Even as We Speak (15 page)

In Warsaw, he fought a duel. An accusation – it was false, but it jibed with his billing – that he had embezzled the Paris lottery funds caught up with him there. Banished from
Poland, he moved on to be expelled from Vienna, mainly because Maria Theresa had heard that he had been expelled from Poland. So on to Paris, in order to be expelled from France. It was as if his
mug shot had been put out by Interpol. During a stretch in a Spanish slammer, he wrote a three-volume opus about Venice, probably designed as a sop to the Venetian State Inquisition. If that was
his idea, it worked: in 1774, at the age of forty-nine, he got a pardon. The Inquisition got him all the same – not as a victim but as a fink. In this role, as a paid informer, he had regular
employment at last. How could he screw it up? He wrote a satire that satirized the wrong patrician, and was banished all over again.

In Vienna, he finally got lucky by ingratiating himself with Count Waldstein, who, in 1785, appointed him librarian of his castle in Bohemia. There, growing old and bored, Casanova began writing
his memoirs in 1789, the year of the French Revolution – an event whose significance almost entirely escaped him. He had never been that kind of revolutionary, and by now he wasn’t even
a rebel: he had gone legit at long last. But even while he lived out his days in provincial isolation he always dreamed of Venice, where, had he ever returned, he would undoubtedly have
accomplished his own ruin all over again. In his last summer alive, two years before the century ended, the Inquisition pardoned him, but it was too late.

It was always too late, or too early, or too something. In a life of opportunism, he took every opportunity to make a shambles of anything he had managed to achieve. Confusion was a compulsion,
as if everything had to be tested to the point of destruction, to prove that it wasn’t real. And, in fact, nothing
was
real, except women. Women were something he could grasp,
however briefly, and if you seek the rhythm of Casanova’s mind working – instead of just his feet running away from trouble – it is to what he says about women that you must turn.
And one of the first things he says, in the preface to his
magnum opus
, is proved by the rest of it to be true: ‘Feeling that I was born for the sex opposite to mine, I have always
loved it and done all that I could to make myself loved by it.’ Feminists should not seize too quickly on the generalized term ‘the sex opposite to mine’. The operative words are
‘to make myself loved’. That’s what he really wanted to do, and that’s what he really did. Women really existed for him. Everything else was a fantasy, even his literary
ambitions – except in the case of this one great book, whose greatness, for all the sordid detail of unwashed linen and down-at-heel shoes, depends on making reality fantastic, a dream world
like
The Thousand and One Nights
.

In the last act of
Don Giovanni
, Mozart consigns the great lover to Hell. Even today – in fact, today more than ever – this is a conclusion morally
satisfactory for the audience, even though some of its members will be committing adultery that very night, and a few of them may have committed it during the intermission. But all of them respect
the conventions. The rat had it coming to him. That’s the way we are supposed to feel about the Don and all his confrères in libertinage, with Casanova as the arch exemplar: that for
their crime of callously pillaging the emotional life of their helpless victims they deserve punishment, and might even have been visited with it ahead of time, through their never having properly
lived. But Lorenzo Da Ponte was not the sole author of the opera’s libretto. His collaborator-cum-technical adviser was Casanova himself, who knew better – or, at any rate, knew that
that’s not all we feel. We also feel envy. When Woody Allen said that he wanted to be reincarnated as Warren Beatty’s fingertips, he was articulating a longing widely felt among men.
The moral consensus of today would like to pretend that a Lothario’s deadly charm is no less reprehensible than a paedophile’s sack of candy. But nobody except a pervert envies a
pervert. There are few men, no matter how virtuous, who do not envy the seducer.

