At a Slight Angle to the Universe

In mid-November 1915, more than a year into the Great War that claimed nearly a million British lives, E.M. Forster found himself on a ship from Marseille to Alexandria. At 36, he had no desire to become a soldier, yet he didn’t quite feel aligned with the ardent pacifism of his Bloomsbury friends back in London either. He dreamed, instead, of a third way.

His mother, Lily, suggested that he become an ambulance orderly in his beloved Italy—a role, incidentally, that suited the teenaged Hemingway. The idea brought on romantic fantasies: Forster had read with fervor about Walt Whitman’s nursing work during the American Civil War, which seemed to him an ideal and paradigmatic combination of the poetic ethos, the homosexual sensibility, and the fulfillment of one’s national duty. Dreaming of the work he might do in Italy, Forster wrote to his friend, Syed Ross Masood: “All one can do in this world of maniacs is to pick up the poor tortured broken people and try to mend them.” But Italy was not to be. Alexandria, where he was headed, represented a sort of fourth way: there would be no nursing nor mending, and he would be a civilian, not an enlisted man—but he would nevertheless perform a service and, at least for a time, have his romance. When he set foot on the shore of the city’s western harbor, he began his modest role as a searcher in the Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau of the Red Cross.

As it happens, the treasures Forster found in Alexandria were not those he sought. As one of his biographers put it, “there was something tragic, something hopeless and beautiful about the possibility of Alexandria”; a tragic beauty sustained by the city’s classical past as “the city of Alexander, of Antony and Cleopatra, adrift from Roman law, the city where the greatest library in the world had been built.” But the actual Alexandria in which Forster lived and breathed was drained of all this. He described the city as “something suspiciously like a funk-hole.”

Not the city of the Ptolemies, then, romantically ruined like Rome but a city whose history existed only in dreams, whose monuments had been scattered across the high seas, and whose soul lived on in the pen of a single man, a poet: C.P. Cavafy.

***

Cavafy did not cut an imposing figure. His bearing—along with his poetry, his philosophy, and his historiographical perspective—might best be described as askew. Or, to borrow Forster’s now-famous line, he appeared as “a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe.” In modern parlance, we would simply call Cavafy queer. This is meant in every sense of that term but especially in its now primary sense of homosexuality—a fact at the core of Cavafy’s effect on Forster’s worldview and his understanding of art. In the words of the critic Peter Mackridge, Alexandria’s modern poet laureate embodied and defended the idea that “‘perversion’ is ‘the source of greatness’” in art as in life.

Cavafy cultivated his homosexuality—its aesthetic potential and its epistemological power—in a city that, to his mind, had been the epicenter of gay sensuality going back to the time of Alexander. His poems were deeply erotic from the start, but after 1919, they unequivocally laid claim to homoeroticism. With his characteristic and dexterous irony, he often evokes such pleasures in the language reserved for them by the forbidding social mores: “aberrant pleasure” (“A young man of letters”), “deviant pleasure” (“Their Origin”), "deviant desire of the flesh” (“The Tobacconist’s Window”), etc. In each case, a sense of irony develops in proportion as the pleasures depicted in the poem are vindicated by their beauty, as in “The Tobacconist’s Window,” which ends in a scene of lovemaking worthy of Madame Bovary:

Their eyes met by chance,
and expressed timidly, hesitantly,
the deviant desire of their flesh.
Then, a few uneasy steps on the sidewalk—
until they smiled and slightly nodded.
 
And after that, the closed carriage…
the sensuous closeness of the bodies;
the joined hands, the joined lips.

Cavafy’s apartment was above a brothel whose activities he saw as an essential part of the balance between mind and flesh, art and eros, light and dark. “Where could I live better?” he wrote. “Below, the brothel caters for the flesh. And there is the church which forgives sin. And there is the hospital where we die.” Ostensibly wary of electricity costs, he was even known to light his apartment with meticulous, curatorial effort, arranging the candlesticks and lanterns in a way that obscured his face and illuminated the faces of his guests.

In this man, then, Forster found confirmed the erotic-political impulses he began to feel during his sojourn in the ancient city but struggled to put into words. Thinking about both the raging war and the heteronormative censoriousness of the society in which he was born, Forster pined in his journal for “a world that should not torture itself by organised and artificial horrors.” Like the subject of Cavafy’s “He Vows,” he found himself unable to deviate from his deviations:

He vows, every so often,    to start a better life.
But come the night                         with its own counsel,
its own compromises,        its own promises;
but come the night           with its own potent allure
of the body that desires and demands, he returns
once more, lost, to the same fateful pleasure.

