Foteini Dimirouli describes Cavafy’s life as ‘a story in the making’ (p. 23). She goes on to provide a detailed and convincing account of the extent to which Lawrence Durrell’s portrayal of the ‘old poet of the city’ in the Alexandria Quartet has contributed to persistent myth-making about Cavafy. At the same time, however, she confidently states that Cavafy was ‘secretive’ (p. 25) and led an ‘unremarkable life’ (p. 29, quoting Daniel Mendelsohn), thereby perpetuating two of the great clichés of Cavafy life-writing. D. also notes that ‘Liddell’s relatively short and limited biography [leaves] readers in the dark with regard to the poet’s most intimate affairs’ (p. 25). Some readers might, of course, consider this a blessing.
No sooner had D. sent her book to press than Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis published the first authoritative biography of the poet. And barely a year before that, Takis Kayalis produced an in-depth study of the sources Cavafy used for some of his best-known ‘historical’ poems. Thus, three good books about Cavafy have all come along at more or less the same time, like proverbial buses, and the four authors involved had no more opportunity to compare notes than bus drivers apparently do to compare timetables.
All three works demonstrate (and in D.’s case discuss) the incomparable importance and impact of the Cavafy Archive, which was inaccessible to most scholars between 1933 and 2019. The Archive, now an open public and scholarly resource, was used extensively and to great profit by J. and J. in their meticulous research for the biography. It was used by K. to provide accurate bibliographical details of all the poems he discusses. And its role in shaping Cavafy’s reputation is discussed by D.
As befits three very different works, the three books adopt very different structures. J. and J.’s biography is intended for non-specialist as well as expert readers. It has an almost novelistic ‘thematic’ structure, which Cavafy himself might have liked, given his lifelong efforts to classify and arrange his poems thematically. The Prologue and Epilogue deal with Cavafy’s death and, in the latter case, afterlife. The five parts into which the rest of the book is divided highlight five key areas: family, Alexandria, friends, ‘living for poetry’, and ‘cultivating fame’. There is a very informative ‘Interlude’, roughly in the middle, on Cavafy’s reading (pp. 249-78); illustrations (between 270 and 271); and a welcome guide to ‘Important People in Cavafy’s Life’, prepared in collaboration with Angeliki Mousiou, at the end (pp. 418-27).
K. looks in depth at Cavafy’s reading and his construction of an ‘antiquarian poet’ persona. This volume is in three parts: ‘Cavafy Reads a Coin’, ‘Cavafy Reads Inscriptions’, and ‘Cavafy’s Contexts’. The contexts and trajectory of Cavafy’s rise and rise are traced by D. through a chronological series of British and American writers: Forster, Durrell, Auden, Brodsky, Spender, Merrill.
In 1984, Margaret Alexiou wrote, ‘The world of Cavafy’s poems is not “real” in the literal sense, whether the setting is contemporary Alexandria, or Sidon in 400 A.D., or just “a large Greek colony” of 200 B.C.’ She goes on to argue that ‘In none of Cavafy’s poems can it be definitively “known” who is speaking’, giving as her first example ‘The City’ and pointing out that we don’t even know which city it is.Footnote 1 K.’s book is a tour de force in unmasking the ‘Cavafy’ (or is it?) who sits at home, poring over books of Ptolemaic inscriptions and numismatic catalogues. K. reveals a carefully-constructed persona/speaker, who is clearly not Cavafy (though he might be an idealized version of him).
In a coincidental parallel, D. convincingly relates the erotic persona of the artist in Cavafy’s poetry to nineteenth century Decadence (p. 121) and also to Durrell’s ‘fictitious recreation of Cavafy’s presumed decadent adventures’ (p. 121). The character of Darley (Durrell’s own persona in the Quartet) claims that Cavafy took his ‘subject matter’ from the ‘streets and brothels of Alexandria’ (p. 121), a claim that few have subsequently questioned.
Predictably, we encounter Forster’s over-quoted ‘slight angle to the universe’ in all three books. D. suggests it is Forster himself who stands at a slight angle; this is convincing, as is D.’s well-argued thesis that all the major writers she discusses find themselves mirrored in Cavafy. D. also places Cavafy ‘at a slight angle on the Staircase of Paradise’ (the title of her first chapter, alluding to a lost skit by Forster that she rediscovered and has published). In K.’s view, Cavafy stood at ‘a slight angle to the British Empire’, the subject of his concluding chapter. J. and J. justifiably describe Forster’s ‘slight angle’ as the ‘now-iconic portrait of the poet’ (p. 224).
