He was a diplomat, duelist, mathematician and liberal, as well as a genius storyteller.
Casanova and his lover
The English poet Dick Davis, in his collection of poems Belonging (2002), has a wonderful poem that packages Casanova's The Story of My Life in five rhyming verses, the last of which, referring to his famous prison escape, writes: "On the roof of the Governor-General, you slip, flail, crawl – / But our shocked applause will not make you fall". The poem subtly describes the reactions of many readers to Casanova's "story." It shows that we're attending a show — or, as Casanova's Italian fans put it, we're "assisting" with a performance — literally giving it our support. It was our applause, even if shocked, that kept the performer at a wonderful level in his anti-gravity acrobatic performance.
Casanova's parents were both actors and he was a performer all his life. Every relationship is a kind of miniature drama (most often comedy, but sometimes melodrama, occasionally tragedy – although usually it is not the last of Casanova himself). At the end of his life, he began to envision his entire life as a three-act play - from then on he began to re-perform it, first narrating certain plots as miniseries (his escape from prison and duels in Poland became famous party works), and then telling the whole story from childhood. In the last years of his life, nominally working as a librarian in a remote castle in Bohemia, he devoted himself almost entirely to the "History of Mavi" (which he wrote in French) that he named.
No other writer has told us so much about himself. Leo Damrosch concludes this new biography by saying: "We know more about Casanova and go deeper than we do about almost anyone who lived a long time ago". Over the past two centuries — perhaps because few people have been willing to read the entire 3,000-page original narrative — countless biographers, novelists, and film directors have retold these stories in different ways, some of which add details to the last melancholy quarter-century of Casanova's life, as Casanova's "love history" ended in 1774, on the eve of his last unfortunate return to his hometown of Venice. Mr. Damrosch's Adventurer is the third long biography in English published in the last 14 years. The author often acknowledges his gratitude for his early work, especially Ian Kelly's life in 2008, and as an actor he has a special perspective on Casanova as a permanent performer.
The Adventurer: The Life and Times of Giacomo Casanova
The question arises naturally: what new plot can Mr. Damrosch offer? Actually, it was a good deal. First, it was the first to revolutionize Casanova's research by taking advantage of two superb new versions of "history" that had emerged over the past decade. Damrosch recounts in detail the vicissitudes of the epic text, which were not copied and published until nearly 30 years after Casanova's death, when his notoriety had disappeared, making him less well-known than his two painter brothers.
In fact, the published version that created this legend in the 1820s was very unreliable. Editor Jean Laforgue, an anti-religious French Republican, himself reviewed and revised many of Casanova's statements about religion and politics (he was not a revolutionary despite Casanova's resentment of not belonging to the nobility) and "corrected" his Italian French. In the 1960s, a more reliable version was finally published, but it was not until after 2010, when the Bibliothèque Nationale de France acquired the original manuscript for $9.6 million (to date, barely accessible to even staunch scholars, and now available online) that two new scholarly editions were produced, including numerous annotations on Casanova's cancelled and alternative editions. In his quotations, Mr. Damrosch provided his own new translations of these editions (the new English version of "Histoire" is now needed) and took advantage of the scholarly research of his editors, as well as many commentaries in French and Italian.
An undated portrait of Giacomo Girolamo Casanova
More importantly, Mr. Damrosch was an 18th-century historical authority, so it was well suited to place Casanova in the context of his time. Although Casanova is best known for his love life, he longs to be taken seriously as an Enlightenment thinker. In addition to "history", he wrote numerous philosophical papers and a five-volume speculative novel (a financial failure for the author); He also began translating "Iliad" in Italian and Venetian dialects. Admittedly, as Damrosch tells us, "none of his articles would have been read if we had not known how Casanova had written it", but the desire of these intellectuals prompted him to seek to meet with the main intellectuals of his time, especially Voltaire, who apparently (and self-righteously) regarded Voltaire as a personal competitor. These encounters are memorable and boastfully described in The Epic—including an encounter with Rousseau that, as Damrosch tells us, almost certainly didn't happen.
