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THE LADIES' MAN ; Bit of a Lad, Old Casanova

Posted on: Sunday, 6 March 2005, 09:00 CST

Giacomo Girolamo Casanova (1725-1798) was a man of many parts, but only one of those parts made him immortal. He was, by turns, a friar, a lawyer, a scientist, a soldier, a diplomat, a violinist, a notary's clerk, a practitioner of the occult arts, a spy, a businessman and a librarian. He founded a state lottery - in Paris - and briefly became a millionaire on the proceeds; he established a workshop for printing silks; he wrote, in Italian, a huge and intensely scholarly History of Unrest in Poland; he translated the Iliad into Italian verse; he ran a theatre company; he wrote a scandalous novel, Ne amori ne donne; he published assorted learned pamphlets on mathematics, and worked on several treatises in philosophy; he travelled compulsively (and under harsh compulsion); he spent large parts of his life in exile or in various prisons.

In his later life, he spent 13 years as a near-hermit, writing almost non-stop: the main fruit of this labour was a sprawling autobiography, some 3,700 pages long, almost none of which was published in his lifetime, and the bulk of which has only been accurately edited in quite recent years.

And yet, for all this prodigious and wide-ranging activity, most of us persist in remembering him for just one thing. Casanova - even the dictionaries will tell you as much - is history's greatest lover of women, the irresistible serial seducer, the walking erect penis: the triumphant libertine every heterosexual man has, at least once in while, bitterly envied or dreamed of emulating.

Various artists and writers have tried to present Giacomo in a different light, whether in a spirit of de-mythologising contempt - such as Fellini's chilly film portrait of a "bald, glabrous, waxen beanpole, covered with powder and oil, filthy and stinking" (Costanzo Costatini) - or of thoughtful affection, as in a recent psychoanalytical study, Casanova, or the Art of Happiness, by Lydia Flem. To little effect. Try as one might to interest people in, say, Casanova's claims to being the father of modern science fiction - his five-volume fantasy novel Icosameron (1788) predicts the car, the plane and the television - they will still want to hear about the broads, the chicks, the totty.

Fair enough: better to be remembered for one accomplishment than for none at all, and it would be a strange world in which, say, Casanova's lost thesis on the building of synagogues was of greater public fascination than his one-night stands. Sex is the obvious selling point for all popular recreations of the Casanova story, even when the treatment is as glacial as Fellini's: advance publicity for the forthcoming BBC series has been heavy on torn stockings and bulging bullfrog bosoms, so the clever money would be on the words "bawdy" and "romp" featuring heavily in reviews.

But it needn't spoil anyone's naughty fun to point out that Casanova was not merely a more complex figure than the hoary, whoring old caricature admits, but in many respects - though not everyone has agreed with this - a much more agreeable one. Over the last couple of centuries, the real- life figure of Casanova has become all but inextricably mixed up with the mythical figure of Don Giovanni, and has absorbed some of the Don's most sinister overtones. Don Giovanni, as we know him from Mozart, is a heartless, vengeful seducer and an unscrupulous killer: he leaves a grim trail of dead rivals, ruined women and aborted foetuses behind him on his path to Hell. Most audiences see in him what they would see in a real-life counterpart: a man whose compulsion to make "love" to women is motored by aggression and hate.

Casanova is a very different type of lover. A tall and comely lad, he was, in his early years, as often the seduced as the seducer. Later in life, he proposed that "When a man is given the time, he achieves his aim by attentiveness, and when he is pressed... he makes use of presents and gold..." He wooed, that is, by kindness and generosity rather than brute force. He soon lost interest in women who obviously didn't care for him, and he found the verbal aspects of love-making so essential a part of its pleasure that he spurned ladies with whom he had no language in common. Far from being heartless, he fell passionately in love with striking ease (and out of it with similar ease, a sceptic might add). He maintained that "four-fifths" of the joy of sex was in giving pleasure to one's partner, and he seems to have had the enviable knack of staying on good terms with many of his former lovers, often for many years. "You were born to make people happy," wrote one of his "conquests" in a mood of fond nostalgia. What's more, he even practised safe sex, using "a little garment of very fine, transparent skin, eight inches long, closed at one end, but resembling a purse and having at its open end a narrow pink ribbon."

