a decorous life

In the introduction to his 2001 translation of the poems of Constantine Cavafy (Before Time Could Change Them: The Complete Poems of Constantine P. Cavafy, Harcourt Brace), Theoharis Theoharis uses the phrase “decorous intensity” to describe the restraint that tempers the powerful emotion found in so many of the Alexandrian’s poems. One thinks immediately of the erotic poems as examples of this restraint. Though it is obvious that the speaker is discussing sexual encounters, he never reveals the sweaty details of these moments. We also don’t know the idiosyncrasies of the lover’s body—each lover is an idealized youth. The youths are anonymous and alike in their beauty, and thus their modesty is preserved, though there is no doubt about their immodest activities. Here is an example of this gentle reserve:

One Night

The room was poor and shabby,
hidden above the shady tavern.
From the window the view was an alley,
dirty and narrow. From below
came the voices of some workers
playing cards, having a good time.

And there on the common, the humble bed
I had passion’s body, intoxicating joy
from sensual, rose lips—
rose lips of such an ecstasy
that writing now, after so many years,
in my solitary house, I’m drunk that way again.


Through the narrator’s spare description, we have an idea of his past lovemaking, though not the specifics. We also know nothing of the lover except for the speaker’s impression of his body. The omission of detail reproduces the effect of memory, which often reduces activities of the past to their essential characteristics. We can imagine that, to the solitary speaker of the poem, sex is now more an idea than it is a physical reality, and so the distance from the physicality of sex is appropriate here.
Cavafy also shows a certain reserve in expressing the intensity of emotion felt by the speaker in his poems, whether in yearning for a lover or in sorrow over some calamity. This reticence is communicated in part by Cavafy’s choice of words. His poems are devoid of exaggerated adjectives and uncommon nouns. Edmund Keeley notes that Cavafy was one of the earliest poets among his contemporaries to use colloquial Greek in his poetry (1). One would think that Cavafy’s practice of expressing great emotion in a handful of everyday words would make these emotions seem cliché, and therefore less real or intense. However, in his best work, Cavafy’s word choice has the opposite effect.
Cavafy’s plain language and quiet reticence infuse his poems with just the sort of vivid emotion that this type of diction usually fails to achieve. Each spare adjective, each quiet admission of happiness or sorrow vibrates with extravagant feeling. This effect is particularly evident in Theoharis’ translation of “The Satrapy.”

The Satrapy

What a calamity, given how ready you are
for fine, distinguished tasks,
that this unjust fate of yours
always denies you encouragement and success;
that mean habits block you,
both pettiness and indifference.
And how horrible the day you give way
(the day you allow it all and give way)
and tramp off to Susa,
and go to King Artaxerxes,
who places you, favorably, in his court,
who makes you gifts of satrapies and such.
And you accept them with despair,
those situations which you do not want.
Your soul demands other things, cries for them;
commendation from the city’s Rulers and the Sophists;
contested, priceless, clamorous Approval—
the Agora, the Theater, and the Laurels.
How can Artaxerxes give you these,
where will you find these in the satrapy,
and what life will you lead without them.


