"The essential difference between the historian and the poet is that one tells us what did happen and the other what ought to happen”
--The Poetics of Aristotle
The Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, born in 1863 in Alexandria, Egypt where he died on his seventieth birthday, preferred to leave his hometown only in his mind. And when he did travel, it was to lands nearby but of the distant past- to write poems about people both real and imaginary ("of historical possibility", as Cavafy called them) in ancient Sparta, Sidon, Antioch, Magnesia, and other Greek colonies-Cyrene, Sinope, and Commagene- even closer to the edge where classical civilization met the barbarians- places all stamped with the fading mark of Hellenism. Yet it was his own town, Alexandria, the long tarnished jewel of the Mediterranean, that inspired some of his greatest poems- those about himself.
Marguerite Yourcenar, the French author of the historically accurate fiction Memoirs of Hadrian, and herself no stranger to entering the mind of real people from antiquity, wrote that Cavafy was "one of the greatest poets, certainly the subtlest, perhaps the most modem, though sustained more than any other by the inexhaustible substance of the past." His poems, she said, created "a labyrinth in which silence and avowal, text and commentary, emotion and irony, voice and echo inextricably mingle, and in which disguise becomes an aspect of nakedness."
Cavafy called himself a poietes historikos, a Greek neologism borrowed from Aristotle that means "a poet with the mind of an historian". Yet as he referred to himself, using the adjective rather than the substantive, he was Greek, not a Greek, feeling his culture was an attribute, not an essence. He was a Hellene, a man of Greek language and shared history, but not a native son of Greece. His family name came from a Turkish word for shoemaker, and his family's most distant roots may have sprung from the Persian-Anatolian frontier.
As the poem Going Back Home from Greece, about an ancient Greek glad to be leaving mainland Greece behind for what he considered the more vibrant colonies of Asia and Africa, where cultures and peoples freely mixed, puts it, "It’s time we accepted the truth:/We are Greeks also-what else are we?-/but with Asiatic affectations and feelings/sometimes alien from Hellenism…/..We must not be ashamed/of the Syrian and Egyptian blood in our veins;/we should really honor it, take pride in it."
In Egypt, he was self-consciously Greek, yet among Alexandria's prosperous Greek community of traders and industrialists, he was self-consciously an outsider, just as one critic has called him "a connoisseur of history's outcasts." His father's cotton business had gone bankrupt, so requiring him to work as a clerk and translator in the Ministry of Irrigation's district office known as the Third Circle, which brings to mind more Dante's infernal place for gluttons than it does the waterworks headquarters for the western Nile Delta.
Located, appropriately, over the Gran Trianon, Alexandria's finest and still thriving pastry shop, Cavafy walked to his work at the Third Circle every day for thirty years. His boss there called him "a trifle over-deliberate", because of his fussy corrections of the punctuation of incoming English correspondence- a description which might apply equally well to his poetry and to his person itself.
The English writer E. M. Forster, who befriended Cavafy while stationed in Alexandria in WW I, called him "a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe...who may be prevailed upon to begin a sentence- an immense complicated yet shapely sentence, full of parentheses that never get mixed up and of reservations that really do reserve...which one feels stands also at a slight angle to the universe."
That "slight angle to the universe" also might have involved Cavafy's speaking voice, which carried a faint British accent acquired from a childhood in Liverpool when his father's business was thriving, as well as his sexual orientation, about which he was quite open. As the literary critic Peter Bien wrote of Cavafy, "he merely wrote as he spoke- the mixed city argot of one who indulged in palimpsests by day and pederasts by night."
Cavafy was unmarried and lived with his widowed mother until he was 36 years old, and at her death moved to a flat on Rue Lepsius, just above a ground-floor brothel with a balcony view of St. Saba Greek Church and hospital. "Where could I live better?" he asked a friend. "Below, the prostitutes cater for the flesh. And there is the church which forgives sin. And there is the hospital where we die."
