My Greek doppelgänger, the heteronymic poet Andreas Karavis, who at one time enjoyed a certain notoriety, may be on the point of reappearing, if only briefly. I’ve received of late several inquiries from American readers who have discovered his work and professed an interest in his origins and purpose. Perhaps the time has come for a re-evaluation.
Andreas Karavis was no mere hoax or delirium or hypothetical construct but a veritable mentor who stood for many different things and embodied many different possibilities. How to account for his apparition? On the personal level, I knew that, as happens at least once in the career of every poet, I had arrived at that curious writing juncture which may be described as both impasse and crossroads. My previous book, Chess Pieces, following on Bedrock and Modern Marriage, represented the end of what I call the “psychic decade,” a period of eight to twelve years in which poets tend to consolidate their verbal deportment and to begin impersonating themselves. Soon their poems start to read as if they had been stamped on the page. For my own part, the tone, stance, and voice, the fastidious poetics and the inclination to the cerebral which had marked my work throughout that period were now, I believed, exhausted and needed to be replaced by a new poetic language which engaged the world more directly. An exaggeration perhaps, but this was something like the purpose and effect that I hoped Karavian language would achieve for me. Put another way, Karavis represented a deliberate and systematic attempt on the part of someone who had lost confidence in his poetic identity to find himself again in translation.
But that was not all. Karavis was not only Greek but curiously Canadian by way of imaginary emigration. In other words, he had started to assume, for me, a remedial significance as well since his work might equally be understood as a sort of moly, a drug intended to combat the arid, sanctimonious, overly earnest and presbyterian atmosphere in which much of our own literature malingers. Thus I slowly came to regard Andreas Karavis, from a Canadian perspective, as an antidote to the spiritual lethargy of many of our best known writers, in particular Margaret Atwood, the goddess of dullness (whom Karavis would have called akoskiniti, which is to say “unsifted”) who sums up all that is most depressing and parochial and unadventurous in Canadian life and letters. Alexander Pope got it proleptically right when he described the “Goddess of Dulness” in The Dunciad as
Laborious, heavy, busy, bold, and blind,
She rul’d, in native Anarchy, the mind.
For Atwood, despite her dowager status in Canlit, is a writer who, with very little in the way of linguistic flare and visionary intensity, writes (or wrote) a kind of period poetry that gives the impression of having long passed its “best before” date. As with most of the characters in her novels, so with the words in her poems: predictable, unvarying, wooden, truncated, connotatively flaccid, oddly nasal in their timbre, and devoid of real signifying power because relying for their effect on a near-perfect correlation with the cultural temper of an audience desperate for corroboration. Owing to this bizarre resonance, Atwood was spared the labour of development as she was exempted from the struggle with language. She had only to be herself as she was – facile, clever, priggish – for the reader’s easy identification with a recognizable and idealized self to occur – but a self not qualitatively different from the one already in place. Atwood owes her success to the fact that the reader does not transact so much with the poetry or the fiction as with a privileged double with whom she or he merges and assimilates, doubt assuaged and dispossession overcome, whether as a woman, an intellectual or a Canadian. Readers of Atwood merely impersonate themselves at a slightly higher elevation but undergo no spiritual change or evolution whatsoever.
So, in this context, who is Karavis? Simple, really. Karavis is meant to counteract the malady of Atwoodism that we suffer from in this country, the coast-to-coast slackness and blandness that devitalizes so many of our writers. Total strangers to attic salt, we tend to look askance on anything that resembles creative friskiness or the innovation of stylistic heterocosms since these distract us from the drab and subfusc literary mise en scène we have comfortably settled into. Our problem is that for the most part we are not happy unless we are indefatigably recounting our flat and uneventful lives, inviting our readers to share in our misery or our dullness and to feel somehow elect in doing so. Tameness-and-sameness is the name of the game, as evidenced in the generally torpid quality of the writing itself, in both poetry and prose.
