Jusdanis, Gregory and Peter Jeffreys. Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2025.

Jeffreys, Peter and Gregory Jusdanis. Alexandrian Sphinx: The Hidden Life of Constantine Cavafy. London: Summit Books. 2025.

 

The German Biblical scholar and philosopher, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), argued that translators can either pull the reader to the text or push the text to the reader. He meant by this that translators either strive for a literal rendition of the original at the expense of full comprehension, or they produce a more dynamic translation, one less faithful to the author but more accessible to the reader.

I recalled Schleiermacher’s formulation during a discussion of literary biography at the University of Amsterdam on 28 November 2025. At one point, the moderator, Maria Boletsi, Professor of Modern Greek, asked Koen Hilberdink, a renowned Dutch biographer, whether his duty was to respect the wishes of living subjects for secrecy. Hilberdink responded that, while he tried to follow their desires, his obligation ultimately lay with the reader. This duty obliged him to write interestingly, to engage the reader with the narrative, to embed tension into his writing. It was refreshing to hear someone speak about readers as a vital component in the writing process, a topic rarely raised in the academy. Readers, after all, are the receivers of our texts.

The idea that we always write for someone was forced upon me during the composition of Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography, which I wrote with Peter Jeffreys. More than ever, we had to think about our audience because the biographical genre orients itself more directly towards general publics than scholarly writing. This is so because biography tells stories and thus attends to the human desire for narrative. Rather than seeking to demonstrate a particular position, biography puts analysis in the service of the narrative and the exploration of the life. Not driven by analytical formulations, it draws on personal memories and seeks insights into emotions and motivations as it tries to trace the psychological development of an individual. And, as in Cavafy’s case, it follows the development of the individual as an artist.

In writing Cavafy’s life, for instance, we wanted to show how he changed from the derivative writer of his youth to the spectacular poet of his adulthood. We also wished to explain how the sunny, winsome, and empathetic young man turned into the charming but cold and distant poet of old age who sacrificed personal relations onto the altar of art. In so far as we tried to provide insight into his emotional and intellectual development and to tease out contradictions, we had to talk about the idea of motivation.

Of course, having been brought up on the literary theory of the 1970s and 1980s, I recognised that motivation can be a problematical concept as it is hard to trace our own intentions, let alone that of another person. Yet, motivation is inescapable in life-writing because it is vital to our interaction with others. Just because intentions are inaccessible or difficult to uncover does not mean we do not rely on them in our daily exchange with people and in our reading. This became obvious to me during the theoretical debates about authorial intention and the “death of the author.” Loath to use phrases such as “the author meant,” critics simply endowed the text with agency, so the “text” started “saying” or “doing” things. In effect, we require the concepts of agency and motivation whether we like or not. We are so preoccupied with the behaviour of others that we cannot understand their lives without access to the concept of intention.

And this is why we love reading fiction—because it gives us an opportunity to figure out the inner workings of the various characters. In novels, for instance, we take pleasure in asking questions such as: “If Anna Karenina did not love her husband, why did she marry him?” Will we ever know the answer? Certainly not. But it does not stop us from posing the question. As the philosopher Stanley Cavell wrote, “the category of intention is as inescapable […] in speaking of objects of art as in speaking of what human beings say and do; without it we would not understand what they are” (1976: 198).  In the same way we regard ourselves as acting freely, even if our actions are socially determined. Hilary Bok argues that we believe in a practical way that if we perform an action or choose between possibilities, we do so of our own free will (1998: 93, 99). Social life assumes that we are responsible for and are held accountable for our actions. It is obvious that readers will take me to task for any errors, omissions, or misrepresentations in this text.