If the seducer really were a rapist in disguise, he would be easier to condemn. But all too obviously his success depends at least as much on co-operation as on coercion. The virtuous
man’s envy is made worse by the consideration that if the virtuous woman takes a holiday from the straight and narrow the seducer is the very man she is likely to choose as an accomplice,
just because he is irresponsible, passing through, and won’t be coming back. Among the recently bereaved, the faithful but bored, and the businesswomen whose poetry has been insufficiently
appreciated, the seducer cruises for his easiest prey: the woman of substance who wants an amorous encounter that doesn’t mean anything. Later on, she can tell us that it didn’t mean
anything. But we know very well that at the time it meant everything. The louse got the best of her; he gets the best of all of them.

By the standards of the great lovers in our own century, Casanova didn’t run up all that big a total. (Richard Burton scored at the rate of a
Luftwaffe
fighter pilot on the
Russian front.) But today’s dedicated stick man has the advantage of modern communications. For Casanova, the hunting grounds were days apart by slow coach. Factor that in and you have to
marvel at what he achieved. A statistical check of the complete book turns up a figure of a hundred and thirty-two full-scale conquests. The breakdown by nationality reveals him as sowing the seed
of a united Europe. Forty-seven Italian women said
si
. Nineteen French women said
oui
. Ten Swiss women said
si
,
oui
, or
ja
. There were eight German,
five English, and ten women from sundry other countries. The total has to be reduced somewhat if you count the twelve sets of doubles as single victories, but doubtless it could be restored and
even extended by the tussles that he thought weren’t worth a mention, having taken place too low on the social scale. Nevertheless, twenty-four servant girls are registered as having
succumbed, along with, at the top of the range, eighteen gentlewomen and fifteen members of royalty. There were only two nuns, which must have meant that the convents were hard to crack, because
nothing inflamed him like spiritual refinement. Nor was he put off by brains (‘The older I grew,’ he writes in Volume XI, ‘the more what attached me to women was
intelligence’), although he endorsed the assumption, standard in his time, that men were naturally smarter than women and therefore he would never have to face the difficulty of dealing with
a woman who mentally outstripped him. Even the divine Henriette, the greatest love of his life, he admired for her accomplishments without ever considering that they might shame him into
inferiority. Though disarmingly ready to admit his occasional foolishness, he was confident about his superior mind. In that respect, his mind was commonplace, a point seized on by Arthur
Schnitzler in the most interesting work ever inspired by Casanova, the novella
Casanovas Heimfahrt
(
Casanova’s Homecoming
).

In Schnitzler’s novella, Casanova, over the hill and under the weather, is heading home to Venice for one last crack at straightening out his business affairs, getting himself off the hook
with the authorities, etc. – the usual unfounded hopes exacerbating the same old permanent imbroglio, but by now the energy that made it all into an adventure is almost gone. Nevertheless,
this time he is determined that nothing can halt him on his homeward path – except, of course, one thing. An old friend, now enviably well set up in life, tells him about his house guest, a
girl of unusual intelligence and grace. Casanova, stopping off just to clap eyes on this paragon, resolves to stay and win her. So far, so blah: but Schnitzler gives the story a twist that makes it
unlike anything in Casanova’s memoirs. This time, the girl really is Casanova’s mental superior. She has a gift for mathematics that shows up his vaunted capacity in that field as a
cabalistic mishmash. To top off that humiliation, she is,
mirabile dictu
, not attracted to him physically. He is too old for her, and she has a young lover. To nail her, Casanova must
resort to a trick. The brilliance of Schnitzler’s story lies in what kind of trick it is. Casanova has to pretend to be the young lover. In the darkness, she doesn’t realize that the
man making great love to her is the great lover himself. Casanova’s identity counts for nothing. For treating her as an object whose emotions do not count, he is treated as an object in his
turn: the rapist is raped.

