The Complete Poems of C.P. Cavafy. Daniel Mendelsohn

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:

      Cavafy’s flat was on an upper floor of a rather lower-class, unkempt apartment house. Upon entering, one saw a wide hall laden with furniture. No walls were to be seen anywhere, as they were covered with paintings and, most of all, with shelves or Arabian étagères holding countless vases—small ones, large ones, even enormous ones. Various doors were strung along that hall; the last one opened onto the salon where the poet received his visitors. At one time I greatly admired that salon, but one morning in 1929, as I was passing by to pick up some collections of Cavafy’s poetry to be delivered to friends of his in Paris, I waited alone there for quite a while and was able to study it detachedly. With surprise I realized for the first time that it was crowded with the most incongruous things: faded velvet armchairs, old Bokhara and Indian stuffs at the windows and on the sofa, a black desk with gilt ornament, folding chairs like those found in colonial bungalows, shelves on the walls and tables with countless little columns and mother-of-pearl, a koré from Tanagra, tasteless turn-of-the-century vases, every kind of Oriental rug, Chinese vases, paintings, and so on and so on. I could single out nothing as exceptional and really beautiful; the way everything was amassed reminded me of a secondhand furniture store. Could that hodgepodge have been in the taste of the times? I had read similar descriptions of the homes of Anatole France and of Villiers de l’Isle Adam, who were also, both of them, lovers of beauty and gave careful attention to their writing. Whether Cavafy himself chose and collected those assorted objects or whether he inherited them, I do not know; what is certain is that Cavafy’s hand, his design, could not be felt in any of that. I imagine that he just came slowly to love them, with time, as they were gradually covered with dust and memories, as they became no longer just objects, but ambiance. (tr. Diana Haas)

      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,

      may be prevailed upon to begin a sentence—an immense complicated yet shapely sentence, full of parentheses that never get mixed and of reservations that really do reserve; a sentence that moves with logic to its foreseen end, yet to an end that is always more vivid and thrilling than one foresaw. … It deals with the tricky behaviour of the Emperor Alexius Comnenus in 1096, or with olives, their possibilities and price, or with the fortunes of friends, or George Eliot, or the dialects of the interior of Asia Minor. It is delivered with equal ease in Greek, English, or French. And despite its intellectual richness and human outlook, despite the matured charity of its judgments, one feels that it too stands at a slight angle to the universe: it is the sentence of a poet.

      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.

      2

      “IN 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