Books (2007)

Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them; While the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the stars, be not darkened, nor the clouds return after the rain: In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those that look out of the windows be darkened, And the doors shall be shut in the streets, when the sound of the grinding is low, and he shall rise up at the voice of the bird, and all the daughters of musick shall be brought low; Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets: Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it. Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanity.

– Ecclesiastes, 12

They don’t make mirrors like they used to.

– Tallulah Bankhead

Contents

People and Places

Preface

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

Vale

Acknowledgements

A Note on the Author

People and Places

Adam Alvarez (b. 1958), son of Al and Ursula.

Adrian Brendel, cellist, son of Alfred and Reni.

Alfred Brendel (Sir), pianist and poet. Subject of Alvarez’ New Yorker profile, reprinted in Risky Business.

Alan Owen (1928–2011), BBC composer and pond swimmer.

Alex Henshaw, pilot.

Andrew Christie Miller, landowner.

Anne Alvarez (b. 1936), married Al in 1966.

Barbara Neil Christie Miller, writer.

Berenice Krikler (1930–2010), psychotherapist.

Bernard Williams, philosopher.

Betty Joseph, psychoanalyst.

Bob Silvers, editor of New York Review of Books.

Cassius Cogan (b. 2006), son of Kate and Danny Cogan, grandson of Al and Anne.

Cate Haste Bragg, producer and writer, wife of Melvyn Bragg.

Chris Ruocco, ex-boxer, Kentish Town tailor, pond swimmer.

Cindy Blake, writer, wife of Tony Holden.

Cloe Peplow Alvarez (1946–2010), Adam’s wife.

Cornwells, David (aka John le Carré, novelist) and Jane.

Cyrus Ghani, Iranian/American international lawyer, writer, scholar.

Damasco and Diomira Pinelli, climbing friends of Al’s and Anne’s in Italy.

Danny Campbell, lifeguard and writer; now living in France.

Danny Cogan, Kate’s husband, father of Cassius and Tommy.

Dan Fawkes, lifeguard, team leader.

Dave (Little), with new folding bike.

Dave Brooks, the Bagpiper, also cycles to the pond, ex-boxer and ex-bouncer.

Dermot Greene, Labour ex-Camden councillor, swimmer, friend.

Frank Kermode (Sir) (1919–2010), critic and scholar.

Gabriel Griffin, organiser of Poetry on the Lake festival at Lake Orta, Italy.

Glynn Roberts, lifeguard.

George Francis, ex-boxer, pond swimmer.

Giuglio Gigli, friend in Italy.

Highgate Men’s Pond, close to the road so more accessible for Al.

Iga Downing, osteopath, partner of Torquil Norman.

Joe Brown, great rock climber and mountaineer.

Kate Alvarez Cogan (b. 1971), daughter of Al and Anne.

Ken McMullen, film director and artist, pond swimmer.

Les Lancaster, lifeguard, injured, now teaching.

Luke Alvarez (b. 1968), son of Al and Anne.

Mac (Ian) McNaught-Davis, mountaineer, media personality, climbing partner of Joe Brown and of Al.

Max Ott, kitchen designer.

Melvyn Bragg, broadcaster and novelist.

Mick Annegarn, lifeguard.

Mike King, eldest brother of the King Brothers, pop group famous in the 1950s and 1960s. Pond swimmer.

Mike and Kathy Levene. Mike is Al’s nephew and solicitor. Kathy is Mike’s wife.

Mixed Pond, the smallest of the three ponds on Hampstead Heath. Closes for winter, though it sometimes opens again briefly for warm days in autumn.

Mo Anthoine (1939–89), rock climber and mountaineer, subject of Al’s book Feeding the Rat.

Nicola Gammon, friend of Kate’s.

Olaf Henderson, garden designer, hi-fi expert.

Paddy John, pond swimmer.

Paradiso, local name for the Alvarezes house near Barga, Italy, bought in 1972, with pool added in 2006 when Al could no longer climb, nor walk much.

Paul Thompson, sociologist and pond swimmer.

Percy, walked five miles to get his swim in the pond.

Piers Plowright, radio producer, pond swimmer.

Powells, Robert, actor and Babs, Pan’s People dancer.

Reni Brendel, formerly married to Alfred Brendel.

Rendcomb, aerodrome and airfield in Gloucestershire.

Riccardo, owner /manager of Barga pool.

Richard Himes, super-fit lifeguard.

Robert Sutherland-Smith, stockbroker, pond swimmer.

Roy, pond swimmer.

Roy Houghton, poker player.

Rudolph Strauss, cousin of Albert Einstein, pond swimmer, died at the pond in his eighties. A remembrance service was held at the pond.

Rupert Shortt, writer, pond swimmer.

Ruth Hajioff, acupuncturist.

Sally Simon (1924–1984), Al’s sister.

Savannah Alvarez (b. 1990), daughter of Adam and Cloe Alvarez, granddaughter of Al.

Shane Khedoo, lifeguard.

Simon Low, Luke’s partner.