The Trianon still has a private bar, shielded from the general public and adorned with a mural of undressed nymphs. As Cavafy put in the mouth of a fellow Alexandrian Greek 1700 years before his own time, in the poem From the School of the Famous Philosopher, "He began to haunt/the corrupt houses of Alexandria,/every secret den of debauchery."
Alexandria had always a reputation for a no-questions-asked, live-and-let live urbanity. Plutarch wrote of how Anthony followed Cleopatra there "to spend his days like a boy, in play and diversion, fooling around and squandering away time...the Alexandrians liked it all well enough, and joined in good nature in his frolic and play, saying they were much obliged to Anthony for acting his tragic parts in Rome and keeping his comedy for them." The novelist Lawrence Durrell, author of The Alexandria Quartet, four novels that examine all possible romantic entanglements there, called Alexandria a city with "five races, five languages..and more than five sexes."
The city was metaphorically failing and falling, as well as sinking literally into the sea- as it has been for centuries. Cavafy found many equivalencies to this physical decrepitude in both his own life and in history- as read in the decline of his own morals, the decline of his family's fortune, the decline of the city's Greek population, the decline of Hellenism vis-a-vis Rome, the decline of Byzantium vis-a vis Islam, the decline of proto-Egyptian nationalism vis-a-vis British occupation, and indeed in the apparent decline of Western Civilization during the awful battles of World War I.
The first lines of Cavafy’s unpublished poem Exiles, set in the 9th Century AD when Alexandria had already seen two centuries of Arab occupation and was on its way to becoming nothing more than a neglected fishing village, speaks to this decay that was already lying heavily upon its past grandeur. "It goes on being Alexandria still. Just walk a bit/along the straight road that ends at the Hippodrome/and you will see palaces and monuments that will amaze you./Whatever war damage it has suffered/however much smaller it has become/it is still a wonderful city."
As Forster wrote with some humor of what was left to modem Alexandria, its "material prosperity based on cotton, onions, and eggs seems assured, but little progress can be discerned in other directions, and neither the Pharos of Sostratus nor the Idylls of Theocratus nor the Enneads of Plotinus are likely to have future rivals."
When Forster further noted that kings, emperors, and patriarchs had once trod the ground between Cavafy’s office and his flat, he did not have to add that such grandeur would never return. As the Alexandria-born Sephardic Jew Andre Aciman, author of the memoir Out of Egypt, wrote when he returned there more recently, "To those who asked, I said I went back to touch and breathe the past again, to walk in shoes I hadn't worn in years. This, after all, was what everyone said when they returned from Alexandria- the walk down Memory Lane, the visit to the old house, the knocking on doors that history had sealed off but might pry open again."
Cavafy felt himself more Alexandrian than Greek, yet fiercely proud of his mother tongue. As a friend said of him, "to be understood in Alexandria and tolerated in Athens was the extent of his ambition." Indeed, it was in Athens where, on a visit near the end of his life, he underwent a tracheotomy for his throat cancer which ended his ability to speak. He was a snob about the Greek tongue rather than about Greek soil and water. A translator of Shakespeare, he nevertheless pitied the great playwright for having to "live outside the walls of Greek speech."
The "walls of Greek speech" were intimidating to outsiders even at the height of Hellenism. As he wrote in the poem A Prince of Western Libya, about a Hellenized pretender from some barbaric tribe west of Alexandria who had come to the city to seek its honors, "and all the time he was terrified he would spoil/his reasonably good image/by coming out with barbaric howlers in Greek/and the Alexandrians in their usual way,/would make fun of him, vile people that they are."
In his poem Theater of Sidon (400 B.C.), he wrote, "I sometimes compose highly audacious verses in Greek/and these I circulate- surreptitiously of course./O gods, may these puritans who prattle on about morals/never see those verses about an exceptional kind of sexual pleasure." Cavafy circulated his verses just the same, privately printed and given as gifts in small editions to friends. He never wanted his unsold books to be gathering dust in a bookstore, or to be picked over by those who did not wish him well. The poems were published commercially only after his death.