Cavafy’s position on the British Empire has never been convincingly established. Perhaps he didn’t really have one. Nominal Egyptian independence from Britain was declared in February 1922, but didn’t noticeably affect Cavafy. Post- and de-colonial readings of Cavafy seem to rely on quite a lot of missing evidence. K., incidentally, is excellent on the imperial underpinning of historians, including Bevan and Mahaffy (pp. 218-9), whose work Cavafy mined for historical information and sometimes even style, but whether Cavafy was all that interested in the British Empire remains unclear.
Alexandrian Sphinx. The Hidden Life of Constantine Cavafy
The task facing J. and J. was no small one: sifting through a vast trove of archival material, including letters, photographs, souvenirs of trips abroad and social occasions at home, and lists of everything from household tasks to recipients of poetry collections and the thematic classification of poems. The presence of so many lists, if taken out of context, may strike the modern reader (or biographer) as obsessive. Victorians, however, regularly kept such records of (for example) household tasks, the better to manage their servants. After the death of his mother, these duties devolved upon Cavafy and his brothers; later, on Cavafy alone.
There is an erroneous account in J. and J. of the distribution of Cavafy’s earliest collections, Poems 1904 and Poems 1910. Neither collection was withdrawn from circulation (p. 383). Poems 1910 is an expanded version of Poems 1904, and therefore superseded it. Poems 1910 is in the distribution lists for 1911-1915. It was superseded by successive thematic collections, and eventually by Poems 1905-1915, with which it partly overlaps.
Apart from the lists, there are letters, private notes and the notes Cavafy wrote in hospital when he was dying and no longer had a voice. A major discovery here is a bathetic note the poet wrote to Rika Sengopoulou, presumably at his most emotionally labile: ‘[…] pity the old man who is suffering […] and try to forget the agitation I have caused you. My tears, proof of my sincerity.’ (p. 405) If we compare this to the note about Rika from the same period in the Cavafy House Museum in Alexandria, which reads, ‘If Sengopoulou is asleep, wake her up!’, the mystery of Cavafy’s relationship with Rika deepens (Fig. 1).
Cavafy’s note. Photograph by Sarah Ekdawi, February 2025. The Onassis Foundation has generously made all material from the Cavafy Archive open copyright.
A major strength of the biography is its exploration of Cavafy’s friendships and his diminishing ability to make new friends as he got older and his focus shifted from human companionship to the furtherance of his poetic reputation. Friendship, however, remains an important theme in his poetry, as K. also points out (pp.153-6). In a sense, Alekos and Rika Sengopoulos became both friends and family to Cavafy in his later years, though I am not sure about the biographers’ description of Rika as Cavafy’s ‘de facto spouse’! (p. 404).
The biography gives due weight to Cavafy’s formative years in England, English education and ‘entrenched Anglophilia’ (p. 39). It relates his understanding of the importance of commerce and capital to the ‘Victorian mercantile ethos’ of his family (p. 22) and similarly the references to trade and markets in his early writings (pp. 41-2). His years in Istanbul are considered ‘perhaps the most significant for his intellectual development’, with the city acting as a kind of ‘urban finishing school’ (p. 55). Part II focuses on Alexandria, ‘the Dreamscape’ and, at one point, takes the reader on a walk in the poet’s footsteps from home to office (p. 112 ff). The Alexandrian streets, buildings, cafés and social life of leading Greek families are evoked. Social church attendance, especially at Easter, is plausibly presented (p. 129). That Cavafy seems not to have had any Muslim friends (p. 144) is unsurprising in this social context, as is his lack of interest in his Egyptian colleague El Kayar (p. 144, p. 165; also in K. pp. 210-11). But the absence J. and J. note of ‘Arab Egyptian loves’ (144) may be undermined by a reference in the text known as Ars Poetica to having been ‘very much in love with’ two gentlemen identified only as ‘Sul.’ and ‘Bra.’.Footnote 2 Suleiman and Ibrahim, perhaps?
Part III circles back to young adulthood and Cavafy’s youthful close friendships. It includes an interesting reading of the late unfinished poem, ‘Company of Four’ (pp. 179-80). Under the sub-heading ‘It would have been you’ (p. 230 ff), J. and J. discuss Cavafy’s later friendships with Malanos and Sengopoulos, contrasting the former’s nasty remarks about both Cavafy and Sengopoulos with Sengopoulos’s great, unfeigned grief at the poet’s death (pp. 230-1).