Steve O’Connell, team leader, lifeguard.

Sylvia Plath (1932–63), American poet, married to Ted Hughes, her poetry, life and death were celebrated in Alvarez’s The Savage God.

Terry Turner, supervisor of lifeguards.

Tommy Cogan (b. 2009), son of Kate and Danny, grandson of Al and Anne.

Tony (Anthony) Holden, writer, poker player.

Tony May, lifeguard.

Torquil Norman (Sir), British businessman, aviator, philanthropist, founder of the Roundhouse Trust. Subject of Alvarez’s New Yorker profile, reprinted in Risky Business.

Ursula Barr (1935–2008), first wife of Al, married 1956–60.

Ursula Owen, publisher, editor and campaigner for free speech, partner of Sir Frank Kermode.

Violet Alvarez (b. 1987), daughter of Adam and Cloe Alvarez, granddaughter of Al.

Win, elderly lady pond swimmer.

Preface

I love language and the things you can do with it and I also love the intricate business of getting it right, but sitting at a desk, writing, reading books and staring out of the window is not a discipline that comes easily to an adrenalin addict with itchy feet. The physical world has always fascinated me just as much as the world of ideas and I have often used writing to satisfy my need to get out into the weather, do things, go places and try my hand at whatever was on offer.

In my arrogant youth I had made a practice of sticking my neck out – mostly in the mountains, but also in my professional life. My friend Mo Anthoine, who shared the habit, called it ‘feeding the rat’, and I fed mine recklessly, convinced I had nothing to lose. I had been born with what looked like cancer; the doctors – my parents too, for all I knew – assumed I would not make it even as far as puberty, and maybe I sensed their fears and thought the same. Whatever the reason, I never really believed in my immortality; I thought of myself as someone permanently living on borrowed time, a man for whom three score years and ten were never going to be a problem.

Yet I managed to celebrate my sixtieth birthday by repeating a climb I had done ten years earlier and this time I found it easier. I can go on doing this forever, I thought. I was wrong. Back in 1960, some Welsh doctors had set my broken leg badly and thirty years of hard use had worn away all the cartilage in the ankle; I could still walk, but only painfully, with bone grinding against bone. For a time, I preferred not to notice, though the next summer in Italy I could scarcely limp to the foot of the climb. I kept up the pretence of climbing for a couple of years on Harrison’s Rocks, a little outcrop south of London, then – reluctantly – gave up trying, aged sixty-three.

At some point, however, I began to realise that being an old man was not, after all, a posthumous existence; it was merely life of a different kind and I had better make the most of it while it lasted. My body may have been falling apart, but in some ways I had never felt more alive, and the world had never seemed more beautiful, more desirable, more poignant. I had been diving into the amber waters of the ponds on Hampstead Heath since I was a kid; now I began to go daily all year round. This is a record of some of those dips.

2002

Wednesday 27 March. 52°F

The cormorants went a couple of weeks ago, the seagulls soon after. There were never more than half a dozen cormorants, but there were gulls by the hundreds. Occasionally, when I dived in, a great cloud of them would take off, squawking. My routine is to swim quickly to the twenty-five-yard barrier, head in water, doing the crawl, then turn onto my back and drift back more slowly, admiring the sky and the clouds and the weather. And there were the gulls, irritably banking and swerving, kicking up a fuss.

That was last week. Now the gulls have gone, the other birds are all nesting and the swans have taken over. They have made their nest on the far bank but want to keep the whole pond to themselves. Last week, too, the twenty-five-yard barrier was taken down and that changes the game: how long you stay in the water and how far you swim and how cold you want to get – now it’s up to you. The first trick is to swim where the swans are not because they don’t like intruders. There is a pair of Canada geese that have come in from the boating pond next door, maybe to nest, but whenever they drift into the swans’ ken they are spat at and chased away. Likewise the moorhens and coots, which keep well clear.

This morning the geese were on the jetty when I arrived. They waddled resentfully in front of me and half turned at the jetty’s end as though to take a stand. I said, ‘Fuck off,’ and kept on coming. They flopped into the water, then drifted close in, waiting for me to go away. When I dived in after them, they fled.

Thursday 28 March. 52°F

Until now, whenever I walk down the slope from the car to the pond gate, a cold blast of air hits me just about when I reach the three great beech trees. Maybe it’s because there is a string of four ponds – the Men’s Pond, the Boating Pond, the Women’s Pond, the overgrown pond where herons nest – and they generate a corridor of cold air. But not today. For the first time this year the air on my face felt warm. And because they mowed the slope yesterday, everything smelt of cut grass. It was like diving into a bell of sweet-smelling greenness.

Chris Ruocco the tailor brought my new lovat-green corduroys with him and gave me a fitting after we’d swum. A proper fitting: him kneeling with a mouth full of pins, cocking his head critically, pursing his lips, making adjustments. All very professional, except that we’re in an open-air, concrete-floored, corrugated iron enclosure of a swimming pond on Hampstead Heath.

