The great, early-twentieth-century Greek
poet Constantine P. Cavafy much preferred writing about a culture’s end-times rather
than all of the times that came before. This was largely because he preferred
reflecting on past achievements to enduring the vicissitudes of
producing or maintaining new ones. His short, abrupt, almost parable-like
lyrics of historical figures and events—such as “The God Abandons Antony” or
“Thermopylae”—don’t feature strong men achieving victories that will, after
death, immortalize them but rather describe the slow, inevitable acceptance of
whatever defeats may come next.
In “Thermopylae,”
the central event is not a small, heroic band of Spartans standing against the
uncountable Persian hordes; it’s about the “honor” that “still is due to them /
when they foresee … /… that the Medes will eventually break through.” In much the
same way, Cavafy’s personal poems often concern men growing old as they reflect
on shimmering, partially recalled passions, as in “Since Nine—” when one of his
many aging monologists sits alone in his dimly lit house recalling:
The apparition of my body in its youth,since nine o’clock when I first turned
up the lamp,has come and found me and reminded meof shuttered perfumed roomsand of pleasure spent—what wanton
pleasure!
As the late Hellenistic scholar Peter Mackridge wrote, in his
introduction to an Oxford collection of Cavafy’s poems, Cavafy was “often
called a ‘poet of old age,’” but that
statement might easily be rewritten to say he was a poet of “old age and old,
half-remembered achievements.” Unlike his contemporary and admirer T.S. Eliot,
he didn’t see history as ending “with a whimper” but rather with a long,
subsiding, pleasurable sigh of recollection. For Cavafy, when life and history
came close to their ending, poetry began.
It’s
probably a good time to read (or reread) Cavafy, a poet who lived in an era
similarly turbulent to our own but who always found time to indulge himself
with the less turbulent and (for him) more lasting pleasures of poetry. In Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography, Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys
have taken many liberties with the normal chronological structure of narrative
storytelling, and mostly it pays off. Structured thematically—which sometimes
means the reader gets a bit lost in the often sedate, expanding uneventfulness
of Cavafy’s life—the book features long
chapters focusing on distinct aspects of the poet’s life and work: His
relationship with family members comprises one chapter, while social
relationships with other hedonistic, spoiled young men like Cavafy himself
comprise another. And there’s one long, fascinating section that simply
details a normal day of Cavafy’s rambles through Alexandria. In many ways, the
authors seem to have found the perfect “form” for presenting the complex figure
of Cavafy—a relatively solitary and self-determined man who intersected with the
events of his time and the people in his life, while still establishing his
own sense of time and history in a series of unique poetic reflections. He
never seemed to achieve great things or earn literary fame so much as steadily
generate, and enjoy, books and streets and poetry and lovers and friends. He
lived his life, just as he wrote his poems, like a series of sweet secrets.
Cavafy was born in Alexandria in 1863,
the youngest of seven brothers; his family “was above all else defined by a
Victorian mercantile ethos stemming largely from the network of the Anglo-Greek
community that operated out of Manchester, Liverpool, and London,” according to Jusdanis and Jeffreys. And from a
young age, Cavafy grew accustomed to having empires vanish under his feet. His
father died when he was still a child; a subsequent worldwide depression (1873)
dismantled the family business; and various political conflicts (such as the
Anglo-Egyptian War of 1882), sent Cavafy and his family scurrying from
Liverpool to Constantinople and back, until Cavafy, with his devoted mother,
Heracleia, settled permanently in his hometown of Alexandria, where he spent
the remainder of his life. Cavafy wasn’t the type of young man born to wrest
his family from economic misfortune; spoiled and dandyish, he preferred hanging
around cafés, bars, and brothels, and reading books. Both Constantine and his
older brother, Peter, began dabbling with poetry from a young age; but only
Constantine, after many years of dilettantism, as if lifting himself up by his
own aesthetic bootstraps, began to shape himself as a world-class poet by the
early 1900s—and one both influential and unclassifiable in equal measure. His
work (also collected in a two-volume English translation by Daniel Mendelssohn
in 2012) seems to have been deeply significant to the reading lives of his
contemporaries—such as W.H. Auden, Eliot, and D.J. Enright—even while it is
hard to find his influence in their works: Nobody ever quite wrote poems like
Cavafy. Nor would they.