For genuine vitality, the positing of alternative worlds to enrich and transform or anyway modify what is already there, is precisely a function of style, not of artificial plot structures or fashionable prosodies. Style is inferential presence, that is, stylistic presence in the honorific sense of the term is always the expression of that which is not immediately patent or localized but must be intuited and sought. But Canadian style as a generalized phenomenon is only the topographical quotient of timidity divided by resentment. There is little or nothing left over, no aliquant remainder to suggest further “operations” on the world. If style is not experience per se but a way of imagining possibility, one might say that for the most part what is designated as “Canadian style,” certainly in our poetry, is almost entirely reproductive and literal – which would account for its devastating monotony.
In this light, the Karavian style or mindset, construed ideally, represents instead the tenor of play, of different possible outcomes, of seductive risk rather than suffering endurance, of defiant otherness rather than complacent identity, of all that is possible and plural and exalted rather than what is single-pleated and given and commonplace. It is as if Karavis took as his watchword the opening lines of the sixteenth century poet Stephen Parmenius’s Paean, a Latin paraphrase in hexameters of Psalm 104, which, although written prior to his departure for North American waters, may along with his De Navigatione be considered as the original “Canadian” poem from which the rest of our tradition has deviated. Parmenius, our national poet before the fact, sailed with Sir Humphrey Gilbert and perished in a storm off the coast of Sable Island in 1583. The exordium of the poem reads:
Nunc age, pars nostri melior, seu spiritus auram
Seu mihi mens alacres vitam diffundis in artus,
Dicamus bona verba . . .
[Now come, O my better self, let us compose
excellent phrases, whether as soul
you give my joints their spirit
or as mind you animate all with life . . .]
The key is: O my better self. But after the sinking of the Delight and the loss of Stephen Parmenius, Canadian poetry was pretty well dead in the water, although every now and then a reincarnation of the poet’s brave and enterprising spirit reappears, an Irving Layton or a Gaston Miron for example, ready to tackle the mammoth boredom and savage indifference of the national temper. (“If now you look/ For new and strange adventures,/” Parmenius writes in the De Navigatione, “Corresponding to your talent and your fate/ You’ll meet monsters and giants that even Hercules/ Would not scruple to subdue.”) But as I suggested above, Canadians do not as a rule make aerial writers who know how to stay aloft. Exceptions like Layton and Miron aside, most of our poets (and novelists) – not all, thank the Lord – at their best may fairly be described as brilliant plodders, but when they attempt to soar they seem alarmingly like Icarus wafting over the Bermuda Triangle.
As for Karavis himself, although I regard him as a kind of displaced and updated Parmenius, as a sailor in uncharted waters and an inaugural voice, it must be admitted that he knows very little about Canadian poetry. When I first interviewed him in the early nineties, he had no idea that such a thing even existed. During our second interview several years later, despite my having acquainted him with some of our most resonant names through a selection of choice translations, he was still of the same persuasion. I suspected he might readily go along with the terse summation of Michael Schmidt, editor of Carcanet in Manchester, who wrote that “Canadian poetry is a very short street.” When I pressed for clarification, he grew serious and replied: “Everything you have sent me reeks of artificiality, of poets who have no umbilical connection to the source of their inspiration, who have no spirit, and who are therefore driven to build hovels in the air. Yes, one must strive to reinvent oneself, but one can only reinvent oneself from the ground up in accordance with the indwelling spirit. And this is why the poetry – or the translation you have provided me – reads like an overly simple recipe in the hands of an incompetent chef. It is painfully inauthentic and prosaic. I mean by this that the work you have brought to my attention is only the fabrication of the ordinary. In short, it seems to me that these are poets whose main effort in life as well as language is to rehabilitate the cliché. They have yet to learn that words, like good wine, must have tannic grip and length on the palate. And the syllables must ring like worry beads beating time on the haunch of the wine bottle.”
As Karavis somewhat puckishly put it in a three-quatrain rhyming poem about the poet’s roving eye and loquacious tongue – the subject is the poet’s traditional hankering to seduce the Muse – the last stanza of which I have tried to versify into an English equivalent, while retaining the original closure:
His eye diverted by a pretty wench,
his Greek transmutes into a kind of French;
with fruity eloquence, though bald and gross,
he speaks the logos spermatikos.
