Alexandrian Delights: Rereading Cavafy
I first encountered Cavafy when I was in high school. Well, not actually Cavafy, which is how he is known in the English-speaking world, but Konstantinos P. Cavafis (1863-1933), the German transliteration of his Greek name. And what I encountered was only a handful of poems. They were included in a tattered paperback, Museum der Modernen Poesie, the “Museum of Modern Poetry,” edited by the German poet and critic Hans Magnus Enzensberger, which I randomly pulled from my father’s bookshelves one afternoon more than 40 years ago.
I fell in love with that little volume. It wasn’t in great shape, the result of poor production quality and much use. The protective plastic film on the book’s cover was peeling, and when I accidentally dropped it, several pages fell out, fluttering to the floor like leaves from a dying tree. What was inside, however, was anything but dead. Enzensberger’s anthology was, I realized, not your average kind of “museum” — not a dusty repository of old things but a gathering of living voices, as varied and colorful as the century they represented. Among these voices, Cavafy’s stood out: insistent, irreverent, seductive, and a tad fussy, a Greek Walt Whitman without the posturing and grandstanding. Maybe it was the poet’s name that appealed to me, too, suggesting sun-touched beaches and craggy rocks somewhere in Greece and an ocean as blue as the sky above it.
To my surprise, the Cavafy poems dispersed throughout the volume were not about such things at all. Cavafy’s world was an interior one, focused on inner states, intense feelings, illicit desires. Although I had four years of Ancient Greek in school, I knew little about the difference between the demotic and purist registers in modern Greek, and how Cavafy would blend, in the same poem, formal and colloquial language. Helmut von Steinen, Cavafy’s early German translator, preferred the grandiose over the plain-spoken Cavafy; he made all his poems sound as if they’d been composed by Homer when he was taking breaks from the Iliad. Yet some of Cavafy’s lines stuck with me through several decades. There was, for example, that somber passage from the poem “Die Stadt” (“The City”): “Denk nicht, dass Du in neuem Raum, dass du in andere Meere gingst / Die Stadt wird ziehn deinen Zug.” In my translation of von Steinen’s translation: “Think not that you can wander to new spaces, other oceans / That city will trail you.” Cavafy’s poem was an earlier, less mordant version of another poem I admired then, the German poet Gottfried Benn’s ironically titled diatribe “Reisen” (Travel) from 1950, which ended with the devastating observation that there was only one thing one could do in life: “bleiben und stille bewahren / Das sich umgrenzende Ich.” Stay put and silently guard / The always solitary self.
Alexandria, “A Native Market.” Ca. 1900. Collection of Christoph Irmscher
The city in Cavafy’s poem was, of course, his native Alexandria, that bustling port at the nexus of Europe, Asia, and Africa, a true melting pot as well as, for some, a prison. Cavafy spent 30 years toiling there as a clerk in the Public Works Office, dreaming about other places and other times, writing his poems at night, in coffee shops, seedy backstreet rooms, or in his book-filled apartment at 10 Rue Lepsius, in the old Greek quarter. His Alexandria was, to me, a place more fantastical than real. But that changed, dramatically, a few years ago, when, after my mother’s death, I inherited a large cache of letters written by my great-grandmother Ida von Pechmann. My heart nearly skipped a beat the day when I looked at the first packet of letters, written between January and December 1889, and realized they were sent from Alexandria. Ida was in Cavafy’s city when he was there, too! Soon I was reading Cavafy again, this time in English, in Rae Dalven’s spare but effective translations, which allowed me to follow the Greek original. If von Steinen had made Cavafy sound as if he were writing for a poetry contest, Dalven gave his lines the simplicity of statements of clinical fact. How different “The City” sounded in her rendition: “You will find no new lands, you will find no other seas. / The city will follow you.” And now, even though I hadn’t been there myself, it was following me, too.
