Another Poor Sensitive Gentleman

I am reading The Collected Poems of C.P Cavafy, the new edition with translations by Aliki Barnstone. More than ever I am convinced Cavafy is one of the last century’s great world poets, in the company of Eliot, Stevens, Crane, Yeats, Rilke, Montale, Valery, Mandelstam and Pessoa. Conventional understanding says Cavafy wrote two sorts of poems, historical and erotic, a distinction I’ve always accepted, but what impresses me on this reading is how often Cavafy merges those realms and defies categories. Here’s a poem written in 1899 and published two years later, “Che Fece…Il Gran Rifiuto”:

“A day comes to some people when
they must pronounce the great Yes or the great No.
It is instantly clear who has the Yes within,
ready; and by uttering it, he crosses over to

“his honor and conviction. The one who
refuses has no remorse. If asked again,
he’d say no again. And yet that No –
the tight No – weighs him down to his life’s end.”

Here’s Barnstone’s gloss:

“The title is from Dante’s Inferno, Canto 3.60: `After I had recognized some of them,/I saw and knew the shame of him who/through cowardice, made the great refusal.’ The poem refers to Celestine who became pope in 1294 and abdicated five months later, saying the great `No.’ Dante see this as an act of cowardice, Cavafy as one of honor.”

Honor, perhaps, but also sadness and resignation. I’ve always read this poem in light of Cavafy’s homosexuality. Without the Dantean tag and the explication of Church history, it seems an exclusively personal statement, a refusal of convention, moral and otherwise. With it comes a sense of melancholy and regret.

“Of the Jews (50 C.E.)” was written in 1912, published in 1919:

“Painter and poet, runner and discus thrower,
beautiful as Endymion, Ianthis, son of Anthony,
was from a family friendly to the synagogue.

“My most honest days
are when I leave the aesthetic search,
when I leave behind beautiful and hard Hellenism,
with its paramount focus
on perfectly made and mortal white limbs.
And I become the person I wish
Always to remain – of the Jews, the holy Jews, the son.

“His eager declaration: `Always
To remain of the Jews, the holy Jews –’

But he did not remain that way at all.
The Hedonism and Art of Alexandria
Held him, a devoted son.”

Barnstone’s note tells us Ianthis is an imaginary character: “A Jew with a Greek name, whose father’s name is Roman, thereby reflecting the diverse elements in Alexandria. He lived during the reign of Claudius (41-54 C.E.), who restored many rights of the Jews, which is reflected in Ianthis’s quandary of loyalty to Judaism and Greco-Roman culture.”

Cavafy was not Jewish but seemed to have a highly developed sense of empathy for outsiders of all sorts – truly a “devoted son” of multicultural Alexandria, its art and its “hedonism.” Many of his poems take place in small rooms, sanctuaries of desire, and many are mirror images of the poems T.S. Eliot was writing around the same time. Cavafy was gay and, judging from his poems, prolifically sexual; Eliot, straight and repressed.

In “Portrait of a Lady,” a sort of Symbolist short story in free verse with a title borrowed from Henry James, a nameless young gentleman is the object of seduction by an older, worldly woman. Nervous and ashamed of his pallid fastidiousness, he tries unsuccessfully to muffle the distraction of her flirtations with “a dull tom-tom” in his brain:

“I keep my countenance,
I remain self-possessed
Except when a street piano, mechanical and tired
Reiterates some worn-out common song
With the smell of hyacinths across the garden
Recalling things that other people have desired.
Are these ideas right or wrong?”

Cavafy, of course, would never have asked that question, any more than he would have asked the one Eliot poses in his poem’s final line: “And should I have the right to smile?” For Cavafy, the obvious answer is a wistful “Yes.” Speaking of James, I hear echoes of his “poor sensitive gentlemen,” especially those in the later stories and in The Ambassadors, in Cavafy’s poems. As Dencombe, the dying novelist in “The Middle Years,” says, “A second chance—that’s the delusion. There never was to be but one.” Cavafy’s gentlemen have many chances, many assignations, and the poems are their bittersweet memorials. Only Cavafy, the poet not his gentleman, can finish Dencombe’s speech:

“We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”