Cavafy's Homosexuality and His Reputation Outside Greece

Abstract

Cavafy's Homosexuality and His Reputation Outside Greece Peter Bien His verse is now recited by young men. His visions pass before their lively eyes. Their healthy sensuous minds, their shapely muscular bodies are moved by his expression of the beautiful. ("Very Seldom." Cavafy 1975: 82) "Let if finally be said: Cavafy is neither 'perverse' nor 'obscene' nor 'obsessed' nor even 'erotic' . . . Cavafy articulates a specifically homosexual strategy of liberation and historical consciousness. And if we distort this, most central, aspect of Cavafy's perception of human society, we have decimated him beyond recognition." (Kitroeff et al. 1983: 6). With this manifesto, the editors of the Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora launched their special Cavafy issue in 1983. How different their pugnacious challenge sounds from E. M. Forster's characterization , 60 years earlier, of a poet whose art reveals "a curious world" in which he has "misgoverned" (1923a: 75-77). Forster's homosexual suggestions are discernible in retrospect, no doubt; but they were effectively veiled for those who never dreamed in the 1920s—or the 1930s or 1940s or even the 1950s, for that matter—that Cavafy's work articulates a specifically homosexual strategy of liberation (if indeed it does). What I propose to do in this paper is to examine Cavafy's homosexuality as a factor aiding the establishment of his reputation in the English-speaking world; to wonder whether Cavafy speaks differently to different audiences; to demonstrate some instances of sexual code-language in specific translations; and finally to question the alleged specificity of Cavafy's strategy of liberation. Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Volume 8, 1990. 197 198 Peter Bien The key figure in the establishment of Cavafy's reputation outside Greece was the celebrated British novelist E. M. Forster. He must be given the credit for spreading Cavafy's fame to the English-speaking world, thus opening the door to wider appreciation throughout Europe and beyond. Every Cavafy aficionado knows Forster's pioneering essay that appeared in Pharos and Pharillon in 1923, with its vignette of "a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe" (1923a: 75). But Forster's more extensive efforts on Cavafy's behalf were less well known until recently because much of the evidence resided in unpublished letters among the Forster papers at King's College Cambridge and at the Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas. Many of these letters were published a few years ago (Lago and Furbank 1983 and 1985). In addition, Jane Pinchin's book Alexandria Still: Forster, Durrell, and Cavafy, published in 1977, gathers together the evidence and interprets it. Pinchin shows how and why Forster's three-year association with Cavafy in Alexandria—Forster was stationed there as a functionary for the British Red Cross from November 1915 to January 1919—helped to liberate him from the paralysis that had forced him to abandon A Passage to India in 1913. What Forster discovered in Alexandria, thanks to Cavafy, was how to deal with loss. He examined Alexandrian history in a Cavafian manner, confronted its anticlimactical shiftlessness, and concluded, as he once wrote to Cavafy, that repose comes "not in fruition but in creation" (Forster 1917a: 111). In other words, Forster learned in Alexandria that process surpasses results. This is what made possible the completion of A Passage to India, in which the friendship of two men ends anticlimactically with separation. No wonder that Forster chose Cavafy's "The God Abandons Antony" as a kind of emblem for his own passage to maturity: Do not lament your fortune that at last subsides, your life's work that has failed . . . (1975: 60) He placed this poem at the center of his books on Alexandria, Pharos and Pharillon (1923a) and Alexandria: A History and a Guide (1922), both of which were assembled (from previous writings) precisely while he was completing his great novel. Forster was always reticent about his homosexuality, as he was about Cavafy's. But it is clear that the liberation he experienced during his time in Alexandria was connected with the love that in those days dared not speak its name. For one thing, he found a lover there...

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