After writing a biography of Rousseau, Mr. Damrosch was in a position to provide an illuminating comparison between the two main figures of confessional writing, showing "how Rousseau withdrew from society, reflected and explored his own mind [while] Casanova immersed himself in society and brought many personalities to life in history, which he wrote quickly and happily". While Casanova is clearly self-obsessed, he is a sociable person, interested in other people, especially women, and able to describe them vividly, even if not always with words of compassion as we would like.
Damrosch also wrote another great compulsive memoir, James Boswell (in The Club, 2019), who compared the ways the two men wrote about sex —which was of great benefit to Casanova: "When Boswell did try to bring sexual relations to life, he was reduced to a string of clichés—'sweet delirium,' 'snow-white arms,' 'amorous Dalyan,' 'sweet feast,' God-like vitality'... Casanova continually discovers effective language to recreate each new shared experience, "often using "religious language to describe those transcendent 'sacred moments.'"
This brings us to Casanova's best-known theme, and to the third area where Damrosch claims to inject new light into Casanova. In his introduction, he declared that it was time to write a biography that would be candid about Casanova's sometimes sexual abuses. He acknowledges that other writers have tried to show things from the perspective of the women he was seduced — in 2006, Judith Summers published a fascinating book called Casanova's Women — but he said that few major biographers have fully confronted "Casanova's treatment of women as manipulative." He has power over them, he knows that, and he likes to take advantage of it.
While Casanova always claims that his enjoyment of sex depends primarily on his partner's enjoyment, Mr Damrosch points out that on some occasions this claim is clearly false. For example, in his youth, there was an episode "undoubtedly a gang rape, but Casanova claimed it wasn't really rape because the woman had a great time." It would be a model for him to fail, a convenient way to exonerate himself, not to mention guilt. In a later chapter, after describing the plot of the middle-aged Casanova's harassing behavior that caused a young woman to have a nosebleed, Mr. Damrosch declared with great satisfaction: "He completely failed to realize how terrible his actions were." It's been a long time since that fist was smashed in the face."
This raises the question of why we continue to read the story of this morally problematic adventurer (and pedophilia is also on his list of bad deeds). Well, the answer lies in the word itself, which provides the title for Mr. Damrosch's biography. Casanova was the quirky figure of the 18th century, the "adventurer" (other famous examples being Cagliostro and the Count of Saint Germain, both of whom appear in "History"), And Dick Davis's memorable description of him as "pervert, liar, wondermaker,/Braw bobby-dazzler, seducer of the world" – his stories, whether centered on sex/love or complex scams, are adventurous – and fascinating, especially in his narration. He traveled all over Europe and met everyone, from serving maids, charlatans and nuns to nobles, great writers and ruling monarchs (such as Frederick the Great and Empress Catherine), who brought them to life in his work.
He doesn't describe everything—he has little to say about the natural landscapes and the visual arts—but through his stories, we have a close connection to 18th-century European society. We see their clothes and jewelry (especially his own), taste and smell their food (cooking books are all based on his descriptions), hear their conversations – not just adoration. We met a large number of characters, some of whom reappeared in different European cities, apparently casually, as in the novels of the time. Some of the famous love words he described in the most tender of love words were engraved on the glass windows: "You will forget Henriet too"—but he certainly would not. Casanova didn't forget anyone, nothing – and compulsively and convincingly wrote down all these unforgettable adventures.
When his biography read to the end, Mr. Damrosch joined in the "shocked applause." His conclusion is an active tribute to Casanova's prose, and in particular to the fact that when writing this extraordinary work in his lonely old age (Casanova mocked his yellow teeth and incompetence), he never allowed "his last tragic mood to darken it", and Monsieur Damrosch brought Rousseau again, this time by illuminating parallelism rather than contrast. Rousseau admits that he often tends to extend the happy moments of his youth, "finding a perfect expression for what he was doing: 'I didn't describe them as 'retombais,' but went back to them. Casanova's History of Mavi is in many ways distinct from the Confessions, sharing this vivid sense of the present. The greatest merit of Mr. Damrosch's biography is that, although he never loses the distance of criticism, he has completely succeeded in conveying that "vivid sense of the present", that "joyful desire" for life, which is what inspires us to read Casanova and why we read him.