And if he is entirely frank about his sexual adventures, he is also fairly brisk and non-salacious - a point which was not always obvious to his earlier readers. The most popular 19th-century edition of the Memoirs was a French version by one Jean Laforgue, who took it upon himself both to suppress parts of the text he didn't like (such as Casanova's disparaging comments on the French Revolution) and to turn the author's sprightly original into something at once more pompous and more prurient. Laforgue wasn't even consistent in his dirty-mindedness: while spicing up some episodes, he cut others entirely in case they were found too licentious.

Today, the reader who picks up the Memoirs in search of a bit of pleasing erotica will often be disappointed by the lack of juicy detail: by the standards of modern pornographers, Casanova is a dud. Once that disappointment is past, though, there are plenty of other attractions on offer. It has been said that the Memoirs offer the fullest and most accurate portrait of 18th-century Europe that any single writer ever composed; and also that "No man in history has... left quite so sincere a record of his life as Casanova." The adventures are wild enough, but they never read like the self- aggrandising whoppers of a compulsive braggart. He changed names to protect the prominent, but in other respects this seems to be about as reliable an autobiography as one will ever meet.

A couple of episodes from his childhood may serve to show what an interesting fellow he was outside the bedroom. The son of professional actors, Casanova was unlucky in losing his father when young, and even more unlucky in his mother, Zanatta, a pretty, snobbish, heartless air-head with the habit of seeing stupidity almost everywhere save in its true place: herself. An incident from Giacomo's ninth birthday, 2 April 1734, now seems emblematic. He is being taken by river to Padua, and wakes in the morning to the astonishing sight of trees moving past the portholes. "Mother, what is happening? The trees are walking!" The adults howl with laughter, and his mother wearily explains that it is the boat which is moving, not the trees. Giacomo ponders this for a while and then concludes "So it is possible that the sun does not walk either, but that it is we who move from west to east." His mother laughs at him, and one of her friends calls him an imbecile. But another adult, a free- thinker called Signor Baffi, hugs him and kisses him, tells him that he is quite right, and that from this point on he must never fear to use his reason, no matter how much the crowd may mock.

Another emblem: aged 11, he is brought down to supper for the entertainment of adults. (His mother is finally beginning to see that he might be something to show off in public, even though she does not quite understand why.) To test the lad's learning and wit, a visiting Englishman writes out an ancient Latin grammarian's riddle for him: Discite, grammatici, cur mascula nomina cunnus Et cur femineum mentula nomen habet. Roughly: "Tell us, grammar experts, why the Latin word for the female organ has the masculine gender, and that for the male has the feminine gender."

Giacomo ponders for a couple of seconds, and then writes out an elegant Latin pentameter: Dice quod a domino nomina servus habet - "Because the slave takes the name of his master." There is more than quick-wittedness and early learning here: there is a nascent, clairvoyantly sharp view of the relationship between the sexes and their complex dances of master/mistress and servant.

Now, one does not have to be a card-carrying Freudian to twig that there might be some profound connection between Casanova's loveless childhood and his tireless search for amorous adventure as a grown man. The Don Juan type, it has been proposed, is a man whose promiscuity is an endless and inevitably doomed hunt for satisfaction in symbolically "conquering" and obliterating a cold mother again and again, via the bodies of unfortunate real-life women. The Casanova type, while no less insatiable, seeks something much healthier - adult compensation for a boyish lack, with the giving and taking of affection as important a psychic need as repeated orgasms.

A bit glib, this? Maybe, but the argument gains in substance when one considers the life of the 20th-century man with the strongest claim to Casanova's prize title as Ladies' Man: the novelist Georges Simenon, creator of Inspector Maigret. Plenty of people who have never so much as opened one of the 400-ish books he published will be aware of his claim to have had sex with more than 10,000 women. Fewer, no doubt, recall that it was precisely in the context of a discussion about Casanova that he made this boast.