Great-grandmother Ida von Pechmann
The Cavafys and the Muellers (my mother’s family) might have moved in some of the same circles. Like Peter Cavafy, the poet’s father, my great-great grandfather, Ludwig Thomas Mueller, an immigrant from rural Bavaria, exported Egyptian cotton to Europe. Unlike Peter Cavafy, his company endured. Unlike my great-grandfather, the elder Cavafy was not successful. He died when little Konstantinos was only seven, leaving a mountain of unpaid bills. Konstantinos was the youngest of nine children; two died in infancy, not a rare occurrence in Alexandria, where epidemics often went unchecked. Ludwig Thomas Mueller had nine children, too, as well as one illegitimate daughter, who ended up marrying a Maharajah (a story for another occasion). Five made it to adulthood; the oldest was my great-grandfather Wilhelm Alexander, whom his Maltese-British mother liked to call Willy and who reluctantly joined his father’s firm. In 1888, during one of Willy’s frequent trips to Munich, he met and married my great-grandmother, the 28-year-old Ida von Pechmann — a veritable baroness, though without the wealth and arrogance. Following a husband she barely knew to a part of the world she knew even less was Ida’s way of both respecting convention (she did get married, after all) and thumbing her nose at it. If Cavafy poured his sorrows into his poems, which he circulated privately, Ida did a similar thing with the hundreds of letters home that were now in my hands: a meticulous record, in neat, purplish ink, of raising her five children against considerable odds and without much help from her husband.
The Muellers lived in Ramleh, an up-and-coming suburb of Alexandria, in a house not far from the Rue de la Gare de Ramleh, where Cavafy lived with his mother until 1899. Neither Cavafy’s nor Ida’s lives were particularly luxurious. Ida sewed dresses for herself and made outfits for her children. When she and Willy figured out a way of keeping their drinking water cool, by putting the bottles into a crate packed tightly with ice and straw, she wrote about this discovery as if it were a world historical event. Ida’s first experience of a sandstorm, or khamsin, left her stunned, as if she’d suddenly found herself in some tale from The Arabian Nights. Darkening the sun, bathing everything in a lavender light, the storm scooped up huge sand clouds from the desert and, flying into town with a great whining sound, flung them at people’s houses, like finely ground ashes from a volcanic explosion. Ida had managed to close her shutters, but the sand seeped in anyway, dancing around her rooms, coating her furniture with a fine white powder almost impossible to remove. In the weeks after her first sandstorm, Ida looked at the houses in Ramleh and noticed that they looked like they had been painted yellow on one side because the rain had glued the sand to the walls — a very funny look, she decided, wondering when it might go away.
Beach in Alexandria, stereoscopic card. Collection of Christoph Irmscher
Letters, for Ida, were ways of coping with her loneliness. She could, as she told her mother, fill “several cowhides” with everything she wanted to tell her. Her letters were no poems, though they often sounded like it. When Ida looked at the ocean, for example, she saw endless water, an infinitude of nothingness that flowed between her and the home she had left behind. For Cavafy, the ocean was a playing field for his fantasies: “I see my fantasies / my memories, my visions of sensual delight” (“Morning Sea”). While Ida was eager to fit into her new world, even if she didn’t always understand it, Cavafy took pride in his outsider status, in the fact that he was “not one / of the many units there,” that he was not “counted in the total sum” (“Addition”).
Both Cavafy and my great-grandmother belonged to Alexandria’s colonial elite – which was less a matter of money, of which neither Cavafy nor Ida had much, than of status and skin color. Cavafy’s erotic desires often focused on working men, their hard bodies and calloused hands, a beauty unspoiled by too much introspection. Ida, who had likely never interacted with people who weren’t white, kept her distance from the locals, even as her children did not. But she was also a little prepared for the strangeness of the other European cultures represented in the city. When she had been in Alexandria for only a few months, a cousin dragged her to a Greek wedding, a spectacle that she found both amusing and a little appalling – the gaudily attired priests chanting around a large Bible bound in gold, the blood-red carpet, the shining candle-holders, the endlessly repeated chants that lulled her to sleep.
When Ida left her Ramleh enclave to go downtown, it was to buy fabrics in the Arabic market or go shopping at Chalon’s, a department store. I doubt that she would have ever frequented any of the coffee shops at the Square Muhammad Ali, where Cavafy would sit after work hoping for beautiful young men show up, whose bodies, to him, were works of art in motion, visions of divinity made manifest. “Something they said beside me directed / My attention to the cafe entrance …” (“At the Cafe Entrance”).