Many readers will welcome the ‘Interlude’ (pp. 249-78) on Cavafy’s reading, surely a product of Jeffreys’ research and his expertise in the Victorian era. Cavafy’s reading list ranges from Phanariot poets (p. 251) to British aestheticism (p. 252) and what Perides termed ‘unmentionable’ French fin-de-siècle literature (p. 277). Whether Cavafy really ‘actively engaged with classical texts’ (p. 269), however, is roundly contested by K. (e.g. p. 104).
Parts IV and V deal with how Cavafy placed ‘art above everything’ (p. 282); his overweening self-belief (p. 332), and his tireless efforts to promote his own poetry, ‘propagandiz[ing] day and night for his reputation’ (p. 363). The Epilogue reminds us that one of his greatest supporters and promoters, Rika Sengopoulou, planned and began to make notes for a biography called ‘Cavafy en pantoufles’ (‘Cavafy in Bedroom Slippers’). J. and J. have finally given us just such a biography, taking us from cities, streets and cafés into the heart of the poet’s house and the ‘bindery’ where he assembled his collections.
Cavafy’s Hellenistic Antiquities
This major contribution to Cavafy scholarship, retailing at £100 in paperback,Footnote 3 is somewhat marred by lack of English-language editing. We read, for example, of “the prejudices that impaled [Cavafy’s] reception” (p. 11); that a new trend “tended to fumble the distinction” (p. 61); and that the poem “Tomb of Iases” presents “an ancient man who speaks his mind from the grave” (p. 140). To further compound these infelicities and solecisms, K. has chosen to rely mainly on the English translations of Sachperoglou – to give but one example: ‘a carnal desire/lit up their eyes and made their blood boil’ (p. 129: the unfinished poem ‘Abandonment’). It is also unhelpful for K.’s argument when ‘verify a date’ is mistranslated by Sachperoglou as ‘examine an era’ (p. 102: ‘Caesarion’).
Like J. and J., K. has made good use of the Cavafy archive, and indeed expresses mild surprise that ‘previous users’ (i.e. those allowed in before the Onassis Foundation purchased and digitized it) have not ‘properly mined and evaluated’ its contents (p. 3). K.’s own stated agenda is to place Cavafy’s work in a context of late nineteenth-early twentieth century literary, cultural and sexualized receptions of antiquity (p. 1).
K.’s exposition of Cavafy’s actual (rather than claimed, implied or attributed) sources is magisterial. He uncovers the textual sources for the coin described in ‘Orophernes’; presents irrefutable evidence that Caesarion was not, in fact, a marginal figure until the movie industry came along and ousted him from Antony and Cleopatra’s story; and convincingly demonstrates that the collection of inscriptions described in ‘Caesarion’ is entirely fictional.
In his opening discussion of ‘Orophernes’, K. sets the tone by giving correct bibliographical information, a normal scholarly procedure previously rendered impossible by lack of access to the archive. It is worth comparing this to the complete absence of such information for the same poem in the Savides editions, apart from the date ‘1915’, which appears to refer to first publication (though this was actually, as K. notes, 1916). The date of first composition, as noted by Cavafy in his chronological catalogues, was 1904. K. traces later revisions of the poem by Cavafy, who corrects his own error (the coin was not ‘golden’, as he initially wrote), most likely pointed out to him by his friend the archaeologist and future director of the British Museum, E. J. Forsdyke (p. 34).
The discussion of Cavafy’s sources for the coin is both entertaining and salutary. K. points out that eight decades of scholarship, ‘including several articles and comments by historians and numismatists’, have failed to elucidate Cavafy’s sources for this poem (p. 29), more than one imputing it to books Cavafy hadn’t read, sometimes because they had not yet been published (pp. 30-1). And yet, as long ago as 1958, Marguerite Yourcenar suggested that Cavafy might have seen the reproduction of the coin in E. R. Bevan’s 1902 The House of Seleucus (p. 33). Most critics just ignored her (p. 34). K. goes on to prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that she was right.
Cavafy’s correction of his own factual error and republication of the now canonical version (in which ‘tetradrachm’ replaces ‘golden coin’) ‘confirms’, writes K., ‘Cavafy’s antiquarian commitment to the verification of his factual data, which many critics have long (but falsely) confused with proper historical accuracy’ (p. 35).
