Casanova: the life of a Venetian conquistador 

Born in Venice, the son of actors, Giacomo Casanova (1725-98) was an omnivorous and lubricious libertine.  He loved to gamble and take risks, and felt free from all restraints, no matter what financial and emotional damage he caused.  He committed fraud, assault, pedophilia, rape and incest.  One shocking exchange in his Histoire de Ma Vie foreshadows the revelation of incest in Roman Polanski’s film Chinatown .  Casanova recalls his conversation with a woman:

“Nina is my daughter.”

“How is that possible?  Everyone believes she’s your sister.”

“She is my sister too, since she’s my father’s daughter.”

“What are you saying!  Your father made love to you?”

“Yes.  I was sixteen when he got me pregnant with her.”

Casanova was at various times a university student, apprentice priest, soldier, naval officer, mathematician, entrepreneur, novelist, diplomat, spy, theater violinist, professional gambler, magician, fortune teller and con-man.  Casanova describes himself as a chameleon-like figure, “supple, insinuating, a great dissimulator, impenetrable, obliging, often base and falsely sincere”.  Though vengeful and violent, seizing whatever was forbidden, he never felt guilt or remorse and always exonerated himself.

His stratagems and swindles often got him into trouble and, hotly pursued by the police, he once switched from one Venetian gondola to another to escape capture.  He was forced to flee across borders, expelled from Venice, London, Warsaw, Vienna and Paris, mugged in Dresden and imprisoned in Madrid.  Easily bored, sempre in gamba, energised by new people and places, Casanova constantly ricocheted around Europe.  Leo Damrosch’s new biography Adventurer (Yale University Press, £16.99) notes that “he covered something like 40,000 miles all told, on foot, in carriages and occasionally in ships.  In a single year, 1760, he spent time in an almost incredible total of twenty-six cities.” 

Lord Byron would arrive at an inn and order a maid for casual gratification; Casanova took them as a priapic obsession.  No languishing lover, Casanova rarely experienced the feeling Freud described: the greater the obstacles to sexual satisfaction, the greater the pleasure when these obstacles are overcome.  Nor did he believe the Latin adage that after coitus all humans are sad.  Sex made him jolly, even ecstatic.  In his narrative most mothers are pimps, most children and young sisters eager for sex, most pretty wives unfaithful. 

 Most of his lovers have spontaneous and volcanic orgasms.  Casanova names more than 100 women, but they are all similar in character and sexual response.  By contrast, James Salter’s brilliant novel A Sport and a Pastime (1967) describes 41 different sex scenes.  Casanova gives only one woman’s side of the story, but her letters are difficult to interpret.  He could boast like Don Giovanni, “ In Espagna, mille e tre, ” but it’s hard to believe that all of his Histoire is true.

Casanova believed one should have three distinct sexual gratifications—anticipation, experience and remembrance.  When that happens, “these three gratifications become pleasure, pleasure, pleasure.”  He adds, “if we get what we desire, it’s certain that we won’t desire it anymore, since one doesn’t desire what one already possesses.”  He does not say that anticipation, in which wild fantasies surpass actual reality, provides the most intense pleasure.

The range of Casanova’s sexual activities is amazing.  He nobly rejected the offer of a mechanical chair that would suddenly imprison a woman and leave her at his mercy. But he went in for voyeurism and felt a delicious horror by watching two girls with their middle fingers resting on each other’s clitoris, “an almost imperceptible piece of flesh.”  In a rare moment of semi-restraint he submitted to masturbation and “kissed again and again the lovely hands that had condescended to this task.”  He found deformity fascinating and humped a hunchback.  Homosexual encounters were always welcome and homosexual orgies even better.  A pregnant nun who kicked the habit allowed him to nurse at the breasts of a bride of Christ.

Casanova’s absolute favourites were pubescent girls, especially a twosome of sisters.  He bought a 13-year-old Russian child for sexual purposes, and was ecstatic when her “wispy pubic hair divided into little curls that formed a transparent fringe above the little entrance to the temple of love.”  He believed, like Shakespeare in Sonnet 20, that nature pricked him out for woman’s pleasure.  When an eager lover stroked his member and he ejaculated, she exclaimed, “O my God, what a pity.  Unhappy me, he’s dead!”   But he cheerfully reassured her, “in a moment you’ll see the little fellow revive, and so full of life that next time he won’t die so easily.”

There were inevitable dangers in Casanova’s exhausting eroticism.  He was not discouraged by women’s periods; and after he refused to envelop himself in the dead skin of an unreliable condom, his bastards turned up unexpectedly in his travels.  He became clapped out, in both senses, by twelve doses of gonorrhea and some syphilis.  His maladies were treated with the exceptionally toxic and corrosive mercury chloride, which killed the bacterium—and often the patient as well.  Weary and jaded at the age of 38, he was merely going through mechanical motions.  Montaigne justly criticized the unruly liberty of the male member and accused it of “obtruding so importunately when we have no use for it, and failing so importunately when we have the most use for it.”

Casanova’s scandalous 3,000-page Histoire de Ma Vie first appeared in an abridged German edition in 1822, 24 years after his death.  It suddenly stops in mid-air when he was 50, though he lived for 23 more years.  By that time, Damrosch states, Casanova had fallen to “a new low.  His old expedients for acquiring money, the gambling and the scams, were failing him.”  Once persecuted in Venice, he now became a secret informant for the Inquisition.  But he kept on writing, even dreamed about writing, and his work, surprisingly free of bitterness, celebrated life. 