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Next to Ida’s epistolary musings about her daily life, Cavafy’s poems seem wild, if not in tone, then at least in subject matter, obsessed with all kinds of transgressive behavior. He was, he wrote in one of his notebooks, “stricken by eros.” And his poems don’t hesitate to lay out such strickenness in many ways, celebrating a young man’s uncombed hair falling down over white temples as if he were a Greek statue (“So Much I Gazed”), his skin that feels “as if made of jasmine” and eyes blue as sapphires (“Far Off”), his ”lips / that are made for consummation” (“Picture of a 23-Year-Old Youth, Painted by His Friend of the Same Age, an Amateur”). One of the first poets to write so openly about homosexual desire, Cavafy knew that his erotic investments were not “routine loves” (“Sensual Delight”). And even if he didn’t initially identify the gender of his lovers, his tone and diction made clear that these poems were about scandalous desires. Cavafy would don only the thinnest of disguises, pretending, for example, in “Dangerous Thoughts,” to be Myrtias, a Syrian student living in Alexandria during the reign of Constantin the Great: “I’ll give my body to sensual pleasures, / To enjoyments I have dreamed of, /To the most audacious erotic desires, / To the lascivious impulses of my blood,/ with no fear at all.”
How much of this was based on actual experiences, how much of it merely imagined? As Cavafy’s friend, the British novelist E. M. Foster, pointed out, Cavafy played a role in real life too, that of the nattily dressed Greek gentleman in a straw hat, “standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe.” The role of someone who works hard to fit in and then doesn’t. And thus in Cavafy’s poetry, too, physical desire — the admiration of male beauty, embodied in the vision of a “perfectly handsome youth” — is inseparable from depravity (“One of Their Gods”). And how sobering to see such a handsome youth vanish into the darker quarters of Alexandria where drunkenness and debauchery rule. Love is inseparable from unseemly lust, ecstatic consummation from disillusioning loss.
It is customary to separate, as Cavafy himself did, the early Cavafy from the mature, late one. But even as a young man Cavafy would write poetry as if were already approaching the end of his life. “He recalls impulses he curbed,” he writes in “An Old Man,” ‘how much / joy he sacrificed,” conjuring a figure we can very well imagine sitting across from us in a coffee shop, staring at an empty cup. The presence of these “comico-tragical” old men even in young Cavafy’s work foreshadows what soon became his overarching theme and worry: that while desire is the one thing that makes life worth living, it may also, if you aren’t careful, kill you (“The Souls of Old Men”). Given this dilemma, compromise becomes a vital tool for survival. Writing about a young man whose portrait he came upon in an old book, Cavafy speculates that he was “one of those who loves more or less healthily / remaining within the limits of the more or less / permissible” (“In an Old Book”). The repeated ironic “more or less” stings. Living “more or less” means flirting with disaster without fully experiencing it, means choosing a life of constantly interrupted ecstasy or, to use Cavafy’s own term, “half-enjoyment” (“A Young Man in His 24th Year, Skilled in the Art of the Word”).
Some of Cavafy’s most intense poems are about sideways glances or furtive touches, about a young man, for example, who, having left his dreary day job, clerical work of the kind Cavafy did for so many years, walks around aimlessly before entering a small shop, where he pretends to be interested in the handkerchiefs, asks “what they cost, in a choked voice,” and moves as close as he can to the young man who is helping him, yearning for a “momentary contact,” while also taking care that the storekeeper in the rear won’t notice (“He Asked About the Quality”).
Poetry, for Cavafy, was like the mirror in the hallway conjured in a late poem that retains the image of a flawlessly beautiful young man who had delivered a parcel and, for a moment, paused in front of it, adjusting his before he left again (“The Mirror in the Hall”). The idea of poetry as a way of making permanent what would otherwise slip away might not seem novel. But Cavafy does something extraordinary with it. In “For Them to Come,” for example, he makes the shadows of past affairs come alive to engage in a literary lovemaking that he hopes may become as real as the experience that inspired it. Poetry isn’t, Cavafy knows, the real thing, but it gets pretty close. As Cavafy reports, in 1347, after a long civil war, the Byzantine emperor John VI (John Cantacuzenus) and his wife, lacking actual gems, instead wore colored glass for their coronation, a practice Cavafy admires: “a sorrowful protest / against the unjust wretchedness of those who are crowned” (“Of Colored Glass”). Though your poems might be paper crowns, they can still make you look like a king.
