Constantine P. Cavafy

Anyone asking who was Constantine P. Cavafy must begin in Alexandria, the Egyptian port city where he was born on 29 April 1863. He was the ninth and youngest child of Peter John Cavafy and Charicleia Photiades, members of the prosperous Greek merchant community that dominated the city's cotton and grain trade ^[1]. His father ran Cavafy and Company, an export firm with offices in Alexandria, Liverpool, and London, and the family lived in considerable comfort during the poet's earliest years ^[2].

That comfort collapsed quickly. Peter Cavafy died in 1870, leaving the business in the hands of relatives who managed it poorly, and by 1872 Charicleia had taken her sons to England. Constantine spent roughly five formative years in Liverpool and London, absorbing the English language so thoroughly that friends later claimed he spoke Greek with a faint British inflection ^[1]. When the family firm finally failed in the late 1870s, the Cavafys returned to Alexandria in reduced circumstances.

A second upheaval followed in 1882, when British naval forces bombarded Alexandria during the nationalist uprising led by Ahmed Urabi. The family fled to Constantinople, where Charicleia's father lived, and stayed for about three years ^[3]. Those Constantinople years mattered. Biographers generally date Cavafy's first sustained attempts at poetry, and his first awareness of his homosexuality, to this period of displacement in the old Byzantine capital ^[2].

Cavafy came back to Alexandria in 1885 and, apart from brief trips abroad, never lived anywhere else again. The city he returned to was no longer a place of family wealth. He worked first as a journalist and then at the Egyptian Stock Exchange, where he held a broker's licence for years, before securing a position in 1892 as a clerk in the Third Circle of Irrigation, a department of the Egyptian Ministry of Public Works ^[1].

Because he was a Greek national rather than a British or Egyptian subject, he could never be placed on the permanent staff. He remained a provisional employee for thirty years, renewed annually, rising slowly to a modest supervisory grade before retiring in 1922 ^[3]. Colleagues remembered a meticulous, courteous man who corrected the English of official correspondence with visible pleasure and guarded his afternoons for his own work.

The double life suited him. The office paid for his independence; the evenings belonged to poetry, to the card tables and cafes of the Greek quarter, and to the discreet encounters that would later surface, transfigured, in his erotic poems ^[2]. He lived with his mother until her death in 1899, then with unmarried brothers, and finally alone in a second-floor flat on Rue Lepsius, above a brothel and near both a hospital and a church. He is often quoted as remarking that the arrangement placed everything the flesh and spirit needed within reach, though the anecdote survives in several versions ^[4].

Cavafy's development was unusually slow and unusually deliberate. He wrote verse from the 1880s onward, much of it conventional and romantic, but around the turn of the century he subjected his entire output to what he called a philosophical scrutiny, repudiating most of what he had written ^[2]. The mature voice that emerged after about 1900, and especially after 1911, is the one the world knows: dry, precise, stripped of ornament, sceptical of heroics, and steeped in the Hellenistic and Byzantine past.

He was equally deliberate about publication, which is among the most distinctive Constantine P. Cavafy facts. He never sold a book of poems in his lifetime. Instead he had individual poems printed on broadsheets and small pamphlets, which he distributed personally to readers he judged capable of understanding them, sometimes with corrections added by hand ^[1]. He organized his acknowledged poems into folders arranged thematically and chronologically, treating his corpus as a single evolving work rather than a series of volumes.

The poems themselves fall, by his own rough division, into three overlapping categories: historical, philosophical, and erotic ^[3]. The historical poems rarely visit the famous centuries of Athens. Cavafy preferred margins and aftermaths: the courts of minor Seleucid kings, Greek merchants in Syria, Julian the Apostate's doomed pagan revival, Byzantine officials navigating decline. Irony is his constant instrument. In "Waiting for the Barbarians", a city's entire political life is organized around invaders who never arrive; in "The God Abandons Antony", written in 1911, a man is told to face the loss of his city without self-deception, listening to the exquisite music of the procession leaving him ^[5].

Any account of Constantine P. Cavafy achievements has to reckon with how recognition arrived: late, sideways, and largely through other writers. Within Greek letters he was for years a controversial outsider, an Alexandrian who ignored the patriotic and pastoral modes then dominant in Athens. The Athenian literary establishment was divided about him well into the 1920s, though younger Greek poets increasingly took him as a liberating example ^[3].

