Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Reframing Decadence: C. P. Cavafy’s Imaginary Portraits by Peter Jeffreys
The subtitle of Peter Jeffreys’s Reframing Decadence invokes Walter Pater’s Imaginary Portraits, first published in 1887 (Pater 1887). This is appropriate to Jeffreys’s argument for “Cavafy’s literary descent from the decadent tradition” (x). Jeffreys’s thesis is completely persuasive. Chapters on Cavafy’s translations of Baudelaire, his ekphrastic poems, his echoes of Pater, and his fascination with Byzantium in decline document in detail his deployment of Decadent styles and themes. Jeffreys is the author of Eastern Questions: Hellenism and Orientalism in the Writings of E.M. Forster and C.P. Cavafy and has edited two volumes of Cavafy’s extra-poetic writings, The Forster-Cavafy Letters and Selected Prose Works (Jeffreys 2005, 2009; Cavafy 2010). His expertise and linguistic facility allow him to marshal little known Cavafy texts, many unfinished, some translated here for the first time, to discuss the meter of poetic lines in their original Greek, and to guide readers to the sources of Cavafy’s terms and phrases in archaic Greek historical texts.
Such attention to detail is a virtue. To adopt a Decadent sentiment, however, some virtues may be less compelling than certain critical, if not vices, then indulgences. Among these is biography, often disparaged as a refuge for those unequal to the rigors of textual analysis. At the risk of self-incrimination, I was most interested in the first chapter of Reframing Decadence, previously published in The Journal of Modern Greek Studies (Jeffreys 2006). Jeffreys focuses on Cavafy family’s connections to the wealthy Greek expatriates in Victorian London with whom they were intertwined by business, marriage, and baptism. These families were important patrons of Aesthetic and Pre-Raphaelite artists. The beautiful women of “the Ionides-Cavafy clan” (4) posed for famous Pre-Raphaelite paintings and played a part in some of those movements’ notorious scandals. Cavafy was excluded from this glamorous world, however. As a child, [End Page 413] he lived in Alexandria until, after his father’s death in 1870 when Constantine was just seven years old, his mother moved to Liverpool, from where her younger sons attended British schools; his impoverished family returned to Alexandria in 1877.
To frame his comparisons of the Cavafy brothers’ youthful writings with Swinburne’s poems, Jeffreys hurriedly invokes this history in speculative formulations, such as “the precocious Cavafy must certainly have been aware of the implications of his relatives’ fellowship with and patronage of these artists” (6–7). We get no explicating of what these implications were, however, beyond the problematic assertion that “this daring goes some way toward explaining his own courageous homoerotic verse decades later; for, in a sense, his cousins had already paved the road to hedonism upon which he would tread so resolutely the rest of his life” (7). Such passages typify the shortcomings of this study, which, when it departs from textual analysis, founders into vague—rather disapproving-sounding—generalization. How does the “daring” of wealthy expatriate patrons explain “courageous homoerotic verse”? Why does the latter call for “explaining”? Is “hedonism” an adequate or appropriate rubric for a “road” treaded “resolutely”? Most substantively, how did the poet’s exclusion from his compelling family history frame his relationship to this legacy?
Such superficial analysis and inattentive rhetoric undercuts this book’s claims on our interest. Decadence in art and literature arose at a particular time and place as a sophisticated, aesthetically and emotionally compelling response to a complex set of issues. If, as Jeffreys demonstrates, Cavafy carried Decadence into the twentieth century, this sustained performance of derivation or imitation is significant to the extent that it, too, is a sophisticated, aesthetically and emotionally compelling response to its own place and time. Hints of such an argument emerge in the Prologue, not from Jeffreys, but in a lengthy quotation of Edward Said’s subtle reading of Cavafy’s decision to adopt “a learned Greek idiom of which Cavafy was self-consciously the last modern representative” (xv). The way “his poems...