The Alexandrian poet taught Forster what he had long known and longed to express: that the best society is homoerotic and that “the artist’s life has profited” from those pleasures that modern men have learned, by force, to hate within themselves. “Why not more of this?” Forster confided to his journal, recalling the nude man he had watched on an Alexandrian beach. “Why not a world like this?” These are the kinds of questions that Cavafy, over the course of his 70 years, did not allow to remain rhetorical.

To approach Cavafy this way—that is, to speak of him, his work, and his milieu from without, as it were, from the perspective of another, foreign, and largely unrelated writer—is the only way his poetry allows devoted readers to make sense of him. This is because he was queer in that other sense of the term: odd, aslant, oblique. “Cavafy writes about geographical, historical, and human peripheries,” Mackridge explains. Writing of the Hellenistic period, for example, Cavafy gives readers Alexandria and Seleucia rather than Athens and Sparta; rather than Rome, he offers Byzantium. He favored the impacts of events to the events themselves and preferred that the lives of great men and the catalog of their deeds be voiced from without, by the lover’s lips, the historian’s quill, the tombstone’s epitaph rather than from the supposed objectivity of historical record. If Cavafy were to speak of his own life, he would no doubt make of himself a rumor.

***

Cavafy’s origins may have overdetermined his peripheral perspective. His parents and ancestors were Constantinopolitan Greeks, known among the Ottomans as rūm millet, descended from the Eastern Orthodox inhabitants of Byzantium. Cavafy was particularly attached to the mythos of this Byzantine past, in which Hellenic culture was once not only central but also unifying, as in his poem “Philhellene,” about the engraving of the sovereign’s face upon a coin (“Above all, I bid you pay attention / … / that after the words ‘King’ and ‘Saviour’ / be engraved in elegant lettering: ‘Philhellene.’”). The rūm millet were a tolerated minority in Constantinople but remained culturally, politically, and socially peripheral under the empire. To confuse matters further, Cavafy’s father, a highly successful importer-exporter, invested considerable capital into setting up a branch of his family business in England and obtaining British citizenship, partly anchoring his family to yet another nation and linguistic tradition in which they would always, in some sense, be strangers.

Cavafy was born Konstantinos (or Constantine) Petrou Kavafis in Alexandria in 1863. The Egypt of that time was forged by the governorate of Muhammed Ali Pasha, who had managed, via warfare, to wrest from the sultan virtual autonomy for Egypt. Prior to 1805, when Muhammed Ali was named Wāli of Egypt, hardly any people of European origin lived there; by his death in 1849, he had encouraged immigration and cosmopolitanism to such an extent that more than one-fifth of Alexandrians were foreign nationals. He had also constructed the Mahmoudia Canal, which reconnected the city with the Nile and dramatically expanded Egyptian trade with the rest of the Mediterranean. Alexandria was therefore an ideal place for Cavafy’s father to set up his business.

But tragedy intervened. His father died in 1870, and Cavafy’s mother took him and his brothers to Liverpool, where they had business connections, and Cavafy enrolled in school. Within a few years, the business in England ran up debts, and the family was forced to return to Alexandria, only to be uprooted once more during the Anglo-Egyptian War of 1882. The British Empire, eager to control the port city that had more or less eluded it since slipping from French hands during the Napoleonic Wars, brought its iron fist down on an uprising of Egyptian nationalists. The British fleet bombarded the city’s harbors, laying waste to many buildings, including Cavafy’s family home. Before the conflict reached its fever pitch, Cavafy’s mother took the family to Constantinople, where they remained for the better part of three years.

Despite living through the kind of sociopolitical tumult that rivaled the history he studied so thoroughly, Cavafy rarely wrote about the present, except as the banal background—the cafés he sat in, the rooms he made love in—to his meditations on eros and death. He once articulated the key themes of his work: “Cavafy … has three areas—the philosophical (or the area of thought), the historical, and the hedonic (or sensual).” The consensus among Cavafy scholars is that these three “areas” do a more or less good job of cataloging his oeuvre, although such division can also obfuscate fundamental aspects of his canon.

