SOURCE: “The Poems before 1911,” in Cavafy: A Critical Biography, Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1974, pp. 132-50.

As Cavafy himself caused a line to be drawn dividing his poems written before 1911 from those written after that date, it seems natural to make use of it, though it need not be given undue significance; there were several dates in his literary development.

It will be best to set out briefly and clearly the facts about the early poems: considered as publications, they fall into three groups:

• (1) Poems published in periodicals—in Leipzig, Alexandria and Athens.
• (2) Six poems issued on broadsheets by the poet between 1891 and 1904.
• (3) Two pamphlets printed for private distribution: that of 1904 contains fourteen poems, and that of 1910 increases the number to twenty-one.

A poem may, of course, belong to one or two or all three of these groups, one method of publication not excluding another. In 1910 Cavafy invented a new and original system for the dissemination of his subsequent work, which must be discussed in its place.

Another cross-section of poems must be made, in accordance with their later fate.

• (A) The ‘canon’, i.e. poems included in the posthumous edition of 1935. Here twenty-four poems ‘before 1911’ appear, and their retention was sanctioned by the poet. They include the twenty-one poems of the 1910 pamphlet, together with two poems written in that year, ‘The town’ (23), and ‘Satrapy’ (24), also ‘Walls’ (15), which had been issued a year after its composition as a broadsheet in 1897, but had been left out of the pamphlets.
• (B) ‘Rejected poems’—these are the three poems printed on broadsheets that the poet did not allow to reappear, and twenty others that had been printed in periodicals.
• (C) Unpublished poems—these poems, 75 in number (62 belonging to the period before 1911) remained in manuscript, and were not included by Alexander Singopoulos in his collected edition because they lacked the poet's sanction, although he included ‘On the outskirts of Antioch’ (154) which was not printed till after Cavafy's death.

The are certainly not all the poems that Cavafy wrote and omitted to publish: between 1891 and 1925 he kept a register,¹ which contains many titles to which no extant poem corresponds. The preservation of several has been deliberate. Some are marked: ‘Not for publication, but may remain here.’ The poem on Nichóri may remain ‘as autobiographical’. Others perhaps survive because Cavafy found them too good to throw away, if not good enough to print. On one poem he writes: ‘It does not deserve to be suppressed.’² Some of them may have been kept for further revision, or because they contained a line or phrase worth keeping: we know something about the slow gestation and frequent revision of many pieces in the canon. A few may have been held back as being too outspoken, and some because they do not fit in with the pattern which his work was gradually assuming. Some of the unpublished poems are as worthless as those ‘rejected’, some are worthy of a place in the canon; and as a class they have not been repudiated by their author.

Though a slow developer, Cavafy was by no means a late beginner. He had been writing since 1882, as an English note of 1906 proves:

‘By postponing and repostponing to publish, what a gain I have had!

‘Think of … trash (at the age of 25, 26, 27 and 28) of Byzantine poems and ma[n]y others which would disgrace me now.

‘What a gain!

‘And all those poems written between 19 and 22. What wret[ch]ed trash!’³

In this note, which is harsh but by no means unjust, he seems to date the beginning of his poetical career in 1891; he draws the first line there, repudiating all that had gone before. There seems to have been a brief pause in 1886-7, at the age of 23 and 24, when he was getting back into Alexandrian life. But he must have been writing continuously between 1887 and 1891. As we have no poems dated between 1888 and 1890, we may suppose that some of them have come to us in a later version and the others have been destroyed.

In 1886, the year following his return to Alexandria, Cavafy had a burst of publication. In January and April he published prose articles in a Constantinopolitan paper; the first was on coral in mythology, the second on ‘the inhumane friends of animals’, that is, on their inhumanity to man.

Meanwhile, between March and August, he published three poems in the Greek paper Hesperos of Leipzig. They were ‘Bacchic,’⁴ ‘Vain, vain love’⁵—a free version of Lady Anne Barnard's ‘Auld Robin Gray’—in Greek decapentesyllabics and with a Greek setting for the story; also ‘The Poet and the Muse.’⁶ Most if not all of this work had probably been written at Yeniköy.

