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Cal'afy Robert Liddell (Duckworth £4.95) lany years ago a Greek writer who had known din gave me his version of Constantine avafy's last visit to Athens from Alexandria in ,, Mortally ill with cancer of the throat, he 'erosed to submit to the drastic operation that rn,.tght have prolonged his life because he was at (as the Greek told it) that "it will make Te look so hideous." During his long and 1,ntsory recuperation — the tracheotomy that hidbeen performed on him having now made speechless — he would from time to time slip out of his hotel in the evenings to revisit places (c Of of dubious reputation, cafes and ay. ernes frequented by workmen, soldiers and sballors) where once he had found fulfilment. c*I-It now, a silent and pallid spectre, he made Loi ntact with no one. The story — retold by Mr cldell in the more restrained style that he has chhesen for his admirable life of the man whom "e calls the last and greatest Alexandrian" — trnight have provided the theme for one of those 1,,a§ie poems of Cavafy's later years, with their ft for "the lust that is branded", their regret _er lost beauty, lost youth and lost happiness, and their ever-present sense of mortality. tis°f all Greek poets, Cavafy is best known to c", e outside world, though few people would that him him as the greatest. The reason for this is "at. though in some ways his work is solragile George Seferis writes of him in his A Poet's tocnonal (Harvard University Press £4) "Up of a Point he appears to be hanging by a thread till4cotton" — it nonetheless remains indestrucchant e even when subjected to translations as in „sY as those, for example, of Rae Dalven. As s,,e case of Whitman, an essence always 6," vives even the most extreme distortions of 0“fe original rhythms and language. The secret thi in ts miraculous survival is revealed, I think, sav`Wo other of George Seferis's notes: "He was . . by exactly the thing they accuse caT, Of: his bareness"; and "As the years pass, iinefY does not see images, he sees motions, ent`.a of motion. He uses no metaphors, but his ut*.tre work is a metaphor." If, however
"sPired the translator traces those "lines of
th7..orrrtigintahr no brutalities can wholly destroy inr Liddell has dug up a lot of interesting maerniation about the poet's forbears. Like ritnrit,Y People who have fallen on hard times, his ate ",er and his brothers all tended to exaggerLickitne steepness of the family's decline. Mr
'en advises us not to take seriously the
claims to descent from the imperial house of Ducas, nor even the very bogus-looking home-made crest that sometimes adorned their writing-paper." But the Cavafys were certainly gentlefolk and there were periods when Constantine's father was certainly making, as well as spending, a great deal of money. But reckless speculations, as well as reckless spending, characterised the lives of the Cavafy brothers; and whatever the father left — Constantine was only seven at the time of his death — was soon squandered and dissipated. The family went through more than one very lean period and Cavafy, though not as poor in later life as he would have liked people to imagine, was certainly never well-off.
The most dramatic event in a usually undramatic life was a period of enforced exile with his mother's family in Constantinople after the massive exodus of Europeans from Alexandria in the troubles of 1882. The Cavafy family had been prudent enough to acquire British nationality and they and their similarly placed friends, with what Mr Liddell calls "a Blimpishness not uncharacteristic of Egyptian Greeks," were the first to deplore Egyptian attempts to `transwogrify' (as they would see it) their city. Yet, when the British produced an army of occupation to safeguard the interests of themselves and the other European powers, Constantine's brother John snobbishly remarked on their commoness, conceit and ignorance. Later still there were complaints at the slowness with which the British paid compensation for the damage inflicted by them. These contrasting attitudes to the occupying power of, on the one hand, indifference and contempt at times of stability and, on the other, of hysterical invocation of the rights conferred by a British passport at times of trouble, are hardly attractive.
Though Mr Liddell has been unable to unearth any absolutely unassailable evidence, it seems likely that Cavafy's homosexual initiation took place while he was living, in extreme poverty, with his mother ("The Fat One," as he called her) in Constantinople. The view of a Greek Cavafy scholar, Stratis Tsirkas, that Cavafy's homosexuality was somehow brought on first by his sojourn in England as a boy and then by his contacts with members of the British occupation in Alexandria is palpably absurd. The Greeks have an unfortunate tendency to blame anything they do not like or of which they do not approve on to other nationalities. Similarly absurd is the sometimes expressed view that the material for Cavafy's homosexual poems was derived not from his own life but from that of his older brother, Paul — who certainly led the more rnonda In existence of the two.
For most of his life Cavafy worked in the Third Circle of the Irrigation Department. By an arrangement then common in Egypt but which no self-respecting staff association or trades union would countenance today, he first served a long, unpaid apprenticeship before a paid employment was conferred on him. By all accounts and not surprisingly he was not a particularly hard-working, punctual or conscientious servant of the British administration; but his masters were nonetheless delighted with him — one of his subordinates, an Egyptian, has described how they would invite him into their offices and get him to talk to them.
Would one be equally delighted if one were to meet him today? I feel sure that one would. As Mr Liddell makes scrupulously clear, there were many things in his personality that were far from admirable: deviousness; cunning; lack of stoicism — Timos Malanos describes how he would weep and cling to friends when they visited him on his death-bed; an inability, akin to Delius's, to see good in any works other than his own; disloyalty. But "the Greet gentleman .. standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe" who could enchant E. M. Forster, would also surely enchant us.
Mr Liddell is the ideal biographer for his subject: he is a Classical scholar; he is wholly at home in modern Greek; and above all, having lived in the city, he can claim that "a?1, Alexandrian is writing about an Alexandrian. His book is mercifully succinct, contrary to the present fashion, but at the same time gives all the information that needs to be given and demonstrates why the best of the poems are so good. He accords the right degree of importance to the homosexuality, neither too much nor too little. (George Seferis, drawing a parallel with Baudelaire, has warned against an exaggerated attention to Cavafy's eroticism.)
Nonetheless, for a knowledge of what the man was really like rather than of what happened to him and of what he wrote, I think that one must go back to Forster's little
pen-portrait in Pharos arid Phariflon; to a beautifully evocative novel by Robert Liddell himself, called Unreal City (renamed Unreal Sissy by the malicious), in which Cavafy is iMagined as still living in the Alexandria that Mr Liddell knew; and, above all, to the poems, those distillations of Cavafy's often disordered life and of his always ordered thoughts.
Francis King has most recently written A Game of Patience
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