As a hanging judge, Schnitzler was sitting behind a shaky bench. He himself pursued brilliant young females more ardently the older he became, and his series of wonderful, untranslatable plays
concerning that very subject of intergenerational affections was based on a private life that would get him pilloried today. But before saying that Schnitzler was unwarrantedly tough on Casanova,
one must admit that there is plenty to be tough about. Casanova did indeed rape at least one servant girl. (‘I resolved to have her by using a little violence.’) And he was indeed a
cradle snatcher, on a career basis: Roman Polanski was threatened with a stretch in Chino for a lot less. Of Casanova’s registered victories, twenty-two were between eleven and fifteen years
of age, twenty-nine between sixteen and twenty, only five were over thirty, and only one was over fifty. That he loved women for their individuality should not be doubted – his sketchy prose
condenses into lyricism when evoking a woman’s character – but the point needs to be qualified by the consideration that he preferred their individuality to be in its formative stage,
so that he could, as it were, get in on it. He had an automatic, full-throttle response to anything, seen from any angle, that might conceivably turn out to be a beautiful young woman – a
shadow in the alley, a light footstep on the stairs. His incandescent love affair with Henriette began when he had seen nothing of her except a bump under the coverlet. But, with all that admitted,
when we read what he has to say about his love for, and with, Henriette it is hard to remain suitably censorious. When, to cap the effect on him of her beauty and her gift for philosophy, she
unexpectedly reveals her prowess on the violin, he is not just further delighted with her, he is delighted for her – a crucial plus.

In moments like this – and his enormous book is abundantly peppered with them – Casanova’s prose is energized by the sort of spiritual generosity made possible to a man only
through the recognition that the woman he adores has a life separate from his, and can be ‘possessed’ only in the metaphorical sense. Casanova, cuckolding honest husbands right and
left, never more than one step ahead of the law and continually dogged by inopportune doses of the clap, might seem an unlikely candidate to be a moralist. But, given the times, he was. He had
scruples about passing the clap on, and not just because it would have got him into trouble. For reasons too complicated to repeat here but fully recorded in convincing detail, he nobly refrained
from seducing a desperate young beauty who had escaped from her troubles by flinging herself into his practised arms:

He also admitted, in cold print, if with a hot flush, to sixteen separate instances of having his attentions rejected. Since no mere rake ever admits to anything except progress, this statistic
alone should be enough to prove that Casanova was something other and better than a heartless monster. For the rake, the woman is not really alive. For Casanova, nothing could be more alive: that
was his problem, and it lies at the heart of the problem he presents us with today. His success as a philanderer was dependent in part on his acuity as a psychologist. Conventional behaviour,
without which civilization cannot exist, closes out possibilities. The faithful, while no doubt attaining satisfactions that the faithless can never know, must doom themselves to realizing some of
our most haunting dreams only as fantasies. Casanova, by living those fantasies, knew their force.

What are these dreams of unbridled bliss doing in our poor minds? Casanova didn’t know, either, but he did know that they are as intense for women as for men. In that regard, he was a kind
of genius, and his book remains a ground-breaking work of modern psychology. Freud was a back number beside him. Freud thought that the fine women of Vienna who didn’t want to sleep with
their husbands were mentally disturbed. Casanova would have solved their problems in an hour on the couch.

Casanova’s pretensions to morality are absurd not because his moral sense doesn’t exist but because it is based on his desires. As if life were art, he deduced his rules of conduct
from the pursuit of beauty. What made him irresistible, apart from his looks and his charm, was the poetic power of his
visione amorosa
; his women thought, correctly, that they were his
inspiration. What made him reprehensible was his conviction that love could justify any and all conduct. But no less reprehensible is it for us, today, to deny that desire, with an awkward
frequency, can be felt with all the force of love, and with enough of love’s poetry to convince the person feeling it that he is in a state of grace – which is always a flying start
towards convincing the person at whom he directs it that she might as well join him. Giving in to desire is not the only, or even the best, method of dealing with it, but failing to admit its power
and all-pervasiveness is a sure formula for being swept away by it when it floods its banks, as sooner or later it always does. Casanova, by contriving, against all the odds posed by his chaotic
personality, to transfer his awareness of that perennial conundrum from life to print, attained his literary ambitions after all, and lives on in his magnificently ridiculous book as some kind of
great man – the most awkward kind, the man we call a force of nature because he reminds us of nature’s force.