To these ‘rejected’ poems we may add six that were never published in his lifetime. There are two translations, one of a French song (as yet unidentified), another of Sigh no more, ladies from his projected version of Much Ado about Nothing. Two poems about Constantinopolitan life have a faint interest. Reference has already been made to ‘Dünya Guzeli.’ ‘The veïzades to his love’⁷ is another dramatic monologue. The young Phanariot aristocrat (veïzades) regrets that class separated him from the fisherman's daughter. It is straining these poor little poems (and the lyric ‘Friends, when I loved’) to cite them as evidence of Cavafy's bisexuality at that time (though it may well have existed). There is a gentle, trivial little poem ‘Nichóri’—surprisingly affectionate when we remember how unhappy his family was at ‘cette affreuse Yenikeui’.

A more reasonable deduction from these poems (and from the note on the destroyed ‘Byzantine poems’) is that Cavafy's earliest source of inspiration was Constantinople. His return to his birthplace must have shown him that Alexandria was the centre of his world, the Hellenistic world, which had roots in Hellas and offshoots in Byzantium. This he gradually discovered in the years before 1911. Afterwards he was no more to write about themes beyond his range, such as ‘Shem el Nessim’⁸ and ‘The daughter of Menkera’⁹ (1892) and the other ‘Egyptian’ poem, ‘27 June 1906, 2 p.m.;’¹⁰ or the two Lohengrin poems¹¹ (1898), or the poem of the clock at Bruges ‘Vulnerant omnes ultima necat’¹² (1893) or that about Hamlet, ‘King Claudius’¹³ (1899) and others.

The year 1891 was marked by renewed journalistic activity and also by the beginning of his chronological register, in which he records the revision of various poems during that summer. His most interesting composition in the year is the sonnet, ‘Builders.’¹⁴ This has been called the first ‘Cavafian’ poem, for here for the first time is found that strange ironical compound of stoicism, pessimism and cynicism that underlies so much of his work. The builders begin in good spirits, everyone contributes what he can; then the storm comes, the work is left to collapse and—anyway—it was destined for a happy future generation that will never exist.

Seferis remarks on various features characteristic of Cavafy that here appear in a rudimentary form: the use of myth or parable, the rime calembour and enjambement.¹⁵ The two last, of course, cannot be illustrated without the Greek text; they were displeasing to the editors of the Attikon Mouseion who, nevertheless, recognised an interesting new voice, and were glad to print the sonnet.

Cavafy also issued it as a broadsheet for private distribution, perhaps to mark his emergence as a poet: at last he had produced a poem which was not contemptible, and which had the cachet of publication in Athens. Probably this was his first publication of the kind, and there was nothing singular about the method. Mr Savidis¹⁶ cites many contemporary instances of poems issued in this way, and it has not yet fallen completely into desuetude.

In the decade 1891-1900 we know that he composed 148 poems in all; he published 32 poems (four on broadsheets), and forty of the surviving unpublished poems are of this time. Only seven out of the 148 reached the ‘canon’.

‘Walls’ (5), probably printed in 1897, was his next broadsheet; it is issued with John Cavafy's version and perhaps marks the beginning of a collaboration between the two brothers, which was continued on John's side until 1917 or even later, though no other of his versions was printed: they are not very good.

Constantine wrote to John, with questionable sincerity, on 21 September 1898 about his version of the ‘rejected’ poem ‘Addition,’¹⁷ which he found ‘a true gem’—but the gem had a bad flaw. ‘On all accounts the smallest care must come out. It's a thing I didn't say in my poem, a thing I had no intention of saying and that I don't believe I shall ever write. It's a dangerous statement that, so to speak, commits the recueil, and is opposed to the spirit of previous poems already translated (‘Walls,’ ‘The windows,’ ‘Lohengrin,’ ‘The suspicion,’ which are a complaint against unhappiness), and it will perhaps be opposed to the spirit of other poems that will be translated. Finally, it's a profession which I in no way want to make.

‘What I wrote is that “I don't examine” whether I'm happy or unhappy. That is, for the moment, the moment of writing, I describe the idea that gives me pleasure, that I'm not a number in the ‘Addition’ [he seems to mean the sum of conventional bourgeois people], and doing this, I don't examine if I am happy or unhappy. I don't examine, not I don't care.

‘The substitution of other words for smallest care will, I know, be very difficult, but it must be done. I wonder if the rhyme share could be used? Whether I have or I have not a share of happiness or Even if I have not a share of happiness. But these phrases are bosh.’

