The First Casanova
ROSENTHAL, RAYMOND
WRITERS & WRITING The First Casanova By Raymond Rosenthal Casanova, so the story goes, began writing his memoirs when he lost most of his teeth and could no longer publicly recount those lengthy...
...He enjoyed sex and the women enjoyed it with him...
...The simple explanation-that Casanova was a crook and adventurer, that women were an integral part of these adventures, and that his attitude toward love was the predatory one of a gambler whiling away the dreadful burden of boring, empty time-rarely seems to occur to any of them, whether they admire him, like Havelock Ellis, or find him "uncomfortable" and sad, like Edmund Wilson...
...WRITERS & WRITING The First Casanova By Raymond Rosenthal Casanova, so the story goes, began writing his memoirs when he lost most of his teeth and could no longer publicly recount those lengthy anecdotes which, in the past, had served as his entry to cultivated society...
...Casanova himself, in his preface, lists the highly seasoned dishes he liked to eat and then, with a straight face, goes on to say: "As for women, I have always found that the one I was with smelled good, and the more copious her sweat the sweeter I found it...
...To make people cry,' he would tell me, 'one must cry oneself, and one must not laugh when one wishes to make people laugh.'" There are many examples of this straight-faced, devastating humor...
...Casanova has joined forces with a loutish Franciscan friar...
...Yet, as Ellis says, he did suffer from "a certain degree of moral imbecility...
...Indeed, Trask is one of our age's finest translators and in this first and belated publication of the complete and unbowdlerized Casanova (after an editorial history as murky and complicated as one of Casanova's own intrigues), he has carried out his task with enormous assurance...
...The children slept, the old man coughed...
...It is this aspect that connects Casanova with modern life...
...Willard Trask, in this new translation (History of My Life, Harcourt, Brace and World, 330 pp., $7.50) catches the cadence perfectly...
...Francis...
...I was even worse off than he was, for when I tried to get up the dog came at my throat and terrified me...
...The racket the monk made trying to ward off his made the scene so comic that I could not really be angry...
...The second recipe for comic writing which Casanova sets forth and adheres to is explained as follows: "The art of making people laugh without laughing myself was my great talent in those days...
...De Sade should not even be mentioned in the same breath with the sensual, shrewd Venetian...
...but it was no use, for the house was isolated...
...you must tell as much of the truth of your mishaps, your pitiful scrapes and imbroglios, as you can bear to...
...We like Casanova, we are charmed by his physical grace and superb effrontery, in much the way that the countless women he slept with must have been charmed...
...To quote Ellis again, "Casanova is a consummate master in the dignified narration of undignified experiences...
...It was the picture of poverty...
...At certain points in the book, Casanova himself reveals the method he has followed...
...Don Giovanni considered women his enemy...
...A man of finer mould could scarcely," Ellis observes, "have loved so many women...
...With Casanova's History, in fact, one has the usual story of a truly underground book that reflects his era and its spirit with more fidelity and ?©lan than the works written in the portentous, stifling shadow of the accepted humanist models derived from writers like Petrarch...
...As a gambler, he resembles more closely a common contemporary figure-ubiquitous in the movie and entertainment industries, business, politics, and, also, in sex-than might at first seem apparent...
...They are walking to Rome, begging their way...
...And, to be sure, the same unflinching, hair-trigger courage that took him in and out of endless troubles also accounts for the audacity of his style, which tells us everything absurd and degrading about his own role in these affairs without losing either our interest or our sympathy...
...and, thus, the women he seduces hate or pity him or love him only as a demonic force...
...Francis since he saw he could get no help from me...
...The fool shouted for help at the top of his voice, invoking St...
...The dying old man turned to his womenfolk and said: 'You must cook the hen and bring out the bottle I've been keeping for 20 years.'" The hen is still hard after four hours on the stove, the wine is vinegar, and when Casanova and the monk go to bed the two women attack them in the dark...
...There is some pallid indication, chiefly in the mechanical inventions and the infrequent asides, of the wit and ingeniousness that make the History of My Life such a continuous delight to read...
...Casanova compelled to submit to the sexual act against his will may seem unusual and out of character, but the absurd degradation of this scene is closer to the essential spirit of his story than the long passages of triumphant love-making and the more annoying passages of sermonizing which, at times, he felt it necessary to insert for purposes of "moral" elevation...