Cavafy’s poetry is, above all, belated—late to all that has happened and all that will. It sees the death in all life, the end in all beginnings, the loss in every gain but also experiences them, often before the fact. In one of his most celebrated early poems, “The God Abandons Antony,” set in 30 BC, the speaker soothes Antony just before his death and the fall of Alexandria as a procession passes in bacchic celebration beneath his window and out toward the city gates—a phenomenon said to indicate that Dionysus had forsaken Antony.

When suddenly, at the midnight hour
an invisible company is heard going past,
with exquisite music, with voices—
your fate that’s giving in now, your deeds
that failed, your life’s plans that proved to be
all illusions, do not needlessly lament.
As one long since prepared, as one courageous,
bid farewell to the Alexandria that’s leaving.

All things and beings contain within them their own fate, which “gives in” at one moment or another. Cavafy’s peculiar poetic vision, expressed here in what might be called his preferred didactic mode, as advice to a historical figure of immense importance, sees through to the fate immanent in all humans. From this perspective, the knowing one, to fight or resist or rue the giving in of fate is to “needlessly lament,” a historical vice of the worst kind. Courage, on the other hand, is embodied by those who seek to practice the Cavafian vision for themselves and are thus “long since prepared” for what is to pass.

Above all, don’t be misled, don’t say it was
a dream, that your ears deceived you;
don’t deign to foster such vain hopes.
As one long since prepared, as one courageous,
as befits you who were deemed worthy of such a city,
move with steady steps toward the window
and listen with deepest feeling, yet not
with a coward’s entreaties and complaints,
listen as an ultimate delight to the sounds,
to the exquisite instruments of the mystical company,
and bid farewell to the Alexandria you are losing.

And as with one’s vision, so too with one’s ear: the belated hero, like the belated poet, will, when prepared for the giving in of fate, learn to appreciate and even take “ultimate delight” in its music, its “exquisite instruments.”

Edward Said found in Cavafy the paradigm of “late style,” which often manifests toward the end of a great artist’s life. It’s not that the thought of death leads to a new disposition in one’s art, but rather, imbued with a sense of mortality, the artist attains “a peculiar amalgam of subjectivity and convention” and attempts to “cast off the appearance of art” by breaking and taking leave of certain cherished forms. In Adorno’s formulation, “death is imposed only on created beings, not on works of art, and thus it has appeared in art only in a refracted mode, as allegory. …”

Deepening these reflections, Said writes that late style

has the power to render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradiction between them. What holds them in tension, as equal forces straining in opposite directions, is the artist’s mature subjectivity, stripped of hubris and pomposity, unashamed either of its fallibility or of the modest assurance it has gained as a result of age and exile.

Cavafy goes one step further, demonstrating that lateness can develop independent of the artist’s age or indeed of his or her impending death. When one is as sensitive to historical time as Cavafy was, one is always already old, aged, seeing the frayed edges of all things beyond which death lies black and endless.

The ironic distance that Cavafy’s speakers maintain with respect to their subjects—as in his many Browning-esque dramatic monologues—manifests the “disenchantment and pleasure” that he holds in tension across his poetry. Thus, Antony has to be coaxed out of his present-tense, blinkered frustrations and into the higher-order understanding of his own inexorable fate, for which he has long since prepared. In “Ithaka,” Odysseus, for his turn, is also spoken to from this belated vantage, which would foreclose the future as the domain of the unknown and of adventure and recast it as already past, already learned from:

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

The Cavafian voice, wise and wary of a youthful fondness for excitement, seeks to unmake the dramatic engine that powers The Odyssey: it is Odysseus’s haste to get home, to see Penelope and Telemachus and his homeland once more, that, when blocked by circumstance, fires the thrill of Homer’s epic. “Don’t hurry the journey at all,” the speaker tells him; savor it, understand it—there would be no epic if Odysseus harbored such a world view.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
 
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

By the poem’s close, readers see to what extent the meaning of Odysseus’s lodestar has been transformed. Ithaca is not the end but the origin, the primary mover. When the end does finally come, she will not be there as Odysseus hopes to find her. She will be “poor,” and she will be empty, having already fulfilled her function. If Odysseus, like Antony, can bring himself to listen to this wisdom, he will loose his Ithaca of its particularity and grasp it as a kind of thing, a type of impulse, a genre of experience—one of many “Ithacas” that form the bedrock for all of life’s longing, striving, and desiring.

