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Reframing Decadence C P Cavafy s Imaginary Portraits
Peter Jeffreys Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Peter Jeffreys
ISBN(s): 9780801447082, 0801447089
Edition: Illustrated
File Details: PDF, 4.97 MB
Year: 2015
Language: english
Reframing Decadence
Reframing Decadence

C. P. Cavafy’s Imaginary Portraits

Peter Jeffreys

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London
Copyright © 2015 by Cornell University

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or
parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in
writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University
Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.

First published 2015 by Cornell University Press

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jeffreys, Peter, author.
Reframing decadence : C.P. Cavafy’s imaginary portraits /
Peter Jeffreys.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8014-4708-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Cavafy, Constantine, 1863–1933—Criticism and interpretation.
2. Decadence in literature. I. Title.
PA5610.K2Z7256 2015
889.1′32—dc23 2015010882

Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible

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For my parents, Irene and George
 Contents

Prologue: “Dangerous Thoughts” ix

1. “Aesthetic to the point of affliction”:

Cavafy and British Aestheticism 1
2. Translating Baudelaire: L’esprit Décadent
and the Early Writings 26
3. Pictorialist Poetics: Transpositioning Word and Image 57
4. Paterian Decadence: Hellenism, Hedonism,
and the Matter of Rome 93
5. Cavafy’s Byzantium: Historicizing Fantasies of
Exquisite Decline 122

Epilogue: Decadence’s Gay Legacy 159

Bibliography 175
Notes 203
Acknowledgments 235
Index 237
 Prologue

“Dangerous Thoughts”

After his memorable encounter with C. P. Cavafy in 1927, the Greek novel-
ist Nikos Kazantzakis recorded his impressions of the poet in a verbal por-
trait that mischievously casts upon him the effete aura of decadence: “Now
as I see him for the first time this evening and hear him, I feel how wisely
such a complex, heavy-ladened soul of sanctified decadence succeeded in
finding its form in art—a perfect match—in order to be saved.” For Ka-
zantzakis, Cavafy possesses all the formal traits of an “exceptional man of
decadence”: “wise, ironic, hedonistic—a charmer with a vast memory. . . .
Seated in a soft armchair, he looks out the window, waiting for the bar-
barians to arrive. He holds a parchment with delicate encomia written in
calligraphy, dressed in his best, made up with care, and he waits. But the
barbarians do not arrive, and by evening he sighs quietly, and smiles iron-
ically at the naiveté of his own soul which still hopes” (1965, 79). Although
Kazantzakis likely intended these slightly irreverent comments to be read
more for their dramatic effect than for their critical astuteness, his un-
sparing use of the word “decadence” (παρακμή) throughout his account
x Prologue

conveys as much about Cavafy’s poetics as it does about the aging poet’s
vanity. Indeed, Kazantzakis’s portrait perceptively identifies Cavafy’s lit-
erary descent from the decadent tradition, a central dimension of his poet-
ics that forms the subject of this book. Not only did Cavafy write under the
intoxicating spell of décadisme during his early years, but he would remain
a devout votary of this loosely defined but unmistakably influential move-
ment, the “common denominator” of all literary trends that emerged dur-
ing the last two decades of the nineteenth century, as Jean Pierrot (1981, 7)
maintains. Cavafy’s literary genealogy is firmly rooted in the “dangerous
thoughts” of fin de siècle decadence, a source of subject matter and imagery
that constitutes an overarching literary strategy that enabled him to trans-
gress and transcend moral and aesthetic boundaries; his poem “Dangerous
Thoughts” (1911),1 which offers an imaginary portrait of the youth Myrtias
who willingly succumbs to “audacious erotic desires” and “lascivious im-
pulses,” serves as one of the best illustrations of this decadent temperament.
Cavafy cultivated this distinct cosmopolitan aesthetic throughout his poetic
career, and thus it is no coincidence that the cunning Kazantzakis chose
this tainted but highly fitting category to characterize the enigmatic person-
ality of the Alexandrian poet.
Today, nearly a century after Kazantzakis penned his lines, the para-
digm of economic, military, social, and cultural decline has once again be-
come the undeniable historical reality for many Western nations. From
Niall Ferguson’s provocative recasting of the Spenglerian narrative in Civ-
ilization: The Rest and the West (2011) to Hanif Kureishi’s contemporary
reprisal of it in his short story “The Decline of the West” (2010), we are
regularly reminded of the cyclical inevitability of cultural decline. The
timeliness, therefore, of a comprehensive reappraisal of the most widely
read modern Greek poet—one that aims to realign him with the decadent
tradition—requires little by way of justification. As a poet who has pro-
foundly explored the themes of failure, decline, and defeat from various
literary angles, Cavafy has a cultural relevance that has been gradually ex-
panding to a newer and wider contemporary readership beyond his tradi-
tional base of diaspora Greeks, classicists, and gays. This has as much to
do with the current decline-obsessed zeitgeist as it does with Cavafy’s cos-
mopolitan appeal. A telling illustration of this appeal is a statement that
appeared in the New Yorker defining the cultural pose of the suave über-
European “drinking Burgundy wine, listening to Sibelius, and reading
 “Dangerous Thoughts” xi