The story broke in L'Express, 21 February 1977. Federico Fellini was just about to launch his new film - Donald Sutherland played the title role - and a Roman publicist had decided that it would be a good idea for Simenon to interview Fellini. The men had been friends, and something of a mutual admiration society, ever since the Cannes Film Festival of 1960, when Simenon, as president of the Jury, had browbeaten and schmoozed the other jurors into awarding a major prize to La Dolce Vita when a vociferous claque wanted it given to a film by Antonioni. The friendship which began in Cannes blossomed to such an extent that Fellini, while still shooting Casanova in August 1976, wrote Simenon a letter in which he claimed that the novelist had just appeared to him in a symbolic dream, and had cured him of the creative block which had been plaguing his production.

The published interview ran in reasonably orthodox fashion until the point at which Fellini remarked that he preferred to make love wearing a bra. This prompted the most famous words Simenon ever spoke: "You know, Fellini, I think that in my life I have been even more of a Casanova than you. I did the sum a year or so ago and since the age of 13 and a half I have had 10,000 women."

This apparently unpremeditated aside did little for the launch of Casanova but a very great deal for the fame of Simenon. Suddenly, the man who invented Maigret became the man who had slept with 10,000 women. Eight thousand of these, by Simenon's own admission, had been prostitutes, but even so... Simenon was 74 years old at the time of the interview, let's call that 60 years of sexual activity, equals about 166 new women each year, or about one fresh conquest (or transaction) every two days. Is it plausible? Simenon's second wife, Denyse, was scornful, down-sizing his amorous estimate to just 1,200, still a score that would leave most chaps looking fairly smug. Tired, anyway. (After Simenon's death, Denyse wrote a funny, scathing novel about him called Le phallus d'or.)

As his biographer Patrick Marnham explains, Simenon himself considered that his sexual appetites were perfectly normal - all that was unusual about him was that he had the means to gratify them. But it is hard to escape the feeling that GH was - let us say - rather more "normal" than most of us blokes. When he first moved to Paris, he felt "obliged" to have at least four different women every day. When he was young, he said, he had literally suffered physical pain at the thought that, no matter how many women he bedded, there would always remain millions more he could never have.

Notches on the bedpost aside, what do Casanova and Simenon have in common? Simple: awful mothers. Where Casanova's mother was, as we have seen, vain, snobbish, shallow, utterly self-preoccupied, Henriette Simenon was grim- faced, perpetually anxious, parsimonious, emotionally blackmailing. She once told little Georges that if he did not behave, "they" - a nameless, horrific "they" - would take her away and operate on her in hospital. She made no secret of preferring his younger brother, Christian, and always acted as if Georges was bound to turn out a failure. She "found unhappiness where no one else had suspected its existence" and, in the end, years of fretting and sourness reduced her to a shrew.

Simenon was not merely aware of the wounds this had left, but felt that it was in some way crucial to his artistry. In a French radio talk on Balzac, broadcast in 1960, he commented on "the unloving nature of Balzac's mother" and rather sweepingly defined a novelist as "a man who does not like his mother, or who never received mother-love". Simenon was baffled, though, at Balzac's other way of dealing with this hand fate had dealt him. While he sympathised with Balzac at almost every level, he was honestly puzzled by the fact that Balzac had not been a compulsive skirt- lifter: "He never seems to have had recourse to the filles faciles who teemed in the arcades and gardens of the Palais-Royal." A doctor once said of Simenon that he remained "a small boy holding the hand of a mother who would always withhold her approval".

The outstanding difference between Simenon and Casanova is that Casanova - crude but fair summary - managed to grow up. Where Simenon's pleasure in wealth, fame, comfort and Olympic-level fornication never quite escaped the taint of his mother's scorn, Casanova learned how to cultivate that unsullied, neurosis-free pleasure which is a key component of common happiness. He is, quite simply, likeable, and interesting into the bargain - which is why it comes as a shock to find that Fellini held his fellow-countryman in sheer contempt.

Interviewed by Costanzo Costantini, Fellini sneeringly described Casanova as "a national phallic monument", and raged that he was "a character so disgusting and supine: symbol of the ancien regime and the Counter-Reformation: an image of the frustrated, infantile, repressed Italian". (It's true that Casanova identified with the aristocracy rather than the French Revolutionaries.) "How could I have liked him after I had undertaken the task of reading his Memoirs? They are deadly dull, written with such fastidiousness that one never understands what he is talking about." (It sounds as if Fellini knew them in the verbose Laforgue edition.) "They're just an ocean of paper, more tedious and depressing than a phone book. Even the most beautiful apartments become sterile when described in the style of a court reporter. To give you a visual impression of them, it's as if the Leaning Tower of Pisa had been rebuilt by convicts using toothpicks ... I wanted to destroy the myth of Casanova."

