Alexandria: City of Memory
by Michael Haag
Yale University Press. 367 pages, $35.
IT IS with considerable authority that Michael Haag offers his latest book, Alexandria: City of Memory. Haag has written several guides to Egypt, is the author and photographer of Alexandria Illustrated, and contributed both the afterword and the notes to the British edition of E. M. Forster’s Alexandria: A History and a Guide. This highly eclectic background—as historian, biographer, and guide—comes through winningly in Alexandria: City of Memory.
Haag’s new book presents Alexandria through the experiences of three men: E. M. Forster, Constantine Cavafy, and Lawrence Durrell. Each writer’s time in Alexandria is recounted through letters, diaries, and interviews. These biographical narratives are complemented by an impressive collection of photos as well as a wide array of unique visuals: the tram ticket Forster saved from his initial encounter with his Alexandrian lover; Forster’s own hand-drawn map of the city; a page from a guestbook of a wealthy family; and other unusual items. What emerges is a strong portrait of each of these men, made stronger by examination of his relationship to this unique city. For the period between (and including) the two World Wars was unique: Alexandria was a startlingly cosmopolitan city with large Greek, Italian, Jewish, and Egyptian populations. Indeed non-Egyptians comprised close to a third of the population, moving freely in an environment where “the Egyptian and foreign elements mingle as they would never dream of doing in Cairo.” Haag’s narrative begins shortly before Forster’s arrival in Alexandria at age 36, when he was a “man without experience of sex or love, a captive in his mother’s house.” It is in Alexandria that he first experiences both sex and love. He comes to know the first with a soldier one night on the beach and the second with an eighteen-year-old tram operator named Mohammed el Adl. Alexandria: City of Memory provides us with a rich and compelling portrait of Forster. We come to understand this writer who is often best known for his phrase “only connect,” but was in truth a lonely man with complex relations to the otherness he encountered in both Egypt and India. The story of Forster’s life in Alexandria during the First World War included a number of other gay people, notably Lytton Strachey, the flamboyant Bloomsbury Group member, Edward Carpenter, the inspiration for Forster’s Maurice, and Kanaya—a gift of the maharajah during one of Forster’s visits to India—with whom rough sex became a distraction during his separation from Mohammed. Forster’s introduction to the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy finds two men dealing with similar issues: the disappearance of their social class, constraints of a controlling mother, and reconciliation of their gay identity with a deeper desire to connect. Cavafy is described as a man who “seems never to have a sexual relationship with a social equal, nor is he known to have had a sustained affair with anyone at all.” Haag shows clear parallels between Cavafy’s life and the details of his poems. For example, the workmen being paid by Cavafy for sex translate seamlessly into the poem “Days of 1909, ’10 and ’11.” Likewise the bars, cafés, and billiards room where Cavafy would go to pick up young men form the backdrop for the events in “One Night.” While Forster and Cavafy’s experiences occur against the backdrop of World War I, Durrell’s experiences bring World War II Alexandria into focus. In this last section of the book, we get a broader sense of other prominent individuals living in Alexandria, including the Menasce family of Sephardic Jews that founded the synagogue on the Rue Menasce. The final third of the book focuses on Durrell’s experiences working for the British Information Office and the writing of his Alexandria Quartet. As he did with Cavafy, Haag focuses on how Durrell’s interaction with the often palimpsest cultures of Alexandria informed his writing. We see how Durrell weaves attributes of the real-life Cavafy into the title character of the Quartet’s Balthazar, while the acting head of the city’s secret police becomes Scobie, a “septuagenarian, ex-merchant sailor, occasional transvestite and the local head of the British intelligence.” In the end Alexandria: City of Memory is a sort of homage to the people, places, and culture of an Alexandria that no longer exists. The book begins with Durrell meandering through Alexandria’s streets in the late 1970’s. Having agreed to return there to film a BBC documentary, he finds little of the cosmopolitan Alexandria of his memory. In closing the book, Haag tells us that “not all the inhabitants of cosmopolitan Alexandria left the city,” and ends with a vision of Greek, Jewish, Protestant, Syrian Catholic, and Latin cemeteries lying side-by-side in today’s Alexandria. While visitors today will not find the Alexandria of Forster, Cavafy, and Durrell, they can at least revisit some of its memories in this impressive volume. John Garrison is a writer living in San Francisco and is currently at work on a novel set in World War I Alexandria.
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