Alexandrian Sphinx: The Hidden Life of Constantine Cavafy, Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis, Simon & Schuster, £30

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, my first thought was of Cavafy’s poem ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’: ‘And now, what shall become of us without the barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.’

At the age of 15, I read Sartre, Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, and then I discovered Cavafy on one of my parents’ bookshelves. At that point, my Cypriot grandmother, Anna Tornaritou, born Chatzidimitriou, revealed to me that one of her four brothers, Michalis Chatzidimitriou, was the poet Glafkos Alithersis, who lived most of his life in Alexandria and was an early friend of Cavafy. One day, I was sure, I would visit Alexandria, to understand more of Cavafy. Although my mother’s uncle, Alithersis, never achieved renown as a poet outside Greece and Cyprus, he was the first person to see how the great Greek poet, Constantine Cavafy, attained his fame. As I learnt from the brilliant experimental biography by Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys, the first in 50 years, when my grand-uncle met the poet in the later part of his life, Cavafy was steadily acquiring a reputation in his native Egypt, in Greece, and in Europe generally.

Born to one of the richest families of the Near East, Cavafy grew up in luxury until his father’s death threw the family into a destabilising cycle of peregrinations and penury. The father’s passing left the family firm in the hands of Constantine’s older siblings, who, like his younger brother, were more talented in the arts than in business. His mother was forced to move the children to Liverpool and then London before settling in Alexandria with memories of their past glory. The British bombardment of Alexandria in 1882 compelled the family to flee again, this time to Istanbul, where they lived in poverty, waiting eagerly to return home.

It is there that the young Constantine began his early poems and probably had his initial sexual encounters with men, perhaps in the hammams of the city. The authors are circumspect on this matter; very little information exists about the poet’s sexuality. This is one of the great paradoxes of Cavafy’s life. The man who, more than any other poet of his time, spoke frankly about homoerotic love and made this one of the hallmarks of his oeuvre, left few written traces about his love-life. The authors speculate that he might have concerned for his poetic reputation, given the fate of Oscar Wilde. Or his literary heirs might have removed material from the archive, fearing homophobia in Alexandria and Greece.

When the young Constantine returned to Alexandria from Istanbul, he seemed at a loss about his future. After brief sojourns in the stock exchange and journalism, he settled as a civil servant in the Irrigation Department of the British administration in Egypt. As Jusdanis and Jeffreys note, it was a boring life for such a brilliant mind. But he neither complained nor accepted other lucrative positions, because the otherwise dreary job left him time to think and imagine.

Around this time, he embraced his mission in life to become a world poet. At first, he kept this hubristic dream to himself, but he began publishing poems in the traditional manner of the then katharevousa (purist) poetry. But in middle age something remarkable happened. Feeling dissatisfied with his poetry and seeing the failure of his brother John’s poetic output, he re-thought his work completely, renounced most of what he had written, and reinvented himself as a modernist poet, writing in a mixture of katharevousa and demotic.

Jusdanis and Jeffreys argue that, had he not taken this painful restructuring of his poetics, he would have remained a marginal poet in the Greek tradition and not the titan he became. For this reason, this biography is really a study of genius, of how a brilliant and ambitious man willed himself and his poetry upon the world’s imagination, a remarkable achievement given that Cavafy lived in a ‘provincial’, if cosmopolitan, city and wrote in a marginal language.

In May 2009, I visited Alexandria for the first time; friends in Los Angeles insisted that I should try to meet the American-Egyptian film-director (and former husband of Nastassja Kinski), Ibrahim Moussa, as he would be the one to show me the real Alexandria. Ibrahim, an admirer of Cavafy, showed me the city: I was smitten by her timeless melancholic beauty, her mysterious alleys, the intense smell of jasmine and gardenia, and her hidden secrets one could or could not detect. The house in which Cavafy lived was very modest, as I expected. But there is no doubt – Alexandria was Cavafy’s inspiration.

How did Cavafy triumph in this way? Not only did he reinvent himself, mining the European symbolist tradition and returning periods of Greek history, such as the Hellenistic epoch of Alexander the Great. Constantine courted young men to become apostles of his work, persuading them that they could fulfill their life’s mission by spreading the master’s fame. Jusdanis and Jeffreys explain with insight the reciprocal relationship that exists between the visionary and his followers, and which applies to influential leaders (good and bad ones) in the arts, business, and politics. The leader offers a bit of himself – poetry, wisdom, energy, power – and the apostles willingly submerge their own egos in the service of a greater mission.

This is where my own grand-uncle comes in. I learned in these pages that, having become disenchanted at being exploited by Cavafy, he denounced him and then wrote a lucid study, showing that Cavafy’s genius lay partly in persuading others of his genius.

But Cavafy didn’t really care. As Jusdanis and Jeffreys explain, he sacrificed love to be crowned a prince of poetry. Of course, many people opt for success in place of intimacy but ultimately fail to compensate for lack of personal happiness. Cavafy, on the other hand, won spectacularly, more than he imagined. History is ruthless, indifferent to all the people Cavafy may have hurt on the way to obtaining his extraordinary achievements.

Jusdanis and Jeffreys neither glorify Cavafy nor do they pull him off his pedestal. They offer instead a nuanced portrayal of the man’s contradictions by bringing out the inner conflicts of the poet’s life – his struggles, anxieties, compromises, deceptions, grand plans and failures. In other words, they give us an intimate portrait of a genius, and of the ‘man in his slippers’.

Constantine the man slowly and almost inexplicably transformed into Cavafy, a celebrated author of gay desire, diaspora consciousness, and the glories and perils of globalisation. The biography tells the story of this man, the Sphinx of Alexandria, who, against all odds, ensnared the world with his verses and became one of the 20th century’s greatest poets.