In addition to examining Cavafy’s inner life, it was necessary to place him in Alexandria, having him saunter through the streets, talk to shop owners, hear the cries of street vendors, engage in dialogue with friends and colleagues, and experience the sounds and scents of his city. The emphasis on setting the scene, on telling a story, and on examining motivations and life changes gives biographical studies broader insight. This is what excited me about the prospect of writing of Cavafy’s biography. Liberated from the strictures of scholarly textuality, I felt I could direct myself to a larger readership. This is not to say that biography is free of rules—all genres take shape in and promote protocols and conventions of writing—but that the narrative mode of biography corresponds more closely to the expectations of general readers. This point came out very clearly in a reading I gave at Oxford University, organised by Dimitris Papanikolaou, that is, the difference between biography and fiction. As I explained to the audience then, my freedom from scholarly discourse was short lived as I soon reached the explanatory limits of biography. In trying to tell Cavafy’s life story, I hit upon two barriers: the relative paucity of information about Cavafy’s life and the silences in the archive itself. Let me consider the first point.

The more research we did, the more we became aware of the scant knowledge we have of Cavafy’s early life. We are not sure, for instance, of his early education in Alexandria and we know very little about his five years in Liverpool and London, as a child. Sadly, we have next to nothing about his thoughts and activities during the years he spent in Istanbul where his mother, Haricleia, had taken her family to escape the British bombardment of Alexandria in 1882. Until I went to Istanbul in 2019, we did not even know the location of her father’s estate on the Bosphorus. While living in this house, Constantine corresponded regularly with his older brother John, who had returned earlier. Unfortunately, John did not keep Constantine’s letters, while Constantine saved all of his brother’s missives. Thus, we must deduce his thoughts and feelings only from John’s responses. Constantine hovers silently in his brother’s words and gestures, like the listener in one of his dramatic monologues, such as in 'Philhellene.'

In comparison, we have access to Oscar Wilde’s grades from school and his teachers’ comments. I would wager that of the many biographies I read in recent years, ours was the one confronting the longest gaps in the historical record. For this reason, when reading The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, I marvelled at the precise way Andrea Wulf could chart Humboldt’s peregrinations through Latin America, a man who lived a century earlier than Cavafy. Turning to Paul Gauguin, an artist closer to Cavafy’s time, I was envious that his biographer, Sue Prideaux, had access to detailed primary sources about young Paul’s travel to Valparaíso, Chile, and then to Martinique and finally the South Pacific. Finally, Richard Zenith could describe the buttons on the coat Fernando Pessoa wore during his journey to South Africa. Not that this type of detail is important, relevant, or even interesting. But it highlights the empty spaces we faced in describing Cavafy’s world.

What caused the loss of primary material in Cavafy’s case? For one, it seems that, with few exceptions, his correspondents did not save his letters or they lost them.  At the same time, he experienced the cataclysmic loss of the family’s fortune and social position after his father’s death in 1870. The bombardment of his beloved city by the British damaged their house and led to the loss of his books, notes, and early work. The many moves within Alexandria itself and the family’s flight to England and Istanbul contributed further to the disappearance of documents, records, and furniture. Moreover, the penury of the Cavafy family forced descendants to sell their possessions. In a poignant letter of 1972 to a relative in Alexandria, his niece, Haricleia Valieri, laments having had to sell her grandmother’s jewellery and the family’s heirlooms. In my first visit to the Cavafy Museum in Athens, known as the Cavafy Archive, I confronted with much melancholy the few possessions surviving from a man who died only in 1933.

Just as profound, but symbolically more affecting, were the silences and erasures of the archive itself. By this I mean the tacit or active collusion of the archive not to address two important issues in Constantine’s life: his sexuality and his perceptions of the Muslims he lived among. For me, this void was the most disheartening as I had a compelling desire to uncover gossip about his sexual exploits, descriptions of his partners, love letters, and indiscretions. I wanted intimacy, the opportunity to enter his soul and mind. But I came up with very little new. And I doubt such material exists anywhere.