Which brings me to the subsequent point I wish to make. As should be obvious by now, Karavis is meant to be fun, a property that doesn’t exactly abound in our literature. (The only recent exception I can bring to mind is Don Akenson’s “historical” novel, At Face Value – taken by many of its first readers as straight biography – in which he “reveals” that late nineteenth century Tory backbencher John White was “actually” a cross-dressing prostitute, one Eliza McCormack.) It is important to emphasize that in at least some of his facets and aspects, Karavis was begotten in laughter among friends at the supper table. These sympathetic accomplices contributed to planning out portions of his itinerary, presiding with growing enthusiasm and ever diminishing control as Karavis soon proceeded to embark upon a second career, escaping both his creator and collaborators.
In this way began the Karavis saga – or is it comedy – as he made his debut in a public world he had heretofore resolutely fled, turning in the process from an obscure and insular word-trawler into a peripatetic illuminist adventurer. As I wrote in the Introduction of the Companion to Karavis’s Saracen Island, Karavis was observed by the Press on the same evening “delivering a lecture in Patras, giving a reading at the British Council in Athens, and attending a black-tie gala on Chios as the guest of honour of one of the wealthiest Greek shipowners.” Our hope and intention was to construct a modern version of the The Fakenham Ghost – a fiction which flourished in early nineteenth century England – as the inscription on one of that book’s engravings suggests:
A favorite the Ghost became;
And, ’twas his fate to thrive:
And long he liv’d and spread his fame,
And kept the joke alive.
Every week something new seemed to add to the general ambience of merriment and surprise. The Greek Home Office scoured the country for Karavis, his wife Anna Zoumi and the literary magazine Elladas, of which Ms. Zoumi was an associate editor, before coming to the conclusion that Karavis was an emanation. Diana Kuprel at Books in Canada could scarcely contain herself when she bannered Karavis in the Great Authors section as “Greece’s modern Homer” in an effort to enliven a somnolent milieu. The late Peter Davison, poetry editor at The Atlantic Monthly, printed an early Karavis lyric, waggishly acknowledging me as translator, and the Journal of Modern Greek Studies in the course of a review I wrote of Edmund Keeley’s Inventing Paradise provided the poet with a platform on which to display his runic cum metaphysical aplomb. My dentist Mel Heft, who posed for the poet’s photograph, hammed it up for the press at the Embassy reception held at the Molivos restaurant in Montreal in honour of Karavis, repeating the one phrase he had memorized for the occasion: “My name is Andreas Karavis. Who are you?” Minas Savas (whose translations of Yannis Ritsos are among the best we have in English) began his Karavis retrospective for The Greek American for April 2001 by affirming that “all present in that Montreal restaurant saw the man with sun-beaten features, a fisherman’s cap over a Mediterranean face, who after a few comments in Greek departed as if duty demanded more substantive business.” A short while after the event I was approached by the president of Jockey Canada through his friend, the same Dr. Heft, with a most tempting offer to model a line of underwear, no doubt strutting my stuff beside a Doric column and leering saucily at the camera.
Next, journalist Matthew Hays, on assignment for the Globe and Mail, traced and interviewed one Maria, landlady and Laundromat owner in Montreal’s Park Extension, who considered herself a poet and was rumoured to be related to Karavis. Eric Ormsby (an important member of the board) ran into the poet, who was plainly bent on pursuing an assignation, in the lobby of the Pera Pallas Hotel in Istanbul. He was later sighted by several people in New York, in the general vicinity of the Caravas Restaurant in the Village, which I had never heard of until then. Critic W. J. Keith produced an intriguing account of his unexpected encounter with Karavis’s unacknowledged older brother, Christos, who put an entirely different complexion on the Karavis story. My sister also got into the act, writing to the newspapers and journals under her Greek married name with fulsome attestations of the bard’s existence and his impromptu performances in the tavernas and caféneions of Pigadhia, the capital of the island of Karpathos where Karavis lived for many years. This triggered a phone call from a retired Orthodox priest who remembered Karavis fondly from a visit he had made to the island in the mid-eighties. (Enas megalos piitis, alla paraxanos andros, mallon,” he averred, “a great poet, but a rather strange man.”) When George Sanderson, former editor of The Antigonish Review, having accepted several Karavis pieces for publication, wrote to request the original Greek poems to print with facing translation, I had no choice but to make a full confession. Sanderson cracked up. Instead of being offended, he gave me his blessing. “It’s about time we had some fun in this country,” he said.
