by Gore Vidal
E. M. Forster famously described him at the time of the First War: “. . . A Greek gentleman in a straw hat standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe. His arms are extended, possibly. ‘Oh, Cavafy . . . !’ Yes, it is Mr. Cavafy, and he is going either from his flat to the office, or from his office to the flat. If the former, he vanishes when seen, with a slight gesture of despair. If the latter, he may be prevailed upon to begin a sentence—an immense complicated yet shapely sentence, full of parentheses that never get mixed and of reservations that really do reserve; a sentence that moves with logic to its foreseen end, yet to an end that is always more vivid and thrilling than one foresaw. And despite its intellectual richness and human outlook, despite the matured charity of its judgments, one feels that it too stands at a slight angle to the universe.”
Although Cavafy himself appears to have been a conventional Greek Orthodox Christian, as poet he inhabits the pagan Greco-Roman world of legend as well as the everyday world of Alexandria in which he might be called the Pindar of the one-night stand between males. A troubled, sometime Christian puritan, W. H. Auden, suspects that the passionate encounters he describes are largely one-sided because the poet no doubt paid: It is true that the grave soldiers at the Nea Zoe expected a small payment for their company but the business transacted was always mutual and the double nimbus of accomplished lust can be spectacularly bright in a shadowy room full of Arabian furniture not to mention ghosts and even gods.
Yes, the gods themselves, always youthful, eternal, still appear to men. “When an August morning dawns over you, / your scented space gleams with their life; / and sometimes a young man’s etherial [sic] form, / vanishing, passing quickly, crosses the tops of your hills.” In One of Their Gods, Cavafy observes: “When one of them passed through Selefkia’s market, / at the hour when darkness first comes on, / as would a tall, and consummately handsome youth / with the joy of invulnerability in his eyes . . . headed for the quarter that only lives at night, with orgies and debaucheries / with every type of frenzy and abandon, / they speculated about which of Them he was, and for which of his suspicious entertainments / he’d descended to the streets of Selefkia / from his Worshipped, his most Venerated Halls.”
Here is a standard exercise given students in classical times: imagine that you are Julius Caesar, you have just crossed the river Rubicon; you are at war with your own republic. Now, as Caesar, write what you are thinking and feeling. A canny exercise because to put yourself in the place of another encourages empathy and understanding. J. G. Herder even invented the German word Einfühlen to describe those, like Cavafy, who have the capacity to enter and inhabit other-time. Some of his best poems are soliloquies that he invents for those who once lived and died in history or, more intimately, for those whom he has known and loved in his own story.
The history that he most draws upon is the world of Alexander the Great, whose heirs created Greek kingdoms in Egypt and Asia Minor, sovereignties that, in less than three centuries, were powerless Roman dependencies. Marc Antony’s loss of the Roman world to Octavian Augustus particularly fascinates him. “Suddenly, at midnight, when an invisible troupe / is heard passing, / with exquisite players, with voices— / do not lament your luck, now utterly exhausted / your acts that failed . . . / listen, taking your final pleasure, / to the sounds, to that mystic troupe’s rare playing, / and say your last farewell to her, to that Alexandria you are losing.” For Cavafy, Alexandria, not Cleopatra, is the heroine of the hero’s tragedy.
Despite Cavafy’s sense that the old gods have never forsaken us, he shows no sympathy at all for the Emperor Julian, who, vainly, tried to restore the worship of the gods in the fourth century. Admittedly, Julian could be a grinding bore, but even so, the essentially pagan Cavafy should have admired him. But he doesn’t. Why not? I think one pronoun shows us what Cavafy is up to. “In Antioch we were perplexed on hearing / about Julian’s latest behavior.” There it is. We. Cavafy is writing as a Christian citizen of Antioch, a city which disdained the emperor and all his works. Einfühlen at work. Cavafy is like an actor here, in character—or like Shakespeare when he imagines himself heir to a murdered king even though, according to one of Cavafy’s most ingenious poems, it is Claudius who is the good king and Hamlet, the student prince, the villain, the youth, “was nervous in the extreme, / while he was studying in Wittenberg many of his fellow students thought him a maniac.”
Cavafy once analyzed his own temperament and talent. “To me, the immediate impression is never a starting point for work. The impression has got to age, has got to falsify itself with time, without my having to falsify it.
“I have two capacities: to write Poetry or to write History. I haven’t written history and it’s too late now. Now, you’ll say, how do I know that I could write History? I feel it. I make the experiment, and ask myself: Cavafy, could you write fiction? Ten voices cry No. I ask the question again: Cavafy, could you write a play? Twenty-five voices again cry No. Then I ask again: Cavafy, could you write History? A hundred and twenty-five voices tell me you could.” The critic Robert Liddell thought Cavafy could have been a master of historical fiction. Luckily, he chose to be himself, a unique poet at an odd angle to our culture.