A page from Casanova’s manuscript for Histoire de ma vie

The Histoire is flawed by an endless profusion of obscure names, including 200 actors and musicians, which leads Damrosch to awkward sentences: “As for ‘Querelinth,’ that would be actor and adventurer named Giacomo Passano, who also called himself Acanio Pogomas . . .”  Casanova lapses into a stream of clichés—“sweet delirium,” “supreme rapture”—and into the style of sentimental novels, such as Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771), when he writes: “She extended her lovely hand and I bathed it with tears and kissed it a hundred times.”  He oscillates between extremes of temperature: “froze my blood” and “consumed by a fierce fire.”  He also loves superlatives: “I found myself master of the most beautiful of all breasts.”  Casanova’s elevated style is quite different from the unromantic physical descriptions in John Cleland’s pornographic Fanny Hill (1748), where the sexual act is described from the woman’s point of view.  Casanova is idealistic and exalted; Cleland is grittily realistic and makes fun of male desire: “He drew up his shirt, and bared all his hairy thighs, and stiff staring truncheon, red topp’d, and rooted into a thicket of curls, which covered his belly to the navel, and gave it the air of a fresh brush; and soon I felt it joining close to mine, when he had drove the nail up to the head, and left no partition, but the immediate hair on both sides.”

In the end, Casanova was consumed by the sexual desire that once had nourished him.  His slavish passion becomes funny when, propelled by his throbbing member, he spins out of control.  The energetic sinner concludes his memoir with two egoistic but serious aphorisms: “Loving life, I loved myself, and I hate death because it’s the executioner. . . . What if there is indeed an afterlife, but you have nothing to do? ”   Finally, his high-octane, self-serving account is unreliable, and he seems to be inventing fantasies instead of describing what actually happened.  

Casanova briefly met Benjamin Franklin and James Boswell, but left no details of their conversation, and his encounter with Voltaire was a sad and embarrassing disappointment.  Instead of offering the requisite homage, Casanova self-reflectively condemned Voltaire as “proud, greedy for fame and money, vindictive and fanatical.”

Voltaire . Portrait c. 1720s, the Musée Carnavalet

Casanova also met his antithesis, Samuel Johnson, who was scrupulously honest, profoundly moral and deeply religious.  A sensual but celibate widower, tormented by sin and guilt, Johnson was fearful of death and terrified of damnation.  They should have had a fierce and memorable clash, but Casanova records nothing of interest in his talk with the great sage.

Leo Damrosch has taught at Harvard and published important works on Swift, Johnson, Blake and Rousseau.  His book on Casanova, a difficult subject that refers to a bewildering number of obscure people, is also first-rate.  It lacks a bibliography, but has a useful chronology, 34 colour and 48 black-and-white illustrations and—extremely rare these days—no typos or factual mistakes.  Damrosch has mastered the complex material and examined the conflicting evidence with lawyerlike scrutiny.  He has a clear and lively style, swift narrative, keen perception, and excellent chapters on the social history of 18th-century Venice.  

Damrosch is especially good on Casanova’s two daring escapes.  After digging himself out of a Venetian dungeon, he lost his footing on the roof and hung by his elbows in the gutter until he managed to grasp a lucky ladder.  In Warsaw, after a casual chat with a lady, he was forced to follow the medieval dueling code, which allowed a man to both insult and then kill his opponent.  Both duelists were wounded by their enemy’s pistol and survived to become friends.  Casanova, an inexperienced shot, upheld his honour and gained European fame by defeating a crack marksman.

After rattling around Europe all his life, in 1785 Casanova, improbably and unhappily, finally settled down on a nobleman’s estate in Dux, a Bohemian town between Dresden and Prague.  Though intensely gregarious, he had few friends.  Like Jonathan Swift who declared, “I hate and detest that animal called man; although I heartily love John, Peter and Thomas,” Casanova “could and did love individuals.  But he rejected the religious mandate to love all humanity.”  Toward the end of his life he became weary of the libertine ethos that had driven him from pleasure to pleasure, and gloomily remarked, “this party at Sorrento was the last true pleasure I have tasted in my life.”  Painfully aware of his aging body, he bitterly observed with rare insight, “I’m fifty-eight years old, I can’t travel on foot any more, winter is coming on, and if I have any thoughts of becoming an adventurer again, I look in the mirror and burst out laughing.”

Dux Castle

A friend remarked that Casanova would have been “a very handsome man if he hadn’t been ugly.”  Like Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Bertolt Brecht, he had a rotten character, and spent on sex what he earned by sponging.  But Damrosch, rightly refusing to make moral judgments, sees Casanova’s positive qualities.  His lively pen recorded his conquistador’s life in both the criminal world and polite society of contemporary Europe. Educated in law at Padua University, a proficient linguist with a serious interest in science, he had an agile mind and was endowed with vitality and impressive energy, intellect and sharp wit, charisma and roguish charm.

Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has published Thomas Mann’s Artist-Heroes (2014), Robert Lowell in Love (2016) and Resurrections: Authors, Heroes—and a Spy (2018).