Books
Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis
Alexandrian Sphinx
The perspective of precious, sensuous human intimacy makes Constantine Cavafy a fascinating poet but also difficult to write about. Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis, the authors of Alexandrian Sphinx: The Hidden Life of Constantine Cavafy, furnish us with a book that deepens and illuminates this enigma. Despite many critical studies, theirs is the first full biography of the poet in English for more than 50 years. They refuse a chronological account for a structure of thematic sequences, so that encountering their narrative design feels a little like wandering through the complex symbolic architecture of a Greek Orthodox church, where motifs repeat in order to evolve. Here we encounter the entanglement of historiography and modern European poetics intrinsic to Cavafy’s creations.
Jeffreys and Jusdanis, eminent Cavafy scholars, create a book that refuses any version of kavafolatreia, or Cavafy worship. Instead their biography offers an indispensable portrait of the poet’s allure, his daily life as a clerk at the British-run Irrigation Service of the Ministry of Public Works in Alexandria in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the complicated reception of his work in Greece and the Anglosphere. As they write, there are conspicuous gaps in the archive and “no complete image of the poet emerged after his death”. This, along with Cavafy’s refusal of modern technology, creates a fragmentary effect rather like that of the poetry itself, where he achieved the unique quality of becoming a modern poet from antiquity.
Cavafy was a poet of place, his fabled city of Alexandria acting as a time machine for his Greek–Egyptian yet European sensibility. His primary subject is the eternal nature of desire, its delight in transcending oppression or prudish judgement, how the beauty of the male body lingers in the soul. He was also an anxious traditionalist. These qualities are all essential to his uncanny revivification of the Hellenistic world, in which his expression of eros undresses history’s grand narratives in favour of a queer delight in hyperreal and sensuous single moments.
Although Alexandrian Sphinx does at times become blurry in its portraiture, this is partly because of the complex layers of self-presentation Cavafy wove around himself and his work. We ultimately find ourselves returning to sensory images that cut through to life as we experience it, such as the Greek actor Maria Alkaiou’s childhood memory of Cavafy smelling of cedar. Or her other cherished recollection of the poet sitting her as a little girl on his knee in his electricity-free apartment at 10 Rue Lepsius, pointing to the many candles lighting the room and saying: “Look at how we can see them but they can’t see us.” It’s as good an image as any for the Cavafian effect.
Summit Books, 560pp, $49.99 (hardback)
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 18, 2025 as "Alexandrian Sphinx".
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