One of his formative
intellectual influences was Edward Gibbon’s
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but some of Cavafy’s deepest personal influences were the private pleasures he enjoyed with young
men, whom he met during his flaneurish rambles through Alexandria. Leaving
history behind is a major theme of his work, but leaving conventional daylight
culture behind was the twilight pleasure he most enjoyed.
In “Waiting
for the Barbarians,” for instance—perhaps his best-known work— the royalty,
senators, and citizens of an unidentified kingdom prepare to surrender all their
rites, finery, and institutions to an invasion of “barbarians” who will, the
narrator expects, be “bored by eloquence and public speaking.” Cavafy’s poetic
narratives are often like parables, rarely extending beyond 30 or 40 lines, and rather than depict history as a progress from one era to another,
this one ironizes the idea of “progress,” depicting a civilization that seems
readily prepared to exchange a little of what it has for a little of what it hasn’t—much like Cavafy’s wandering lovers, moving through the streets
and markets of Alexandria from one affair to another. As the nameless narrator
(most of Cavafy’s narrators lack names, ages, or physical details) concludes:
And now, what will become of us
without barbarians.Those people were a solution of a
sort.
Cavafy’s sense of history isn’t ruled by heroes and kings; rather, it is an empire of memories established in the hearts of old men.
But Cavafy’s monologists never really achieve “solutions.” If they’re lucky, they move on from one interesting experience to another, and after many years, those experiences add to their rich storehouse of remembrances. Just as the narrator of “Ithaca” advises an unnamed, Odysseus-like figure: “Do not hurry your trip in any way. / Better that it last for many years; / that you drop anchor at the island an old man, / rich with all you’ve gotten on the way.” Cavafy’s sense of history isn’t ruled by heroes and kings; rather, it is an empire of memories established in the hearts of old men.
For Cavafy, life and poetry were
entirely cut off from the conventional arcs of everyday life—working regular jobs, making money, and raising families.
As a young man he managed to acquire a government job at the Department of
Irrigation Service that didn’t make many demands on his attention and sent him
home early every afternoon to think about nothing but his poems. Even his
method of publishing and promoting his work was more of a closet industry than
a writerly vocation; when he had enough poems (most of which he would work over
for many years until he deemed them satisfactory), Cavafy would print them as
broadsides at his own expense and distribute them freely to friends and
families who, in turn, were expected to pass them on. Eventually, through these
networks, Cavafy distributed small volumes of his collected poems, again at his
own expense. Yet despite these slim beginnings, there was something about
Cavafy’s work—and his personality—that eventually drew admirers from all over
the world, many of whom journeyed to Alexandria to visit his home and share
café meals and conversation—including writers such as Nikos Kazantzakis and E.M.
Forster. Forster met Cavafy in 1916 and spent the next several years promoting his
work in essays and by making personal introductions to the likes of T.E.
Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, and Cavafy’s eventual English-language publisher, Leonard
Woolf at Hogarth Press. Forster also composed one of the most memorable
descriptions of the poet: “a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing
absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe.”
Even long after his death in 1933,
Cavafy’s spirit haunted most modern literary
visions of Alexandria, and it even circulates throughout Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria
Quartet, where Cavafy is referred to simply as “the old poet of the city,”
as if there could be any other.
The later Greek poet, George
Seferis, famously claimed: “Outside his
poetry, Cavafy does not exist.” And it’s hard to think of another poet whose
entire life was so devoted to, and even subsumed by, the written word: When
Cavafy wasn’t writing, he was either reading or talking to friends about what
he was writing and reading.
Cavafy was probably the least
naturalistic poet of his generation—and
while he shares some affinities with the symbolists, such as Ezra Pound and Paul Verlaine
(two of his admitted major influences were Verlaine and Charles Baudelaire), his poems
seem more anchored in basic human realities than theirs. Even when his poems
focus on historic events—the assassination of Julius Caesar, say, or the
contentious satrapies that succeeded Alexander the Great—the language is so
simple, and the characters so generalized, that they read almost like a series
of floating, disconnected memories of men that somehow persisted long after
their bodies turned to dust. (Cavafy almost never wrote from the viewpoints of
women.)
As Jusdanis and Jeffreys argue,
Cavafy’s poems rarely examined the specific world he visited in his ramblings through Alexandria; what interested him more was the aesthetic world
he fashioned from them. It’s hard to
think of another poet who, like Cavafy, could spend a lifetime strolling by his
home city’s port-side bars and restaurants and yet only once mention the
ocean as a subject—“and then only as an absence”—as he does in “Morning Sea” (1916).
