Half an Hour and Other Poems by C. P. Cavafy, George Economou

Abstract

1835 As a teenager during World War II, he wrote fifteenstories that make up almost half of thisvolume. When he shopped the collection, titledOut of the War, in 1945, it was rejected all round. Discouraged, he published one story ina little maga zine and shoved the rest into a draw er, to be forgotten for twenty-seven years. He took up a journalistic career thanks to the one published story that caught the attention of the righteditor. In 1972he rediscov ered the stories,got thempublished in 1974, and started writing more stories, collected in 1985. A novel, The Other Garden, followed in 1987, winning the Whitbread FirstNovel Award. A book of essays, The Theatre ofEmbarrassment, was published in 1991. SinceWyndham, now eighty five, admits he loves "sitting still/' it remains to be seen whether this publication will stimulate a returnto writing fiction. In an interview with Rachel Cooke, published August 17, 2008, in theSunday edition of theObserv er,he described a view thatseems to accordwith his own quiet and, some would say, underproductive career: "What I've always wanted to do in fiction is towrite about the hours and hours and hours, the enormous proportion of life which is spent in a kind of limbo, even in people's active years. It seems to me that it isn't sufficiently celebrated." Indeed, the early stories inOut of the War arewritten from theper spective ofpeople whose lives are in a kind of suspension. Some mirror his own case:Wyndham leftschool, waited to be called up, broke an ankle in basic training, was discov ered tohave TB while recuperating in a military hospital, and never made it to active duty. As a whole, they present small-town life as ratherdreary and unfulfilling.Even though they are quite well crafted and contain very shrewd character studies, especially of young women, one can understand why publishers' readersmight have seen the stories as hitting thewrong note in 1945. Of the later stories, "The Ground Hostess" is a gem. A woman approaching middle age loses her mother, determines she is now free to try writing, decides on a memoir of hermother, but phone calls from well-meaning friends and her own natural lassitude block her from beginning. She invents two lovers, one for each of her two most insistent callers, hoping to secure evenings of peace so she can write. But thingswork out differently.It's an admirable story, all the more for teasing the reader to speculate possible endings along the way. "Ursula" and The Other Garden best display Wyndham's considerable talents in drawing character, par ticularly women as considered and admired bymuch youngermen. My one disappointment in these stories is thatwhile those observed change and reveal different sides of their characters through the years, their = observers are curiously static. They = seem lost in being ones on whom = nothing is lost. = The introductionby Alan Hoi- = linghurst rightly situates Wynd- = ham's fiction in the tradition of man- = ners, "from Jane Austen to Henry = James." But Wyndham's later fiction = represents what became of that tradi- = tion, when theprivileged understood = thattheyhad lostpower within soci- = ety.Wyndham combines thepathos = of a Katherine Mansfield?and her = ear for dialogue?with the satiric = perspective of an EvelynWaugh. All = ofwhich is tosay thatFrancisWynd- = ham is very worth discovering. = W. M. H?gen = Oklahoma BaptistUniversity = Verse C. P. Cavafy. Half an Hour and Other Poems. George Economou, tr. London. Stop Press. 2008. 50 pages, ill. isbn 0-9547603-1-X This spare, vibrant selection of twenty one poems by the Greek poetConstan tine Cavafy contains an eclectic range ofwork, includingboth early and late verse. It is an arresting, unusual presen tation that offers the poems in an evoca tivevisual format two drawings fora bust ofCavafy that was never executed are on the cover, and several poems are paired with intriguingillustrations by Greek artists. As Cavaiy's international popular ityhas continued to grow, so has the weight ofbibliographicscaffolding sup porting theconstructs ofhis translated poems, and it is George Economou's explicitlystated intent here to remove theobstructiveclutterof classifications like //collected,,, //uncollected,,, and "rejected"aswell as overly longhistori cal glosses. By presentingthepoems in ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ imiiiiiiiimmiiiii a simple chronologyand keeping the corresponding notes to a...