History of My Life, Volume IX & X

History of My Life #5

by Giacomo Casanova, Willard R. Trask (Translator)

Giacomo Casanova was born in Venice in 1725. His parents, both actors, wanted him to become a priest, but their hopes were dashed when, at sixteen, he was expelled from the seminary for immoral misconduct. Probably best-known for his reputation as a womanizer, Casanova was in turn a secretary, a soldier in the Venetian army, a preacher, an alchemist, a gambler, a violinist, a lottery director, and a spy. He translated Homer's Iliad into Italian and collaborated with Da Ponte on the libretto for Mozart's Don Giovanni. He retired in 1785 to the castle of a friend - Count Waldstein of Bohemia - in order to write his memoirs. Because every previous edition of Casonova's Memoirs had been abridged to suppress the author's political and religious views and tame his vivid, often racy, style, the literary world considered it a major event when Willard R. Trask's translation of the complete original text was published in six double volumes between 1966 and 1971. Trask's award-winning translation now appears in paperback for the first time.

Genres: History, Memoir, Biography, Nonfiction, Italy

856 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1794

About the author

A seminary expelled Giovanni Jacopo Casanova de Seingalt, Italian adventurer, who afterward wandered Europe, met luminaries, worked in a variety of occupations, established a legendary reputation for lust, and chronicled his memoirs.

Giacomo Girolamo Casanova de Seingalt, a Venetian, authored book. People regard Histoire de ma vie ( Story of My Life ), his main book, part autobiography, as one most authentic source of the customs and norms of social life during the 18th century.

He, sometimes called the greatest lust of the world, so famously womanized with his synonymous name with the art of seduction.

Reviews

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

So essential for one's library that it is silly to even mention it. Casanova rocks his world - and not just the women I might add. Get all volumes. It's a hoot and quite an adventure at the same time.

It's kind of mean of me to add all volumes on this list - but Casanova was a fantastic writer - and is this all true? To be honest I don't really care. What comes through is the man's charm.

I do suggest that one just pull a volume off their bookshelf and start reading any passage. It's uber-amusing and he was a smart man. Total thumbs up and anything else that I may get up as well for this gentleman of leasure.

[Simon Maxwell-Stewart]

It's been some three or four years since I first read this, but Giacomo Casanova's loomed large in my psyche ever since.

We have an unusually progressive doctor from what is now the Czech Republic to thank for these memoirs' existence. Upon a routine check-up with an ageing, ailing, anomic Casanova, this doctor noticed that the Venetian would become animated whenever he alluded to his past exploits, and so recommended that he spend some time revisiting his life in an autobiography. I'm sure he couldn't have expected that this autobiography would eventually number between 3000-4000 pages and still remain unfinished, but Casanova put almost as much zest into writing about his life as he did into living it.

Before continuing too far into these memoirs, the reader must first decide whether or not they're in the hands of a reliable narrator. At the end of the final volume of his memoirs, we're suddenly wrenched out of Casanova's hands and placed into a third-person wrap-up of his life's affairs. The juxtaposition is a little jolting: it appears, by the end of his life, Casanova was not seen as a well-travelled, venerable older gentleman, but more as an outdated anachronism, dressed in apparel several decades out of date, and even lumbered with a repertoire of archaic mannerisms and politesse more fitting to a prior age. It made me question just how subjective and skewed were the preceding volumes. I honestly believe there are few lettered individuals more in thrall to verity and truthfulness than Casanova, but that doesn't mean to say he didn't misperceive events. Did the legions of women whose lives he fleetingly entered really leave him on as good terms as he imagined? Did the royal and notable personages of the era- including Catherine the Great, Voltaire, Frederick the Great, Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin and the like- really get to know him as well as implied? (Although in Voltaire's case, he and Casanova had something of an ego-clash). I've read contemporaneous memoirs from the era and a few of them actually feature the exact same personages. It makes me think that the royal courts of Europe were very nearly open to all and sundry.

Nevertheless, I wouldn't have been able to get this deep into a book of this size if I hadn't put myself entirely into its author's hands. Casanova was as much a shining product of the Age of Enlightenment as the best work by Bacon or Newton, except his masterpiece was his life. I haven't personally interviewed everyone who's ever lived, but I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that no one else has lived as full a life as Giacomo Casanova. He is our discriminating guide through dozens of countries, career choices and social classes over the largest part of the 18th Century. We travel from Venice to Constantinople, to Rome, to Paris, to Austria, France, Holland, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Russia, Switzerland, England, and hundreds of other places besides; we see him morph from priest to soldier, professional gambler to science fiction author, fiddler to cabalist, inventor to ambassador, state prisoner to state spy, alchemist to one of the first people to introduce the lottery to Europe. No other author from the era straddled the various classes with as much impartial ease as he. Though he did often find himself drawn to the aristocracy, simply by dint of their decadent lifestyles, he was all-too-aware of the royalty's susceptibility to simpering idiocy, and the poorer class's innate nobility. In fact, in a century of breakthroughs and acute intellectualism, he was one of the era's brightest thinkers, having shrugged off almost all traces of medieval fog from his system. He was so much more than just a by-word for womanising. Though there's that, too...