It was noted at the death of America’s tragic twentieth-century empress—the one who died with a Greek name as well as fate—that her favorite poem was Cavafy’s Ithaca. One can see why. Cavafy has gone back to Homer: the origin of Greek narrative. Odysseus, returning from Troy to his home island of Ithaca, is endlessly delayed by the malice of the sea god Poseidon. Cavafy appears to be addressing Odysseus himself but it could be anyone on a life’s journey. “As you set out toward Ithaca, / hope the way is long, full of reversals, full of knowing.” He advises the traveler not to brood too much on the malice of those who want to destroy him, to keep him from his goal. If you don’t take them to heart, they cannot defeat you. The poet also advises the traveler to enjoy the exotic cities along the way; he even favors selective shopping, something that also appealed to our nineteenth-century tragic empress, Mrs. Abraham Lincoln. Why not take advantage of a visit to Egypt for wisdom? “Keep Ithaca always in your mind. / Arriving there is what has been ordained for you. / But do not hurry the journey at all. Better if it lasts many years: and you dock an old man on the island, rich with all that you have gained on the way, not expecting Ithaca to give you wealth / Ithaca gave you the beautiful journey. / Without her you would not have set out. / She has nothing more to give you.” Then the final insight; acceptance of a life now lived. “And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not fooled you. / Having become so wise, with so much experience, / you will have understood, by then, what these Ithacas mean.” One does not need to be a tragic empress to be impressed by Cavafy’s practical wisdom.
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PART I I
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* GEORGE
I grew up in Washington, D.C. Did I—or anyone so situated—give much thought to the man for whom our city was named? Hardly. The Washington Monument, even for me at the age of ten, was of world-class boredom. Mount Vernon on the Potomac was interesting—particularly George’s clothes, lovingly displayed. He was a giant, with large hands and feet and a huge rump; also a formidable poitrine due to some sort of syndrome which rendered him Amazonian in appearance and childless—mulelike—for life. But he was a man of great dignity and strength and once when he ordered two soldiers to stop a fight and they went right on, he picked each up by the scruff of the neck and banged the two heads together. Very satisfying. Plainly a dominatrix of the old-fashioned sort.
A condition of my admission to St. Albans, a local school, was that I read a biography of Washington. I, who could, even then, read almost anything, was desolate. George Washington. The syllables of that name had the same effect on me that Gerald Ford now does. But I finally got through what was a standard hagiography of the sort that every nation inflicts upon its young in order to make them so patriotic that they will go fight in wars not of their choosing w
hile paying taxes for the privilege. Pre-Watergate, to get people to do such things it used to be necessary to convince the innocent that only good and wise men (no women then) governed us, plaster-of-Paris demigods given to booming out, at intervals, awful one-liners like “Give me liberty or give me death.” Thus were we given the liberty to pay our taxes, though it might have been nice to have had the freedom to use for the public good some of the money taken from us.
A long time has passed since my school days and my first encounter with George. Currently, incomes are down. Taxes are up. Empire has worn us out and left the people at large broke. In the process, we ceased to have a representative government. In 1996, 51 percent of those qualified to vote chose not to vote for president. President Clinton was reelected by 49 percent of the voters, a minus mandate to put it mildly. And so, George, where are you now when we need you? To which the answer is, which George do you have in mind? Bush or . . .
The real George Washington, to the extent that we can reconstruct him, was born in 1732 and died in 1799, younger at death than the crotchety Bob Dole was in the late election. When George was eleven, his father died, and he was brought up by his half brother, Lawrence, who had married into the Fairfax family, one of the richest in Virginia. It was Lawrence who owned that fine estate on the Potomac River, Mount Vernon. As George was not much of one for books and school, he became a surveyor at fifteen; he was also land-mad and so, while surveying vast properties, he started investing every penny he could get his hands on in land. Some of it, crucially, along the Ohio River. Meanwhile, the Grim Reaper was looking out for George. Lawrence and his daughter both died when George was twenty, making him the master of Mount Vernon. Now very rich—but never rich enough—he took up soldiering. The colonial governor of Virginia sent him to the Ohio Valley (near today’s Pittsburgh) with orders to drive the French from “American” territory. And so, in 1754, the first of George’s numerous military defeats was inflicted upon him by the French. With characteristic Gallic panache, they sent him back home, where he was promptly promoted to colonel. But then anyone destined to have his likeness carved on a mountainside can only fall upward. In 1758, George was elected to the Virginia legislature, the House of Burgesses; the next year he married a very rich widow, Martha Dandridge Custis. George was now, reputedly, the first American millionaire.
George and Revolution. As George looked like a general—the unpleasantness near Pittsburgh was overlooked—the Second Continental Congress, in a compromise between Massachusetts and Virginia, chose him to be commander in chief of the new Continental Army, whose task it was to free the thirteen American colonies from England. “No taxation without representation” was the war cry of the rebelling colonists just as it is of the Reverend Jesse Jackson and close to a million disenfranchised blacks in George’s city today.
A far less accomplished general than Ethan Allen or Benedict Arnold, George did know how to use them well. In 1775, although Boston and New York were in British hands, George sent an army north to conquer Canada—Canada has always been very much on the minds of those Americans inclined to symmetry. When the White House and Capitol were put to the torch in 1814 and President Madison fled into the neighboring woods, where was the American army? Invading Canada yet again. The dream. The impossible dream.