Friday 29 March. 52°F

Another cloudless, shining day. At the top of the slope, the blossoms of the horse chestnut are still all green, but they are beginning to uncurl their fingers. So are the three big trees in the middle of the slope: little catkins on the (female) beech, sticky fingertips on the copper beeches. A week ago, they were still tightly curled bumps on the end of the twigs. The water temperature is the same but its surface is like glass, so I swim further out and dawdle back. In the area everyone is lounging around, soaking up the sun, and the nude enclosure next door seems already crowded. It’s Good Friday and no one is in a hurry. Anne has come with me. While I swim she walks briskly to the top of Parliament Hill, then circles back to meet me on the causeway between the ponds. She is pink-cheeked, bright-eyed and full of purpose, rattling a stick at a swan that has commandeered a coot’s nest. It sits there preening, while the two coots bicker indignantly. When the coots try to reclaim their property, the swan uncoils its elegant neck and hisses at them.

Saturday 30 March. 52°F

A perfect spring day, the air soft and delectable. At 10 a.m. the Heath is oddly deserted – maybe because it’s the Easter holiday weekend and everyone is sleeping late. I swam almost to the outer barrier, the water still chilly, the air warm. It was beautiful. Then Anne and I ate a big breakfast at the Italian-run workmen’s café. They recognise me there now and greet me as though I were a more regular customer than I am. The portions are huge, the tomatoes especially delicious, the staff are easy-going and it costs almost nothing. Much nicer than the rather pretentious and always packed Café Mozart along the road.

Sunday 31 March. 52°F

All week it’s felt like May; now it’s March again – overcast, trying to rain, cold wind. I sat in the car with a poker hangover – the kind you get when you know you’ve played badly. Or, rather, I started playing well and winning, then got careless or foolhardy or tired – all three, probably – and ended up losing badly. No one to blame but myself, which I do. And there I was last week, congratulating myself on my professional attitude. That’s not how the pros play. Afterwards, I had a drink with Adam and Ben, both of whom I like. The feeling is clearly mutual, but that didn’t stop them patronising me as an old buffer. And I went along with it, full of jokes and good cheer, but inwardly seething with resentment.

I swam even further than yesterday and the water felt almost warm. So did the air when I came out. But the wind got me fast, I dressed as quickly as I could and drove home with the heater on. The pond seems curiously empty without the seagulls. The swans and the geese were off at the edges, leaving the water to the ducks, moorhens and coots.

Tuesday 2 April. 52°F

The air and the water stay chilly: as the poet says, ‘Spring comes slowly up this way.’ Again the geese are occupying the jetty and I have to drive them in front of me and wait till they clear off before I dive in. One of them showed what he thought of me by shitting prodigiously as I hit the water, so I had to twist in mid-air in order to avoid his smear of spreading, sinking white. Jeff arrives while I’m drying myself and brings me up to date on the latest Late Night Poker results.

Wednesday 10 April. 52°/53°F

A week away in Italy. The only thing paradisical in Paradiso was the wisteria, its flowers in full bloom and no leaves, the whole house hung with pale mauve blossom, like an outrageous wedding cake, and all the bees in the Garfagnana gathered in it, drunkenly celebrating. But the cloud was down, the wind was cold and most of the time it rained. We did what had to be done – fired one cleaner, hired another and sorted out the house – then huddled in front of the fire and read. It was a relief to get back to London and central heating.

It’s cold here, too, but at least the sky is clear. Spring has come on fast in a week. The trees are putting on their leaves and the grass is vivid green. This is the time when everything starts over again and I go around thinking of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde:

‘O yonge, fresshe folkes, hee or shee . . .’

The lifeguards have taken up the coconut matting on the jetty, the mating birds are busy on their nests and the pond seems empty. The wind makes small, quick waves and the sunlight makes them shine. Everything is on the move and dazzling. It’s like diving into champagne. This is what I miss most in Italy. The ponds on the Heath have been part of my life since I was eleven and they have become increasingly important. The early morning swim in their amber water kept me going when my first marriage was coming apart; I was swimming in the Mixed Pond with Anne Sutton when Ursula stormed up and the marriage ended. They keep me going again now when walking on the Heath is beyond me. All that endless, footloose travelling and insatiable need just to go, to look, to see places and meet strangers and try things, now I’m back where I started. I was six months old when my parents left Bloomsbury and moved to Hampstead, and I’ve never really left it.

Thursday 11 April. 52°F

Cold east wind and a pale sun. The water is delectable. One of the swans was on its nest on the far bank, the other patrolled up and down twenty yards out. I swam further out than yesterday, but not far enough to interest him. The geese were waddling around on the left bank, annoying a fisherman, so, apart from a couple of ducks, the swan and I had the pond to ourselves.

Saturday 13 April. 52°F

Strange weather: the green thickens on the trees, there are faint dabs of colour on some of the hawthorns, the daffodils have been dancing for weeks, and the bluebells are beginning to show their heads. But it feels like winter; the sky is overcast, the wind north-easterly