Cavafy” (Buruma 2011, 39). Implied in this highly sophisticated defini-

tion is the impending onslaught of some looming disaster awaiting those
who assume such precious poses (in this instance, Belgian politicians in
denial of the growing decay of their urban centers and the rise of Flem-
ish nationalism). That Cavafy’s name presently resonates so unmistak-
ably with the poetics of decline is a complex and fascinating phenomenon,
one that requires more than a predictable gloss referencing his signature
poem “Waiting for the Barbarians.” Rather, it calls for an engaged study
of the extensive and pervasive decadent thematics that inform so much of
Cavafy’s poetry. Even though he brilliantly rehabilitated and subtly in-
fused many of the central tropes of decadence in his work, numerous read-
ers and critics maintain quite mistakenly that Cavafy moved well beyond
decadence into different poetic modes altogether. One aim of this book
is to address this misperception by firmly establishing Cavafy’s decadent
pedigree and elucidating how the decadent lineage remained an enduring
part of his creative repertoire.
Although the concept of literary decadence remains highly contested
and continues to resist any precise definition, as a critical term it encom-
passes Cavafy’s poetics more effectively than does the literary category
symbolism or realism. Several early Greek critics—namely, Alkis Thrylos,
Tellos Agras, Panos Karavias, and Timos Malanos—were eager to con-
nect Cavafy with decadent literary trends. Despite the initial influence of
this critical consensus, Cavafy’s association with the decadent movement
underwent a curious reappraisal and revision, a fact that is not surprising
considering the problematic nature of the term itself.2 That he was fixated
on decadent aspects of Hellenistic and Roman Alexandria as opposed to
the celebrated glorious achievements of classical Greece is now axiomatic
for any critical analysis of his poems. Yet the more substantial connections
between Cavafy and decadence have remained rather underexplored and
even negated, effectively cutting off the poet from his inspirational creative
font. This is due in part to the efforts of certain critics, notably the Alexan-
drian novelist and critic Stratis Tsirkas, who, in the late 1950s, somewhat
overzealously defended Cavafy from the scurrilous charges of depravity
made by Timos Malanos in his study The Poet C. P. Cavafy (1933). Mala-
nos, although unfairly critical of Cavafy as a scheming, selfish promoter
of “depraved” and “derivative” verse—a mere “parasite” and theatrical
“prompter” as he put it (1957, 207, 77)—was nevertheless more in tune
xii Prologue