In his sublime negative capability, Cavafy holds not only disenchantment and pleasure but also fantasy and reality, in productive tension, without ever collapsing one into the other. It is a lesson learned in the school of “aberrant” desires: the greatest pleasure but also the most frenetic agitation lies in the space between arousal and fulfillment. Knowing this to be the condition of Eros and knowing too, as Mackridge puts it, that “his particular artistic sensibility [was] created by homoerotic desire,” Cavafy abstracts this principle into a general, aesthetic, and philosophical one: the poem serves as the third point in the triangulation of fantasy and reality. The first five stanzas of the dialogic “Waiting for the Barbarians” presents a call-and-response scheme in which the curious questioner is repeatedly assured that the reason for the events he is witnessing—“What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?”—is the impending arrival of the barbarians at the city gates. But when the barbarians fail to arrive, and the people are confused (“How serious people’s faces have become”), the questioner is left without a reliable structure, an explanatory narrative, for the way of the world in which he lives. In the final couplet, a speaker, who appears to be neither the questioner nor the respondent, laments the loss of an essential fiction, the dissolution of a fantasy: “Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? / Those people were a kind of solution.”

In “The City,” perhaps Cavafy’s most famous early poem, the dialectical tension between dream and matter is at its greatest. The speaker begins by ventriloquizing his addressee:

You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried like something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”

Readers can only sympathize with this reported comment, especially as it is attributed to “you,” which might just as well be readers. The dream of a better place, a fresh start, a new life unburdened by destiny and unblackened by the ruins of past mistakes is as old as the human heart. It might be the only thing keeping “you” buoyed upon the dark waters of despair. Yet the speaker will not have it:

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You’ll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses.
You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.
Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.

Here, then, the swift hammer of reality. But are readers to trust it only because it comes with the voice of authority—this speech is not reported, but direct—and comes last? For readers of Cavafy, this is too bleak a vision to embrace without skepticism. The poem brings us both poles, fantasy and reality, for a reason: always and everywhere, they come together.

***

Cavafy never published a book of poetry in his lifetime, preferring instead to place select poems on their own or in collections with other poets. These he often gave away or sent to friends and peers, not all of them artists, whom he believed would best understand what he had written. Though he wrote with an audience in mind, his was so restricted and so dependent upon the individual poem that he never took the steps needed to reach a broader public.

This isn’t to say that he abhorred publicity, a quality critics love to see in their favorite geniuses. On the contrary, he often provided journalists seeking an interview with a third-person critical assessment of his work, as if written by someone else. (“Cavafy, in my opinion, is an ultra-modern poet,” one of these claims, “a poet of the future generations.”) But he seemed to want the best of both worlds: the perfect understanding of an ideal audience and the acclaim due a legendary poet. This predisposed him to the assumption that no one, on first reading, really grasped his work. In a memorable scene recorded by Forster 30 years after the fact, Cavafy tells the English writer,

“you could never understand my poetry, my dear Forster, never.” A poem is produced—“The God Abandons Antony”—and I detect some coincidences between its Greek and public school Greek. Cavafy is amazed. “Oh, but this is good, my dear Forster, this is very good indeed,” and he raises his hand, and takes over, and leads me through.

Cavafy’s mistrust of his own readers routinely gave way to sudden delight in just this way. What Forster noticed in “The God Abandons Antony,” in particular, was one of Cavafy’s proudest innovations, which only decades of scholarship has managed to properly esteem. Cavafy’s use of Greek was a novel hybridization of two literary variations that had developed over the course of the 19th century: katharevousa, the official, high-literary Greek that aimed to preserve some of the ancient Greek vocabulary and grammar in modern Greek writing and demotic Greek, the modern language Greeks used in their everyday lives. Mixing the two allowed Cavafy to generate new ambiguities in his lyrics. For instance, as Mackridge explains, katharevousa treats every vowel sound as a unique syllable, whereas demotic Greek tends to merge two adjacent vowels into a single syllable—in this way, a single line containing one or more adjacent vowels can be metrically shorter or longer depending on the mode of pronunciation used, neither one being resolvable with the other.