Here let me stop. Let me too look
at Nature for a while.The morning sea and cloudless skyA brilliant blue, the yellow shore; allBeautiful and grand in the light.Here let me stop. Let me fool myself: that these are what I
see(I really saw them for a moment when I first stopped)instead of seeing, even here, my fantasies,my recollections, the ikons of pleasure.
Unlike the romantics, Cavafy is not
drawn into the awesomeness of mountains and valleys; rather, he is quick to turn
his eyes from them, preferring to wander absorbedly in the memories and
impressions that nature has invoked, and always returning to the subjective
realm where only he, Cavafy, reigned supreme. He might briefly appreciate
nature’s beauties, but those visions are quickly supplanted by his “fantasies,”
“recollections,” and “ikons of pleasure.”
There is something deeply
self-absorbed and even solipsistic about Cavafy, and everything about his life
seemed like a monument to itself. As Jusdanis and Jeffreys make clear, his
apartment was both a writerly retreat and a monument to hoarding: He seemed
incapable of throwing out anything that related, however incidentally, to any
event or memory from his past—letters,
photographs, books, recipes, printed menus, train tickets, receipts from
hotels, inventories he kept of games he enjoyed playing (dominoes, roulette,
tombola), and even his mother’s jewelry.
According to some friends, Cavafy’s sexual rambles continued well into old age, and while he
was more forthcoming about his sexuality than, say, his contemporary, Wilfred
Owen, he was not gregarious about relating his amorous adventures. In one poem,
“That They Come—,” he describes that part of his life that was never a secret but was never brought forth shining into the daylight, either:
One
candle is enough. Its faint lightis more
fitting, will be more winsomewhen
come Love’s— when its Shadows
come.One
candle is enough. Tonight the roomcan’t have
too much light. In reverie complete,and in
suggestion’s power, and with
that little light—in that
reverie: thus will I dream a visionthat
there come Love’s— that its Shadows
come.
In Cavafy, the need for light is
almost incidental; it only marks a space in the darkness where an individual
can “dream a vision” and, with a single candle, energized by reverie, make the
room “complete.”
This is the first major biography in
English since Robert Liddell’s in 1974,
and it is a much more substantial and devoted work than that previous one; it
also comes at a time when poets as idiosyncratic as Cavafy might be easily
forgotten for a variety of reasons. For while many different “schools” of
critical attention have sought to appropriate Cavafy’s work and life, it
is never possible to reduce him to the dimensions of either a “gay” poet or a
“Greek” poet, a modernist or a symbolist. And in his preference for Hellenic
Greece rather than the golden age of Athens, he treated the dispersion of Greek
arts and literature after the Roman Empire as more significant than winning
wars or conquering countries.
The most fascinating chapter, though,
concerns two admirers who befriended the elderly Cavafy when they were barely 20 years old—Timos Malanos and Alekos Sengopoulos.
Both were brought quickly into Cavafy’s closely cultivated entourage and spent
their days socializing with the poet, reading the poet, and listening to the
poet explain what they were reading and why other people should read it too.
Alekos—the more devoted of the pair—went on to act as the poet’s heir and literary
executor after his death in 1933; the more critical one, Malanos, eventually
found himself shut out of the inner circle and began writing essays about
Cavafy that weren’t entirely laudatory. He wrote the first book-length
assessment of Cavafy’s career, in 1971, and in one anecdote, he recalled asking
the older poet to read some of his apprentice work:
He read it,
then going through it line by line he kept saying, “This is Cavafian; this is not Cavafian; this parenthesis
is Cavafian; this word is not Cavafian.” Naturally what was not Cavafian he
changed into Cavafian.… But he himself did not see (or perhaps he did not want to
see) that in this way we had a parody. His main interest was in the pupil (any
pupil) who would follow his footsteps.… I was 20 years old at the time … and I
sensed that his soul, concentrated all in his glance, in the touch of his
hands, was about to hazard a movement in my direction like that of a
carnivorous plant.
While some have dismissed Malanos’s
recollections as the bitter payback of the man not chosen to be the
literary executor, his anecdote communicates one of the most memorable
conclusions of this latest book—that the most important person in Cavafy’s life
was always Cavafy.
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