Al Alvarez has lived his life backwards. In his 20s, fresh out of Oxford, he took the literary world by storm, and at 28 was the youngest person ever to deliver the Christian Gauss lectures on literature at Princeton. He published books of criticism, single handedly redefined poetry with his attack on what he dubbed the "gentility principle", and championed young poets, such as Sylvia Plath. A long and distinguished academic career, punctuated by occasional weighty critical tomes, beckoned. But it didn't happen, and Alvarez, now 71, is glad he had the good sense to grow up.
If he had carried on with life in what he once called the "squirrel cage", I might be heading up the steps to Alvarez's tall, sunny, exhaustively lived-in house in the genteel London district of Hampstead to discuss his latest critical outpourings on poetry; as it is, I have come to talk about poker.
Poker: Bets, Bluffs and Bad Beats is Alvarez's second book on a game that has been an obsession for the past 40 years. His first, The Biggest Game in Town, about the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, appeared in 1983. Stu "The Kid" Ungar and Nick the Greek have well and truly replaced George Herbert and Richard Lovelace in Alvarez's critical pantheon.
But why the curious trajectory of his career? Why did he turn his back on academic life and give up being poetry editor of the Observer (the platform from which he had launched his assault on well-mannered English poetry), and stopped playing the literary game; or, rather, insisted on playing it by his own rules. "I haven't really got a career," he says. "All I have done is stayed independent. In a differently ordered culture, I probably would have had some sinecure professorship, but I was too early for that. I was always good at teaching; I just didn't like having colleagues."
In his new poker book, he recalls reading Herbert O Yardley's classic introduction to the game, The Education of a Poker Player, for the first time. It taught him how to play; but it also taught him some more important lessons. "When I first began to play," he writes, "I was in my late 20s and had the profound ignorance that often goes with excessive education. I had been through the most high-minded academic mill, read a vast number of books, and written a couple of my own, but in my personal life I was naive to a degree that still makes me blush. I had a marriage I couldn't handle, a childish desire to be loved by the whole world, and an equally childish conviction that everything would turn out right in the end . . . I was wrong."
Very wrong. At 27, he married the 20year-old grand-daughter of Frieda Lawrence (the widow of D H. Lawrence) after a whirlwind romance, and they had a son. But the marriage was a disaster, triggering a bout of the depression that dogged Alvarez throughout his 20s, leading to an attempted suicide in 1960. He drew on that experience in his best known book, The Savage God, published in 1971, which explored the links between suicide and creativity. The other impulse driving that book was his friendship with Sylvia Plath, who had committed suicide in 1963.
In his autobiography, Where Did It All Go Right?, he says that he failed Plath. "I wasn't up to her despair and it scared me. My own suicide attempt was two years behind me, and I didn't want to go that way again."
The autobiography ends with Alvarez's marriage in 1966 to his second wife, Anne Adams, a Canadian child psychotherapist. His reasoning: "Happiness writes white. It does not show up on the page." He describes the book as the story of "gloom and doom turning into pleasure".
Alvarez bade farewell to academic life, cauterised his wounds with The Savage God, and wrote poetry, novels, and reportage for the New Yorker that eventually made its way into hard covers - The Biggest Game in Town; Offshore (based on his stay on a North Sea oil rig); and Feeding the Rat, about an unsung mountaineering friend. Climbing is Alvarez's other lifelong passion. "Feeding the rat" - testing yourself, exposing yourself to danger - has always been necessary to Alvarez. Poker is part of that, and he still puts his money on the table in London casinos a couple of nights a week, though he abandoned a high-rolling game in which he played for 20 years following serious losses.
"Poker is about control," he says. "It's like rock climbing. You see a television programme about rock climbing and you think these guys are insane, but it's not like that - it's all about working things out and being in control."
Alvarez's new poker book - a coffee table guide to the game - is a potboiler, and part of me (that part obsessed with the odd trajectory of his career) wants to grill him about all the "real" books unwritten, all the studies of Herbert and Lovelace that might have been.
If he does lose any sleep over what he has done, and not done, it doesn't show. "I've wasted a lot of time climbing rocks and playing cards and goofing about, but I've had a lot of fun. If I dropped dead this moment, I would have had a great time."
Poker: Bets, Bluffs and Bad Beats is published by Bloomsbury, £20 in UK.