K.’s book is so dense and so packed with revelations that a brief review could never do it justice. I will confine myself to a few selected highlights. Of ‘Caesarion’, J. and J. write, ‘the poet resembles Constantine himself’ at home, ‘perusing through volumes of inscriptions. The scene enacted in ‘Caesarion’ illustrates the copious research that went into his poems’ (pp. 326-7). In contrast, K. shows how the poem that ‘begins with a reading of Ptolemaic inscriptions’ and ends with a direct quotation from Plutarch, ‘enhances [Cavafy’s] own pose as a scholar-poet who converses directly with ancient sources, unearthing lost treasures from historical oblivion’ (p. 101). K. argues that Cavafy was a ‘brilliant artist’ and a modernist but ‘neither a historian nor a scholar’ (p. 101). As to rescuing Caesarion from oblivion, two of K.’s sub-headings provide a neat summary: ‘Cavafy reads Mahaffy’ (p. 107) and ‘Cavafy goes to the movies’ (p. 127).
In parallel to J. and J.’s discussion of the importance of friends at all stages of Cavafy’s life, though with different degrees of intimacy and real connection, K. comments extensively on the motif of friends in Cavafy’s poetry. He convincingly argues that male friendships function ‘as a powerful metaphor for male-to-male desire’ and notes that lovers in certain poems ‘identify each other simply as friends’ (p. 154), while groups of male friends in other texts encode homosexual desire (p. 155).
I am not convinced by K.’s argument that ‘In a Township of Osroene’ celebrates ‘hybridity’ (pp. 154-5), or D.’s that the poem ‘affirm[s] diversity’ (D. p. 115). The speaker is surely supporting the very ‘binary oppositions’ between the European ‘us’ and Eastern ‘them’ attributed by D. to Durrell. The poem turns on the word ‘Όμως’ (‘and yet’); the speaker says that even though ‘we’ (the friends in the dodgy tavern) are ‘ένα κράμα’ (ethnically mixed), the injured youth in the moonlight looks like Plato’s Charmides, i.e. the (white) Greek ideal of beauty. Elsewhere, Cavafy lists ‘white foreheads’ as a sign of (Greek, ideal) beauty (Έτσι πολύ ατένισα– a poem with perhaps a hint of Herrick’s ‘Delight in Disorder’ in the submerged off-rhyme, ‘ατένισα’ – αχτένιστα’).
The theme of ‘Antique Desires’ is taken up in the third part of K.’s book, ‘Cavafy’s Contexts: Antiquity, Desire, Empire’. K. broadens his discussion to include Wilhelm von Gloeden’s fake-antique photos of nude and semi-nude youths (‘antiquarian porn’, p. 196). Some of this discussion (with accompanying photographs) struck me as tendentious. K. then moves to ‘late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historiographical and cultural formulations of the Hellenistic East as code for the British Empire’ (p. 209). The argument that Cavafy accessed material on Eastern Hellenism through the writings and conversation of ‘important colonial figures’ including T. E. Lawrence (p. 210), seems incontrovertible, as does K.’s assertion that Cavafy ‘address[ed] his poems to a set of highly cultured and classically trained British intellectuals who often also occupied high-ranking positions in colonial administration’. Cavafy’s intended readership is not usually discussed in these terms, which are enlightening. It is also worth noting that this presupposes a favourable view of translation, rather than the reluctance proposed by J. and J. (pp. 386-9). Surely Cavafy’s objection was actually to a definitive published collection of translations just as he objected to a definitive published edition of his poetry.
C. P. Cavafy in the English and American Literary Scenes. Authorizing the Other
D. sets out to answer the ‘unanswerable question’ posed by J. and J. in their Preface: ‘How did a man who, until early middle age, showed little promise or capacity for greatness, living in a provincial city and writing in a minor language, manage to create poetry that has captured the world?’ (J. and J. p. xxiv). In D.: ‘How does an author writing in a “small language” find a way to international renown?’ (p. 8). D. traces the trajectory of Cavafy’s rise from ‘relative obscurity to […] legendary celebrity’ (p. 1), arguing that the current ‘staggering consensus’ on the value of Cavafy’s poetry can only be understood in the context of a reciprocal process of ‘authorization’, whereby the authors championing Cavafy ‘saw their authoritative position reaffirmed and strengthened in the process’ (p. 5).