The next privately printed poem, ‘Prayer’ (3), issued as a broadsheet on 23 October 1898, exhibits the typical Cavafian theme of the mater dolorosa. Seferis¹⁸ sees in it the trickery of the immortals, but it is better to see (with Mr Savidis) the double incapacity of mortals to be helped and of immortals to help. The Virgin is sorry that the sailor's mother comes too late to pray to her, when he is already drowned. So in ‘Interruption’ (10) the beneficent actions of Demeter and Thetis are misunderstood and thwarted by Metaneira and Peleus, who snatch their babies from the fires in which the goddesses were attempting to give them immortality. Thus in ‘The funeral of Sarpedon’ (18) Zeus could not prevent Patroclus from killing his son Sarpedon; the best he could do was to arrange that Phoebus should look after his body and bury it in ‘rich Lycia’. And when Patroclus in his turn was killed, Zeus was sorry for ‘The horses of Achilles’ (20) who wept over him, and he regretted that he had exposed these immortal creatures to mortal griefs.

A broadsheet published in 1898 and entitled Ancient Days contained two poems later rejected: ‘The tears of the sisters of Phäethon’¹⁹ and ‘The death of the Emperor Tacitus.’²⁰ The former had been written in 1892, the latter four years later: we can observe a great progress towards bareness of style achieved during those years, but apart from this the second poem is only remarkable for its failure to come to life. Cavafian themes are there: age, death and nostalgia—but it is not animated by a breath of inspiration. This is the summit of Cavafy's Parnassianism (already responsible for a number of lifeless sonnets). If Mr Malanos had chosen this as an example of his prosaic history no one could have quarrelled with him—least of all the poet, who vainly tried to revise it in 1906.

It has to be owned that the output of Cavafy's first decade as an adult poet was not extremely distinguished. The ‘rejected’ poems well deserve their rejection. It is disturbing to find the very worst of these, ‘Ancient tragedy’²¹ written in 1897, the year after ‘Walls.’ No one is likely to blame Messrs Keeley and Savidis for their choice of only three of the unpublished poems of this period for inclusion in their translation.

‘Julian at the Mysteries’²² (1896) is an interesting poem, that may be considered with the later poems on this subject. The other two are cynical, amusing, untragical commentaries upon tragic themes. In ‘When the watchman saw the light’²³ (1900) we have an ironic reaction to the prologue of the ‘Agamemnon’: the bourgeois of Argos are glad the waiting is over, but do not expect too much of the king's homecoming: no one is indispensable. ‘King Claudius’²⁴ (1899) is a similar poem about Hamlet: the comments of the world of Elsinore after the fact, when Fortinbras is firmly established on the throne with Horatio's collaboration (Cavafy anticipates Professor J. I. M. Stewart). This is a long-winded poem, and was perhaps chosen by the translators for the amusement of the English reader rather than for its intrinsic merit.

In all the houses of the poorer folk
Secretly (they were afraid of Fortinbras)
They wept for him. For he was mild and gentle,
A peace-maker (the country had much suffered
From all the battles of his predecessor).

Hamlet, of course, had been the victim of an hallucination.

The Prince was always a complete neurotic.
And when he was at Wittenberg
Most of his fellow-students thought him mad.

At the end Horatio is reported as making a feeble apology for Hamlet, in which the ghost is dragged in as evidence. No one believes a word of it.

So therefore, while they listened to him speak,
The great majority of them in their hearts
Were sorry for the good king …
But Fortinbras, who profited by it all
And easily won the power and the throne,
Gave great attention and authority
To all the sayings of Horatio.

‘“Candles” is one of the best things I ever wrote,’ said Cavafy in a letter to his friend Pericles Anastassiades,²⁵ some time between 1895 and 1897, and it is as the author of ‘Candles’ (6) that he has been esteemed by many people who otherwise did not care for his work.

The days of the future stand before us
Like a row of little lighted candles—
Gold and warm and lively little candles.
The days past remain behind,
A sad line of snuffed out candles;
The nearest are still smoking,
Cold candles, bent and melted.
I don't want to see them, the sight of them hurts me,
And it hurts me to remember their first light.
I look in front at my lighted candles.
I don't want to turn round and see and tremble
At how fast the dark line is growing,
How fast the snuffed out candles are multiplying.

It would appear that a second line—rather a wavy line—is to be drawn between the years 1899 and 1901 or later. Production is very much slowed up. He had seen Xenopoulos in 1901 and had received judicious praise. He had visited Athens, which was to him his intellectual capital. His artistic conscience was being further refined, and there were to be no more ‘rejected’ poems; the register records more rewriting at this time.