What could have happened? There is always the possibility that someone tampered with the archive. Rika Sengopoulos, his literary heir, who first examined the papers after the poet’s death, suggests this in the notes she kept after gaining access to the papers. It is also possible that both she and/or her husband, Alekos, had removed incriminating information. Or someone else down the line of people may have pilfered documents. This happens quite often as heirs try to protect their own reputation or that of their dead relatives from incriminating documents. Harold, the brother of the WWI poet, Wilfred Owen, redacted sentences and entire pages from his sibling’s letters. In similar ways, relatives tinkered with the letters in the archives of Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson.

Apart from this possibility, there was a much more insidious silencing of the poet’s homosexuality by omission, evasion, and prevarication. Although Cavafy was courageously open about his sexuality in person and in his poetry, his contemporaries glazed over this. Rika believed his homosexuality was an affectation of Cavafy’s youth. The novelist, Stratis Tsirkas, minimised the significance of the poet’s erotic life in his influential work on Cavafy. Quite often men reported that they had been aware of his “anomaly” while denying any sexual involvement with him. As a result, we know next to nothing about his lovers, their ethnicity, race, religion, age, or the depth of their relationships. This is less of what the ancient Romans called damnatio memoriae, the purposeful elimination of someone from the historical record, than nullification through non-disclosure, dissimulation, and wilful ignorance.  

A similar situation exists with respect to Cavafy’s interaction with and links to the Muslim inhabitants of Alexandria. I began the project with burning questions: how did Cavafy view his own existence and that of the Greeks in Egypt? How did he interact with his fellow Egyptians? Did he understand the rage of Egyptian nationalism? Of course, Cavafy wrote the (posthumously published) poem, '27 June 1906, 2 pm' about the execution of Selim, a young, Muslim man, by the British in 1906 in which the speaker sides with the Arab victim. But I could not find answers to my general questions, in contrast to the memoirs published by Cavafy’s close friend, Penelope Delta, which describe the attitude of Greeks towards Arabs. Here we have another vacuum in the record, caused perhaps both by Cavafy’s own reluctance or lack of interest in Muslim Egypt, and by the more general unwillingness of the Europeans to examine forthrightly their place in this country.

In confronting the gaps of the historical record and the lacunae of the archive, I discovered the space where biography begins to gasp for air. Restricted by the rules of evidence, the need for objectivity, the necessity for verifiable sources, citations, and data, biography itself falls silent. Its penchant for storytelling, its capacity to interpret inner life, emotions, and motivations, and its ability to set the scene cannot compensate for the archive’s silence. Simply put, it cannot make the archive speak.

We, therefore, have to rely on the imagination to create what we cannot find in the record. In this way, fiction can give voice to this emptiness. Unburdened from the protocols of realism and proof, it can convert the lacunae of the archive to its own advantage. Characters can emerge out of empty spaces, just as in Cavafy’s marvellous 'Caesarion': the little-known prince steps out of the amnesia of history into the poet’s salon, “pale and exhausted,” but bearing an “ethereal, enticing appeal,” exactly as the poet wanted. Without fear or defensiveness, fiction can compensate for the silence of the historical record by giving form and breath to Cavafy’s Muslim lovers. Novels, plays, or films can add insight for our understanding of Cavafy’s erotic life and his relationship to his Muslim neighbours.

Biography, therefore, can only give a partial and imperfect version of his life, determined, as it is, not only by the conventions of realism, truth, and evidence but also by the vagaries of the archive itself. But these limitations may turn out to biography’s advantage, tempering its explanatory pretensions. There is value to be reminded that biography can never produce a full and authentic life. The story it tells is necessarily fractured and fragmented – just as the life itself had been.

 

I would like to thank Maria Boletsi and Dimitris Papanikolaou for inviting me to write this essay, for their helpful comments, and for hosting discussions about the biography at their respective institutions.

 

Works Cited

Bok, Hilary. 1998. Freedom and Responsibility. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Cavell, Stanley. 1976. Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Prideaux, Sue. 2025. Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin. New York: Norton.

Wulf, Andrea. 2015. The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World. New York: Knopf.

Zenith, Richard. 2021. Pessoa: A Biography. New York: Liveright.