posted on 18 Jul 2016

Imagining Alexandria: Poems in Memory of Constantinos Cavafis by Louis De Bernières

In his début poetry collection, Imagining Alexandria: Poems in Memory of Constantinos Cavafis, the well-known novelist Louis De Bernières seems, above all, to be celebrating carnality, physical love, human emotions. No doubt this is partly because the poems were, as De Bernières admits, ‘written under the influence of Cavafy,’ and the Greek poet’s eroticism, sensuality, physicality, ‘infect’ the ‘perspective and tone of voice’ of these poems. The short poem ‘A Prayer,’ might stand as De Bernières manifesto in this regard, where he declares: ‘God reward us with the honest joy of beasts, and / God preserve us from the unclean chastity of priests.’

The prayer is answered, in a sense, by the collection as a whole, which rejects the ‘unclean chastity’ of priestly spirituality for ‘the honest joy of beasts.’ In other words, this is poetry which revels in the corporeal, whilst not infrequently lambasting the futility of certain kinds of priestly spirituality; this is poetry which finds aesthetic beauty and meaning in the body, not the soul. The illustrations which accompany the poems do the same: many of these are frankly erotic depictions of male and female bodies. Significantly enough, they are by an anatomist and surgeon, Donald Sammut – a modern priest, one might say, of the body.

Indeed, there is, of course, potentially another kind of priestliness, another kind of religiosity, in this worship of the human body and its associated pleasures, and religious language abounds in some of the more erotic poems:

 

            Let him with his most reverent hands

            Caress,

            Let him with his most fearful thoughts

            Bless

            The smooth and undulating landscape

            Of his lover.

 

Here, sex is a matter of ‘reverence,’ of ‘blessing’ the lover’s body. A later poem, ‘What Love Does,’ pushes this pseudo-religious language to its extreme – to the point that the corporeality of human love is elevated, in a moment of ecstatic imagery, to a near-cosmic significance:

  

This is what love does. This is what you say:

“Behold I love you in all languages, in all hearts and in all stars.

I am spread skyward to mate with the moon, swarm with the sea,

Convulse with the fire of the sun.

Behold, I walk unharmed in the flames of joy

And even the clang of silence stays unheard.

Behold, I talk with God to God’s face

And fly with angels in a further sky.”

 

If this all seems over-blown, a poetry of orgasm, of ecstasy and consummation, it is important to note the quotation marks. This is not the narrator, let alone the poet himself, speaking; rather, he is quoting an idealistic and – by implication – younger lover, in order to undercut his or her ecstatic hyperbole at the end of the poem:

 

            Enjoy it as long as you can. You’ll remember it fondly,

            This flying with angels, this chatting with God on equal terms.

 

Here, the narrator throws the younger lover’s imagery back at him or her, in bitterly bathetic language, so that ‘talk[ing] with God to God’s face’ is now just a matter of ‘chatting ... on equal terms.’ The narrator’s language and bitterness, in this respect, are coloured by perspective: whilst the younger speaker talks in the present tense, and is clearly immersed in the ecstasies of love, the narrator is looking back on those ecstasies as something he has now lost. Imagining Alexandria is full of such narrators – narrators who speak back from a mature perspective, who ‘remember ... fondly,’ nostalgically, regretfully, or bitterly passions and ecstasies which are now fading, lost, or unfulfilled.   

It is this recurrent perspective – one which De Bernières no doubt shares with Cavafy – which transmutes the immediately erotic and visceral into the profound. After all, the word ‘profound,’ of course, comes from the Latin for ‘deep,’ and it is the depth of perspective which turns even overwhelming, apparently-transcendent experiences, such as young, physical love, into poetry. This is the depth of perspective provided by time, by retrospect, by old – or, at least, older – age; and De Bernières’s touching final poem about old age, ‘When the Time Comes,’ seems to encapsulate the narratorial perspective of many of the previous poems:

 

            And if imagination serves, if strength endures, if memory lives,

            Ponder on those vanished loves, those jesting faces.

            Take once more their hands and press them to your cheek,

            Think of you and them as young again, as running in the fields,

            As drinking wine and laughing.

 

This is exactly what many of De Bernières’s poetic narrators do: they ponder on ‘vanished loves,’ taking ‘once more their hands’ and pressing them to their cheeks. The original intensity of young passions is recollected in mature retrospect – ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity,’ as Wordsworth puts it; and perhaps there is – as Wordsworth suspects – something inherently retrospective about poetry in general, something which inevitably implies old age, or at least maturity of perspective. Poetry, for De Bernières, Cavafy and maybe even Wordsworth, finds it difficult to capture the immediacy of physical and emotional ecstasy as it is happening, in the present tense; poetry, and especially narrative poetry, deals much more effectively with such intensity in retrospect, in the past tense. As such, it very much conforms to the critic J. Hillis Miller’s famous definition of narrative in general: ‘Storytelling,’ claims Hillis Miller, ‘is always after the fact, and it is always constructed over a loss.’ 

(publishing details: London: Harvill Secker, 2013, 978-1-846-55743-9, 95pp.

 

Jonathan Taylor

July 2016

Jonathan Taylor’s books include the novels Melissa (Salt, 2015), and Entertaining Strangers (Salt, 2012), and the poetry collection Musicolepsy (Shoestring Press, 2013). He is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. His website is www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk. This review was first published in Iota Magazine.