Cavafy and Hockney: hedonism and homosexuality

From my most unnoticed actions

and my most veiled writing—

from these alone will I be understood.

“Hidden Things”

Alexandria, on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt, is 135 miles north of Cairo.  Maurice Bowra notes that the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy’s “life was spent in that polyglot, half-oriental city, whose Islamic and Egyptian traditions meant nothing to him.”  He did not know Arabic, and had no links to the pyramids and sphinx.  But in that once-illustrious city, the cloud-piercing Pharos lighthouse had toppled over, the superb Library had been burnt (perhaps by Julius Caesar), Alexander the Great was buried, and Cleopatra and Antony had been tragic lovers.

Britain effectively ruled Egypt, from their victory in the Anglo-Egyptian War of 1882 until the revolution of 1952.  The Italian Futurist Filippo Marinetti was born in Alexandria in 1876.  Arthur Rimbaud worked briefly in the city en route to Ethiopia in 1878.  In “Under Ben Bulben” Yeats referred to the aura of wisdom surrounding the placid water near Alexandria: “Swear by what the Sages spoke / Round the Mareotic Lake.”  But E. M. Forster, Cavafy’s greatest admirer and advocate, worked in the city for the Red Cross in World War One and called it “ill built, ill planned and ill drained”.

Cavafy (1863-1933) was born in Alexandria, the youngest of seven sons who left no male heirs.  When his wealthy father, who’d exported Egyptian cotton to Britain, lost all his money, the family moved to Liverpool in 1872 and to London in 1874.  After the firm went bankrupt they made a humiliating return to Alexandria, but Cavafy always retained a sense of entitlement.  When the British bombarded Alexandria in 1882 to suppress an Egyptian uprising against the Turks and Europeans, the family’s house and possessions were destroyed, and the Cavafys fled to Istanbul where the family had originated.  Cavafy finally returned to Alexandria in 1885 and remained there for the rest of his life.

He had a dark complexion, a black moustache and wore heavily tinted owlish round-rim spectacles.  In a 1932 photo he looks like a woebegone character in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.  One friend described “his fractured, almost geological countenance.”  He confessed, “I observed my ugliness and was disgusted by its sight.”  Though he was physically unattractive, “he feared losing his looks and in middle age began dyeing his hair and wearing a scarf to hide his sagging neck.”

David Hockney’s charming bust-length etching Portrait of Cavafy in Alexandria (1966) captures the poet with wiry dark hair hanging over his left ear, wide forehead, heavy eyebrows, large round glasses, pointed nose, thin lips, strong chin and quizzical expression.  He wears a white suit, high stiff collar and black tie with wavy white stripes.  He appears in front of a long, low arcaded building decorated with eight palm trees, and a blank desert-like space behind him.

Cavafy refused to install electricity in his modest flat, and used oil lamps and candles to create shadowy effects and dramatic illusions.  He had a horror vacui, obsessively hoarded everything and crammed the place with tacky bric-a-brac, which gave the impression of a bizarre bazaar.  He did not have a university education, but knew Latin and was trilingual in Greek, English and French.  His impressive scholarly library contained plentiful erotica — though not, surprisingly, the 120 Days of Sodom (1785) by the Divine Marquis.

The second-floor flat had a glassed-in balcony where Cavafy observed the exotic crowd on the street.  The ground floor of his building housed whores who boldly waved to him and his visitors as they approached the entrance.  He wittily remarked, “Under me is a house of ill-repute, which caters to the needs of the flesh.  Over there is the church, where sins are forgiven.  And beyond is the hospital, where we die.”

Like Forster, Cavafy “lived with his mother until she died in 1899 and was finally free from her prying and domineering presence”.  With tender fetishism, “he kept a pair of his mother’s red velvet plumed slippers, which he caressed when in need of poetic inspiration.”  Edmund Keeley remarks that Cavafy “bribed the servants to conceal his nocturnal tracks from his basilisk mother,” and Patrick Leigh Fermor adds that he “slipped through the narrow alleys at nightfall heading for lawless debaucheries and delights”. When the servants weren’t covering for him, Ahmed did the dishes while Hasan shined the silver.

This brilliant Greek poet had an uneventful life and tedious job in a dull provincial city.  For 30 years as clerk in the British Irrigation Service, he copied reports, checked accounts, handled foreign correspondence and translated documents.  One superior chastised him by stating “you are not giving satisfaction”, as if challenging him to a duel.  But this humiliating job gave him enough money to live modestly and enough free time to write after he left the office at 1:30 pm.  Despite his local fame, his homosexuality impeded him from attracting a rich patron.

Cavafy seemed to have been born old, but in his youth he went swimming and played tennis (the poet as jock), talked in cafés, smoked a water pipe, played cards, bet on horses, gambled at the casino, speculated on the stock exchange, attended fashionable weddings, observed Orthodox church services—and visited homosexual brothels.