It is unnecessary to search in his biography for causes, and to argue post hoc proper hoc. His family bereavements between 1899 and 1902 may have been unconnected with his poetic development. The emotional crisis through which he went in the autumn of 1903 may have been an effect rather than a cause: the excitement of finding new powers of expression may have upset his equilibrium more profoundly than the meeting with the young man of the sheep's eyes and the green great-coat.

Between August and 25 November 1903 Cavafy wrote (in English) that document printed with the misleading title of Ars Poetica²⁶—beginning it in Athens, and finishing it after his return to Alexandria.

‘After the already settled Emendatory Work, a philosophical scrutiny of my poems should be made.

‘Flagrant inconsistencies, illogical possibilities, ridiculous exaggeration should certainly be corrected in the poems, and where the corrections cannot be made the poems should be sacrificed, retaining only any verses of such sacrificed poems as might prove useful later on in the making of new work.

‘Still the spirit in which the Scrutiny is to be conducted should not be too fanatical …

‘Also care should be taken not to lose from sight that a state of feeling is true and false, possible and impossible at the same time, or rather by turns. And the poet—who even when he works most philosophically, remains an artist—gives one side, which does not mean that he denies the other, or even—though perhaps this is stretching the point—that he wishes to imply that the side he treats is the truest, or the one oftener true. He merely describes a possible and an occurring state of feeling—sometimes very transient, sometimes of some duration.

‘Very often the poet's work has but a vague meaning: it is a suggestion: the thoughts are to be enlarged by future generations or his immediate readers: Plato said that poets utter great meanings without realising them themselves …

‘My method of procedure for this Philosophical Scrutiny may be either by taking the poems one by one and settling them at once—following the lists and ticking each on the list as it is finished, or effacing it if vowed to destruction: or by considering them first attentively, reporting on them, making a batch of the reports, and afterwards working on them on the basis and in the sequence of the batch: that is the method of procedure of the Emendatory Work …

‘If a thought has been really true for a day, its becoming false the next day does not deprive it of its claim to verity. It may have been only a passing or a short lived truth, but if intense and serious it is worthy to be received, both artistically and philosophically …’

On 23 February 1902 Xenopoulos²⁷ had written to thank him for a collection of his ‘marvellous poems’. This was in manuscript, in red and black ink. It was apparently in some sort of loose-leaf folder, for Cavafy asked (as Xenopoulos says in his article of 30 November 1903) ‘to take back an old poem, which he thought was not “worthy of the honour to be in my hands”.’²⁸ ‘I was very sorry, but as I respect the idiosyncrasies of poets, I sent it back to him.’ It was ‘The Tarentinians carouse.’²⁹

Xenopoulos' article of 1903 appeared in the Panathenaia at the time when Cavafy had just finished or was finishing the Ars Poetica. Xenopoulos had received twelve poems (thirteen, including ‘The Tarentinians’). This he must have returned with special regret, for it had been (if he remembered rightly) the first poem to call his attention to the unknown name of Cavafy and make him look with interest at all subsequent poems with his signature. He remarks on the ‘danger’ of coming to admire a poet whose verses only appear from time to time in periodicals, and he presents eight for the admiration of his readers—he says justly that ‘with his microscope’ the poet shows us things that we never imagined; the thoughts are (as Cavafy said) to be ‘enlarged’ by the readers.

Until the first pamphlet of 1904 appeared, Cavafy sometimes distributed his poems thus, in manuscript or in cyclostyled copies. He had cultivated an elegant and easily legible calligraphy, to which his superiors in the Irrigation bear witness, but it had very likely been developed for literary purposes.³⁰ It was not a family characteristic, for among the Cavafys only John—also a poet—wrote a good hand; and the letters of the three school-friends show that it was not learned in Papazis' Academy. When he gave away offprints of published poems or broadsheets, it would appear that they had generally undergone correction. He feared the finality of print for his work, which he was continually rewriting, revising and suppressing; he would never consider any poem as having reached its final form, and even when it had been printed he treated the printed version as a manuscript, and continued to work on it.³¹

At the end of 1904 he gave fourteen poems to be printed: the result, no doubt, of his ‘Emendatory Work’. On 7 May 1905 he wrote to Xenopoulos:³² ‘Last year I printed 14 poems in one pamphlet. The reason was that I am often asked for copies of my verses, and in this way it is easier for me to give samples of my poetry. I didn't send you the pamphlet sooner, because this year I intended to print another fuller one—of about 25 poems—and to send you that. But for various reasons the plan was put off till next year, or perhaps 1907.

