This beautifully-produced book represents a creative and critical engagement with a crucial ten-year period in Cavafy's artistic development, from the year of apparent writer's block that preceded the ‘Philosophical Scrutiny’ (Cavafy's statement of intent to review, revise and, where unsatisfactory, destroy his poetic output to date) to the year in which he published his most famous poem, ‘Ithaca’.
The volume opens with a brief introduction, which explains McKinsey's project, and closes with an extended essay on ‘The Aesthetics of Pleasure’. An appendix contains an unfinished essay by Cavafy on The Chronicle of the Morea. In the body of the book, McKinsey interleaves Cavafy's poetry and prose writings from 1902–1911 in chronological order of composition, a fraught enterprise given the difficulty of interpreting the available information. Much of the prose included is dated by Cavafy himself on the relevant manuscripts but for the dates of poems, although he does not say so, McKinsey appears to have relied almost exclusively on Cavafy's chronological catalogue (F16 in G. P. Savidis, Μικρά Καβαφικά vol. 2, Athens: Ermis 1987, pp. 53-62). One poem for which we do not have a composition date (‘Τα Επικίνδυνα’: ‘Dangerous Pursuits’, p.122) is included without explanation under the month and year of first publication.
A major unstated principle for McKinsey's selection of poems is the systematic exclusion of items from the relevant sections of the catalogue noted by Cavafy as ‘rewrites’. Unfortunately, this is at odds with his inclusion of items not marked ‘rewrite’ but which are known to be rewrites - a case in point is ‘Μια Νύχτα’ (‘One Night’, p. 84; C.F. Lena Savidis, Λεύκωμα Καβάφη, Athens: Ermis 1983, p. 325) - and items that appear with different titles in the catalogue, for which it is a reasonable assumption that the title change may not be the only revision (or rewriting) in each case. This begs the question of Cavafy's own implicit evaluations: in the catalogues, a rewrite does not have a discernibly lesser status than a new composition; it has also resulted in anomalies such as the exclusion of ‘Φωνές’, which Cavafy's publishing practices clearly show to have been closely associated by him with ‘Επιθυμίες’ (included here: ‘Desires’, p. 52). McKinsey's chronological arrangement has also resulted in the breaking up of the unpublished thematic sequence kept separately by Cavafy in the ‘Passions File’, although interweaving these with Cavafy's prose notes yields some interesting results (see below).
McKinsey's stated criteria for inclusion (p.3) are the availability of ‘reliable’ texts; importance to Cavafy's creative development, and potential interest to English language readers. He elects to omit what he calls ‘two important sets of writing’, although he gives these ‘due consideration’ in his Afterword (essay): the ‘self-commentaries’ and ‘confessional notes’, on the grounds that ‘no reliable or complete edition of these has yet appeared’ (p.5).
McKinsey is a gifted and experienced translator as well as a Cavafy scholar. His translations of Cavafy's poetry are elegant and subtle, with understated acoustic effects that convincingly convey the closely-observed ‘phrasing, enjambment, subtle assonance and [. . .] loose iambic [metre]’ of his ‘Note on the Translation’ (p.7). The prose translations are also very fine. The sequential presentation of Cavafy's prose writings and poems from a ten-year period leads to some interesting and suggestive juxtapositions: the notes ‘[On Wickedness]’ and ‘[The (So-Called) Wicked Man]’ immediately precede two unpublished erotic poems (from the ‘Passions File’), ‘On the Stairs’, and ‘At the Theatre’, followed by a published one, ‘In the Entrance to the Cafe’. Cavafy's note ‘[The Time of Year I Love]’ on how hot summers and August nights provide the ‘shapes and sensations’ [‘μορφές κ'αισθήσεις’] that eventually ‘crystallize into written words’ (p.100) is followed by ‘Επέσρεφε’ (p.101), beginning, ‘Come back often and take me, / beloved sensation’ [‘Επέσρεφε συχνά και παίρνε με, /αγαπημένη αίσθηση’]. In general, reading Cavafy's reflections on art and life interspersed with his poems, instead of separately in different volumes (hitherto the only possibility), gives a fresh and fascinating perspective on the artistic process as well as a window into his creative development.
The Afterword provides useful information on the dating of the notes and on Cavafy's non-productive year, 1902, reflecting on Cavafy ’s poetic coming of age (pp. 125-30) and offering a useful discussion of the ‘Passions File’ poems (although McKinsey does not enter into the debate about whether these function as a collection). He disposes elegantly of unsupported prurient claims (by Liddell among others) about Cavafy's purported brothel-based sex life (p. 132), arguing that the interchangeability of ‘desires’ and ‘unfulfilled desires’ in the poems, taken together with Cavafy's attested and self-confessed shyness, may well imply a lack of actual experience.
McKinsey's account of Cavafy's poetic practice (pp.133-135) is exemplary, and for this alone the book will make a very useful addition to undergraduate bibliographies. He then moves to Cavafy's (literally) hidden writings: the still unpublished confessional notes, said by Perides to be unfit for publication because of their highly graphic nature (p.135). As McKinsey wryly comments, whatever the reason for the preservation of these notes in Cavafy's archive, ‘it certainly wasn't with the aim of future publication’ (p. 136). McKinsey revisits earlier interpretations of these notes, which Tsirkas believed referred to a struggle with alcohol addiction and Dimaras attributed to ‘incomplete erotic experiences’ (p. 137). McKinsey also notes ‘the likelihood’ of ‘errors of transcription’ in such of these notes as have been published. The ensuing discussion of a difficult topic (autoeroticism in a homosexual context) is sensitive, historically grounded and well-informed; its frame of reference stretches from Walter Pater to Derrida, Lacan and Zizek by way of 19th-21st century writers on pathologised homosexuality. McKinsey points to the almost certain absence of ‘a community of kindred [i.e. homosexual] souls’ in Alexandria (p. 141). He makes a strong case for considering the ‘autoerotic aesthetic’ alongside the ‘homoerotic content’ of Cavafy's poetry (p. 143) and offers a close reading of poetic and prose texts that unarguably refer to the social (and hence artistic) constraints under which Cavafy lived and wrote (pp.145-157), concluding with a consideration of the homoerotic elements in certain historical poems.
Despite the reservations noted above about selection criteria and dating, Clearing the Ground is an interesting creative experiment and a pleasure to read. It is the fruit of a very long scholarly engagement with Cavafy and also the work of a skilled translator with acute critical sensibilities and a wide-ranging knowledge of nineteenth through twenty-first century literary, ‘medical’ and scholarly works. McKinsey and his publishers have produced an attractive, user-friendly, creative and informative volume, which will delight and enlighten many readers.