He was an unsympathetic man whose uneventful life was circumscribed, regulated and prosaic.  He could be charming and erudite, but was selfish and egocentric, vain, ambitious and narcissistic, cold, guarded and inscrutable.  He kept excellent bottles of whisky to offer desirable guests and second-rate bottles for unwelcome visitors.  A young disciple, who had done a great deal to publicize his work, could not afford a small operation to save his hearing.  Cavafy heard the doctor’s urgent recommendation, but did not show the slightest interest and did not offer to help.  Like the blind Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges—anglophile, learned, but remote—the poet needed to be cared for.

In “Walls” Cavafy described his emotional isolation:

Without consideration, without pity, without remorse

they built high, thick walls around me. . . .

Yet, I didn’t hear any sound or noise from the builders.

Imperceptibly they closed me off from the world outside.

In the “City” he confessed:

My heart, as if lifeless, lies entombed.  . . .

I see the dark ruins of my life.

where I have spent so many years, wrecking and ruining them.

The main subject of his conversation concerned the friends and enemies of his work.  In Constantine Cavafy his dual biographers Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys write: “Friendship for Constantine became a matter of convenience, reserved for those evangelicals who served his literary career. . . . He would take up young admirers and convert them to his cult, creating a generation of fanatic epigones whom he manipulated into waging his poetic battles. . . . The master self-promoter managed his own reputation with obsessive finesse until the final weeks of his life.”  He even published his own encomia under his disciples’ names, directing one follower to proclaim that “his poetry is entirely original and nothing like it exists anywhere else in the world”.  His fed-up enemies once captured a devoted lecturer, en route to praise Cavafy’s work, by first getting him drunk and then waylaying him in a handsome hansom.  (I wish a kidnapping had prevented me from going to some dentist-drill academic lectures.)

Cutting his cigarettes in half didn’t save Cavafy from throat cancer.  In 1932 he went to Athens for medical treatment and had a tracheotomy, which first reduced his voice to a whisper and then obliged him to communicate with brief notes on scraps of paper.  He returned to Alexandria in 1933 and died in the nearby hospital on his 70th birthday.

The dominant themes of his poetry concern ancient political figures in the Hellenistic period (323 to 30 B.C.E., including the Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity) and the Byzantine era (330  C.E. to the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453); the effervescence of time, the longing, mourning and lachrymae rerum [the tears of things]; the traumatic loss of wealth, social standing, love, friends, fame and the final extinction of the Greeks in Asia Minor.  He emphasised “cultural decline, social isolation, disappointment, metaphysical impasse, vanity and futility”.  He boldly portrayed homosexuality and celebrated the male body.  Forster called his poems “learned, sensuous, ironic, civilised, sensitive, witty.”

His long-meditated work lacked the immediate inspiration of a poet like John Keats.  Cavafy worked on his poems for months, even years, and rejected many of them.  In the short, unrhymed, deliberately repetitive late poems, he stated the problem in the first stanza and resolved it in the second.  His poems were “evocations, dreams, allusions and feelings rather than realistic descriptions”.  His superb editor Daniel Mendelsohn called them “deeply, hauntingly rhythmical, sensually assonant”. The character in the erotic poems is a lonely, aging man who despises his own appearance.  “Candles” contrasts his youthful past and present old age, and prefers illusion to reality: “I don’t want to look at them; their sight saddens me, / I am saddened also to remember their previous light. / I look ahead at my lit candles.”

After losing his family’s wealth and status, Cavafy retreated from the contemporary world and immersed himself in the distant past.  He ignored the most important Greek events in his lifetime: the British bombardment of Alexandria in 1882 and the Turkish defeat of the Greeks in 1922 that marked the destruction of Hellenic culture in Asia Minor.  By contrast, Hemingway brilliantly described the 1922 Turkish massacre of Greeks in “On the Quai at Smyrna”.  When the Greeks were driven out of the Mediterranean city and could not take their mules with them, they “broke their forelegs and dumped them into the shallow water.”  This echoed Juvenal’s description in Satire 10 of the Romans’ desperate manoeuvre after losing a battle: franguntur crura caballos (broke the horses’ legs).

Cavafy declared, “The Hellenistic period is more amoral, more free, and allows me to move my characters as I see fit.”  But as Mendelsohn observed, the places and people in Cavafy’s obscure poetry are unfamiliar not only to Anglophone readers, but “even to most scholars of Classical antiquity”. Fermor wryly remarked, “one can almost hear the parchment creak and the flutter of papyrus.”