Forster's comment that "the civilization Cavafy respected was a bastardy in which the Greek strain prevailed...if the strain died out- never mind: it had done its work" is perfectly echoed in his poem The City. "You said: I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,/find another city better than this one.../Don’t hope for things elsewhere/there is no ship for you, there is no road./As you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,/you’ve destroyed it everywhere else in the world.”
Marguerite Yourcenar astutely said, "Cavafy may have been well served by the luck which granted him a city bereft of glamour and the melancholy of ruins. For him, the past lives new..." As his biographer Liddell wrote, in a comment that captured perfectly his yearning to escape into time past, "Cavafy regarded the present with the same indifference and the same cynical disbelief as the past, but with much less interest, for it lacked coins, inscriptions, and historians." And as Cavafy himself wrote, "when we say "time", we mean ourselves. Most abstractions are merely pseudonyms for ourselves."
Yet he was a true son of Alexandria, who saw that city as the cultural mixing pot, with Greek culture as its powerful stir rod, that it once and always had been, and still in his day was, before Nasser's socialist revolution made its Italians, Jews, Armenians,. and his fellow Greeks feel so unwelcome that they were forced to give up their own history there and leave forever.
As he wrote in the poem The Glories of the Ptolemies, speaking in the voice of a Lagid, or descendant of Lagus, father of Ptolemy I, "I’m Lagides, king, absolute master/(through my power and wealth) of sensual pleasure/There’s no Macedonian, no barbarian, equal to me/or even approaching me. The son of Selefkos/is really a joke with his cheap lechery/but if you are looking for other things, note this too:/my city’s the greatest preceptor, queen of the Greek world,/genius of all knowledge, of all art.”
Cavafy’s library contained Edward Gibbons' The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a work that aimed to put his own country's present day firmly in the perspective of the classical past- something that Cavafy also aimed for, as well as an edition of The Greek Anthology, a collection of some 8,000 epigrams from classical and Byzantine times. The anthology's choicest poems, all short, use erotic conventions and a conversational tone to make casual observations about life and love.
By far the anthology's best known poet was Callimachus (300-240 BC) a scribe in Alexandria's library, who broke with the Greek epic tradition- "big book big bore" he once said- to write with brutal honesty about his love life ("sleep cold at someone's door, as shivering, I lie tonight at yours" and "peripatetic sex partners tum me off. I do not drink from public fountains, can't stand anything out in the open").
Cavafy and Callimachus make a matching pair of self-castigating lovers, one at the end of Alexandria’s Greek history, as is evident in his poem He Swears, "He swears every now and then to begin a better life/But when night comes with its own counsel,/its own compromises and prospects-/when night comes with its own power/of a body that needs and demands,/he goes back, lost, to the same fatal pleasure.”
A friend said, "History provided him with a museum of safe and useful masks- Cavafy made his perversion travel through history, although sometimes he forgot it in favor of history itself." Many of his most touching poems were indeed masked by history, as in Tomb of Iasis, an epigraph on an imaginary Greek youth's tomb from classical times- "But from being considered so often a Narcissus and Hermes/excess wore me out, killed me. Traveller,/if you’re an Alexandrian, you won’t blame me./You know the pace of our life- its fever, its unsurpassable sensuality.
It was not uncommon for Cavafy, the casual observer of everyday life, to meet that other Cavafy, the erudite student of classical history in one and the same poem. In his poem In Alexandria, in 31 BC, just as in a painting by Pieter Brueghel in which a common man witnesses history as it unfolds without recognizing its significance, the subject is how the false news of Anthony's victory at the Battle of Actium planted by a palace propagandist, proceeds to race through Alexandria's uneducated populace.