Beginning with Forster, the first famous Anglophone author to ‘discover’ and promote Cavafy, D. explores the one-sided ‘friendship’ between the two and the ways in which Forster ‘crafted’ Cavafy, projecting his own ‘outsider status’ onto the Alexandrian (p. 43). D. gives a convincing account of how Forster promoted Cavafy to London literary figures, publishers and translators, and what Forster gained – and hoped to gain – from this (not at all the same thing). The real gain identified by D. lay in ‘enhancing his own public image as a man of letters’ (p. 68) but the kind of friendship and exchange of (homosexual) confidences Forster wanted, noted also by J. and J. (p. 226), was not to be.
To this reviewer, the strongest, most compelling chapter in the book is the next one, ‘The “Old Poet” of the Alexandria Quartet’. Whereas the originality of the Forster chapter lies in the analysis and contextualizing of Forster’s well-known (and in one case unknown) writings on Cavafy, the chapter on Durrell opens new avenues of discussion and discovery. Just as the line between poet and persona can be blurred, Durrell’s constructed ‘old poet of the city’ played a striking role in later perceptions of the ‘real’ Cavafy. Durrell’s claim to Cavafy was different from Forster’s; he never met the poet, so they could not have been friends, but Durrell saw himself as a fellow-poet and a translator with poetic gifts of a high order (a point not really made by D., when quoting Durrell’s execrable translations of and poems about Cavafy).
Durrell’s complex relationship with Greece, Cyprus and Egypt is laid out in welcome detail. His orientalism, negativity towards Alexandria, and the fact that, unlike Forster, he was not there voluntarily are convincingly examined and related to the Alexandria Quartet, written after Durrell left the city. Durrell’s view of ‘Alexandrian depravity’ plays into his depiction of the poet (pp. 109-10) and his (mis)reading of ‘The City’, lines from which recur to express the wish of different characters to leave the place (p. 111). Durrell’s orientalist depiction of Egyptians as primitive (p. 115), chimes with his patronizing view that Greeks could not appreciate Cavafy (p. 118). He also fuses/confuses Cavafy’s erotic poems with real life (p. 120).
In the remaining chapters, which are full of insight and originality, D. shows how Cavafy’s immediate American afterlife relied entirely on translation, whereas Forster claimed to be able to access some of Cavafy’s Greek through Ancient Greek and Durrell had some knowledge of the modern language. Forster was associated with the Mavrogordato translations (and earlier those of Valassopoulo) but it was Auden’s introduction to Rae Dalven’s translation that proved ‘decisive’ in America (p. 142). Forster’s largely idealized homoeroticism and Auden’s reticence are contrasted with Brodsky’s outspokenness (p. 153). If Cavafy left traces in the poetry of Auden, Brodsky and Spender, James Merrill was the first major Anglophone poet to engage with Cavafy’s work throughout his career (and to read it in Greek). He was also among the first to recognize its musicality (pp. 193-7). D. shows how each of the writers she discusses saw himself in the poet and interpreted him accordingly. She concludes with a brief discussion of Cavafy’s ubiquity in the digital world, from archive to social media.
The few regrettable flaws in D.’s account are related to the physical production and arrangement of Cavafy’s poetry. We are told (nonsensically) that Cavafy’s arrangements of his poems were ‘chronological’ and ‘chronological’ (p. 13), presumably a typographical error (for ‘chronological’ and ‘thematic’). Nor did he ‘reorder’ the chronological collections as well as the thematic ones (p. 71); the chronological order (obviously) did not change. As new poems were completed, they were simply added to the chronological collections. Even more nonsensical is the suggestion that Cavafy needed ‘specialist equipment’ to produce his unbound collections, which ‘involved among other things trimming the page-edges after assembly’ (p. 13), a procedure D. claims was ‘beyond the abilities of an amateur’ (p. 13). The information that D. should have relied on, if unable to inspect one of the hand-made collections and see for herself that the pages, far from being trimmed with special equipment, are not even always well aligned, is all in G. P. Savides, The Cavafy Editions.Footnote 4
To sum up: three major works of Cavafy scholarship have arrived, filling three large lacunae: the poet’s life, his creative (rather than ‘historical’) use of textual sources, and his canonization by Anglophone writers. The biography is based on solid archival research; the exploration of sources draws on impressively extensive reading; the examination of the poet’s position in the canon puts forward a very convincing, well-supported thesis. The minor errors (J. and J.; D.) and infelicities (K.) that I have pointed out could easily be corrected in future editions, and it is to be hoped that K. will find an Anglophone editor because the solecisms in his text do great disservice to a towering work of scholarship.