But Cavafy has made “Waiting for the Barbarians” seem contemporary.  Rex Warner describes the action of the poem: “Here is a fine ironical picture of Emperor, consuls and praetors, all in their best clothes, waiting to receive and to impress a barbarian army that never arrives.  The people are excited and curious.  Something strange and unexpected is on its way.  But when, at nightfall, news comes that the barbarians have either disappeared or been annihilated, there is an increase of sudden gravity as the people return hurriedly to their houses.”  The poem concludes, “And now what will become of us without Barbarians? / These people were some sort of solution.”  Maurice Bowra perceptively adds, “It is strange enough that men should wish such a thing to happen, but it is more strange that it should fail and that men should feel flat and empty without it.”  The poem influenced Dino Buzzati’s novel The Tartar Steppe (1940) and J. M. Coetzee’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians (1980).

The solitary poet had no permanent lovers.  He paid for sex with hustlers in cafés and on the streets, in male brothels and steamy sensual hammams (bathhouses).  He sometimes paid men with gifts and clothing as well as with money.  Cavafy found, as Shakespeare wrote in Antony and Cleopatra, “The beds in the East are soft.”  His real heroes are not the great kings and soldiers of the past, but the handsome boys with beautiful bodies, rented by the hour in louche resorts.  But he had no personal interest in his occasional lovers.  The dead youths in his poems were more interesting, attractive and desirable than the living ones.

One horrified friend noted that Cavafy’s “hands were about to hazard a movement in my direction like that of a carnivorous plant”.  But he “feared that his ‘perversion’ (diastrophe), despite it being a source of poetic inspiration, would harm his health.”  His biographers note, “The shame of his family’s financial disintegration and the fear of being excluded from upper-class social circles help explain why Constantine dreaded scandal and avoided ostentatious displays of homosexuality.”  Illicit sex provided both physical pleasure and poetic inspiration.  As his imagination transfigured the sordid actuality, the poetry authorised the sex.

Cavafy followed Gustave Flaubert’s advice to “be regular and ordinary in your life, so you can be violent and original in your work” and “published scandalously frank erotic verses while maintaining discretion about his own life.”  “Hidden Things” explains the conflict between his desire to reveal and his need to conceal: “They shouldn’t try to find out who I was / from what I did or what I said.”  But his acts and words revealed his true identity.

Cavafy’s poetry uniquely combines antiquity, history and sensuality.  He ignores the real lives of his boys in the brothels, and uses them to inspire and express his own feelings.  His poetic reputation justifies his guilty homosexuality and the beauty of his poems allows his forbidden behavior.  The sexual themes include “closed rooms, fleeting encounters, veiled desires, pleasure and guilt.”  In “By the House,” “Eros with his extraordinary power / had taken hold of my body.”  In the ironically titled “He Came to Read,” and stayed to screw: “The erotic passion passed / into his flesh where all his beauty lies.”  In “Thinking Dangerously”:

I’ll surrender my body to pleasures,

to dreamlike delights,

to daring, erotic desires,

to the lustful urging of my blood fearlessly.

In “Their Beginning,” two young men, having just given in to illegal pleasure, enter the street and try to conceal the kind of bed they’d just slept on.  There’s no emotional connection between them, only shame and guilt: a frantic tumble and a sad farewell.

Critics jealous of his reputation and motivated by personal dislike condemned his homosexual themes, his weak similes “beautiful as a rose” and his awkward phrases: “Fine sights near which you’d wish ever to stay.”  He prosaically writes in “The Afternoon Sun”: “This room, how well I know it. / Now it and the one next to it are rented out / as offices, ” and flatly in “the exquisite ‘Caesarion’ ”: “Partly to verify a certain date / partly to while away the hour / last night I picked up and paged through / a volume of Ptolemaic inscriptions.”

Cavafy’s readers got both erotic and aesthetic pleasure, the latter justifying the former.  The poems allowed him to relive and perfect his sensual experience by balancing “the arousal of the moment with a mastery of diction, meter and rhyme.”  Cavafy’s lovers provide a notable contrast to those of the dignified and fastidious Gustav von Aschenbach in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912).  The German author idealises the beautiful Polish boy, Tadzio, and keeps him at a distance, lest physical contact spoil the perfect image.  In this way he can write about him as a Platonic ideal rather than a sexually alluring youth.  Cavafy complained, “because of a few (sic) poems, they characterize me as unlawful and stigmatized.”

He never published his poems in a book, and the first collected edition did not appear until 1935, two years after his death.  Most unusually for a poet who craved recognition and fame, he privately printed and “distributed his typeset poems as individual broadsheets, pamphlets, bound volumes, clipped batches or sewn notebooks” to a select group of friends who appreciated and admired his work.  He believed his poetry was an ongoing process of self-elimination and revision, liked to oversee his work and retain complete control.  He believed translations would debase the purity of his poetry.  Cavafy had self-doubt well as self-assurance, feared harsh judgments and vicious attacks on the prosaic nature of his poems, the overwrought whiff of the library and the scandalous erotic themes.