with Cavafy’s decadent pulse than were many critics who have since re-
fashioned the poet into a post-symbolist realist. As Dimitris Daskalopou-
los (1988) aptly notes, certain Greek scholars were determined to sanitize
Cavafian decadence in their efforts to recuperate the poet and enshrine
him in the national literary canon.3 What resulted was a gradual dimin-
ishing of Cavafy’s decadent aesthetic. A mere glance at the topics of his
late Unfinished Poems (1918–32—which include subjects ranging from the
demonic apparition of the Emperor Justinian (“From The Secret His-
tory”) to the miraculous slumber of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus (“The
Holy Seven Children”) and telepathic exchanges between Saint Athana-
sius and his monks (“Athanasius”)—disproves the misleading conclusion
that Cavafy’s decadence was a mere passing fad. This book seeks to coun-
ter this problematic revisionism and recontextualize Cavafy in terms of lit-
erary decadence in order to show how the poet remained unapologetically
committed to the tenets of this artistic movement from the time of its as-
cendancy in the late nineteenth century (the period of Cavafy’s early poetic
awakening) up until the composition of his final unfinished poems prior to
his death in 1933. Cavafy’s daring expression of his “aesthetic individual-
ism,” to borrow Matei Calinescu’s apt categorization of decadence, would
lead him to employ the central tropes of decadence with idiosyncratic ex-
uberance throughout his poetic career. To be sure, the late Victorian pe-
riod out of which decadence emerged remains a neglected dimension of
Cavafy’s work, one that yields illuminating critical perspectives on assess-
ing his current global popularity, as I hope to show in the pages of this
book. Much of this mass appeal is directly related to Cavafy’s deft appro-
priation of grand Victorian lore, such as the British obsession with impe-
rial Rome, the burgeoning fascination with the pictorial arts, an excessive
preoccupation with death and the cult of mourning, and the renewed in-
terest in Greek eros that was spearheaded by Oxford Hellenists, whose
revolutionary writings sought to legitimate homosexuality. These seem-
ingly retrograde facets of nineteenth-century culture animate many of
Cavafy’s thematic and aesthetic interests, and it is from the threshold of
decadence that we are best positioned to assess the poet’s imaginative re-
working of these fin de siècle tropes into extraordinary twentieth-century
poetic expressions.
Before we consider the specific delineation of Cavafian decadence, a
brief overview of the concept itself is in order. As a widespread cultural
 “Dangerous Thoughts” xiii

phenomenon, decadence offered paradigms that were at once cosmopoli-

tan, transnational, and global (Hall and Murray 2013, 18). The fluctuating
contours of the movement defined as decadent have been redrawn in more
recent studies by David Weir, Ellis Hanson, Linda Dowling, Matei Cali-
nescu, Asti Hustvedt, Brian Stableford, Kirsten MacLeod, Richard Della-
mora, and Matthew Potolsky (among others), the collective result of which
has been the rehabilitation of a once-shunned term. David Weir, who
views decadence as a major cultural mode of transition from romanticism
to modernism —a movement in a dynamic relationship with other literary
periods—offers the following encompassing account of the word’s noto-
rious ambiguity: “A number of literary movements and tendencies devel-
oped through decadence, either by reacting against its characteristic styles
and themes, or by extending them in some way”; decadence, Weir argues,
developed as an “independent movement at the same time that other, bet-
ter known movements were developing through it. . . . In one sense, dec-
adence is like the mystical sphere whose circumference is everywhere but
whose center is nowhere: naturalism, Parnassianism, aestheticism, and the
rest are all arrayed ‘around’ decadence, but they do not point toward a
common center. In another sense, the center and the circumference are the
same: decadence as an independent movement is a sphere closed and con-
tracted upon itself” (1996, xix). Despite this paradoxical lack of a center,
the term “decadence” was championed (and in turn repudiated) by a num-
ber of significant literary figures, many of whom ventured some very pre-
cise definitions. One such apologia was offered by Théophile Gautier, who,
in his 1868 preface to Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, articulated a highly
influential exposition of the term: “The style of decadence . . . is the last ef-
fort of the Word, called upon to express everything, and pushed to the ut-
most extremity.” In a similar vein, the French critics Désiré Nisard and
Paul Bourget identified the decadent style as one in which language de-
composes into a multitude of overwrought fragments. Jean Moréas wrote
a manifesto in 1886 on the “new school” of decadence (although he pre-
ferred to use the term “symbolism”) in which he denounced didactic pur-
suits, declamation, false sensitivity and objective description. For Friedrich
Nietzsche, decadence was the inescapable hallmark of the modern age and
of Western history in general—the essential condition of humanity. Wal-
ter Pater famously offered his own classical definition by connecting dec-
adent aesthetics to “the sense of death and the desire of beauty: the desire
xiv Prologue