‘Therefore I send you the 14 poems, of which you already have the majority.

‘The pamphlet has not been sent to a newspaper or periodical.’

The same day he wrote to Michaelides of the Panathenaia:³³ ‘I have a poem—“Waiting for the Barbarians”—that I should like to be published in the Panathenaia.

‘It has not been printed in any paper or periodical. I printed it in a pamphlet last year—with a few other poems of mine—simply for distribution to those who sometimes ask me for my verses. The pamphlet has not been sent to any paper or periodical. The two copies I send you are—one, for you to take out “Waiting for the Barbarians” for printing (if you like), and the other personally for yourself, not for communication to the Panathenaia.’

In fact Xenopoulos and Michaelides come sixth and seventh on Cavafy's list of recipients, immediately following his family and Pericles Anastassiades, when the pamphlet was to be sent out in April 1905³⁴—it bore the date 1904 but was probably not ready that year.

It appears, then, that this pamphlet is for private circulation, to take the place of manuscript copies etc., that it contains a choice out of a larger body of work, and that a second and fuller edition is on the way. This, however, was delayed. Mr Savidis enumerates the possible reasons. Perhaps Cavafy could ill afford to pay for the publication—though this was by no means expensive. Secondly, his health might be an impediment: he was much worried by the hernia that declared itself in April 1905. The ‘confessions’ reveal that he still had psychosomatic ‘derangements’ and it is not impossible that he drank too much. But the main reason must have been artistic; he found (and his register proves it) that he wanted to do a great deal of re-writing.

Cavafy still had no thoughts but of private distribution, and a passage written by him in 1907, entitled ‘Independence,’ is very much on the point. There had been a discussion in the Panathenaia about the general indifference to literature in the modern Greek world, and the difficulties of the writer.³⁵

‘But side by side with all that is disagreeable and harmful in the situation, which becomes felt every day, let me note—as a piece of comfort in our woes—an advantage. The advantage is the intellectual independence which it grants.

‘When the writer knows pretty well that only very few volumes of his edition will be bought … he obtains a great freedom in his creative work.

‘The writer who has in view the certainty, or at least the probability of selling all his edition, and perhaps subsequent editions, is sometimes influenced by their future sale … almost without meaning to, almost without realising—there will be moments when, knowing how the public thinks and what it likes and what it will buy, he will make some little sacrifices—he will phrase this bit differently, and leave out that. And there is nothing more destructive for Art (I tremble at the mere thought of it) than that this bit should be differently phrased or that bit omitted.’

This passion for verity already appeared in the Ars Poetica. As Seferis³⁶ well said: ‘Strange lesson: the poet who has been accused above all other of insincerity, gives us a lesson in sincerity. It may be the case that, as a man, he had little tendency towards confessions; but as a poet he seems condemned to the truth, to his truth, on pain of death.’

Sincerity being a literary as well as a moral virtue, it is not to be achieved until we have learned exactly how to express our thoughts and feelings—and parents and educationists too often forget that no child, however honest, can be sincere about any complicated thought or feeling—it is a thing to be worked for. That must be the main reason for Cavafy's frequent revisions, and he was bringing his language nearer to demotic speech.

The arrangement of the 1904 poems was not chronological, but subjective (that is, in the order in which it pleased the poet to present them); the pamphlet of 1910 was a second edition in which seven other poems were inserted, some between poems already printed, and four new poems at the end. The first pamphlet was issued in an edition of a hundred copies of which about sixty were given away; they seem to have been sent out on five occasions, mostly to relations, or to friends or acquaintances in Alexandria. After a third distribution he notes: ‘7 are to be kept as useful—for examples—for the new edition’; and during the fourth distribution: ‘9 are to be kept so that I can have them to give away while the new edition is being made, then they may be destroyed or remain as documents of chronology and that sort of thing.’ Two hundred of the second pamphlet were printed; the distribution began in April 1910 and in that year fifty-five copies were given away, and others in the years that followed, the last going to Alexander Singopoulos in 1915—this is the first appearance of the name of his friend and future heir.

It is, however, the case that Cavafy might have found it difficult to issue his poems in a saleable edition had he wished to do so. He would, of course, have had to pay for their publication (a very much larger outlay than for the economical pamphlets), and it would have meant an almost certain loss. In his Athens journal on 23 June 1907 he wrote: ‘Tsocopoulo³⁷ says that it is considered quite an achievement to have been able to publish a volume and realise not profit but no loss from it.’ There was no literary agent to find him a publisher in Athens, and Stephen Pargas of Grammata in Alexandria did not start publishing until 1914.

