of the Hellenistic, the Late Antique peripheries, had always been indifferent to it, the great symbol of High Classicism. He likely fell in love there with a young littérateur called Alexander Mavroudis; but about this, like so much of his erotic life, we will never have more than the odd hint. A few years later—by now his mother had been dead for almost a decade—he came to live at the overstuffed apartment on Rue Lepsius (today the Cavafy Museum), where he would spend the rest of his life. For Sareyannis, who wrote a reminiscence of his friend for an Athens journal in 1944, it is only too clear that the poet’s taste in decor was clearly no better than his taste in fiction:
Cavafy’s flat was on an upper floor of a rather lower-class, unkempt apartment house. Upon entering, one saw a wide hall laden with furniture. No walls were to be seen anywhere, as they were covered with paintings and, most of all, with shelves or Arabian
étagères
holding countless vases—small ones, large ones, even enormous ones. Various doors were strung along that hall; the last one opened onto the salon where the poet received his visitors. At one time I greatly admired that salon, but one morning in 1929, as I was passing by to pick up some collections of Cavafy’s poetry tobe delivered to friends of his in Paris, I waited alone there for quite a while and was able to study it detachedly. With surprise I realized for the first time that it was crowded with the most incongruous things: faded velvet armchairs, old Bokhara and Indian stuffs at the windows and on the sofa, a black desk with gilt ornament, folding chairs like those found in colonial bungalows, shelves on the walls and tables with countless little columns and mother-of-pearl, a
koré
from Tanagra, tasteless turn-of-the-century vases, every kind of Oriental rug, Chinese vases, paintings, and so on and so on. I could single out nothing as exceptional and really beautiful; the way everything was amassed reminded me of a secondhand furniture store. Could that hodgepodge have been in the taste of the times? I had read similar descriptions of the homes of Anatole France and of Villiers de l’Isle Adam, who were also, both of them, lovers of beauty and gave careful attention to their writing. Whether Cavafy himself chose and collected those assorted objects or whether he inherited them, I do not know; what is certain is that Cavafy’s hand, his design, could not be felt in any of that. I imagine that he just came slowly to love them, with time, as they were gradually covered with dust and memories, as they became no longer just objects, but ambiance. (tr. Diana Haas)
The cluttered, déclassé surroundings, the absence of aesthetic distinction, the startlingly conventional, to say nothing of middlebrow, taste: Cavafy’s apartment, like his job, gave little outward sign of the presence of a great artistic mind—the place from which the poetry really came. The more you know about the life, the more Seferis’s pronouncement that Cavafy existed only in his poetry seems just.
Most evenings, as he grew older, found him at home, either alone with a book or surrounded by a crowd of people that was, in every way, Alexandrian: a mixture of Greeks, Jews, Syrians, visiting Belgians; established writers such as the novelist and children’s book author Penelope Delta, Nikos Kazantzakis, a critic or two, younger friends and aspiring writers. (Among the latter, eventually, was Alexander Sengopoulos,known as Aleko, who was very possibly the illegitimate son of one of Cavafy’s brothers—acquaintances remarked on a striking family resemblance—and would eventually be his heir.) To these friends and admirers the poet liked to hold forth, in a voice of unusual charm and authority and in the mesmerizing if idiosyncratic manner memorably described by E. M. Forster, who met Cavafy during World War I, when Forster was working for the Red Cross in Alexandria. It was Forster who would do more than
David Drake, S.M. Stirling
Kimberley Griffiths Little