74
PARTISAN REVIEW
inevitably turn to, allowing us not even the paltry comfort of squan–
dering them. It seems, indeed, as though they had never been truly
ours, or only in the sense in which Tantalus may have claimed the
tree to be his. The flow of experience from past to present is strangely
interrupted, and the mind, exhausted by former richness or what
passes for such, becomes fixed on the immitigable indigence of the
present.
Considerations of this sort cannot fail to organize themselves into
a system of responses, varying with the temper of each social group
(indeed with the temperament of each individual ) yet generally
stable. Thus the attitudes of an age are engendered, presently to be
tabulated or codified in the works of its leading artists and philoso–
phers. The following pages are based on the assumption that Alex–
andrianism is endemic to the total pattern of Western culture; that it
has made certain of its major phases both determinate and effective.
It is viewed, then, as a recurrent attitude toward history, not a phe–
nomenon of purely local origin and import; as a position gained
through stress and discord, not an experience passively undergone.
(Most historians have tended to treat it in exactly these negative
terms: either as a unique hybridization of Western and Eastern cul–
ture combining the vices of both but none of the virtues, or else as the
slack of the wave in a cyclical process. )
1\1
y choice of Cavafy, a con–
temporary poet born and bred in Alexandria, as an example is a prag–
matic choice, to be sure, for in him all my central concerns are
focused, but by no means a fortuitous one; nor yet one which can be
written off as too 'special.' For though the
thema probandum
might
have been dramatized through the use of such fi gures as Callimachus
or Lycophron (or, for that matter, Pound or Eliot ), Cavafy's geo–
graphical and historical situation, taken in conjunction with his
thematic material and method, provides the inquirer with a more
fortunate arena for working out the dialectic peculiar to the sub–
ject. The tensions and incongruities of what I consider to be the
Alexandrian mind are here sparked by the pseudo-congruities of
place and tradition; the values denied (or maintained) by the poet
are the selfsame values that were once maintained (or denied)
in the
language ;
while his being a contemporary not only gives Cavafy a
much vaster perspective on the past than any Hellenistic poet could
command but also makes him directly available to us. Thus discourse