Cavafy’s lifestyle was probably ill-fitting for a writer keen on modernizing the poetry of his linguistic tradition. He did not spend his days tramping around the back alleys of Alexandria, observing the rogues and taking signs for wonders. He was, in the colorful words of scholar Wendy Moffat, “a clerk for the government office improbably named the Third Circle of Irrigation.” There he “cultivated an exquisite sloth,” piling his desk with papers to give the impression that he was busy, all the while tinkering away at his verses in full view of the colleagues with whom he shared an office. For Cavafy, the Third Circle of Irrigation might well have been the counterforce in the negative capability of his life, which required the coexistence of nighttime deviance and daytime compliance for the generation of his poetry. 

More to the point, though Cavafy imbibed the works of the French Symbolists and the Victorian poets, he had no London to spur him on, no Paris to intoxicate his spirit. The Alexandria of his time was shorn of its ruins, and thus of the visible signs of its past. The city’s most important twin monuments, Cleopatra’s Needles, had stood proudly in the Caesarium there for nearly two millennia before being gifted to the United Kingdom in 1819 and to the United States in 1877, respectively. Muhammed Ali’s grandson, Isma’il Pasha, who had incurred serious debts on Egypt’s behalf and who was looking to secure good relations with two of the world’s great powers, oversaw the dispatching of the Needles to London in 1877 and to New York in 1881. (The British, while transporting their Needle to London by sea, abandoned it off the coast of Spain after encountering powerful winds; the recovery mission sent to salvage the obelisk led to the deaths of six crewmen.)

Cavafy’s Alexandria could not propel him to transcendence. He could not, like Lord Byron’s Manfred, stumble upon some Colosseum that would revive the past upon the stones of the present in a glorious hallucination. Alexandria offered Cavafy pleasures, bureaucracy, fine weather, and not much else. The poet who would sing her history would have to revive her monuments otherwise, belatedly.

***

As Cavafy entered his twilight years, the sense of death at the edge of his work began to close in. Specifically, his poems of that time brood over the cruel and sudden severance that death effectuates. For Cavafy, when a great person or a great period passes, it is as if that which had been universal contracts suddenly into the local, the particular, even the infinitesimal—at risk of being cloistered from posterity. One of his latest and longest poems, “Myres: Alexandria, A.D. 340,” tackles this conundrum in a fictitious scene set during the tumultuous civil war between the sons of Constantine the Great and the tense religious conflict between Orthodox Christianity and Arianism. “When I learned of the misfortune, that Myres was dead,” the speaker begins, “I paid a visit to his house, though I avoid / going into the homes of the Christians, / especially in times of mournings or feasts.” The speaker, having known Myres as a great friend who “lived precisely as we did” and “never spoke of his religion,” finds that death has erected a barrier between himself and his comrade. The Christian ritual being performed for Myres in his home alienates the pagan from the man who, suddenly, has retreated, or been clawed back into his peculiarities, his religion, his creed:

And suddenly a queer impression
seized me. I had the vague feeling
that Myres was leaving my side;
I felt that he was united, a Christian,
with his own people, and I was becoming
a stranger, a total stranger; I also sensed
a doubt approaching me; perhaps I had been deluded
by my own passion, and I had always been a stranger to
    him—.
I flew out of their horrible house,
I left quickly before the memory of Myres should be
snatched away, should be altered by their Christianity.

In the 90 years since his death (and the 160 since his birth), Cavafy has been spared the fate of a Myres, of one de-universalized within the sands of time, by the steady swell of scholarship devoted to his canon of 154 poems. They were collected in a single volume for the first time in 1935 and have since been translated into English, collectively, four times—he is the only Greek poet to enjoy such an honor. Cavafy’s acolytes, including Lawrence Durrell, whose Alexandria Quartet (1957–60) is entirely haunted by “the old poet of the city,” memorialize him not as a poet of his time but as a bard for a lost age or else a coming one—a Zarathustra wise enough to be right and untimely enough to be, as he remains, a rumor.

“Such a writer can never be popular,” Forster wrote. “He flies both too slowly and too high.” He was right about that, if in the word popular readers also hear the word timely; and he was right in concluding the first essay in English devoted to the poet with these words: “Which is better—the world or seclusion? Cavafy, who has tried both, can’t say. But so much is certain—either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.”