Next time I read this, I think I'll do a count of the number of conquests he made throughout his life. At least that he remembered. The final figure must be in the thousands. There's even a How To Seduce a Lady section here which makes that silly pick-up artist book look like the dilettantish dabblings of bare-faced amateurs. Women of today still have a bit of an uphill struggle to duke it out on a level footing with men in terms of fair pay, but back then in Europe their only viable career paths tended to be nunneries and marriage. Which made Casanova's conquests even more astounding, as a woman's virtue was often their most valuable asset. It could be self-aggrandizing, but it appears Casanova genuinely improved hundreds of women's lives over the course of his own. He would invariably leave them in a better position than before he met them: suitably remunerated, or using his connections to give them employment, or even setting them up with a rich, loving suitor far less footloose than him. He could easily have sated his pathological addiction to new women in a much more economical fashion. He wasn't just drawn to their bodies, either. You might even call him something of a proto-feminist. He could hardly bring himself to bed a woman if he didn't first fall for her wit and clear-headedness. You can tell from his few accounts of attending brothels that these were experiences which gave him little joy. The reader might be less forgiving of the fact that, among his innumerable paramours, number eleven year olds (OK, I can only think of two offhand), and his very own daughter! Even if you say that the 1700s weren't so far off from the age when barely pubescent girls were married off to much older men they'd never met, I think even Casanova knew he was pushing it a bit. The episode with his daughter's a great little story in its own right, however. Of all the thousands of women he bedded, she was the closest to forcing Casanova to settle down. He had no idea she was his daughter, and, just days away from their marriage, he met her mother and realised just what a pickle he'd gotten himself tangled in. Then some years later when they meet up again and she's married, he has a ménage à trois with she and her mother anyway. And, like with most of his frissons, you can't help but sit back and nod in scandalized assent. Casanova lost his virginity to two sisters in his early teens, and the liaisons only get more seamy and fascinating from there on out- with arguably the love of his life being an escapee nun.

This brings me to the issue of the expurgated version translated by one of my favourite authors, Arthur Machen. Much ballyhoo is made of the various ways in which Casanova's more contentious passages were chopped up and thrown on the fire, but considering what made the cut, we'd have to be talking about the type of stuff that would have made the Marquis de Sade blush. Perhaps whoever initially attempted to edit these memoirs threw their hands up in the air and gave up around the sixtieth tale of catching the eye of an innkeeper's daughter and practising his cunnilingus skills on her? The only instances of Casanova holding back from presenting the full HD Retina version of the truth was if the people he was talking about were still alive and liable to be compromised by his account; in those instances he cut their names short to things like Madame M.

Although it might not seem like it at first, Machen was something of a kindred spirit and a perfect choice to make this translation from the original French into English. While he might appear on the surface to be just another starchy English Christian, his tales, such as The White People, generally focus on the Saturnine pagan sexuality which lurks between the cracks of modern-day society. Casanova himself, from the off, identifies himself as a firm believer in God, though his interpretation of scripture is pretty unique to say the least. I'm sure Machen, as a lover of the eldritch, found himself particularly fascinated by Casanova's delvings into the arcane arts. Casanova's most lucrative exploits came through soothsaying, alchemy, and similar offshoots like necromancy; though he didn't for a second believe in the veracity of any of them, he took full advantage of the fact that others did. It is essential for author and translator to be relatively simpatico. The number of dry, dour translations which have no doubt soured readers to the genius of the original source is far too high. For a project of this magnitude, the importance is only doubled, and Machen clearly felt like this project was an utter joy which was over far too soon. Casanova, to him, was likely a manifestation of something he was far too Victorian and English to ever fully realise, but someone whom he idealised all the more because of this fact.

You can't really blame him, as Casanova's life really was one big adventure. Various episodes, such as his famous daring escape from the Venetian Leads bastille, where he was imprisoned at the hands of the inquisition for having slightly sketchy taste in literature, and his two duels and their consequences, have been turned into books in their own right. The only time when it started to flag was in these two volumes. This is around the time when he met his match in a famous London harlot who bled him dry and left him destitute. London has a knack for that kind of thing. His looks are starting to abandon him, and the flock of fawning women are thinning. One of the main things I learnt from these memoirs was to never let any opportunity slip by. If someone invites you to tag along to some happening, without doubt do so! If you hear tell of a position opening in some far-flung corner of the world, take it! Fashion your life like a leaf caught in a hurricane. It's evident that Casanova embarked upon these memoirs as a means of becoming a young man again. He got to re-read his diaries for the first time in decades and remember each encounter as if it were happening for the first time. The closer he crept to his present position, the less effective this therapeutic method became. So harrowing must old age have been to him, that he left his masterwork unfinished, failing even to mention such fascinating episodes as becoming a spy for the very institution that had perniciously jailed him as a younger man. The writing itself, whilst still eminently readable, seems to sag and wrinkle and warp, as if old age has infected the very leaves it was written on. It's a sad, frail ending to one of the most ostentatiously wonderful works of literature ever written. Curse that wench from the motherland for breaking the seemingly cast-iron spirit of Casanova. Then again, I seem to recall our author being offered a marriage opportunity or two even after returning from the place of so many misfortunes, England. If he'd willed it he could have settled down with a loving wife in a comfortable home, and occasionally duck out into a fugal reverie of his younger times when no one was looking. He was ever a gambler, however, so this ending was never on the cards for Giacomo Casanova.

At their best- which would be the whole stretch of volume 3 to volume 8- these memoirs sizzle with the sheer joy of being alive. They were written by a toothless, hairless, withered old man who once knew inconceivable beauty. While other accounts from the era might take us through one strata of life, Casanova was an unprejudiced man and dove into new societies and experiences with the élan of a true Epicurean, and the probing wit and self-awareness of one, too.

[Gary Olson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Casanova's life was amazing, with enough adventure and intrigue to fill... well... volumes and volumes of text. Unfortunately, that's exactly what he decided to do, and while much of it is interesting and involving, after a while I just kept saying 'how much longer does this go on?' Certainly worth reading, but pace yourself or your head will go numb.