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Sunday, April 30, 2000
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LETTER FROM ALEXANDRIA
By CYNTHIA HAVEN
You will find no new lands, you will find no other seas.
The city will follow you. You will roam the same
streets. And you will age in the same neighborhoods;
and you will grow gray in these same houses.
-- CONSTANTINE CAVAFY,
from "The City,"
translated from the Greek by Rae Dalven
* * * His verses have been translated into nearly 75 languages. W.H. Auden,
among others, claimed him as an influence on his own work. Few modern
poets have made such a claim on the 20th century as Constantine Cavafy
(1863-1933). His writings insistently confront the collisions of time,
history and the fallibility of memory. Perhaps that is why our era has
canonized him: As we face the perishing of our own worlds, we better
appreciate his anguish and acceptance, his utter lack of self-deceiving
sentimentality or conventional emotion as he observes the evanescence of
life, pleasure, love.
Cavafy's admirers are many. Though his city, like the one in the lines
above, best exists in the mind, the real, ramshackle Alexandria is the
city where Cavafy spent most of his life, a Greek survivor in a
British-occupied Arab nation. In a neutral Greek stripped of simile,
metrical extravagances, easy effects and eventually rhyme, the city
itself became Cavafy's richest metaphor, expanded and made eternal in its
ephemeral history as a Greek capital, as a Roman backwater and as the
contemporary setting for his own fleeting homosexual affairs. His poems
of forgotten emperors, diasporic Greeks, Ptolemaic pharaohs and casual
pick-ups in the local brothels are tinged with irony, sensuality,
Hellenic values and the silence of effacing time.
I had occasion recently to visit Cavafy's Alexandria, to wander the
western side of the city, past street side hawkers, vegetable and fruit
carts drawn by donkeys, heaps of garbage that filled gutters and potholes
and strings of the faded laundry hanging over the chipped and peeling
19th century facades. Ducking into an unpromising doorway in a dirty side
street, I came to 4 Sharm el Sheikh, formerly Rue Lepsius, Cavafy's home
for the last 25 years of his life, now a museum.
Cavafy nicknamed this street "Rue Clapsius": In his time, a brothel
occupied the lowest floor of this four-story building. Step outside on
his tiny balcony, into the sudden sunlight from the dark interior of his
apartment, and you will see the same sight that greeted Cavafy daily: the
rooftop of white St. Sabia, surmounted by a cross, perhaps a block or two
away to the right; and, apparently equidistant to the left, the grim
rectangular lines of the Greek hospital. Cavafy was hospitalized in the
latter during his final months; his funeral was held in the former.
Cavafy called them "Temple of the Body" and "Temple of the Soul" and
called the nearby bordellos of the Attarin district, the third apex of
his Trinity, "Temple of the Flesh."
"Where could I live better?" he asked. It was a small world, a
claustrophobic life.
Even this small world has been rendered more precarious by the
unpleasant tug-of-war that has enveloped the museum's history of the
Greek community, whose roots go back to the city's founding by Alexander
the Great. About 132,000 Greeks lived here in Cavafy's time; that number
has dwindled to a tenacious 500. Thanks to Nasser's program of land
reform and the nationalization of banks and industries, the majority
"returned" to Greece, abandoning this once-European city.
The non-Greek landlords--not, apparently, fans of the poet--resisted
selling or leasing the spacious six-room apartment for a museum but
finally conceded after Greek citizens privately raised 10 million
drachmas. The museum, which opened in 1992, recently signed another
10-year lease, but the price has climbed. The owners are now offering to
sell the whole building for $1.3 million. It's about 10 times the market
value of the property in this squalid part of Alexandria. Can Greece
cough up the cash for a museum so far from its borders? Questionable.
Step into the rooms. The apartment is furbished mostly with period
re-creations. A few pieces of Cavafy's own furnishings were retrieved
from a general dispersal by heirs and are prominently displayed. The
large, rusty alarm clock is original, as are the icons over his
re-created bed: St. George, a Crucifixion and a few unidentifiable saints
in the rosy, Victorian style. A dark Arabic ornamental wooden screen
re-creates the images seen in the photos on the wall from Cavafy's time.
The apartment, with its heavy curtains of vaguely Oriental and modern
design, is dark; Cavafy debated about whether to put in electricity to
the end of his days. That pre-electric mood, at least, has been
sustained: There is still no phone line to the museum, nor are there
postcards or books for sale.
Several rooms are devoted to scholarship--the various language
editions of his works, the innumerable scholarly dissections. El Ahran,
Egypt's leading newspaper, calls the museum "a cross between a center for
Cavafy studies and a re-creation of his home. There is sufficient
material here to keep a PhD busy."
The non-academically inclined may content themselves instead by
holding his small obaab, the bathroom slippers of dark wood, inlaid with
mother-of-pearl. A glass-topped console (an original piece) displays the
death mask with what El Ahran calls his "characteristic gnomic
expression." Cavafy is stripped of the Proustian dandyism that marks the
most familiar of his photos--in plain white plaster, the nose is
aggressive and hooked, the expression stern and forbidding, startlingly
Dantesque.
Yes, but does this help us understand his poetry?
