The truth about Cavafy
Francis King
UNREAL CITY by Robert Liddell Peter Owen, £15.50, pp. 258 The art-historian Roger Hinks — who, like Maurice Bowra, would never sacrifice a friend for a personal advantage but would often do so for a witticism — used to refer to this novel as 'Unreal Sissy'. This, though funny enough, was unjust. There is nothing unreal about the central character, Christo Eugenides; and there was nothing sissy-like about the two real-life people, the Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy and the Athenian eccentric Thanos Veloudios, who were conflated to create him.
Many years after the publication of Unreal City (1952) Liddell wrote a life of Cavafy; but since he omitted, in his old- fashioned propriety, things which he him- self knew but which he thought that the reader had no right to know, and since he shrank from the distasteful (as he saw it) task of discovering other things by the kind of ruthless investigation now so common not merely in journalism but also in biogra- phy, the result was a disappointment. Any- one who wishes to learn the truth, as distinct from the facts, about Cavafy, is more likely to find it in this novel.
Four years after the publication of Unreal City, I myself wrote a novella, The Firewalkers, of which the protagonist, `Colonel Grecos', also owed much of his existence to Veloudios. My Grecos is far more outrageous and forceful than Lid- dell's Eugenides; and since he lacks Eugenides' pathos, he is also far less lov- able. At the centre of my story is Grecos's infatuation with a hideous German; at the centre of Liddell's, Eugenides's infatuation with a beautiful Canadian. Because of his homosexuality, each character risks ostracism by the narrow, pettily snobbish Greek society in which he was brought up; but whereas Grecos is robustly defiant about this, Eugenides is touchily cautious.
Eugenides differs from Cavafy in being a scholar, not a poet; but Cavafy, so much in love with the Alexandria of antiquity, might well have written just such an article on third-century Alexandrian undertakers as engages Eugenides throughout the book. When Eugenides, now old and in failing health, talks of the adventures of his youth, Liddell often skilfully puts into his mouth a prose paraphrase of this or that of Cavafy's poems about his own adventures. Thus, paralleling Cavafy, Eugenides tells the story of how, many years before, he entered a shop to buy some gloves; how he and the young male assistant were at once attracted to each other; and how their ten- tative love-making took place there and then, just out of sight of the proprietor.
Unreal City is about the two most impor- tant relationships of the last months of Eugenides's life: one a friendship, the other a passion. The friendship is with Charles, a young Englishman, shy, erudite, morally fastidious, who all too clearly represents Liddell himself. Like Liddell, Charles has landed up in 'Caesarea' (Alexandria) to teach English, while most of his male con- temporaries are involved in the War; has suffered an emotionally crippling bereave- ment (in Charles's case the loss of an only sister, in Liddell's of an only brother); and has thenceforward allowed his life to be dominated by grief, as Eugenides has allowed his life to be dominated by sex. Charles first meets Eugenides when he rents from him the garconniere in which, in flightier years, he carried on the more dis- reputable of his liaisons. Eugenides then persuades the Englishman to act as his unpaid amanuensis.
In describing the life of the queers (as even they would then have called them- selves) of Alexandria during this period, Liddell more than once speaks of 'inno- cence', more than once evokes 'a pastoral world' of salacious badinage and gossip, lit- tle real sex. Into one of the gay bars fre- quented in equal numbers by civilians, most of them Greek, and soldiers, most of them British, bursts a Canadian corporal, whom Eugenides at once likens to Anti- nous. Ill-educated, maladroit, apt to say insulting things when, as often happens, he has drunk too much, Jim is hardly the Ideal Friend for Eugenides. Yet between the two a relationship — fragile, absurd, touching, eventually tragic — develops. Of this rela- tionship Charles becomes, in effect, the guardian, merely by virtue of being its con- stant witness.
Although he lived there for some time, Liddell never cared for Alexandria. At the beginning of the book, there is a squeamish description of the sea-front — 'on which several cultures have done their worst'. The last sentence, with Charles once again looking out over the ocean to Europe, is `And the choking, mephitic damp rose from the sea.' This is Greek Alexandria, with the Arabs no more than extras in the background. For the Alexandrian Greeks Liddell, who spent most of his adult life in Athens, has an amused, contemptuous affection. On one social level there is Eugenides's servant Chrysanthe, sentimen- tal, malicious, rapacious and yet somehow, by some miracle, likable. On another social level is the 'smart set' — people with names like the Marquise de GlOckstein, the Comtesse Max de Cohen and Madame Helene Yoannides, who inanely chatter about the latest fashions in ideas (existen- tialism and personalism are, at that moment, in; surrealism and Proust, out).
Charles is described as missish, gov- ernessy. The same epithets were sometimes used about Liddell himself. But if he was a miss or a governess, it was the sort of miss or governess who, in Victorian times, would stump indomitably across the Dark Continent in stays and high-button boots. In his demure, witty, elegiac way he is mer- ciless to his characters — not even sparing Charles, who comes so close to being his own youthful self.
This is the third of Liddell's novels to be reissued. One more, The Deep End, is to follow. They make up an impressive intro- duction to a writer still far too little known to the public at large.
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