Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography by Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys

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Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography by Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys

Constantine Cavafy expected that someone would write his biography. Indeed, he’d be most disappointed if no one took up the task. Considered not only as one of Greece’s great modern poets but as a towering figure of world literature, Cavafy left behind a hoarder’s trove of material. According to the authors of the new biography, he never threw away a theater ticket or a to-do list. Even so, vital material was lost through time and upheaval. 

Gregroy Jusdanis (Ohio State University) and Peter Jeffreys (Suffolk University) decided against writing the usual birth-to-death chronicle of their subject’s life. Cavafy was a fearless writer of homoerotic poetry, but his extensive archive includes few journal entries or prosaic reflections on sexuality. The authors “tell a circular narrative” focused on themes such as his Alexandria-based family’s role in the Greek Levantine mercantile network and “his ambitious attempts to promote his work and launch his literary reputation.” They rely on snatches of Cavafy’s sharply incised verse, his published and unpublished essays, excerpts from letters he received and the journalism and poetry of his brothers. The Cavafys were a literary family. 

The portrait that emerges is of a poet worried about social status (his family’s fortune was in decline), aware of the injustice of the imperial system he served as a clerk in British-run Egypt but cautious about speaking out (and losing his job). He was deeply imbued with the culture of ancient Greece and Byzantium but willing, eager, to reach new shores through his poetry. The authors find evidence of an “obsessive personality” in his carefully curated image as an aesthete. Cavafy once wrote, in a line that summons Oscar Wilde, “What is important for our happiness is not how others judge us but how we think they judge us.” 

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