And so, encouraged by the circle of intimates whom an irate correspondent to the National Post, in a fit of anti-Karavian petulance, later called the “supper table jokesters,” I decided to live it up for a change by letting my poet appear on the scene as the heir to Greek Nobel laureates George Seferis and Odysseus Elytis – and it was not long before I was informed by a reasonably well known Canadian poet/editor at a party one evening that in her estimation Karavis was indeed Nobelizable. Another poet, who must have stumbled across an obscure translation somewhere, confided that Karavis had exerted a significant influence on his development. Still another Canadian writer, who had never commented one way or another on my work before, sent congratulations for my bringing so visionary and “big-voiced” a poet into a diminished poetic landscape. There was no doubt in my mind that had I published these poems in a book issued under my own name, the most I could have expected would have been a brief réclame followed by oblivion.
So I was also engaging in an act of cheeky satire apropos the Canadian literary gambit for survival, since we are so insecure in ourselves and in our programmatic quest for a national identity that we cannot believe in our value and substance unless we are franked from outside. Of course we like to use our putative natal “Canadianess” as a distinguishing mark to draw attention to our supposed difference rather than adopt the plenary criterion of intrinsic excellence as writers. But in relying upon such cosmetic features we come to resemble the Canadian poet Ralston McTodd, the “powerful young Singer of Saskatoon” and author of Songs of Squalor whom P. G. Wodehouse in Leave it to Psmith brought to the attention of England’s upper classes. McTodd’s most memorable line, “Across the pale parabola of joy,” speaks volumes.
Most of the Canadian literati, I regret to say, like Ralston McTodd (or, for that matter, the “lugubrious Canadian poet who specialized in verses concerning suicide attempts and metaphysical laments” whom Louis de Bernieres introduces us to in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin), are basically small writers whose primary appeal is to a local patriciate of loyalist citizen-readers or a tightly meshed network of like-minded practitioners – writers who, if they are fortunate, may in time be press-and-publisher-boosted to international fame and descried identity, laurels twining around their monograms. A Canadian is someone who needs to be re-Canadianized by non-Canadians to become Canadian at last. The fate which Canadians most wish to avoid is subsumed in Al Capone’s withering remark: “Canada? I don’t even know what street that’s on.” A short street, probably.
In my own case, it might eventually become known that Andreas Karavis was David Solway and then, I hoped, the question would need to be posed: what sort of a place is this that impels a writer to break the rule of poetic cabotage and metamorphose himself into a sixty-eight year old reclusive Greek poet in order to be properly acknowledged? The point was emphatically made by Ben Downing in an article commissioned by the scholarly journal Lingua Franca on the subject of Karavis, and picked up shortly afterward by the Guardian, the TLS, the BBC Meridian World Service and Le Monde’s Courrier International, among others. And that is the question: how to escape what Tom Wolfe in The Painted Word called those “Canadas of the soul” where certain artists, deprived of audiences and venues, wear out the years, however safely, in exile?
This is, obviously, a variant of every poet’s epic dream: to find some day, as one comes to anchor in a strange yet familiar and desired latitude, the blind dog of recognition stirring on the hearth. That’s why I’ve said in an interview when I was questioned on the Greek poet’s spatiotemporal reality, “If Karavis did not exist, I would have had to invent him.” (Nicos Nicopoulos, owner of the Symposium restaurant in Montreal, was so delighted by the story of Karavis’s life and work as laid out in Saracen Island and the Companion, that he said to me one evening: “You should write a book about him.”) I needed Karavis in order to materialize on the plane of literary existence in this country since the passion for linguistic variety and architectonic discipline when manifested in one’s own work is the kiss of death here (as poets like Norm Sibum, Eric Ormsby, Robyn Sarah and Michael Harris have discovered).
Canada, too, I believe, requires a good dose of Karavian seasoning if our poetry is to become playful and lusty and dynamic again, as it was in Montreal’s fabulous forties with Irving Layton, A. M. Klein, Louis Dudek and P. K. Page. My friend Carmine Starnino, who in the course of a review archly cast suspicion on Karavis’s existence, recounted that some of his readers refused to accept his conjectures. Starnino, aware of Karavis’s provenance almost (if not quite) from the beginning, maintained that the poet filled an affective and imaginative demand, “as if,” he told me one day, “people actually need him to exist.”
