Complete Poems, by C.P. Cavafy - review

Constantine Cavafy was a poet who fascinated English novelists, and remained a presence in English fiction long after his death in 1933. When E.M. Forster lived in Alexandria during the first world war, he got to know Cavafy — and essays, a celebrated exchange of letters and a guidebook by Forster resulted. Cavafy haunts Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, which shares with the poet an aesthetic of the transfixed gaze, of remote history running under everything. Robert Liddell wrote a restrained, elegant life of the poet — oddly dismissed by this translator, Daniel Mendelsohn, as ‘workmanlike.’ More hauntingly, Liddell wrote a novel, not apparently known to Mendelsohn at all, in which Cavafy lives on into the second world war, developing a fixation for Canadian airmen. Unreal City is sceptical about Cavafy: it is the ironic English gaze directed towards a rapturous, unmoving, pretentious, lyric presence. Liddell clearly found his subject infuriating, but impossible to ignore.

I rather agree. Cavafy’s hieratic exclamations about the forgotten greatness of Greece, his cryptic little poems about obscure corners of Byzantine history, about kisses and gazes showered in the past upon lost and beautiful men — all this is potentially infuriating. Cavafy could never have written a novel. His sensibility depends on the thing rhapsodised over not moving. It is impossible to imagine any of those beautiful men getting up and saying anything in response. As soon as you think of a real person as the possessor of ‘the beauty of unusual allures/with those flawless lips of his that bring/pleasure to the body that it cherishes/with those flawless limbs of his, made for beds/called shameless by the commonplace morality’ (from one of the weaker poems), you have to admit that it would quickly exhaust the subject to be adored like this.

Cavafy, in my view, had a temperament not far from that of a rapist — he doesn’t seem to care much what his adored ones think of him, and it is beyond their capacity to surprise other than by getting themselves killed.