Alexandria was the perfect setting for Cavafy’s fantasies, a city that itself was marked by a certain unreality, of which the city’s inhabitants were fully aware. In a poem imagining the ceremony during which Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, declared her sons the kings of Armenia, Syria, Phoenicia, and so on, Cavafy wryly notes: “The Alexandrians surely perceived / That all these were theatrical worlds.” What matters is that the day this happened “was warm and poetic, / the sky a lucid, azure blue, / the Alexandria Stadium a triumphant achievement of art” (“Alexandrian Kings”). In a city founded by Alexander the Great, who returned to it only when he was dead, to be buried nobody knows where, self-irony is the key to life. One of Cavafy’s antiheroes is Mark Antony, Cleopatra’s lover, a pleasure-seeker like Cavafy himself, but one who didn’t know his limits. In “The God Forsakes Antony,” Cavafy recalls Plutarch’s story — the night before his defeat at the hands of Octavian, Antony heard a band pass through the city, instruments blaring and people shouting, a premonition of his own death: Alexandria was saying good-bye to him. For Cavafy, excess is always tempered by renunciation: “a piercing virtue,” as Emily Dickinson observed. The measure of achievement in poetry is the inch, not the meter. Cavafy believed in the advice given by Theocritus to the young poet Eumenes, who worried that he had only completed one poem: “you ought to be proud and pleased. / Coming as far as this is not little” (“The First Step”).
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There is a photograph of Cavafy taken just a few weeks before his death that I find hard to forget — the sideways shift of his eyes behind owlish glasses, avoiding the glare of the camera, the sadly lowered corners of his mouth, the face displaying a mix of fear of what’s to come (he had already lost his voice by then) and resigned acceptance. Cavafy’s scarf, half tucked into his jacket (which looks like it is now several sizes too large), half resting on his shoulder, epitomizes the in-betweenness where he found himself now, a limbo for which his poetry had been one long act of preparation: an exquisite catalog of remembered pleasures, made all the more poignant by the knowledge that they were already in the past. He died on April 29, 1933, his 70th birthday.
My great-grandmother Ida had died eight years earlier. She was living in Munich then, where she was, as she had done most of her married life, taking care of her husband, now blind and entirely dependent on her. In the last photograph I have of her, she is still a substantial presence, looking straight at us through rimless glasses (there’s no avoiding the camera here), a fur stole draped around her shoulders. Her chin rests on her left hand, a pensive pose the photographer might have suggested to her.
Constantine Cavafy, a half-closeted gay man, and Ida von Pechmann, a matronly housewife from Bavaria half-adjusted to Alexandrian society, had little in common except for the fact that, for a time, they lived and wrote in the same place. And yet I see in both of them the same resigned confidence that, since the world at large can’t be set right, one must find fulfillment in smaller, hidden things, whether these were morning dips into the ocean or late-night cruises through the city’s less acceptable quarters: “Later, in the more perfect society, / surely some other person created like me, / will appear and act freely” (“Hidden Things”).
Ida indeed loved her swims in the wee hours of the day (her buttoned-up mother-in-law disapproved), relishing the feel of the saltwater on her skin, enjoying the freedom that came from not having to worry about anything but the next stroke. Hoping that he would join her, she bought a swimsuit for her husband, too. Three months into her new life in Alexandria, on Easter Sunday, she joined an excursion, on donkeys, to a legendary landmark nearby, the Spouting Rocks. She was overwhelmed by what she saw. The sea had burrowed its way far into the rocks and created a little cave. “When the waves are strong, the water is driven into that hollow with such violence that it comes gushing out again through a small opening at the top, in a powerful fountain, pushed up by the waves that come after. The rougher the ocean, the more beautiful the spectacle.” Ida was lucky — the sea was wild the day of her visit, splashing over the embankment and also onto Ida. “Capital fun,” she told her mother. Here was the perfect image for her life and maybe for Constantin Cavafy’s too: the big, great flow of life contained and corralled, channeled and controlled, yet still plenty strong — a force to be reckoned with.