of beauty quickened by the sense of death.” Arthur Symons, in his essay

“The Decadent Movement in Literature” (1893), later expanded and re-
named The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), categorized the move-
ment as one marked by “an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity
in research, an over-subtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual
and moral perversity.”4 And Cavafy’s contemporary Oswald Spengler, the
grand design historian who gave voice to a tragic sense of historical life in
The Decline of the West (1917), echoes the poet’s pessimistic but delicate ap-
preciation for the beauty and splendor inherent in the irreversible process
of cultural disintegration.
Notwithstanding the movement’s lack of an ideological center, there
are several common themes that collectively define its theoretical essence.
Decadent writers insist on the absolute autonomy of art (art for art’s sake);
revile bourgeois philistinism and utilitarianism; seek rare sensations and
intense experiences in their struggle to dispel ennui (Macleod 2006, 1);
value artificiality above nature; are haunted by the cruelty of time and
the imminence of death (Balakian 1977, 69); cultivate a lyrical sense of
doom, metaphysical restlessness, and despair; favor the dissolution of clas-
sical ideas and a late anticlassical style (North 1999, 88); prefer eroticism
to real sexual pleasure (Pierrot 1981, 135); revolt against the romantic cult
of nature and ideal love (Carter 1958, 150); are fascinated with the objet
d’art and the fragment (Hanson 1997, 184); are intrigued by the irratio-
nal and antipositivist phenomena of magic, mysticism, and the occult; and
ultimately question modernity’s choice of comparisons. They prefer not
classical Greece or the Renaissance but Alexandria, Rome, or Byzantium,
thereby undermining “modernity’s sense of superiority” by playing on its
“deep-seated fear that the past has not in fact been overcome, that the tri-
umph over superstition and autocracy has been incomplete, or that, hav-
ing overcome previous societies, the process of history will continue and it
will be overcome and replaced in its turn” (Morley 2005, 580).
This compilation of categories gleaned from the discourse of decadence
applies quite fittingly to Cavafy’s own aesthetic sensibility, which could
be more precisely defined as follows: Cavafy’s poetry is antiromantic and
anticlassical; displays a rather morbid fascination with death; manifests a
bittersweet melancholy and metaphysical restlessness; exhibits a sense of
doom conveyed through highly theatrical tableaux; employs a vivid pic-
torialist palette; shows an interest in mysticism, church ritual, magic, and
 “Dangerous Thoughts” xv

Byzantinism; delights in an excess of learning and artifice; privileges and

celebrates homosexuality; and is perversely compelled by disaster. These
unmistakable aspects of decadence are all inscribed in varying degrees in
Cavafy’s verse, as will be seen in more detail throughout the following
chapters. Coming of age during the fin de siècle and experiencing the rapid
economic dwindling of his family’s fortune, as the last male issue of his
family line, Cavafy was acutely aware of how decline affected his life and
world. This sense of marginalization informed his style as well. He was,
as Edward Said notes, the last of the poets writing in the learned “late
style” of the Greek Phanariots:5 “The language, a learned Greek idiom of
which Cavafy was self-consciously the last modern representative, adds
to the parsimony, the essentialized and rarefied quality of the poetry. His
poems enact a form of minimal survival between the past and the present,
and his aesthetic of nonproduction, expressed in a nonmetaphorical, al-
most prosaic unrhymed verse, enforces the sense of enduring exile that is
at the core of his work” (2006, 145). Not only in this sense of historic and
stylistic belatedness is Cavafy thoroughly decadent (he would cultivate the
neurotic mannerisms of an effete aristocrat throughout his life), but he was
also deeply influenced by political events that led him to a certain despair,
namely the catastrophic failure of Greece’s irredentist policy, the Great
Idea (Μεγάλη Ιδέα), which resulted in the wholesale destruction of Helle-
nism in Asia Minor and Anatolia.6 By situating Cavafy within this complex
array of aesthetic ideas and concepts, I aim to show how decadence—a “pi-
oneering, profound aesthetic” paradoxically generated by a “languorous
and rebellious state of mind” (Weir 1996, 10)—rather than undermining
his originality as a poet, enabled him to emerge as one of the most dynamic
and original poets of the twentieth century. By extracting the more strik-
ing images and conceits of the period and transposing them into highly
personal poetic expressions, Cavafy remains one of the most important in-
terpreters of literary decadence as well as one of its most devoted acolytes.
This book is partly an intellectual history of Cavafy’s evolution as an
artist through the literary movements of his time and partly a biocritical
study of his relationship to literary decadence. As such, it is arranged both
chronologically and thematically, beginning with Cavafy’s early adolescent
years in England, proceeding to his brief flirtation with prose and journal-
ism, then moving on to his early compositions (published, unpublished,
and rejected) before analyzing his mature and late poetry. Intermingled
xvi Prologue