"From his village near the outskirts of town,/still dust covered from his journey in/the peddler arrives. And “Incense”! “Gum”!/”The best olive oil”! “Perfume for your hair”!/he hawks through the streets. But with all the hubbub,/the music, the parades, who can hear him?/The crowd shoves him, drags him along, knocks him around./And when he asks, now totally confused, “What’s going on here”?/someone tosses him too the huge palace lie/that Anthony is winning in Greece.”.
Actium of course marked the beginning of the end for Ptolemaic Egypt, just before the battle's victor Octavius Caesar approached Alexandria and Cleopatra, the city's last Greek sovereign, took her own life. But just before Cleopatra's fatal last act, another one played out, a perhaps imagined scene first recorded by Plutarch one hundred years after the fact, in which Anthony thought he heard a band of Dionysian musicians leaving Alexandria, which to him symbolized his own death.
In the poem The God Abandons Anthony, Cavafy imagines how Anthony, just as any man, might finally come face to face with earthly failure- "your luck that’s failing now, work gone wrong, your plans all proving deceptive"- and yet accept his fate with courage , even that worst fate of all, of having to give up the city he loves most.
"As one long prepared, and graced with courage,/ as is right for you who were given this kind of city/say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving/go firmly to the window/ and listen with great emotion, but not/with the whining, the pleas of a coward/listen-your final delectation-to the voices,/to the exquisite music of that strange procession,/and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.”
Yet Cavafy the ironist is not content to leave off his subject with its honor intact. A second poem, In a Township of Asia Minor, tells of how the fawning townspeople of some small town in the wilds of Asia Minor are quick to rewrite a triumphal inscription to commemorate Actium's victor. When the news arrives that it is Octavius and not Anthony- it is not important either way to them, for either name fits in the space they have allowed. Greek, Cavafy seems to say, is indeed the language of empty praise and shallow Hellenism, as the final inscription shows- "To the most glorious victor, matchless in his military ventures,/prodigious in his political operations…/in the Greek language, in both verse and prose/in the Greek language, the vehicle of fame./et cetera, et cetera, it all fits brilliantly.”
Nikos Kazantzakis, author of the novel Zorba the Greek, said that such cynicism about the use of language, along his absolute mastery over it, would have qualified Cavafis as "a 15th Century Florentine, a cardinal, a secret advisor to the Pope, negotiating the most diabolic, intricate and scandalous affairs."
Indeed, the city life of Alexandria, through all its ups and downs, must be understood both through the lens of history and through the lens of language. The poem Alexandrian Kings contains a perfectly apt verse about this. "And the Alexandrians thronged to the festival/full of enthusiasm, and shouted acclamations/in Greek, in Egyptian, and some in Hebrew,/charmed by the lovely spectacle-/though they knew of course what all this was worth,/what empty words they really were, these kingships.”
"The situation of Alexandria is most curious. To understand it, we must go back many thousand years," wrote Forster. And Cavafy himself echoed this long view of history, with an additional twist of irony, when he wrote, "To me, the immediate impression is never a starting point for work. The impression has got to age, has got to falsify itself with time, without my having to falsify it myself."
The poem that Cavafy is most known for today, partly because it was read at the funeral of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, is Ithaka, and offers a kind of philosophy to Odysseus and all others like him, people in quest of home or a similar goal- either at the end of the road or the end of their life. In simple terms, this philosophy might be- "it is the journey and not the destination that matters".
Cavafy said it like this, "As you set out for Ithaka/hope the voyage is a long one,/full of adventure, full of discovery./May there be many a summer morning when,/with what pleasure, what joy,/you come into harbors seen for the first time:../and may you visit many Egyptian cities/to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars./Keep Ithaka always in your mind./Arriving there is what you are destined for./But do not hurry the journey at all./Better if it lasts for years,/so you are old by the time you reach the island,/wealthy with all you have gained on the way,/not expecting Ithaka to make you rich./Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey./Without her you would not have set out./She has nothing left to give you now'“.