George moved south to New York, where he managed to lose both Long Island and Manhattan to the British, who remained comfortably in residence until the French fleet came to George’s aid in October 1781 and the British, now bored, bad-tempered, and broke, gave up the colonies. In a moving ceremony, George took over New York City, and as the British flag came down and our flag went up, there was not a dry eye to be seen, particularly when the American soldier shimmying up the flagpole to hoist New Glory suddenly fell with a crash at George’s feet. The treacherous Brits had greased the pole.
George went home. He was a world figure. The loose confederation of independent states was now beacon to the world. George farmed. He also invented a plow so heavy that no ox could pull it; he was grimly competing with crafty fellow farmer Jefferson, who had invented the dumbwaiter. Never an idle moment for the Founding Dads. Then Something Happened.
Captain Daniel Shays of Massachusetts, a brave officer in the Revolution, had fallen on hard times. Indeed most of the veterans of the war were suffering from too little income and too many taxes. They had been better off before independence, they declared, and so Shays and his neighbors, in effect, declared war on Massachusetts in 1786 when Shays and several hundred armed veterans marched on the state arsenal at Springfield. Although this impromptu army was soon defeated, Shays’ Rebellion scared George to death. He sent agonized letters to various magnates in different states. To Harry Lee: “You talk . . . of employing influence to appease the present tumults in Massachusetts. I know not where that influence is to be found, or if attainable, that it would be a proper remedy for the disorders. Influence is no government. Let us have one by which our lives, liberties and properties will be secured, or let us know the worst at once.” There it is. The principle upon which the actual American republic was founded, erasing in the process Thomas Jefferson’s astonishing and radical proposal that, along with life and liberty, the citizen has the right to pursue happiness and even—with rare luck—overtake it. George was too hardheaded for that sort of sentimentality. George knew that property must always come first and so, in due course, he got the republic that he wanted, a stern contraption set in place to ensure the safety and property of the prosperous few.
After two terms as president (with Alexander Hamilton acting as prime minister), George went home to Mount Vernon in 1796, mission accomplished. Although Madison and Mason (with Jefferson back of them) came up with the mitigating Bill of Rights, that Bill has never won many American hearts. After the Civil War the Fourteenth Amendment made it clear that the rights for United Statespersons also applied to each citizen as a resident within his home state. The Supreme Court, always Georgian save for the Earl Warren lapse in the Sixties, promptly interpreted those rights as essentially applicable to corporations. And so, in death, George won again.
The man? George was dignity personified. The impish Gouverneur Morris was bet ten dollars that he wouldn’t dare go up to Washington at one of Lady (they called her that) Washington’s levees and put his hand on George’s shoulder. Morris did; collected his bet; then said, “I don’t think that I shall do this a second time.” In his last address as president, George warned against foreign adventures and also permanent alliances with foreign nations while, as rarely as possible, trusting to “temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies.” In his worst nightmares, George could never have dreamed of just how many “extraordinary emergencies” his forty-odd successors would be able to cook up.
George and posterity? He is ever present in our decaying institutions. Iconography? The movies have generally ignored him while his biographies tend to be dull because the biographers are too busy defending his principles while pretending that we live—or are supposed to live—in a democracy, an absolute nonstarter from the beginning.
George today? A year or two ago a wealthy friend (so rich that he never handles actual cash) picked up a dollar bill that someone had left on a table and said, with wonder, “When did George Bush put Barbara’s picture on the money?” Barbara Bush and George are lookalikes. In the end, as it was at the beginning, it is all about money as George knew from the start.
* AMISTAD
In December, coming to a theater near you: Steven Spielberg’s Amistad. The explicator of the Holocaust turns his compassionate gaze upon the peculiar institution of slavery, deferring yet again the high hopes of Armenians that their tragic story will be screened by the conscience de nos jours. Meanwhile, a press release from the Lyric Opera of Chicago tells us that, “by remarkable coincidence,” November 29th will see the world première of an opera, Amistad, by Anthony Davis, with libretto by Thulani Davis. What, then, is the Amistad affair that we now have so much of it?
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sp; In early 1839, Portuguese slavers kidnapped several hundred West Africans for shipment to the slave markets of Cuba. Among them was twenty-five-year-old Joseph Cinqué, from Sierra Leone, a British colony where slavery had been abolished. Cinqué’s wife and three children had no idea what happened to him: he simply vanished one day from the rice fields where he worked. During the two months that it took for the slave ship to sail to Cuba, a third of the captives died. But Cinqué survived the trip, with every intention of freeing himself or dying in the attempt.
Although the Spanish king had outlawed the slave trade in 1817, his Cuban governors continued to sell the services of Africans to local planters, while a mere ninety miles to the north of Cuba slavery was not only legal but a triumphant way of life in the Southern states of a republic whose most eloquent founder had proclaimed that “all men are created equal”—except, as is so often the case in an imperfect world, those who are not. But by 1839 organized opposition to slavery was mounting in the North of the United States, to such an extent that, in twenty years, there would be a fiery disunion of South from North, and civil war. The case of the young rice farmer from Sierra Leone proved to be the first significant shot in that war.