throughout this progression are readings of his canonical poems that are
meant to illustrate important connections with decadent subjects. This
critical methodology deliberately resists certain lines of demarcation—
in regard to either the canonicity of the poems and essays or the date of
their composition—classifications that are often less than helpful when
treating a poet who continually revised and recycled material throughout
his life. (The year 1911 is commonly seen as the date when Cavafy found
his signature poetic voice, the dividing line between his early and mature
poems.) Similarly, I have intentionally eschewed a doctrinal definition of
decadence since the term is too polymorphous to be delineated as such, and
the word and movement tend to fall apart under diachronic scrutiny. A
more useful model for the concept is offered by Matthew Potolsky, who ar-
gues that “works are ‘decadent’ not because they realize a doctrine or make
use of certain styles and themes but because they move within a recogniz-
able network of canonical books, pervasive influences, recycled stories, er-
udite commentaries, and shared tastes” (2013, 5). It is this very notion of
a decadent network—a community of taste, as it were—that best defines
Cavafy’s relationship to literary decadence and underlies the organiza-
tional approach of this book. The standard aesthetic trajectory commenc-
ing from Poe on through Baudelaire, Swinburne, Huysmans, and Pater
serves as the basic axis of the book, one that intersects with numerous other
figures. The book begins with a critical appraisal of the lingering impact
of Victorian aestheticism on the young Cavafy and explores his exposure
to various artistic circles while he was living in England. His direct fil-
ial connection to the Ionides family and their patronage of important Pre-
Raphaelite painters and poets proved foundational to Cavafy’s aesthetic
sensibility. I consider the poetic influence of Swinburne, who, along with
Gautier, first defined decadence as a project. Swinburne’s subversive Hel-
lenism is positioned within the broader framework of painterly influences,
especially the palettes of Edward Burne-Jones and James McNeill Whis-
tler, whose paintings, I argue, will later directly inspire various poems.
This established the aesthetic pictorialism—a pervasive overlap between
painting and poetry—that subsequently serves as one of the major deca-
dent hallmarks that defines Cavafy’s oeuvre.
Cavafy’s exposure to the currents and canvases of British aestheticism
prepares him for his initiation and immersion into French decadence.
Chapter 2 takes up the profound impact of Charles Baudelaire on Cavafy’s
 “Dangerous Thoughts” xvii

early poetic compositions and surveys the poet’s relevant prose writings—
both expository and fictional—that function as an important index of
decadent subjects and interests he would later explore and rework in his
mature poetry. The influence of Poe is significant here—refracted through
Baudelaire—as is the concept of the flâneur and the prominence of the
prose poem. Cavafy’s brief journalistic apprenticeship and ill-fated exper-
imentation with purist Greek prose offer clues as to why he abandoned a
career as a journalist critic and translator, retreating instead to the more se-
cluded haven of poetry. The chapter concludes with a reading of Cavafy’s
gothic short story “In Broad Daylight” in light of his struggle and anxi-
ety vis-à-vis the vexed language issue, the Victorian cult of prose, and the
ubiquitous presence of Greek folklore, all of which played a role in his de-
cision to curtail his public performance in prose.
The book then proceeds to explore the poet’s prevailing pictorialist
strategy (one largely overlooked by critics bent on fashioning a modern-
ist Cavafy) and traces his debt to both Parnassian and decadent writers and
the transposition d’art tradition that he gleaned from the salon critiques of
Gautier, Baudelaire, and Huysmans. The syncretic mode of interreferenc-
ing paintings, sculptures, and poetry derives from this genre, and its influ-
ence on Cavafy is fully evident in the early poems he wrote and published
prior to the 1911 date that marks his poetic maturity. The ekphrastic tra-
dition and the cross-pollination of ideas, motifs, and aesthetics between
the “sister arts” is an imaginative strategy he refines and adapts in his ma-
ture phase in many of his canonical poems as well. Chapter 3 undertakes
intertextual readings of poems and paintings that are meant to highlight
Cavafy’s affinity with the plastic arts, one that consequently explains his
lasting appeal to visual artists. It concludes with a consideration of select
twentieth-century artists who uncovered pictorial dimensions in Cavafy’s
poems that in turn inspired new pictorial variations of them.
Chapter 4 presents a parallel reading of Cavafy and Walter Pater and
proffers a sustained argument for the weighty influence of the Victorian
aesthete on the poet in terms of both a shared aesthetic historicism and
an emerging homoerotic sensibility. Pater set an example not only with
his singular distillation of art criticism into his “euphuistic” writings but
also by inflecting his Hellenism with a sensuality that boldly celebrated
the homosexual subject. Traces of Pater’s influence are found in Cavafy’s
prose essay on Shakespeare, and he borrowed heavily from Pater when
xviii Prologue

