`A Slight Angle to the Universe'

Richard Stern has an amusing piece in The Invention of the Real on trying to arrange an interview with Jimmy Carter. His pitch to Carter’s handlers is to spend three days with the president each year of his term: “I’ll have both the propinquity and the scarcity which gives distance…I’ll be testing Lord Acton’s famous maxim in terms of sharp impressions. Monet with a pen.” The piece is dated March 17, 1977 – two months into Carter’s term, two and a half years before the start of the embassy debacle in Tehran. After months of haggling and worrisome waiting, his proposal is formally rejected and Stern, who at the time was studying Modern Greek in preparation for “a Schliemannian tour of Mycenae, Knossos, Phaestos,” is reminded of the curiously remote Carter by a sonnet, “Hidden Things,” written in 1908 by Constantine Cavafy:

“From all I did and all I said
let no one try to find out who I was.
An obstacle was there that changed the pattern
Of my actions and the manner of my life.
An obstacle was often there
To stop me when I’d begun to speak.
From my most unnoticed actions,
My most veiled writing –
From these alone will I be understood.
But maybe it isn’t worth so much concern,
So much effort to discover who I really am.
Later, in a more perfect society,
Someone else made just like me
Is certain to appear and act freely.”

That’s the Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard translation, the one I have on my shelf. I’ve always assumed the “obstacle” referred, on one level, to Cavafy’s homosexuality, and I continue to like the poem up to the final three lines, which are sentimental and didactic. In my mind, the poem has always been associated with Henry James, his “obscure hurt” and the dogged rumors of homosexuality. Carter would never have occurred to me, though Nixon probably should have. I know this is a dissenting opinion, but after Lincoln I find Nixon the most enigmatic and humanly compelling of our presidents. Read lines three and four again and think of Nixon – the twisted Shakespearean protagonist, a sweaty, insecure, almost sympathetic Macbeth.

In “Hidden Things,” Cavafy has created what I think of as a template poem, a work so suggestive, so persuasively abstract and specific at the same time, it can accommodate multiple, intelligent readings. How is it that a drab clerk in Alexandria, Egypt, could become a great world poet, one of the great celebrators of sexual pleasure, and remain interesting and important to a non-homosexual, non-Greek, non-clerk in the United States who has never been to Africa, 73 years after the poet’s death? Part of the reason is that Cavafy, as E.M. Forster wrote, “stood at a slight angle to the universe." His very eccentricity as a person – literally, away from the center – gave him a privileged perspective on humanity. I have known men and women like this – so strange, sometimes even unpleasant, yet possessing unusual insight into common humanity.

Auden claimed Cavafy as a major influence on his work despite having no Modern Greek and relying on translations. By the way, all three of the cited writers – Cavafy, Forster, Auden -- were gay, and I have no idea whether that has any significance. Auden thought of Cavafy as a poet who was indelibly himself, who couldn’t write or exist otherwise. This is from Auden’s introduction to a selection of Cavafy’s poems in English:

“What, then, is it in Cavafy’s poems that survives translation and excites? Something I can only call, most inadequately, a tone of voice, a personal speech. I have read translations of Cavafy made by many different hands, but every one of them was immediately recognizable as a poem by Cavafy; nobody else could possibly have written it. Reading any poem of his, I feel: `This reveals a person with a unique perspective on the world.’ That the speech of self-disclosure should be translatable seems to me very odd, but I am convinced that it is. The conclusion I draw is that the only quality which all human beings without exception possess is uniqueness: any characteristic, on the other hand, which one individual can be recognized as having in common with another, like red hair or the English language, implies the existence of other individual qualities which this classification excludes. To the degree, therefore, that a poem is the product of a certain culture, it is difficult to translate it into the terms of another culture, but to the degree that it is the expression of a unique human being, it is as easy, or as difficult, for a person from an alien culture to appreciate as for one of the cultural group to which the poet happens to belong.”

Auden hovers around the idea that art, at its best, is “the expression of a unique human being” – even if it ranks among the artist’s “most veiled” work.