This poem’s language seems uncomplicated. The tone is matter-of-fact; even the use of “calamity” is more a statement of fact than a shout of grief. The speaker is confident of the subject’s “despair,” and of the impossibility of finding fulfillment with Artaxerxes. The speaker’s plain assurance makes these statements inescapably true to the reader, too, particularly the line “your soul demands other things, cries for them.” There is hardly any description of the unhappy addressee besides this essential statement of his or her true desire, and so the reader’s attention concentrates on the idea of a tormented soul. This depressing thought trembles with the entire weight of the reader’s imagination and sympathy. The speaker’s confidence reaches a dreadful conclusion in the final line, which positions the addressee’s situation as a statement, not a question. There is no opportunity for other possibilities. The speaker thus convinces the reader of the addressee’s justified despair without having recourse to verbal fireworks.
Daniel Mendelsohn suggests that Cavafy’s daily life was similarly plain, and states that Cavafy’s “flesh-and-blood existence was, after all, fairly unremarkable (2).” Mendelsohn, E. M. Forster, and George Seferis see a contrast between Cavafy’s marvelous poems and his humdrum daily existence. From the age of fourteen, Cavafy lived mostly in Alexandria, sharing a house with his mother until her death. (Cavafy seems also to have been his mother’s primary caretaker during her last illness.) Despite his Greek ancestry and his interest in the ancient world, Cavafy did not visit Greece until 1901, when he was thirty-eight. His principal employment for many years was in a mid-level government office. Cavafy also was not eager to publish his poems. He distributed them mainly in folders to a chosen audience, and as a result his work achieved predominately local recognition during his lifetime, and many of his poems were never published until after his death (3). On the surface, then, Cavafy’s life would not seem to be conducive to the creation of some of the finest poems in modern Greek literature. But what kinds of events are required for the development of a poet? After all, one would argue that the intellectual life of the poet matters more than the facts of his physical existence. Still, a writer’s intellectual life cannot be lived apart from his or her physical needs and circumstances (4). Cavafy must have found a way to integrate his identity as a poet into his daily routine. Cavafy did not write poems in spite of his daily life, which must in fact have fed his poetic output—and not only by means of his much-discussed amorous adventures. One would expect some signs of distress otherwise, either in Cavafy’s letters, or in the record of his daily activities. However, Cavafy seems to have been content in his government post until his retirement, after which he died from throat cancer at the age of seventy. Whatever one believes the life of a poet ought to be, Cavafy’s work shows that he lived it.


________________________________

Works

1. Edmund Keeley, Cavafy’s Alexandria: Study of a Myth in Progress. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976.

2. “As Good as Great Poetry Gets,” by Daniel Mendelsohn. The New York Review of Books, November 20, 2008. (vol. 55, no. 18.)

3. Cavafy: A Critical Biography, by Robert Liddell. Duckworth Publishers, 2000. First published in 1974.

4. See A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf.

afternoon of a dance

In an exhibition at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, there are two particularly arresting images on display. One of these is a photograph of Anna Pavlova. She is standing on the bank of an ornamental pond, which is encircled by a short, thin fence with a low hedge of rushes behind it. Pavlova stands behind the hedge, which obscures her legs almost to the knee. She wears a stiff, pale tutu, the shade of which is impossible to determine from the black-and-white photo. She bends forward from the waist, and the stiff arc of the tutu fans out behind her like the tail of a bird. Pavlova is reaching out her arms, and looks down at the pond with an expression of yearning. In the pond are two swans. One of them is a little blurred, fluffing its feathers. The water ripples around them as they swim. The only discernible motion in the photo is from the swans.

Another image in this exhibition is a print of Vaslav Nijinsky in costume for “L'après-midi d'un faune” (from Bakst’s 1912 painting). Nijinsky is naked from the waist up. He has pointed ears, and his legs are spotted with large black-and-white blotches, like a dairy cow. He wears a sandal on one foot, and his bare foot is raised. Nijinsky bends in a series of curves from his knees, his waist, his tilted head, and his reaching arms. His eyes are closed in absorption. A thick torrent of scarf fills the air around him, and matches the angles of his body. The scarf is bright blue with yellow spirals. Nijinsky almost seems to move, but he is held there. He will never put down his raised foot.

A dance cannot be communicated or recreated on the page, since dance is fundamentally a movement, which can’t be transmitted to stationary media. Even video can’t fully capture a dance—Nijinsky didn’t allow his performances to be filmed, since he believed that film didn’t do them justice. Video never preserves the essential human element of dance. It is strangely affecting to see a dance being made in front of you by bodies like yours (in the broad, human sense), that are moving and living in your immediate space. The spectator’s legs and belly tense involuntarily at the sight of the dancing, in a sort of physical sympathy. This touching effect is either absent or much less pronounced when one watches a video. A dance only exists once, at a specific moment. Dance is thus painfully ephemeral. As Christopher Caines puts it, “But at least if you love a poem or a novel you can often reread it; and if you love a painting or a sculpture you can visit it in a museum…To love a dance makes the least sense of all, for you can hardly ever see the dances that you cherish; they exist almost all the time only as afterimages; and video or film, compared to the living choreography on stage, is nothing.”