After the Asia Minor disaster in 1922 he remarked to Mr Basil Athanassopoulos³⁸ (and, as the latter tells me, in all seriousness) that this meant the loss of centres where Greek men of letters could dispose of their books. In the same way he said to Mr Malanos (who tells me that Professor Dawkins was utterly mistaken in believing this to be a joke):³⁹ ‘As a good merchant advertises his wares for sale, so a poet must advertise the line that he is offering.’ Again he said: ‘People are busy, very busy, so that there's no time to take an interest in one's neighbour. So it's our duty to talk about ourselves and our works, till we have made people stop, and leave their work and attend to us …’ He added: ‘I think I've read that somewhere’—but it sounds like his invention.⁴⁰

It is unlikely that he ever thought of publicly advertising his work for sale, or ever pictured it in the bookshops of Smyrna; he probably wished to retain the amateur status preferred by persons in good Alexandrian society when they practised the arts. He was certainly too businesslike and probably too stingy to throw his money away on a certain failure. Moreover, while his reputation was forming, he wished to choose his readers, and it is not likely that he would have cared for the idea of unbought copies of his poems gathering dust in bookshops or being fingered contemptuously by his enemies.

Between the two pamphlets Cavafy was beginning to become known, even in his own city, for the Alexandrians were finding out that they had a poet. In July 1907⁴¹ a young doctor who was also an intellectual, Paul Petridis, called on him. Petridis belonged to a circle consisting of the young, Nea Zoë (New Life): their age-limit was thirty, so Cavafy could not become a member. He was no doubt pleased to be sought by the young, and perhaps not displeased to enjoy the position of an independent and honoured guest rather than that of a full member of the association. He often attended their meetings.

On 23 April 1909 Petridis lectured on him at their centre to a limited audience. He commented (among other poems) on ‘Windows,’ ‘Walls’ and ‘Waiting for the Barbarians,’ strongly emphasising Cavafy's pessimism. It is supposed that the lecture was largely inspired by the poet himself, or at least that it had his imprimatur. It was subsequently published in the journal of this group.

We cannot see, with Mr Tsirkas,⁴² any irony or revenge in the fact that poems such as these, and ‘Thermopylae’ and ‘Treachery,’ were read for the admiration of an Alexandrian audience by a ‘deuteroclassatos’ and the son of a notable ‘deuteroclassatos’ for we have seen that there was nothing in them to offend their sensibilities. Nor were there any ‘shocking’ poems: Cavafy had not yet published anything that could be called erotic; nor do we know that he had written anything, apart from the five unpublished poems of 1904. If anyone was annoyed, it was because a ‘demotic’ writer was being commended. There is a pleasant tale that Petridis' father was somewhat disturbed, because he thought that his son meant to speak not about Constantine Cavafy but the scandalous Paul—poor Paul, however, was now in exile, and it was not love but money that had been his ruin.

At this time there was another turning point in his poetical career. His friend Sareyannis⁴³ wrote: ‘Cavafy was not born a poet, he became one with the years. He found his final form in 1911. Afterwards he felt that only from that date had he become “Cavafy”. In the first period of his life, which can be called “pre-Cavafic”, he experimented and tried to write poems, but he was not yet master of his Art. Of these attempts he considered some genuinely successful and printed them in the first pamphlets that he published later: to this category belong: ‘The town,’ ‘Satrapy,’ ‘Monotony,’ ‘There he is!,’ ‘The footsteps,’ ‘Bacchus and his crew.’ Others he judged to be absolute failures and denied that they had been written by him. And there were others—at least so it seems to me—over whose acknowledgment he hesitated for many years. To this last category belong most of the poems “before 1911”. There was something in them that did not satisfy him. He systematically avoided speaking of them or letting people speak of them to him. He was continually trying to correct them. He caused the pamphlets of 1904 and 1910 to disappear very quickly, and not only did he refrain from giving them, but he looked out to see if it were possible to take back those that were in circulation. I do not know of which of the two pamphlets he was speaking of when he said that 12 or 15 copies were circulating on which he had his eye and knew where they were to be found. It was precisely because he regretted the publication of his first collection in 1904 and 1910—so it seems to me—that Cavafy adopted the system of F[euilles] V[olantes]. By this new method he was able to make all the changes he wished and to reprint a poem or—if need be—to take one out of one of his collections without rendering useless the other poems that had been bound up with it. It was only after many years had passed and he thought that a whole series of his poems had been stabilised and did not admit of further change, only then did he decide to bind them together in collections.’

