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

Do not believe only what you see.

The vision of poets is sharper still.

To them, Nature is a familiar garden.

In a shadowed paradise, those other people

grope along the cruel road.

With Cavafy, the inevitably self-justifying preoccupation with the notion of a rarefied artistic elite (“Cavafy’s attitude toward the poetic vocation is an aristocratic one,” wrote Auden, perhaps a trifle indulgently)—an attitude irresistible, as we might imagine, to a painfully closeted gay man—was paralleled by a lifelong fascination with figures gifted with second sight, extrasensory perception, and telepathic knowledge. It found its ideal historical correlative in the first-century A.D. magus and sage Apollonius of Tyana, about whom Cavafy published three poems and, as the corpus of poems left unfinished at the time of his death now makes clear, was working on the draft of another toward the end of his life.

As with Baudelaire, the Parnassians, and the later Esoteric and Decadent poets, the furious nineteenth-century obsession with progress, fueled by the technological advances of the industrial age, found no favor with the young Cavafy. His 1891 sonnet “Builders” not only makes clear his allegiance to Baudelaire’s worldview, but also sets the stage for a poetic gaze that would, for so much of his life, be backward-glancing in one way or another:

… the good builders make haste

all as one to shield their wasted labor.

Wasted, because the life of each is passed

embracing ills and sorrows for a future generation,

that this generation might know an artless

happiness, and length of days,

and wealth, and wisdom without base sweat, or servile industry.

But it will never live, this fabled generation;

its very perfection will cast this labor down

and once again their futile toil will begin.

The rejection of modern notions of progress, the inward- and backward-looking gaze, inevitably led to a flirtation with Decadence and Aestheticism as well. The same turbulently formative years of the 1890s produced, for example, a coldly glittering poem, in quatrains, on Salome, in which a young scholar, having playfully asked Salome for her own head—and having been obeyed—“orders this bloodied thing to / be taken from him, and continues / his reading of the dialogues of Plato”; one feels the spirit of Wilde hovering here. More important, the beginning of that decade saw the composition of a cycle of eleven poems, all but two of which we know by their titles alone, which were collected under the heading “Byzantine Days”—Byzantium being a milieu much beloved of the Decadents, who viewed it, of course, from the Western, rather than Eastern, European point of view. Cavafy would come to reject these poems as “unsuitable to his characters”: only two survived the later purge of his early work. It would be some time before he came to appreciate fully just how well Byzantium would serve his artistic and intellectual needs.

Indeed, by the end of the 1890s he was experiencing a profound intellectual and artistic crisis that had been precipitated by his engagement not with other poets, but with two historians. A series of reading notes on Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, made between 1893 (the year after he wrote the last of his “Byzantine Days” poems) and 1899, indicates a serious ongoing engagement with the great Enlightenment historian. The exasperated rejection of Gibbon’s disdainful view of Byzantium and Christianity that we find in those notes betrays the strong influence exerted by the contemporary Greek historian Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, whose History of the Greek Nation expounded a Romantic-nationalist vision of a coherent Greek identity continuing unbroken from ancient to Byzantine to modern times. It was Cavafy’s reading in these two historians that led him to reject his earlier, rather facile use of history as merely the vehicle for bejeweled verses in the Parnassian mode on “Ancient Days” (one of the thematic headings into which he’d group his poems: others were “The Beginnings of Christianity,” “Passions,” and “Prisons”), and inspired him to try to find a way to integrate History and Poetry in a more intellectually and aesthetically serious way.

This intellectual crisis coincided with a devastating series of deaths of friends and family members throughout the same decade (his two closest friends, three of his six brothers, an uncle, his mother, and his maternal grandfather would all die between 1886 and 1902) and with what he obscurely referred to as a “crisis of lasciviousness,” which may or may not have had something to do with his intense attraction to Alexander Mavroudis. Together, these cerebral, emotional, and erotic upheavals culminated in a dramatic reappraisal of his life’s work thus far: the “Philosophical Scrutiny” of 1902–03, to which the poet, as he turned forty, ruthlessly subjected all of his poems written up to that point, both unpublished and published. (Hence the later appellation “Repudiated” for a group of poems that he’d already published by that time and subsequently disowned.) A contemporary note that he left reveals a writer at a moment that he recognizes as one of deep significance, even if he hasn’t yet seen his way through to his ultimate destination:

After the already settled Emendatory Work, a philosophical scrutiny of my poems should be made.

Flagrant inconsistencies, illogical possibilities, ridiculous exaggeration should certainly be corrected in the poems, and where the corrections cannot be made the poems should be sacrificed, retaining only any verses of such sacrificed poems as might prove useful later on in the making of new work.

Still the spirit in which the Scrutiny is to be conducted should not be too fanatical …

Also care should be taken not to lose from sight that a state of feeling is true and false, possible and impossible at the same time, or rather by turns. And the poet—who even when he works most philosophically, remains an artist—gives one side, which does not mean that he denies the other, or even—though perhaps this is stretching the point—that he wishes to imply that the side he treats is the truest, or the one oftener true. He merely describes a possible and an occurring state of feeling—sometimes very transient, sometimes of some duration.

Very often the poet’s work has but a vague meaning: it is a suggestion: the thoughts are to be enlarged by future generations or his immediate readers: Plato said that poets utter great meanings without realizing them themselves …

My method of procedure for this Philosophical Scrutiny may be either by taking the poems one by one and settling them at once—following the lists and ticking each on the list as it is finished, or effacing it if vowed to destruction: or by considering them first attentively, reporting on them, making a batch of the reports, and afterwards working on them on the basis and in the sequence of the batch: that is the method of procedure of the Emendatory Work …

If a thought has really been true for a day, its becoming false the next day does not deprive it of its claim to verity. It may have been only a passing or a short-lived truth, but if intense and serious it is worthy to be received, both artistically and philosophically. (tr. Manuel Savidis)

This unsparing (if, typically, not unforgiving) self-examination was the portal to the poet’s mature period, one in which the tripartite division that he had once used to categorize his work—into “philosophical” (by which he meant provocative of reflection), “historical,” and “sensual” poems—began to disintegrate. The enriched and newly confident sense of himself as a Greek and as a man of letters that resulted from the intellectual crisis of the 1890s seems to have resulted in some kind of reconciliation with his homosexual nature, too. (The death of his mother might, in its own way, have been liberating in this respect.)