For my own part, I regarded Karavis as flexible and accommodating: everyone was welcome to contribute to his calendar, to board his caique and to some extent influence his direction. He was in some sense a communal project regardless (or because) of the fact that this project was all about the irreplaceability of the personal and the surfeit-over-penury function which he (or it) represented. The essence of the character is a certain predicative generosity and I myself, his surmised creator, have experienced a surge of imaginative vitality as a result of his ongoing hospitality.
Manifestly, there are many layers of possibility associated with the character of the poet, whether he is palpable or merely ectoplasmic. If the former, may we not commit to him as a friend who brings more than one domain to bear upon our lives? (“What is a friend?” I once asked him. “A friend,” he replied, “is someone whose unconscious you can trust.”) And if the latter, might we not endorse Peter Davison’s reply to a literal-minded reviewer from a Montreal newspaper, ferreting information for the scoop of the week: “But think a little: poetry for most of us exists only on the page: it exists because we read it. Karavis’s poems are real poems. Is it better to be a real person who writes false poetry than to write real poetry under a name you have invented yourself?” And to repeat, Karavis was an attempt to bring something I reckoned had long been missing from the literary climate of this country and its pale parabola of joy: an element of complexity and verve, the stimulus of what he has called the “paralife,” the warp drive out of the single, limited, constraining, Precambrian exo-self favoured by our national evolution. It is no accident that the poet I imagined as our national griot should hail from elsewhere.
In interiore homine habitat veritas. Given a belief in the spirit as an inner material dimension or substance as real as the body which must be worked and kneaded without remission and assuming at the same time a passion for the genetic effusions of revivifying language, we may then find ourselves in a position to approach the artifact and say, with Isaiah’s craftsman, “It is ready for the soldering” (41:7). And this is the true nature of joy, the discovery and projection of something that we always were in the mode of benign possibility and might have been in the world of recalcitrant circumstance had things been different. How else transcend our native blandiloquence? The ability to reinvent ourselves – several times over the course of a lifetime – is what makes the experience bracing and unpredictable. It is what makes our spouses continue to find us interesting.
As I have argued elsewhere, we are blessed with a bare handful of truly excellent writers but these are generally discounted or misprized. Their only hope is to don some sort of mask or project a second self, a “secret sharer,” as did Irving Layton who, having changed his name many times, assumed the guise of prophet and clarigator, or novelist Trevor Ferguson who salvaged a foundering career by resurfacing one day as John Farrow, an enigmatic and hard-edged detective writer with a highly developed introspective gift and a penchant for rolling cadences.
I cannot pass judgment on my own work but I concede that I do wish to survive, which may explain some of the hijinks in which I have engaged (and why I like to consort with jokesters, who are usually remembered fondly). I have been instructed by certain readers in the know that it is the partial satiric thrust to which I alluded above, one calculated to promote my own literary currency, which is among the major reasons behind Andreas Karavis. This is the story which those who believe that Karavis is a figment – and not a real person hiding behind a presumed counterfeit – would like me to tell. Thus – to take just one example – after years of systematic neglect I recently discovered, while browsing the Vancouver Public Library’s web page for new acquisitions, that I was now “the noted poet.” Quite a metamorphosis. But how much should I reveal and how candidly should I do it? Why should we come to expect or perversely crave the meagerness of pure quiddity except in a world devoid of imaginative heightening? And who can determine the extent to which apparent disclosure is itself a fiction?
For there is always the possibility that much of what I’ve written here about how Karavis came to be is in fact an invention or a fantasy. I’ve stressed that it is important to have fun, in poetry as in life, even at the expense of the intractably real – or the myth of the dismally empirical. Indeed, the French travel agency, Authentic Holidays, in its Bienvenue en Grèce newsletter, prints this entry on Lipsi, Karavis’s home island in the Dodecanese archipelago: Cette île n’est pas touristique. Andreas Karavis, poète, est de cette île. It pleases me to announce that I’ve just received an invitation from Karavis to visit the island to celebrate the birth of his second son, Athanasios.
Sou zissi, as the Greeks say to bless the newborn. “May he live for you.”
Tags: Issue 76