Complete Poems (3 page)

What effect the memory of such glory and prestige—carefully tended and endlessly polished by his mother long after she’d become a widow living in not very genteel poverty—might have had on her impressionable and imaginative youngest son, we can only guess at; but it is surely no accident that so much of Cavafy’s poetry is torn between deep sentiment about the lost riches of the past and the intelligent child’s rueful, sharp-eyed appreciation for the dangers of glib nostalgia. For his father’s premature death, when Constantine was only seven, would bring hard times to Haricleia and her seven sons, from which the family fortunes would never really recover: Peter John had lived well but not wisely. For several years the widow Cavafy and her three younger sons ambled back and forth between Paris and London and Liverpool, relying on the generosity of her husband’s brothers. They stayed in England for five years, where Cavafy acquired the slight British inflection that, we are told, accented his Greek. When it became clear that the surviving brothers had hopelessly bungled their own affairs, Haricleia returned to Alexandria in 1877, when Cavafy was fourteen. With the exception of a three-year sojourn in Constantinople, from 1882 to 1885, following the British bombardment of Alexandria (a response to Egyptian nationalist violence against some of the city’s European inhabitants; the bombardment largely destroyed the family home), Cavafy would never live anywhere else again.

For some time, the life he lived there was, as he later described it to his friend Timos Malanos, a “double life.” The poet had probably had his first homosexual affair around the age of twenty, with a cousin, during his family’s stay in Constantinople; there is no question that he continued to act on the desires that were awakened at that time once he returned to Alexandria. By day, when he was in his middle and late twenties, he was his corpulent mother’s dutiful son (he called her, in English, “the Fat One”), working gratis as a clerk at the Irrigation Office
of the Ministry of Public Works in the hopes of obtaining a salaried position there. (This he eventually did, in 1892, remaining at the office with the famously Dantesque name—the “Third Circle of Irrigation”—until his retirement, thirty years later.) From seven-thirty to ten in the evening he was expected to dine with the exigent and neurotic Haricleia. Afterward, he would escape to the city’s louche quarters. One friend recalled that he kept a room in a brothel on the Rue Mosquée Attarine; another, that he would return from his exploits and write, in large letters on a piece of paper, “I swear I won’t do it again.” Like many bourgeois homosexual men of his era and culture (and indeed later ones) he seems to have enjoyed the favors, and company, of lower-class youths: another acquaintance would recall Cavafy telling him that he’d once worked briefly as a dishwasher in a restaurant in order to save the job of one such friend, who’d been taken ill. About the youths and men he slept with we know little. We do know, from an extraordinary series of secret notes that he kept about his habitual masturbation, that the amusing Alexandrian nickname for that activity—“39,” because it was thought to be thirty-nine times more exhausting than any other sexual activity—was not entirely unjustified:

At about the same time he’d settled in his rather dreary job, he began to write and publish seriously. (He had been writing verse, in English and French as well as in Greek, since at least the age of fourteen; and the family’s flight to Constantinople in 1882 inspired a journal that the nineteen-year-old Cavafy, already in love with literature, called
Constantinopoliad: An Epic,
which he soon abandoned.) Apart from that, the life he led, as he got older, wasn’t noticeably different from that of many a midlevel provincial functionary. He enjoyed gambling, in moderation;
he played the stock market, not without success. Apart from his constant and extensive reading of ancient and modern historians in a variety of languages, his tastes in literature were hardly remarkable. His library of about three hundred volumes contained a quantity of what his younger Alexandrian friend, the botanist J. A. Sareyannis, later recalled, with a palpable shudder, as “unmentionable novels by unknown and forgotten writers.” An exception was Proust, the second volume of whose
Le Côté de Guermantes
he borrowed from a friend not long after its publication. “The grandmother’s death!” he exclaimed to Sareyannis. “What a masterpiece! Proust is a great writer! A very great writer!” (Interestingly, he was less enthusiastic about the opening of
Sodome et Gomorrhe,
which he dismissed as “pre-war.”) He particularly enjoyed detective novels. Simenon was a favorite in his last years.

At the turn of the century, when he was in his early forties, he took a few trips to Athens, a city that was largely indifferent to him—as he, an Alexandrian, a devotee of the Hellenistic, the Late Antique peripheries, had always been indifferent to it, the great symbol of High Classicism. He likely fell in love there with a young littérateur called Alexander Mavroudis; but about this, like so much of his erotic life, we will never have more than the odd hint. A few years later—by now his mother had been dead for almost a decade—he came to live at the overstuffed apartment on Rue Lepsius (today the Cavafy Museum), where he would spend the rest of his life. For Sareyannis, who wrote a reminiscence of his friend for an Athens journal in 1944, it is only too clear that the poet’s taste in decor was clearly no better than his taste in fiction:

The cluttered, déclassé surroundings, the absence of aesthetic distinction, the startlingly conventional, to say nothing of middlebrow, taste: Cavafy’s apartment, like his job, gave little outward sign of the presence of a great artistic mind—the place from which the poetry really came. The more you know about the life, the more Seferis’s pronouncement that Cavafy existed only in his poetry seems just.