The information given by Sareyannis is not entirely accurate. He might have added several poems to those which he mentions; it was not only the pre-1911 poems that Cavafy continued to correct, but also poems written after that date; he did indeed smuggle away extra copies of the 1904 pamphlet, but he distributed nearly all of that of 1910. Nor was he unwilling to answer questions (and sometimes by letter) about the early poems from people interested in them; of whom Sareyannis was not one. He was interested in the historical poems, and bored with ‘Candles’ and other early works. Nevertheless his general contention is true; Cavafy initiated a new method of issuing his work at this time, and his register records the re-writing of poems. But above all it is the new maturity and unity of his subsequent work that must strike us.

Of the early historical poems, some fail to hit their mark (such as ‘The death of the Emperor Tacitus’); in the erotic poems there is a touch of sentimentality, perhaps because they seem to be near in time of composition to the actual experience that inspired them—and the Denshawi poem may also be called sentimental. If the ‘suggestion’ in ‘Thermopylae’ or ‘Che fece … il gran rifiuto’ is to be ‘enlarged by future generations’, rather too much work has been left to those future generations. Dare we say that the poet may have hoped that he was writing a ‘great meaning’ without realising it himself? Some of the better poems (‘Windows,’ ‘Monotony,’ even ‘The Town’) might have been written by some other poet influenced by Baudelaire and Verlaine, if he were a poet good enough; they lack Cavafy's personal voice. This voice, however, is unmistakably heard on several occasions, in the last lines of ‘Waiting for the Barbarians,’ for example, or in the ‘Trojans’:

Achilles comes out into the trench before us
And frightens us with his loud shouts.

It would seem that the truth lies between the two schools of Cavafian interpretation, or rather that (with a little moderation of language) they can be reconciled. Critics as authoritative as George Seferis and Mr Dimaras see a real cleavage about the year 1911. On the other hand Mr Malanos says that in Cavafy's work from first to last there is a unity of mood, of mental climate and of Weltanschauung⁴⁴—and it would be hard to deny this. On this view, the heading ‘before 1911’ was simply adopted as a convenience; after that year the poems appeared on feuilles volantes each automatically dated by the year of publication. The earlier poems could not so be arranged—and there might be legitimate difference of opinion as to how they should be dated—they were therefore lumped together in this way, and the fact has no other significance.

He may be quite right, and it may only be coincidental that it should happen in this year. What is undoubtedly true and significant is that Cavafy at about the age of forty-eight had yet another literary coming-of-age. Such a thing had happened in 1891, and again between 1900 and 1903. But since 1891, when he wrote ‘Builders,’ he had recognisably (though not invariably) been the poet he was to be.

The consensus of good critical opinion is that he grew better and better as a poet, and that his latest work was his best. Critics who have based their interpretation of him on an over-valuation of his earlier work are not unnaturally led into eccentricity of one sort or another.

Professor Baud-Bovy praised the earlier work, in which he thought a need for reticence made the poet express his abnormality and his consequent malaise in terms of appealing imagery: he regretted that the inter-war years, with their relaxation of tabus, should have encouraged him to admit into his later poems a louche and boring company of workmen or shop-assistants in pink or mauve shirts. Here is an over-development of the ‘Cavafy of the Letter T’, ante litteram.

Mr Tsirkas' theory of the ‘political Cavafy’ leads him into equally strange statements. …⁴⁵ ‘In 1911—both in his preceding life and in his work—Cavafy drew a line, dug a trench … His ideals and ambitions take another direction. His Weltanschauung is altered. Above all he ceases to be “worldly” (κοsμικός), both in the literal and metaphorical senses of the word. He stops worrying about social matters. He makes a truce with “the bad men”. Gradually he adopts their way of seeing things. He jeers at and makes fun of ideals for which he once suffered … At one time his symbols were those of heroic struggle, personages from Mythology, from the Trojan and Persian wars, and the Roman and Byzantine empires. Now they become aesthetes. Hellenistic Antioch began to beckon him in 1896 [“Julian at the Mysteries”]. Decadent Alexandria had surrounded him from childhood. He has resisted them long enough. He'll “go”—with all his outfit and all his armour!’

