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PARTISAN REVI EW
is certainly true of Cavafy, who would be wholly out of patience
with soundness were it not for the chance, never to be discounted, of
spotting the hidden taint that denies it. For beauty, he knows, de–
pends on agony, mortification, to be made manifest. From this there
is only one step to considering beauty and agony synonymous; and
once we are aware of that identification, and of the process of thought
that led to it, the filiations of Alexandrianism with both the Christian
and the Romantic temper become abundantly clear.
This love for beauty-in-agony comes to be associated quite na–
turally
in
the Alexandrian mind with an unashamed love for corrup–
tion. Civic corruption is seen as the public counterpart of that inti–
mate corruption which wastes the body and destroys the heart; and
since we are inexorably committed to either, we must try to discover
the secret attractions of both.
6
At first, collusion with the evil powers
around us may seem nothing more than an awkward necessity, but
it soon turns into a game having its own code and its peculiar set of
satisfactions.
No strict line is drawn, now, between pleasing one's own body,
the lovely and diseased body of one's wretched lover, and the corrupt
body of officials on whose favor one's survival depends : it is all part
of the same agony and so of the same, scarcely tolerable, beauty.
Should the sordidness of the operation, as well it might, threaten to
cheapen the agony and so eclipse the beauty, there is always Language
waiting in the wings, ready to step out onto the scene and redeem it :
This fatal city) this Antioch
Has eaten up all my money:
Th is fatal city with its expensive life.
But I am young and in excellent health.
I have a wonderful mastery of Greek)
which mastery shall presently avail the debauched young Syrian–
or such is his hope- in his suit for preferment. The executives to
whom he prepares to apply are utterly worthless; there are no others.
But this is in the nature of things, and if he has no choice in the
6 Neither the Christian nor the Roman tic would, of course, follow this "logic
of metaphor." It is here that the Alexandrian mind comes truly into its own,
entering the realm not only of opportunism but also of experimental erime and
the
acte grafuif.