Jusdanis and Jeffreys’ Constantine Cavafy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 534p, $40) proceeds thematically rather than chronologically.  They “start and finish his life story with his death, then tell a circular narrative” through major themes: family, city, friends, poetry and reputation. They do a competent job with a difficult and elusive subject.  But they include many unfamiliar contemporary Greek names and mention the trio—Mikès Ralli, Stephen Schilizzi and John Rodocanachi—four times in three pages.  As Cavafy declared in “Simeon”: “Oh, Mebes.  Who cares about Libanius!  Or books! / Or all these trivialities!”  Readers prefer to concentrate on his clearer, more enticing and liberating homoerotic poems.

It’s surprising that the biographers do not mention Cavafy’s interest in the homosexual scenes in Marcel Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah (1921). They emphasize his “lifelong interest in the fine arts,” but don’t discuss Eugène Delacroix’s The Massacre at Chios (1824), which portrays the Turkish slaughter of 20,000 Greeks on that Aegean island in April 1822, or Edgar Degas’ A Cotton Office in New Orleans (1873), which gives a vivid sense of his father’s lucrative business.  They innocently translate the French maison close as “house closed”; it actually means a male brothel.  “French letters” has a contraceptive as well as a literary meaning.

I’ve solved an interesting conundrum appears in this book.  During episodes of delirium when Cavafy’s mother was dying, she cried out with a terrifying plea in broken Italian: “‘Tsayette il bianco,’ apparently requesting them to light a candle.”  The puzzled biographers state “we have not been able to determine the exact meaning of the Italian phrase.”  In Italian, “to light a candle” would be accendere la luce.  His mother’s macaronic speech (dropping the superfluous Greek T) seems to combine the French sayette (cloth) with the Italian bianco (white) to mean “the white cloth”—her shroud.  Cavafy later wrote, “Your gravestone will be, for us, a thin, diaphanous veil.”

Like many writers, this biographical duumvirate inflate the greatness of their subject to justify their book. They claim that Cavafy, an “extraordinary genius, is one of the most widely read poets of modernity . . . and conquered the globe as few other poets have done.”  But they do not convincingly show that Cavafy is well-known, widely read and stands with “world poets like Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Heine and Shelley”, who had little or nothing in common with Cavafy.  Two Greek poets later won the Nobel Prize: George Seferis in 1963 and Odysseus Elytis in 1979, but Cavafy was never even considered for it.

Cavafy’s reputation was later enhanced by influential homosexual authors: E. M. Forster, Maurice Bowra, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Francis King and James Merrill.  They identified and were thrilled by the boldest homoerotic poetry since the verses of the cunning windbag Walt Whitman.  Lawrence Durrell, Spender, Merrill and Daniel Mendelsohn have translated Cavafy’s poems.

He had the  greatest influence on Durrell’s novels and Merrill’s poetry.  Cavafy’s poems articulate the essence of Alexandria, and guided Durrell to the sensuous pleasures of that exotic and decadent city.  Durrell liked to quote Cavafy’s “Dangerous Thoughts”:

 My body I shall give to pleasure,

To the imagined delights,

To the most daring erotic desires,

To the sensual impulses of my blood,

Without fear.

Despite his assertion, Cavafy was always afraid; Durrell was not.  In Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet (1957-60), when Justine recites lines from Cavafy for Darley, he feels the “strange equivocal power of the city,” and Darley’s involvement with Justine begins when she attends his lecture on Cavafy.

Merrill connected Cavafy’s poetry to Egypt and was haunted by his “desert-dry tone, his mirage-like technical effects.”  His biographer writes, “The title –‘Days of 1964’—alludes to Cavafy’s similarly titled love poems.  Limpid, refined and dry, Cavafy’s ‘Days of . . .’ poems are disenchanted modern love stories that honor passion as its own good, in memory.”

In David Hockney (1988), Peter Webb shows that Cavafy’s “Alexandrian Kings” inspired Hockney’s  Kaisarion with all His Beauty and “Waiting for the Barbarians” inspired his Grand Procession of Dignitaries in the Semi-Egyptian Style.   In 1966 Hockney published a suite of twelve etchings to illustrate Fourteen Poems by C. P. Cavafy.  A signed copy now sells for $10,000.

Francis King’s “Cavafy” in The Buried Spring (privately printed in 1996) is a brilliant erotic poem in the Master’s style:

But as the wine burned downwards, so his manhood was renewed,

    And slowly, the mist about him, he started to recall

The lips for which he had hungered, the shadows he had pursued,

   And the many hopeless journeys on which he had squandered all.

Jeffrey Meyers published Homosexuality and Literature, with an epigraph from Cavafy, in 1977.

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