Too bad for Federico. His film was dogged with bad luck from the start of shooting: production costs spiralled wildly, Sutherland fell ill, there were strikes, and the negatives of the film were stolen. Fellini's Casanova flopped at the box office, and many of the critics - especially, to his professed disappointment, the feminist critics - hated the film. His explanation for all this misery was that "the myth [of Casanova] was taking its revenge and destroying me." Moral: be careful when you mess with a myth, or the myth might just mess with you.

On the other hand, when the myth taps into reality, you may end up with results of unparalleled potency. Somewhere between the zones of "entirely possible" and "all but certain" lies the extraordinary story that one of Mozart's uncredited collaborators on Don Giovanni was none other than a certain Giacomo Casanova. Evidence? A lot of it, none conclusive, all highly suggestive. We know that Casanova met Mozart's librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, as early as 1777; Da Ponte's own Memoirs reports how their budding friendship went off the rails after a dispute about the finer points of Latin prosody. "This singular man never liked to be in the wrong."

They met again in Vienna in 1783, and seem to have patched things up. By 1787, the year of Don Giovanni's premiere, so one rumour runs, Da Ponte had already started asking Casanova for some help with the libretto in progress. It is even more plausible - at least, the contemporary historian Alfred Meissner says it is the case - that Casanova and Mozart met in Prague very soon before the dress rehearsal of 27 October, and that the two men were locked up in a room together to work on the opera with furious haste. Powerful corroboration of this yarn has been found in the form of manuscripts among Casanova's papers, in his own handwriting, representing a scene following the sextet in the opera's Second Act. It is a thrilling vision - like Falstaff lending a hand to Shakespeare for the Henry IV plays, like the Ancient Mariner dictating to Coleridge, like Don Quixote scribbling revisions in Cervantes' margins.

The one consideration which seriously damages this otherwise delightful thesis is that Don Giovanni's ultimate darkness is so very far from the characteristic mood of the Memoirs - that unfinished and largely unread feat of autobiography which has so much to offer the browser and the artist alike. Let's say it again: you don't need to skim many pages to find - pace grumpy old Fellini - that one of the secrets of Casanova's amorous success is that he was, and remains, very good company.

Perhaps the most generous-spirited of all modern evocations of the man appeared in 1993, in the unlikely form of a book-length, Adults Only comic strip by Hunt Emerson, Casanova's Last Stand (Knockabout Books). Emerson begins by depicting the elderly Casanova as a vain, irascible librarian at Dux, condemned to reading out all the dirtiest parts of his memoirs for the benefit of an idiot boy and a jaded patron, Count Waldstein. But as the story proceeds, with flashbacks to his thousand nights of debauchery, the old chap's nostalgia for lost loves grows more and more compelling. Regrets? He's had a few. For all of the cartoonist's wild, brilliant visual inventiveness and comic fancies - some of the panels are so crammed with mad and lascivious detail that it takes multiple readings to appreciate them in full - it is a surprisingly accurate rendition of the facts as Casanova reported them, and a tribute that is as humane as it is sexy.

Emerson reports that he grew more and more fond of Casanova as he worked on the strip, and his introduction explains why: "All his life, he struggled to maintain standards of pride, cultural sophistication and dignity that were higher than the society around him. And of course he frequently failed, as often as not betrayed by his own emotions and sensuality. He was a survivor, whose base humanity kept him from ever achieving greatness, but whose spirit links his time with ours more, perhaps, than many of his `greater' contemporaries." Well said, Sir; and equally well put the final verdict of the psychoanalyst

Lydia Flem, whose imaginative account of Casanova appears to be as much an act of love as an act of scholarship: "Beyond pleasure, there is still happiness - such is the insolent legacy of Giacomo Casanova." m

`Casanova' begins on BBC 3 on 13 March

Source: Independent on Sunday, The

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