This is not quite an accurate account of the work. It is true that mythology has more or less disappeared from the 130 later poems of the canon; but the three poems inspired by Greek history: ‘Who fought for the Achaean League’ (105), ‘In Sparta’ (139) and ‘Come, O King of the Lacedaemonians’ (146)—are nobly stoical. Moreover there are, proportionately, more poems on Roman and Byzantine themes than there were among the twenty-four poems before 1911. However it is indeed the case that Cavafy has profited by the discovery that the outer Greek world is his true country, and all who love his work must rejoice at this.

Mr Tsirkas' word κοsμικός cannot (as he uses it) be adequately translated by a single word for both its ‘literal and metaphorical senses’, in the ‘metaphorical’ sense (and in common parlance) it is the equivalent of mondain. It is true that Cavafy went out less in later life, but he never ceased to be interested in society and its doings, and was far from cutting himself off from it. The death of his mother in 1899 of course put an end to the receptions in the Boulevard de Ramleh on the second and last Fridays in the month. Family mourning for her death, and for the deaths of his brothers George (1900) and Aristides (1902), must have disrupted his social life; and when Alexander died (1905) the part of his social activities revolving round that household came to an end. Then in 1908 followed the disgrace and exile of Paul, who may have been his chief link with the world—for Paul had great social success. He repented of having harmed John and Constantine ‘materially and morally’—which may include ‘socially’. The story of Piot Bey suggests that the Cavafys lost caste after his débâcle. After his departure Constantine lived alone, and a man in his late forties who is without family and does not greatly care for female society is likely by degrees to become ‘the world forgetting by the world forgot’. Not that Cavafy wished to be much forgotten.

The other meaning of the word κοsμικος may perhaps be rendered (more or less) as ‘socially conscious’, in the sense in which left-wing intellectuals use (or used) those words. There is, however, as we have seen, no reason to believe that Cavafy was in any way opposed to the establishment before 1911: after that time his complete collaboration with it is attested by abundant evidence and living witnesses. It is to be doubted if he ever jeered at ideals—Mr Basil Athanassopoulos tells me how respectful and tender he was of the enthusiasms of the young, even when they were for men and causes not his own. There is no suggestion that he himself ever suffered for other than literary ideals, or ever cherished them.

Notes

1. Cavafy, UP, p.ia'.

2. ibid., notes passim.

3. Savidis, Bibliography, p. 107. The notes to this chapter, already profuse, would be intolerably increased were I to acknowledge individually every debt to Mr Savidis' Bibliography.

4. Dalven, p. 177.

5. ibid., pp. 178-80 (there entitled A love).

6. ibid., p. 181.

7. Cavafy, UP, p. 5.

8. Dalven, pp. 184-5.

9. Cavafy, UP, p. 23.

10. ibid., p. 149.

11. ibid., pp. 103-7.

12. Dalven, p. 187.

13. Cavafy, UP, p. 113; Savidis and Keeley, pp. 6-13.

14. Dalven, p. 182.

15. Seferis, pp. 294-5. As an example of rime calembour (ibid. p. 231) he quotes Derême:

                                                      et pas plus tard que
    Demain je te lirai les œuvres de Plutarque.

16. Savidis, Bibliography, p. 119.

17. Cavafy, Prose, p. 239. The text is in Greek, the words italicised are as quoted. Dalven, p. 200.

18. Cavafy, Prose, p. 301.

19. Dalven, pp. 202-3.

20. ibid., p. 201.

21. Dalven., pp. 204-5.

22. Keeley and Savidis, pp. 2-5.

23. ibid., pp. 14-15.

24. ibid., pp. 6-13.

25. Savidis, Bibliography, p. 123.

26. Cavafy, U. Prose, pp. 36-69.

27. Savidis, Bibliography, p. 99.

28. NE 1963, p. 1444.

29. Dalven, p. 206.

30. Savidis, Bibliography, pp. 150-1.

31. Savidis, Bibliography., p. 152 n.

32. ibid., p. 40.

33. ibid., p. 41.

34. ibid., p. 217.

35. ibid., pp. 164-5.

36. Seferis, Essays, p. 348.

37. Cavafy, Prose, p. 268.

38. JHS, 1933.

39. Malanos, Cavafy, p. 33.

40. Tsirkas, Chronology.

41. Peridis, p. 92 n.

42. Tsirkas, Epoch, p. 277.

43. Sareyannis, pp. 128-9.

44. Malanos, T., pp. 19-20. Of course he cannot mean to include the ‘trash’ before 1891.

45. Tsirkas, Epoch, pp. 16-17.