Constantine Cavafy & E.M. Forster in NYRB

Daniel Mendelsohn looks at the "one-sided crush" for E.M. Forster and renowned Greek poet C.P. Cavafy in his review of two new books for the current issue of the New York Review of Books. The Forster–Cavafy Letters: Friends at a Slight Angle, edited and annotated by Peter Jeffreys (American University in Cairo Press) and Selected Prose Works, translated from the Greek and annotated by Peter Jeffreys (University of Michigan Press), are both just out. At first glance, it seems Mendelsohn is mostly focused on the derailing of E.M. Forster's "sexual innocence" on arrival in Egypt in 1915, but it was Forster's meeting of Constantine Cavafy that "would prove to be momentous both for him and, in time, for the world." Mendelsohn goes on:

Like Forster, Cavafy was a homosexual; unlike Forster, Cavafy, who was half a generation older—he was born in 1863; Forster, in 1879—had found a way to be unconstrained about homosexual desire in his writing. It’s worth remembering that Cavafy was circulating clearly homoerotic poetry already in 1911—fully a year before Forster, during a visit to Carpenter’s home, received the infamous “touch above the buttocks” that inspired Maurice, the novel about homosexual love that he finished in 1914 but that, on his instructions, was published only after his death in 1971. To some extent, the insouciance of the one and the constraint of the other had to do with the difference between Alexandria and England; but there were also striking differences of temperament and biography.

Forster, after all, was the Northern optimist, with his belief in the possibility of “connection”; Cavafy the weary Levantine chronicler of separations, exiles, diasporas. . . .

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