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

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      I

      IN ONE SENSE, it was an unexceptional life—or, at least, no more exceptional or distinguished than the lives of certain other great poets, in whom the richness of the work stands in striking contrast to the relative uneventfulness of the life. (Emily Dickinson, say.) Constantine Petrou Cavafy—the Anglicized spelling of the Greek Kavafis was one that Cavafy and his family invariably used—was born in Alexandria in 1863, the youngest of seven surviving sons of parents whose families were not at all untypical of the far-flung Greek diaspora, with its hints of vanished empire. Their roots could be traced not only to the Phanar, the Greek community clustered around the Patriarchate in Constantinople, and to Nichori (Turkish Yeniköy) in the Upper Bosporus, but also to Caesarea, Antioch, and to Jassy, in present-day Moldavia. His father, Peter John Cavafy, was a partner in a flourishing family business devoted to corn and cotton export that eventually had offices in London and Liverpool as well as in several cities in Egypt; after moving from Constantinople to London, he finally settled in Alexandria, which was ruled at the time by the Muslim Khedive but had a large population of Europeans. There he would be considered one of the most important merchants in the mid-1850s—not coincidentally, a time when the Crimean War resulted in a steep rise in the price of grain. The poet’s mother, Haricleia Photiades, the daughter of a diamond merchant from Constantinople, counted an archbishop of Caesarea and a Prince of Samos among her relations. At the height of their wealth and social success in Alexandrian society, the parents of the future poet had, in addition to their other servants, an Italian coachman and an Egyptian groom. Said Pasha, the Egyptian viceroy, paid attentions to Haricleia that were, if we are to judge from the photographs of her, purely a matter of politeness; Peter John received a decoration from the Khedive at the opening of the Suez Canal.

      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:

      And yet I see clearly the harm and confusion that my actions produce upon my organism. I must, inflexibly, impose a limit on myself till 1 April, otherwise I shan’t be able to travel. I shall fall ill and how am I to cross the sea, and if I’m ill!, how am I to enjoy my journey? Last January I managed to control myself. My health got right at once, I had no more throbbing. 6 March 1897.

      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:

      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 СКАЧАТЬ