Since a dance cannot be fully experienced in separation from the physical bodies that create it, the real dance is imbedded in time. To recreate even an instant of the dance is as impossible as reliving a heartbeat that has passed. Yet we are desperate to hold dances still, so that we can enjoy them even when they’re over. A recent column in The New Yorker tells of the excitement caused by the emergence of several “films” of Nijinsky, films which were in fact engineered using photographs. We hate to acknowledge that once a dance is over, it can never be remade in the same way again.

Dance reminds one of passing time, of lives that move a little closer to their end with each breath. This memento mori function of dance is heightened by the fact that dancers’ professional careers tend to be very brief, since the body cannot maintain the required level of physical ability for long. A pessimistic spectator may even reflect that a dancer’s every gorgeous, marvelous leap brings her closer to the end of her career.

However, the reminder of death contained in dance also infuses each movement with a poignancy inaccessible in works that are relatively unaffected by the passage of time. The dance is passing away before our eyes, so we’d better pay attention.

------------------

Works:

“Sergei Diaghilev and Beyond: Les Ballets Russes”, March 16 - June 26, 2009. Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Caines, Christopher. “Lilac Garden,” in Reading Dance. Robert Gottlieb. ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 2008. 365-372.

Acocella, Joan. “Fool’s Gold Dept., The Faun”. The New Yorker. 29 June 2009. 25-26.

comments on Pale Fire

Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962. Borrowed on June 16, 2009.

1.) There is a girl’s shadow over Nabokov’s name. Before a reader can approach his books, one must turn Lolita to Lolita. She is a part of his work, not the whole. I think the most effective way to put her in perspective is to actually read Lolita.

2.) Still, one is intermittently haunted by her image, especially on crowded trains wherein the author of one’s reading material is apparent to fellow travelers. Never mind them, Reader—or carry a highlighter and pretend you’re taking a course on Expatriate Literature.

3.) Nabokov was quite attractive as a young man, if one favors the lean, pensive type. And one does. (See Pale Fire cover image, Everyman’s Library/Random House, 1992.)

4.) Pale Fire is: a) a long poem entitled “Pale Fire”, by college professor John Shade, written in a competent rhyming trot. b) a Commentary on this poem, composed by Charles Kinbote, a native of the country of Zembla. c) a Forward and an Index, also by Kinbote. d) “Man’s life as commentary to abstruse / Unfinished poem. Note for further use.” (From “Pale Fire”.)

5.) The Commentary reveals (though one is wary of believing anything Nabokov says, more on this later) that Kinbote tried to shape the poem as Shade was writing it, in order to make this poem into an account of Kinbote’s mysterious past. “…I felt sure at last that he would recreate in a poem the dazzling Zembla burning in my brain. I mesmerized him with it, I saturated him with my vision, I pressed upon him, with a drunkard’s wild generosity, all that I was helpless myself to put into verse.” One sees in Kinbote all the passionate drive of an author who has seized an idea in his teeth. Kinbote refers to himself as the “only begetter” of the poem, and Shade as the “innocent author.” The author is Kinbote. The author is Shade. The author is Nabokov.

6.) “I am also in the habit of lowering a student’s mark catastrophically” [said Shade], “if he uses ‘simple’ and ‘sincere’ in a commendatory sense; examples: ‘Shelley’s style is always very simple and good’; or ‘Yeats is always sincere.’ This is widespread, and when I hear a critic speaking of an author’s sincerity I know that either the critic or the author is a fool.” After a statement like this, the reader is not sure what to believe. Certainly one can’t believe the author. The text sinks and shifts like sand underfoot.