fashioning his own version of Pater’s conversion narratives, which fea-

tured comradeship, mourning, and an abiding fascination with the early
church. Cavafy’s favoring of Rome as a setting for so many of his poems
derives in large part from the Victorian obsession with Romanitas; Pater’s
short fiction, and Marius the Epicurean in particular, offered the poet the
well-wrought exemplum of the imaginary portrait of the aesthetic youth
corrupted by Hellenism that we encounter in so many of his poems. More-
over, Cavafy’s debt to Victorian classicism with its immense popular ap-
peal yields insights into understanding his present fame, especially as he
reprises so many of the same motifs that enticed an audience obsessed with
imperial decline and the waning of cultural hegemony.
Chapter 5 focuses on Cavafy’s complex relation to Byzantium and ad-
dresses the conflicting schools of interpretation that read his Byzantine
poems as either overtly ironic or nostalgically patriotic. After overview-
ing the historic association between Byzantium and decadence, I assess
Cavafy’s unique redaction of Byzantine history and revisionist approach
whereby he counters the age-old post-Enlightenment bias against the
Eastern Roman Empire as hopelessly corrupt with the countervailing view
of Byzantine culture as sophisticated, dynamic, and paradoxically modern.
Cavafy’s poems channel both approaches and effectively transcend them
by offering a contrapuntal decadent reification of both the exuberance of
decline and the celebration of Byzantine culture as the precious repository
of Roman polity and Hellenic culture. His treatment of defiant royal fig-
ures foregrounds the dramatic element he valued in Byzantine historiog-
raphy while appreciating the dignified abjection inherent in the narrative
of failed coups, overthrown dynasties, and thwarted ambitions. Byzantium
thus serves as a central facet of Cavafy’s ongoing engagement with deca-
dence and remains his most significant contribution to the transhistorical
and transnational network of writers who define decadent discourse.
The book concludes with a reflection on how the gay legacy of deca-
dence effectively shaped Cavafy’s poetic expression of homosexuality and
continues to influence the ongoing attraction of queer artists and critics
to his work. By focusing on the erotic poems, we see how, in the devi-
ant manner of Huysmans, Cavafy often sublimates raw sexuality in favor
of a more elevated passion transfigured by memory and aestheticized by
art. Yet just as often he presents a genuine physicality in poems that wor-
ship male beauty and recount specific sexual encounters. In both instances,
 “Dangero us Thoughts” xix

Cavafy largely avoids the feelings of abject shame common to many pre-
Stonewall poets and writers; yet there is certain hint of sentimentality in
these erotic poems that, as W. H. Auden felt, lend themselves somewhat
to kitsch, an aesthetic category that remains paradoxically useful in ex-
plaining the poet’s mass appeal. Indeed, the roots of this lingering senti-
mental strain may be traced back to the influence of Victorian aesthetic
painting and the highly emotive pictorialism that left a pronounced mark
on his erotic verse. Thus the ongoing popularization of his work and his
“kitschification” as a gay icon may be seen as yet another manifestation of
his unique relationship to the decadent tradition.
Although Cavafy never left any direct statements on the subject of
decadence either as a concept or as a literary movement, he apparently
discussed the topic at length with E. M. Forster when the two first met
in Alexandria. In his letter to Cavafy dated July 1, 1917, Forster writes,
“[George] Valassopoulo was over this afternoon and told me that since I
saw you something occurred that has made you very unhappy; that you be-
lieved the artist must be depraved; and that you were willing he should tell
the above to your friends.”7 What Cavafy meant by this notion of depravity
(by which he clearly implies decadence) has always intrigued me, and this
book is in many ways an attempt to supply this missing narrative and ex-
pound Cavafian decadence based on his life’s work and the only real testi-
mony he left to the movement—what was really precious: his poetic form
(to paraphrase a line from “The Tomb of Evrion”). This book aims to fill a
long-standing void and encourage new critical interpretations of Cavafy’s
poems centered on a fuller appreciation of his decadent poetics.
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