In a sense, it does. It anchors him. It makes him real--even as his
poetry roams the millenniums, even as Alexandria becomes an unambiguously
Arab city. Cavafy's poetry takes us to the timeless and universal, but
this museum situates him firmly in time and place. However much he wrote
about fleeting love and the fall of empires, he returned alone to these
modest, petroleum-lamp-lit rooms, to this notoriously uneventful life.
Certainly, there is a talismanic charm in holding the small obaab or
gazing at the Orthodox icons, an undeniable, mysterious link between a
man and the objects that formed his daily routine.
* * * Above all, however, this is a Temple of Work. His "Collected Poems"
forms a relatively slim volume, yet he is said to have written 70 poems a
year, keeping only four or five and destroying the rest. Inspiration
comes and goes, but there are no lucky charms: These rooms remind us that
there is no genius but labor. And there is also no choice but labor: " To
set your foot upon this step / you must rightfully be a citizen / of the
city of ideas," Cavafy's character reminds a frustrated young poet in
"First Step," "Coming as far as this is not little; / what you have
achieved is great glory."
And if such a temple perishes, in a country where life expectancy is
brief and poverty is rife, will anyone care? In a world where market
pressures are smashing much grander temples, will it matter? Not
terribly. Sadly, it will hardly matter at all. On that scale, it will
hardly signify if Cavafy's poetry vanishes, either--or Hardy's or
Shelley's or Montale's. Hence, the precariousness of all temples of world
culture, everywhere. Hence, the untenable and unenviable position of our
cultural gatekeepers.
It's a commonplace of our time to say only text matters, that the
poetry is the biography. It is easy for this to become a euphemism to
disguise the erosion of literature's role in a culture that has
bottomless pockets for technological museums and sports halls of fame.
When a nation honors a legacy--however minimally through museums,
plaques, statues--it is creating a space for poetry in the culture's
"thinking."
The Greek community is making just such a space for us, and for them
it matters; it matters passionately. In this city, they still gather on
the anniversary of Cavafy's death to read his poems and hear lectures,
and they have fought for this museum for decades, a small candle they
hold in a larger culture that has extinguished his language and whose
homophobia snuffs out even his name from public remembrance. In a sense,
it is dispiriting that these particular gatekeepers should have to fight
for such a modest place, the only one of its kind in the world and one of
the few deliberately preserved chapters of the 20th century here that
does not commemorate a palace, a parasite, a revolution or a monster.
Cavafy is one of the best poets to come out of Greece in centuries,
and the Greeks here are a salutary reminder that Shakespeares will
continue to be born--if not here then elsewhere--an unbroken chain of
candles extending through time, around the world.
Who assumes responsibility for this legacy and who will pay for it?
Not Alexandria, consumed as it is by a more distant past. Not the
Egyptian nation, which is separated from Cavafy by language and a
religion. But should the burden then fall entirely on the small Greek
Embassy to operate a museum on foreign soil for a world-stature poet?
Obviously, there is no answer, but perhaps it's time we start looking.
Cavafy was ahead of his time in a number of respects, but especially this
one: The last century has seen an avalanche of expatriate poets and
expelled writers. What happens when the legacy of a writer must be
protected or supported by a foreign government--one whose language (or
politics) may make it indifferent to the language of the writer? We face
a welter of conflicting international legacies, in a Babel of languages,
and the cacophony is likely to rise.
Cavafy received communion in his dying hours, as he succumbed in
silence to throat cancer at the age of 70. His final act was to draw a
circle on a blank piece of paper, and then put a period in the center. An
inner eye. A life circled and rounded to a close. Eternity.
It is also the astronomical symbol for the sun. Is it too fanciful,
perhaps, to recall another Greek Egyptian, the last pharaoh in a
deteriorating Roman province, whose final act was to die by the asp, a
creature sacred to Ra? In so doing, Cleopatra sent a message that would
have been recognizable to any Egyptian in the streets: She was going
directly to the Sun God. Cavafy, that unique Egyptian-Greek hybrid, would
undoubtedly have known the story.
A half-hour walk away in the Chatby district, across a very noisy
boulevard, past the cafes where the young men smoke cigarettes and the
older ones, in turbans, suck their shishas with almost comic
concentration, one finds another crowded municipality: the Greek
cemetery, whose white marble monuments, encircled by a high white wall,
appear to be the outlines of a miniature city within a city. We have
arrived at Cavafy's final residence. Not the sun, after all, but a
rectangular white slab, with the simple words, beneath a cross, in Greek
letters:
CONSTANTINE CAVAFY
POET
But perhaps, in the end, his final resting place is not beneath this
cold rectangular slab either. The Greek word "poet" on the white marble
reminds us that his current home is identical with his lifetime residence
and that particular address was neither 4 Sharm el Sheikh nor Alexandria
itself but rather the mysterious and abiding Greek language. That home,
at least, is not subject to rent hikes, dispersion by heirs, legal
restrictions or the budget priorities of a nation.
Always you will arrive in this city. Do not hope for any other--
There is no hope for you, there is no road.
As you have destroyed your life here
in this little corner, you have ruined it in the entire world.
- - - Cynthia Haven Has Written for a Number of Publications, Including the Washington Post and the San Jose Mercury News
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