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Cassanova: Actor, Lover, Priest, SpyBy Ian Kelly
Tarcher/Penguin $28.95
Reviewed by: Patrick McGuire
Kelly’s admiration for Giacomo Casanova comes through in this text quite clearly. Kelly sees Casanova, as his subtitle proclaims, as more than history’s poster boy for promiscuity.
The son of a notable actress of the day, Casanova grew up amid the jollity and squalor of 18th century theatre, when to be an actress was to be supposed a whore or worse. That Casanova was not the son of the man whose name he bore at least lends a little credence to mother’s reputation. Nevertheless, young Giacomo thought himself destined for the priesthood. He had a prodigious and precocious intellect, he learned languages easily, he became fluent in the philosophical issues of the day, and he was ambitious: a perfect candidate for holy orders.
But life got in the way. Or, perhaps, the smooth-talking, charming, witty young man got in his own way. Once he tasted of love, he was hooked. His itinerant life as dinner guest or diplomat or assistant to some important personage began.
Kelly shows us what a charming ladies’ man Casanova was throughout his life; we receive anecdotes of long-past lovers reviving their connections to him. We also see, in gleanings from Casanova’s famous (notorious?) multi-volume History of My Life, the absolute regard Casanova had for pleasing all his lovers. Kelly paints him not as a sexual predator taking advantage of naïve young women but as a sensualist keyed to sharing pleasure.
But Kelly’s ultimate intention is to redirect our ideas about Casanova. He was more than a lover. His memoirs, Kelly says, are really the first great travel writing. His descriptions of many of Europe’s largest cities are filled with the details of varying urban life: its smells, its noises, its cuisine, its people and pace. Casanova is adept as well in sizing up the pleasures and difficulties in traveling between cities.
Kelly is a good, clear writer, but he excels on the subject of Casanova’s relation to food. Kelly points out that it was Casanova who first theorized that oysters were an aphrodisiac. He used to eat them from off his lovers’ breasts. (Here, Kelly quips, this particular intersection between food and sex is not to be tried in restaurants.) That intersection is quite important. Apparently, food and sex, for Casanova, were almost always part of the same experience. The memoirs abundantly detail the sumptuous meals Casanova and his various lovers enjoyed in bed: before, during and after. Kelly’s take, here, is that Casanova is one of the world’s first great food writers.
Kelly tells this life story as if it were a five-act drama, each act having many small scenes. The drama, like a good 18th century production, also has an Introduzione as well as more than one Intermezzo and a Curtain Call. I think the structure a bit naive and implausible, and I’m not convinced that it adds much to the telling. But that is a small negative, for every page teems with details and observations about Casanova and his time, all perfectly modulated to be imminently interesting and narratively fluid.
Kelly obviously admires his subject. And his claim for making Casanova more than a large footnote in the history of sexuality is justly defended. The book is not X-rated, as it were, but it is for adults, if by ‘adults’ we mean persons who can suspend judgment of the man until they see him at his most melancholy extreme as well as in his happy pursuit of excellence in writing, thinking, and translating. Not merely a lover and weaver of words, Casanova should be viewed as a diplomat and businessman as well as a spy. And his memoirs make Casanova a great, virtually-untapped resource for studies in European history and culture.
