Judith Summers
CASANOVA’S WOMEN
384pp. Bloomsbury. £20.
0 747 57744 7
Casanova’s Women begins where many Lives of Casanova begin: at the end. His final scenes make an arresting image, the eighteenth-century James Bond who conned, charmed and gambled his way through a galaxy of Pussy Galores preparing for death in a remote Bohemian castle; the spy, adventurer, and lover turned harmless librarian, looking after Count Wallenstein’s collection of books. Hunched over his desk, the old man is working his memories into a gargantuan history of 3,600 manuscript pages which will become, when they are posthumously published, twelve thick volumes. Giacomo Casanova ended his days with one last triumphant act of indulgence, and by writing his Histoire de ma vie he fell in love all over again. “I love myself more than I love anyone else”, he remembered. Meanwhile, many miles away, in the city which for him represents the pinnacle of human achievement, the French Revolution is bringing to an end the world he once knew. Casanova, supreme advocate of liberty, is imprisoned for the second time in his life, but there will be no dramatic escape over the rooftops as there was in Venice, because he has nowhere else to go and nothing left to do. “You shall become free”, he wrote in a letter from Dux Castle, “when you have lost your freedom.”
To compare the libidinal and intellectual energy of Casanova with that of anyone else, even Byron, is like pitching the effect of a volcanic eruption up against the rearrangement of thimbles on a shelf. And yet it is not the events he relives in his Histoire which make his book so magnificent, but the fact of his having written it at all. He wrote, Casanova said, for people like him, “those who, having lived too much, have become immune to seduction and who, from having lived too long in the fire, have become Salamanders”. Not yet burned out, Casanova put into writing the same drive he had put into living, and the Histoire was his last seduction. In the attempt to achieve literary immortality he embraced every genre, every style, every discourse available, from the utopian bliss of pornography to the realism of politics, from journalism to farce, from theological and scientific debate to the aphoristic wit of La Rochefoucauld.
All of which makes Casanova something of a problem for his biographers. Not only is there not much new to say about him, but there is nothing that he did not say first himself and in perfect prose. What Judith Summers, does, therefore, as did Lydia Flem and Andrew Miller before her, is find new, and briefer, ways of telling the story he has already told.
Summers’s last book, The Empress of Pleasure (2003), was an engrossing biography of Teresa Cornelys, erstwhile lover of Casanova and mother of their unfortunate child, Sophie, and in Casanova’s Women we meet Cornelys again, but this time in the company of a selection of his other lovers, including the lascivious nun “MM”, the dashing Henriette whom he saw as the love of his life, the tedious Manon Balletti, who saw him as the love of her life, and the troublesome courtesan, Marianne de Charpillon, who gave as good as she got. What Summers aims for is a woman’s perspective on the great womanizer, based on the premiss that no man is a hero to either his valet or his ex.
According to the Histoire, Casanova was lover to around 120 women, which is surprisingly few considering he began aged seventeen in a threesome with a pair of sisters and carried on with fixed concentration into his late forties. Assuming he had thirty years of sexual activity, Casanova must have seduced an average of four women a year, but it is a wonder he had time for as many as that. Summers reminds us that in the case of the soprano Bellino, for example, it took him several weeks alone to discover whether the desired object was a boy or a girl, and unable to get a straight answer from either Bellino herself or her mother, he resorted to sleeping with her sisters as part of his investigative research. Seduction, or as Summers calls it, “the game of love”, was time-consuming stuff.
The only woman who seems not to have liked Casanova as much as he liked himself was his actress mother Zanetta, and her rejection of her son no doubt inspired him to seek love from idealized women who were reluctant to let him go. Judith Summers praises Casanova for treating his lovers as equals because he liked to leave them satisfied, but it seems that he saw sexual intimacy not as a form of equality but as a way of merging, and he spent his time trying to fill up what he called the “void” inside him. In true Enlightenment style, Casanova presented what was a pathological need to be loved as a rational pursuit of pleasure, and he has been celebrated ever since not as a casualty of maternal dysfunction but an icon of how to love richly and well.
One effect of lifting his sexual liaisons out of the context of the Histoire and reshaping them for the anticipated female readership of Casanova’s Women is that Judith Summers turns Casanova’s grand exploration of European intellectual and sensual life into an exercise in literary romance. His own account of his seductions is accompanied by a vast and erudite commentary on the nature of philosophy, science, religion, and of course love itself, about which he is endlessly insightful: “when love has a hand in things, each party usually dupes the other”. The subject of the Histoire is happiness, and in a fine manifesto against bourgeois values, he declares that the unhappiest man “is he who has chosen a way of life in which he finds himself with the sad obligation to plan every day, from morning till night”. Judith Summers reduces all this wisdom to sentiments such as, “Mystery enveloped Henriette like a heady perfume, and Casanova was intoxicated by it”, and the ironic self-knowingness of the authorial voice in the Histoire is replaced by a stream of empty speculations like, “Had Zanetta known that her firstborn . . . would posthumously become one of the most famous men ever to have lived she might well have taken more interest in him”.
This is an entertaining but essentially frustrating book, principally because of its subject matter, which is also entertaining but essentially frustrating. It is the range of his intelligence rather than the range of his lovers that makes Casanova so compelling. His women are interesting to us because they were interesting to him, but as his interest never lasted that long, neither can our own. While Judith Summers has worked hard to explore who these women really were, we still end up knowing too little about their lives and characters to have any real sense of the impact Casanova must have made on them. And because Summers relies on what Casanova himself says about the women he loved, the female perspective she sets out to achieve ends up being much the same as the male perspective of the Histoire, only less rich and multivalent.
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Frances Wilson is writing a book on Dorothy Wordsworth. She was a judge on the panel of last year’s Whitbread Biography prize.