7.) Kinbote has a great secret, but maybe not the one he thinks. Shade knows it: “Ah,” said Shade, “I think I guessed your secret quite some time ago.”

8.) Shade likes to take walks with a local farmer, because this farmer knows the names of plants and wildlife. In Shade’s poem, Shade remembers when an incorrect word (“fountain” for “mountain”) led him on a wild-goose chase: in his search for the nature of life after death, all he got was an awkward, “idiotic social call” with an elderly fan of his poetry. Even the fruitcake he was served didn’t make up for his disappointment. Though Kinbote claims he is not a poet himself, he has a poet’s concern for finding the correct words for things. Kinbote is astonished at the ill fit of certain words to their objects: “…what can be more resounding, more resplendent, more suggestive of choral and sculptured beauty, than the word coramen? In reality, however, it merely denotes the rude strap with which a Zemblan herdsman attaches his humble provisions and ragged blanket to the meekest of his cows…” And again: “How hard I found to fit the name ‘robin’ to the suburban impostor, the gross fowl, with its untidy dull-red livery and the revolting gusto it showed when consuming long, sad, passive worms!”

9.) In a 1967 interview with the Paris Review, Nabokov was asked if his characters ever escaped his control and ran off with the plot, as E. M. Forster has said about his own creations. Nabokov replied:

“My knowledge of Mr. Forster’s works is limited to one novel, which I dislike; and anyway, it was not he who fathered that trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand; it is as old as the quills, although of course one sympathizes with his people if they try to wriggle out of that trip to India or wherever he takes them. My characters are galley slaves.”

10.) Time crisscrosses and overlaps throughout the book, in “topsy-turvical coincidence.” Kinbote shows us the uncanny overlap between significant activities of Shade, King Charles of Zembla, and Gradus, a would-be regicide. Kinbote’s commentary weaves the lives of these characters together, so that their individual actions seem to form a larger pattern. This theme also appears in Shade’s poem: “Yes! It sufficed in life that I could find / Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind / Of correlated pattern in the game.”

11.) The poem itself: its quality is dubious. Though there are a few lovely passages (describing a tree: “The setting sun / Bronzed the black bark, around which, like undone / Garlands, the shadows of the foliage fell”), the poem’s principal emotional impact is accessible only after one has read the Commentary. Read without its Commentary, the poem “Pale Fire” is only vaguely interesting, and sometimes irritating—for instance, one dislikes the poet’s fascination with clipping his own fingernails. Kinbote’s assertion is correct: “Let me state that without my notes Shade’s text simply has no human reality at all since the human reality of such a poem as his (being too skittish and reticent for an autobiographical work), with the omission of many pithy lines carelessly rejected by him, has to depend entirely on the reality of its author and his surroundings, attachments and so forth, a reality that only my notes can provide.” In particular, the Commentary makes Shade’s description of his wife appear especially tender and affecting, since Shade’s love for her differs so dramatically from Kinbote’s jealousy and anger toward her. The poem and its Commentary present very different views of not only Mrs. Shade, but of John Shade and their life together, and of Kinbote himself (who is, significantly, not mentioned in the poem). Though Kinbote’s Commentary is quite readable without its accompanying poem—and it might be an interesting exercise to write a Commentary on a nonexistent poem—one does appreciate how the poem and its Commentary are intertwined thematically.

12.) Kinbote, it must be said, is not at all too skittish and reticent for an autobiographical work.

13.) From a televised interview, 1965:

Interviewer: There is occasionally confusion about the pronunciation of your last name. How does one pronounce it correctly?

Nabokov: Frenchmen of course say Nabokoff, with the accent on the last syllable. Englishmen say Nabokov, accent on the first, and Italians say Nabokov, accent in the middle, as Russians also do. Na-bo-kov. A heavy open "o" as in "Knickerbocker". My New England ear is not offended by the long elegant middle "o" of Nabokov as delivered in American academies. The awful "Na-bah-kov" is a despicable gutterism. Well, you can make your choice now.