I bought A Literary Companion to Travel in Greece at Blackwell’s, Oxford, at 13.46 on 11 February 1995, my receipt/bookmark tells me. My purchase, a moment in time, was given significance by its sequel, my introduction to Cavafy. Shortly afterwards, I read for the first time C.P. Cavafy’s poem ‘Ithaca’. Cavafy could have made a poem from that moment, a purchase and its outcome. His poetry is unified by a focus on time and its significance, and in the first of his poems that I encountered the poet uses Odysseus’ journey back to his homeland of Ithaca, from the Trojan War, to reflect that it is the experiences of the journey that will be enriching, rather than the destination.
‘You must always have Ithaca in your mind,
Arrival there is your predestination.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better that it should last many years; …
Wise as you will have become, with all your experience,
You will have understood the meaning of an Ithaca.’
I fell in love with the poem’s evocation of travelling in Greece, recalling my own visits to Greek islands, and the lovely experience of arriving somewhere new and wandering along the harbour in search of a kafeneon. Sofia has often printed stories of readers’ personal faith journeys (or more likely journeys questioning and reshaping faith or its successor) which sometimes, but rarely, lead in a circle back to the church or chapel of their youth. For the Odysseus of Greek myth, however, return to Ithaca brought no lasting satisfaction in the familiar world of home. Another of Cavafy’s poems, ‘Second Odyssey’, sees him setting out once again, bored by the familiar.
Constantine Cavafy was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1863, the youngest of the nine children of a wealthy Greek businessman. His father died in 1870 and, in financial difficulties, the family went to live in Liverpool and then in London, with the business collapsing in 1876. After a brief return to Alexandria, the family moved to Constantinople for three years. On his return to Alexandria, Cavafy tried various jobs, eventually becoming a part-time clerk in the Irrigation Department, a post he kept until his retirement. His mother’s death in 1898 gave to him the freedom to explore his own homosexuality in his poetry. He lived quietly in Alexandria until his death from throat cancer on his seventieth birthday in 1933.
He was, said EM Forster who met him in Alexandria, ‘a very wise, very civilised man’, familiar with the poetry and history of the ancient world, of the Hellenic Mediterranean, and with contemporary European writing in English and French: Oscar Wilde and Baudelaire, for example. If ever I want to read poetry, it is to Cavafy I turn. I recommend him to readers of Sofia, ‘a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, absolutely motionless, at a slight angle to the universe’, as his friend EM Forster described him.
As a historian myself, I appreciate Cavafy’s stance as a historian poet, looking for the significance of events from a distance. A commentator rather than a participant, I love to sit in a café in a foreign city where no one knows me, observing and analysing. Cavafy’s work appeals strongly to this side of me. He presents a mixture of situations, some taken from deep in the historical or mythological past, others drawn from parallels to the poet’s own life experience, and others imagined. He has been described as a poet of the margins, writing about people, time periods, and geographical locations which are tangential to the mainstream. I believe that his work also challenges us to accept how we really are, delicately stripping away a false facade, before gently replacing it along with a perceptive comment.
Sofia readers may, for example, empathise with his approach to ecclesiastical matters. Cavafy’s poem ‘In the Church’ describes the glorious externals of a Greek Orthodox Church: the incense, icons and vestments. ‘I love the church,’ he comments, but rather than making some anodyne theological affirmation, he explains why: ‘My thoughts turn to the great glories of our race, / To our Byzantium, illustrious.’ Most of Cavafy’s poems have a dark side, figuring candle light, decaying buildings, failed lives and the approach of death. In ‘Candles’, Cavafy compares our swiftly passing lives to a line of candles, ‘golden, warm and vibrant little candles’, which are snuffed out as each year passes: ‘I don’t want to turn around lest I see and tremble at how quickly the darkened line is growing.’
The subject of ‘The City’ surveys the rubble of his life and learns that there are no second chances: ‘Do not bother to hope / For a ship, a route, to take you somewhere else; they don’t exist. / Just as you have destroyed your life, here in this / Small corner, so you have wasted it through the world.’ When Cavafy writes about relationships, these are long-finished love affairs, remembered because a location or a dark evening recalls what happened. ‘Tomorrow, the day after, or through the years he’ll write powerful lines that had here their beginning.’
Maybe I should select some Cavafy poems to be read at my funeral? Meanwhile, if I were ever to be asked whom I would select as the guests at an imaginary dinner party with figures from the past, I should certainly save a seat for CP Cavafy.
Margaret Connolly read History at Reading University. Now retired, she was headmistress of Hollygirt School, Nottingham.