Peter Jeffreys argues that Cavafy's early exposure to Aestheticism during his years in London (1874–77) was to play a crucial and continuing part in the development of his literary imagination. His Modernism (like that of Joyce, Yeats and Eliot) has deep roots in the cult of beauty and art-for-art's-sake and in the Decadent movement of the 1890s in France and England. Reframing Decadence traces the ‘transpositional’ relationships of poetry to the visual arts throughout Cavafy's work, bringing out central tropes of Decadence: artificiality, decline, Alexandrianism, hedonism, the pursuit of exquisite sensation and the eroticisation of death.
These themes are woven through the book's five chapters and generate new readings of many of the poems (both ‘canonical’ and less well known) and of a wide range of Cavafy's prose. Jeffreys' account is meticulously researched, the fruit of extensive reading in the primary and secondary sources. His comprehensive Bibliography encompasses the defining texts of Decadence (in a number of languages), alongside recent critical, theoretical and exegetical work. In particular, it highlights the importance of the periodical press in Cavafy's literary formation.
In his first chapter Jeffreys explores the Cavafy family's contact with the Victorian art world, which included the ‘sensual Hellenism’ of the Pre-Raphaelites and the moral-aesthetic controversies which raged over the Grosvenor Gallery exhibitions and the Whistler trial: Cavafy's ‘Morning Sea’ is convincingly presented as a Whistlerian ‘impression’. During the 1890s Cavafy read widely on art and literature in the English periodical press. In demonstrating the considerable overlap between this reading and Cavafy's own prose essays, Jeffreys makes a further contribution to our understanding of Cavafy's ‘English’ context, following on his edition of the Forster–Cavafy Letters [reviewed in BMGS 35]. This context, as it has been established by David Ricks (Tennyson, Browning) and Sarah Ekdawi (Wilde), must include Walter Pater, a key figure in Victorian Hellenism. Pater, comparatively neglected until now by Cavafy scholars, comes to the fore in Chapter Four, ‘Paterian Decadence’, where Jeffreys explores the influence on Cavafy of Pater's historicism, his cult of sensation, and the homosocial atmosphere of his Imaginary Portraits. Cavafy's ‘tomb’ poems, in particular, owe a debt to the mingled pagan and Christian sensibilities evoked in Pater's Marius the Epicurean.
At the same time, Chapters Two (‘Translating Baudelaire’) and Three (‘Pictorialist Poetics’) emphasise the importance for Cavafy of the French language and French literary movements: Aestheticism and Parnassianism. Although Cavafy first became familiar with Baudelaire's poetry and aesthetic theories as introduced into England by Whistler and Swinburne, by the beginning of the 1890s he was engaging directly in what Jeffreys calls a ‘personal dialogue’ with Baudelaire, making translations and ‘versions’ of the French originals and experimenting with his own prose poems. These, together with the journalism he wrote at the time (in English as well as Greek) provide crucial evidence for the development of Cavafy's thinking about prose as a literary medium, and his ultimate decision to abandon prose in favour of poetry. A fascinating question which Jeffreys touches on here is the contribution of Cavafy's early prose writing to the maturity of his ‘prosaic’ poetry (as Palamas, notoriously, would characterise it). The chapter on Baudelaire also explores Cavafy's relationship with the Greek language and the language question—another facet of the complexity of the options facing him as he searched for a style, voice and register. Jeffreys suggests that the choice of a language to write (and even perhaps think) in may have been affected by the cautionary example of Jean Moréas (Ioannis Papadiamantopoulos), the Decadent poet of Greek origins who fell foul of French critical and public opinion.
At this point the account sometimes becomes difficult to follow and appraise, not because of any weakness in the argument but because all substantial quotations and examples in the book are in English translation (perhaps a policy of the publisher). It is quite a challenge to imagine in English Cavafy's Greek re-workings of French.
In his chapter on ‘pictorialist’ poetics Jeffreys discusses Cavafy's debt to Gautier, and the process by which poems such as ‘Artificial Flowers’ and ‘Of the Shop’ re-work Gautier's lapidary ideal into the language of Greek modernism.
He explores how Cavafy drew on French traditions of transposition d'art in bringing together painting, sculpture and poetry. Reading ‘Horace in Athens’ and ‘The Funeral of Sarpedon’ in the context of Symbolist and orientalist paintings exhibited at the Paris Salon he analyses Cavafy's handling of the challenge at the heart of the ecphrastic text: the interplay between visualisation and voice. ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ invokes, but always defers, the moment of the various ‘great invasions’, portrayed in so many nineteenth-century history paintings. In a pendant to this chapter Jeffreys considers Hadzikyriakos-Ghikas, Tsarouchis, Fassianos and Hockney, artists who have responded to pictorial elements in Cavafy's poetry: Fassianos’ version of ‘Lovely White Flowers’ is reproduced in the book and on the dust jacket.
The last chapter addresses the complex and controversial issue of the meanings of Byzantium, a suggestive trope in both Decadence and Modernism. Just as Decadent art preferred artifice to nature and the erotic to the romantic, it deliberately turned to the late antique and Byzantine periods, rather than the classical. Jeffreys argues that Cavafy's poems simultaneously ‘channel’ and ‘transcend’ the contradictory associations of Byzantium with corruption and creativity—‘the exuberance of decline’. In Byzantine culture and historiography Cavafy found the drama, irony, defiant grandeur and dignified pathos that made up his idiosyncratic vision of a continuing Hellenism.
An Epilogue, ‘Decadence's Gay Legacy’, traces a connection from the recognition of the homosexual element in fin-de-siècle Decadent art to the present-day reception of Cavafy as a gay poet and his ‘kitschification’ in recent art photography.