Most evenings, as he grew older, found him at home, either alone with a book or surrounded by a crowd of people that was, in every way, Alexandrian: a mixture of Greeks, Jews, Syrians, visiting Belgians; established writers such as the novelist and children’s book author Penelope Delta, Nikos Kazantzakis, a critic or two, younger friends and aspiring writers. (Among the latter, eventually, was Alexander Sengopoulos,
known as Aleko, who was very possibly the illegitimate son of one of Cavafy’s brothers—acquaintances remarked on a striking family resemblance—and would eventually be his heir.) To these friends and admirers the poet liked to hold forth, in a voice of unusual charm and authority and in the mesmerizing if idiosyncratic manner memorably described by E. M. Forster, who met Cavafy during World War I, when Forster was working for the Red Cross in Alexandria. It was Forster who would do more than anyone to bring Cavafy to the attention of the English-speaking world, and it is to him that we owe the by-now canonical description of the poet as “a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe.” Cavafy, the novelist recalled,

It was, in other words, a life that was a bit of a hybrid: the fervent, unseen artistic activity, the increasingly tame pleasures of a middling bourgeois existence, the tawdry
quartier,
the abstruse, rather baroque conversation. Not coincidentally, the latter pair of adjectives well describes a particular literary manner—characteristic of the Hellenistic authors who flocked to the era’s cultural capital, and who were so beloved of Cavafy—known as “Alexandrian.”

In 1932, Cavafy, a lifelong smoker, was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx. That summer he traveled to Athens for the tracheotomy that
would deprive him forever of the famous voice; from that point on, he was forced to communicate in a distorted whisper and, later on, by means of penciled notes. He returned home in the autumn, after declining an invitation from his wealthy friend Antony Benakis, a collector and the brother of Penelope Delta, to stay with him in Athens. (“Mohammed Aly Square is my aunt. Rue Cherif Pasha is my first cousin, and the Rue de Ramleh my second. How can I leave them?”) After first refusing and then allowing himself to be visited by the Patriarch of the city, he died in the Greek Hospital in Alexandria on April 29, 1933, his seventieth birthday: an elegant concentricity, a perfect closure, that are nicely suggested by what is said to have been his last act. For we are told that on one of the pieces of paper that had become his sole mode of communication he drew a circle; and then placed a small dot in the middle of that circle. Whatever he may have meant by that glyph, certain people will recognize in it an apt symbol. It is the conventional notation, used by authors when correcting printer’s proofs, for the insertion of a period, a full stop.

“I
N THE POEMS
of his youth and even certain poems of his middle age he quite often appears ordinary and lacking in any great distinction,” Seferis remarked during his 1946 lecture—another rather severe judgment whose underlying shrewdness cannot be denied, when we go back to so many of the poems Cavafy wrote in his thirties and even early forties, with their obvious debts to other writers and thinkers, their evasions and obfuscations. And then, as Seferis went on to say, “something extraordinary happens.” As will be evident by now, little about the external events of his life helps to account for that remarkable evolutionary leap; in this respect Cavafy resembles, more than a little, his near contemporary Proust, who similarly underwent a profound but invisible metamorphosis that, by his late forties, had transformed him from a dabbling littérateur into a major artist. Only by tracing the course of Cavafy’s interior life, his intellectual development, from the 1890s to the 1910s is it possible to discern the path by which (to paraphrase
that other great Greek poet again) Cavafy went from being a mediocre writer to a great one.

In the 1880s and 1890s, when he was in his twenties and thirties, Constantine Cavafy was a young man with modest literary ambitions, steadily writing quantities of verse as well as contributing articles, reviews, and essays, most in Greek but some in English (a language in which he was perfectly at home as the result of those adolescent years spent in England), on a number of idiosyncratic subjects, to Alexandrian and Athenian journals. (“Coral from a Mythological Viewpoint,” “Give Back the Elgin Marbles,” Keats’s
Lamia
.) Such writings, as well as the historical poems that belong to this early period, already betray not only a deep familiarity with a broad range of modern historians, whom he read in Greek, English, and French, but also the meticulous attentiveness to primary sources in the original languages—the Classical and later Greek and Roman historians, the early Church Fathers, Byzantine chroniclers—that we tend to associate with scholars rather than poets.

The writings of those early years indicate that Cavafy was struggling to find an artistically satisfying way in which to unite the thematic strands that would come to characterize his work, of which the consuming interest in Hellenic history was merely one. (An interest, it is crucial to emphasize, that rather strikingly disdained the conventional view of what constituted “the glory that was Greece”—which is to say, the Archaic and Classical eras—in favor of the long post-Classical phase, from the Hellenistic monarchies through Late Antiquity to the fall of Byzantium.) There was, too, the poet’s very strong identity as a product of the Greek diaspora, an Orthodox Christian and the scion of that once-distinguished Phanariote family who saw, in the thousand-year arc of Byzantine history, not a decadent fall from idealized Classical heights—the standard Western European attitude, crystallized by Gibbon—but a continuous and coherent thread of Greek identity that seamlessly bound the antique past to the present.