The decisive introduction to English readers came through E. M. Forster, who was stationed in Alexandria with the Red Cross during the First World War and befriended the poet. Forster promoted Cavafy's work energetically, publishing an essay on him in 1919 and including a portrait of him in his 1923 book Pharos and Pharillon, where the phrase about standing at a slight angle to the universe first appeared ^[4]. Through Forster, poems in translation reached T. S. Eliot, who printed "Ithaka" in The Criterion in 1924, and later readers including W. H. Auden, who acknowledged Cavafy's tone as an influence on his own work ^[5].

In 1926 the Greek state awarded him the Order of the Phoenix, one of the few official honours he accepted ^[1]. The first collected edition of his poems appeared in Alexandria in 1935, two years after his death, edited from the folders he left behind; it contained the 154 poems he had formally acknowledged as his canon ^[2]. Complete English translations followed, notably by Rae Dalven in 1961 and by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard in 1975, and his standing has only grown since. "Ithaka" was read at the funeral of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in 1994, sending the poem briefly onto bestseller lists ^[6].

Cavafy never married and made no secret, at least on the page, of the fact that his erotic life was directed toward men. The candour of his later poems is remarkable for the period: pieces such as "Remember, Body" and "Days of 1908" recall specific rooms, shop counters, and young men of Alexandria's poorer quarters, treating homosexual desire not as confession or apology but as ordinary material for art ^[2]. In life he was far more guarded, and almost nothing is documented about particular relationships.

He was, by every surviving account, a creature of habit and conversation. Visitors to the Rue Lepsius flat described candlelit rooms crowded with old furniture, and a host who talked brilliantly about history, pronunciation, and the reputations of Byzantine emperors while steering guests away from questions about himself ^[4]. He read constantly in Greek, English, and French, kept notes on historical minutiae, and revised poems over years, sometimes decades.

Family losses shadowed him. His six brothers all predeceased him or scattered abroad, and the deaths in quick succession of his mother, two brothers, and close friends around the turn of the century coincided with the deepening of his poetic voice ^[1]. Biographers such as Robert Liddell, who published the standard English life in 1974, have connected this string of bereavements to the elegiac cast of the mature work, while cautioning against reading the poems as straightforward autobiography ^[2].

Retirement from the Irrigation Office in 1922 gave Cavafy his first years of full freedom, and he used them to consolidate the canon, continuing to write at his usual unhurried rate of a few finished poems each year. Alexandria's Greek community, once ambivalent, now treated him as its resident sage, and a stream of foreign visitors sought him out, among them younger Greek writers and British literary travellers ^[3].

In 1932 he was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx, a cruel affliction for a man whose conversation was legendary. He travelled to Athens that summer for treatment, where a tracheotomy took away his voice; for the remainder of his life he communicated by scribbling notes on slips of paper ^[1]. Athenian literary society, sensing the end, paid him homage during the visit, an irony he was well placed to appreciate.

He returned to Alexandria and died in the Greek Hospital there on 29 April 1933, his seventieth birthday. He was buried in the Greek Orthodox cemetery of Chatby alongside his mother and brothers ^[3]. Among his papers were finished poems awaiting their moment, drafts he had held back, and the notorious slip on which, reportedly, he drew a circle and placed a full stop inside it shortly before dying, an image his readers have interpreted ever since ^[4].

Few modern poets have travelled further from local obscurity. Cavafy is now routinely counted among the great poets of the twentieth century in any language, and his influence runs through writers as different as W. H. Auden, Lawrence Durrell, whose Alexandria Quartet is saturated with his presence, Joseph Brodsky, and James Merrill ^[5]. Leonard Cohen adapted "The God Abandons Antony" into his song "Alexandra Leaving", and "Waiting for the Barbarians" gave J. M. Coetzee the title of his 1980 novel ^[6].

His manner has proved as durable as his matter. The flat diction, the historical mask, the refusal of rhetoric, and the sympathy for people caught on the losing side of history offered later poets a way of being serious without being solemn. Scholars also credit him with creating, almost single-handedly, the literary myth of Alexandria as a city of memory and decline, a myth Forster and Durrell then exported to English readers ^[4].

The institutions of memory have caught up with him. His flat on the former Rue Lepsius, a street since renamed in his honour, operates as the Cavafy Museum, and his archive of manuscripts, notes, and printed sheets was acquired by the Onassis Foundation in 2012, which has digitized it and opened a Cavafy Archive centre in Athens ^[7]. For readers coming to a Constantine P. Cavafy biography for the first time, the best introduction remains the poems themselves, above all "Ithaka", with its counsel that the voyage, not the destination, is the wealth the traveller keeps ^[6].