...Casanova was not only a great conversationalist or monologist but also an aspiring writer who, in the scraps of time left over from his indefatigable life as amorist, swindler, small-time scientist and necromancer -to mention only the main occupations he plied- managed to write boundless expanses of almost completely unreadable prose and poetry...
...His underlying indifference and boredom are similar to the indifference and boredom that lie behind the frantic sexuality that pervades so much of our everyday existence...
...We shouted 'murder' at the top of our voices...
...The same dog, going from me to the monk and from the monk to me, seemed to be in league with the strumpets to keep us from resisting them...
...His bibliography includes plays, pamphlets, libretti, a translation of the Iliad in ottava rima, and, to cap the whole, tottering literary edifice, a ponderous, five volume Utopian romance entitled Icosameron which I have had the misfortune to peruse in a reduced, Italian version...
...An adventure story in a consistently comic key...
...On the other hand, so much erotic activity, so forthrightly and naively engaged in, has always brought out the moralist or solemn commentator in his critics, who seemed to feel that there must be some higher or more worthy explanation for all this expenditure of energy and spirit...
...In this glutinous waste not a single joke appears to interrupt the plodding gloom of the bid for everlasting fame on the part of the old man holed up in Count Waldstein's library at Dux...
...he is a Spanish satanist who regards sex as bestial rut, the most diabolical of women's weaknesses...
...The entire book is a picaresque novel of immense liveliness, though without the usual rancor of the picador, who looks at society from below, whereas Casanova looks at it from the outside...
...As Havelock Ellis said in his excellent essay on Casanova, no one ever reads Parini and Metastasio, the reigning poetic figures of the time, while Casanova, who wrote his memoirs with little hope of publication and in rather awkward French besides, will be sure of enchanted readers so long as people enjoy "the full, veracious presentation of a certain human type," "the unrivalled picture of the 18th century in its most characteristic aspects throughout Europe," and, lastly, perhaps the best adventure story ever put on paper...
...It was a fortunate loss, for it produced one of the most zestful and amusing records of untrammeled adventure in Western literature...
...The rhythm of Casanova's prose in this two-volume book (four other volumes will appear in two subsequent books) is that of gay, off-hand, rapid conversation...
...Ellis was fascinated by Casanova's straightforward animality, his lack of prudence, his ability to make love in a world where sex had become lodged in the head and was drowning in the tedious languors of over-refinement and idleness...
...The romantic agony of a De Sade, with its cruel end in destruction, could hardly have impressed this clever con-man, who always kept his feet on the ground even when the intrigues he set in motion were the most fantastic and complicated...
...Ellis does not see, however, that Casanova was first of all an adventurer, a gambler, and that his love-making was more an expression of his taste for peril and adventure than the other way round...
...The people are miserably poor, a decrepit old man is dying, there are "two ugly women of 30 or 40 years, three stark-naked children, a cow in a corner, and an accursed barking dog...
...but the monstrous monk, instead of giving them alms and going his way, demanded supper in the name of St...
...First of all, he says, you cannot spare yourself if you wish to be both interesting and amusing...
...A good many of us are gamblers in this sense-no longer believing in love as a unique spiritual encounter, but rather believing that sex is a game, a pitiless dialectic in which the only roles open are those of servant and master, even when absolute freedom is the mask donned by both...
...Yet the literary scholar would be hard put to prove that the author of the effervescent, direct, bouyant memoirs was also the bore who inflicted the prolix dullness of Icosameron on an unwitting posterity...
...I had learned it from Signor Malpiero, my first master...
...Casanova does obeisance to the goddess of reason, yet his real guide is the peasant cunning of his ancestors...
...Casanova is firmly a child of his city, Venice, and its ambience of sensuous pleasure...
...Neither Don Giovanni nor the Marquis de Sade, the two other important protagonists of the overt sexual life, could have been capable of this statement, which sums up the tolerance, earthiness, sensual simplicity and easy-going cynicism of Casanova's sexual outlook...
...The best example of its comedy is the most obvious...
...a man of coarser fibre could never have left so many women happy...
...They stop off at a cottage...
Vol. 49 • December 1966 • No. 25
