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

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.

      And, finally, there was homosexual sensuality. However tormented and secretive he may have been about his desire for other men, Cavafy came, after a certain point in his career, to write about that desire with an unapologetic directness so unsensational, so matter-of-fact, that we can forget that barely ten years had passed since Oscar Wilde’s death when the first of these openly homoerotic poems was published. As the poet himself later acknowledged, he had to reach his late forties before he found a way to unify his passion for the past, his passion for “Hellenic” civilization, and his passion for other men in poems that met his rigorous standards for publication.

      The earliest poems we have date to the poet’s late teens, the period when he was sojourning with his mother’s family in and around Constantinople. These include dutiful if unpersuasive exercises on Romantic themes (ecstatic encomia to the lovely eyes of fetching lasses; a Grecified adaptation of Lady Anne Barnard’s ballad on love and loss in the Highlands) and, perhaps predictably, some flights of Turkish Orientalism, complete with smoldering beauties locked up in harems. As time passed, he was drawn more and more to recent and contemporary currents in Continental literature. The Parnassian movement of the 1860s and 1870s, in particular, with its eager response to Théophile Gautier’s call for an “Art for Art’s sake,” its insistence on elevating polished form over earnest subjective, social, and political content, and particularly its invitation to a return to the milieus and models of the antique Mediterranean past, had special appeal. (That a number of Cavafy’s poems from this period are sonnets is surely a testament to the influence of the Parnassians, who prized the form for its rigorous technical requirements.)

      From the Parnasse it was but a short step to Baudelaire, a Greek translation of whose “Correspondences” constitutes part of one 1892 poem; and, ultimately, to Symbolism. It is not hard to see the allure that the French writer’s elevation of the poet as a member of an elite—a gifted seer whose special perceptions were denied to the common mass—had for the young Cavafy, in whom a taste for the past, as well as a necessarily secret taste for specialized erotic pleasures, coexisted. Lines from the second half of “Correspondences According to Baudelaire” suggests how thoroughly the young Alexandrian had absorbed the lessons of the pioneering French modernist:

      Do not believe only what you see.

      The vision of poets is sharper still.

      To them, Nature is a familiar garden.

      In a shadowed paradise, those other people

      grope along the cruel road.

      With Cavafy, the inevitably self-justifying preoccupation with the notion of a rarefied artistic elite (“Cavafy’s attitude toward the poetic vocation is an aristocratic one,” wrote Auden, perhaps a trifle indulgently)—an attitude irresistible, as we might imagine, to a painfully closeted gay man—was paralleled by a lifelong fascination with figures gifted with second sight, extrasensory perception, and telepathic knowledge. It found its ideal historical correlative in the first-century A.D. magus and sage Apollonius of Tyana, about whom Cavafy published three poems and, as the corpus of poems left unfinished at the time of his death now makes clear, was working on the draft of another toward the end of his life.

      As with Baudelaire, the Parnassians, and the later Esoteric and Decadent poets, the furious nineteenth-century obsession with progress, fueled by the technological advances of the industrial age, found no favor with the young Cavafy. His 1891 sonnet “Builders” not only makes clear his allegiance to Baudelaire’s worldview, but also sets the stage for a poetic gaze that would, for so much of his life, be backward-glancing in one way or another:

      … the good builders make haste

      all as one to shield their wasted labor.

      Wasted, because the life of each is passed

      embracing ills and sorrows for a future generation,

      that this generation might know an artless

      happiness, and length of days,

      and wealth, and wisdom without base sweat, or servile industry.

      But it will never live, this fabled generation;

      its very perfection will cast this labor down

      and once again their futile toil will begin.

      The rejection of modern notions of progress, the inward- and backward-looking gaze, inevitably led to a flirtation with Decadence and Aestheticism as well. The same turbulently formative years of the 1890s produced, for example, a coldly glittering poem, in quatrains, on Salome, in which a young scholar, having playfully asked Salome for her own head—and having been obeyed—“orders this bloodied thing to / be taken from him, and continues / his reading of the dialogues of Plato”; one feels the spirit of Wilde hovering here. More important, the beginning of that decade saw the composition of a cycle of eleven poems, all but two of which we know by their titles alone, which were collected under the heading “Byzantine Days”—Byzantium being a milieu much beloved of the Decadents, who viewed it, of course, from the Western, rather than Eastern, European point of view. Cavafy would come to reject these poems as “unsuitable to his characters”: only two survived the later purge of his early work. It would be some time before he came to appreciate fully just how well Byzantium would serve his artistic and intellectual needs.

      Indeed, by the end of the 1890s he was experiencing a profound intellectual and artistic crisis that had been precipitated by his engagement not with other poets, but with two historians. A series of reading notes on Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, made between 1893 (the year after he wrote the last of his “Byzantine Days” poems) and 1899, indicates a serious ongoing engagement with the great Enlightenment historian. The exasperated rejection of Gibbon’s disdainful view of Byzantium and Christianity that we find in those notes betrays the strong influence exerted by the contemporary Greek historian Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, whose History of the Greek Nation expounded a Romantic-nationalist vision of a coherent Greek identity continuing unbroken from ancient to Byzantine to modern times. It was Cavafy’s reading in these two historians that led him to reject his earlier, rather facile use of history as merely the vehicle for bejeweled verses in the Parnassian mode on “Ancient Days” (one of the thematic headings into which he’d group his poems: others were “The Beginnings of Christianity,” “Passions,” and “Prisons”), and inspired him to try to find a way to integrate History and Poetry in a more intellectually and aesthetically serious way.

      This intellectual crisis coincided with a devastating series of deaths of friends and family members throughout the same decade (his two closest friends, three of his six brothers, an uncle, his mother, and his maternal grandfather would all die between 1886 and 1902) and with what he obscurely referred to as a “crisis of lasciviousness,” which may or may not have had something to do with his intense attraction to Alexander Mavroudis. Together, these cerebral, emotional, and erotic upheavals culminated in a dramatic reappraisal of his life’s work thus far: the “Philosophical Scrutiny” of 1902–03, to which the poet, as he turned forty, ruthlessly subjected all of his poems written up to that point, both unpublished and published. (Hence the later appellation “Repudiated” for a group of poems that he’d already published by that time and subsequently disowned.) A contemporary note that he left reveals a writer at a moment that he recognizes as one of deep significance, even if he hasn’t yet seen his way through to his ultimate destination:

      After the already settled Emendatory Work, a philosophical scrutiny of my poems should be made.

      Flagrant inconsistencies, illogical possibilities, ridiculous exaggeration should certainly be corrected in the poems, and where the corrections cannot be made the poems should be sacrificed, retaining only any verses of such sacrificed poems as