Even as We Speak (14 page)

Huckleberry Finn
may survive the misguided clean-up of the library shelves. Unless I lost count, there are forty-two instances of the word ‘nigger’ in the first fifteen
chapters of the book, but its heart is so obviously in the right place that it may weather the intentions of the politically correct, whose salient folly is to arouse false expectations of the
past. Even if Huck makes it, however, he won’t ever again be read by everybody. Professional admiration for the book will remain intense. (In
Green Hills of Africa
, when Hemingway
names
Huckleberry Finn
as the book that made American literature, for a moment the campfire fabulist is speaking the truth.) Amateur enjoyment must remain restricted to those who actually
read books instead of just hearing about them or watching the video of the movie. Twain was marginalized by the popular culture he helped to create. It had to happen.

Where these four beautiful books will have their effect, along with the Library of America as a whole, is in the academy. With a few exceptions (which have been punished ferociously by qualified
reviewers who realize that this project, above all others, is too important to permit lapses from its own standards) every volume in the collection is a model of scholarship in service to
literature. By now the damage reports are in and we know that a whole generation of students have had literature killed for them by the way they have been obliged to study it. Instead of the books,
they have had to study theories about the books, always on the assumption that the theorists are wiser than the authors. And finally scholasticism, as always, has reduced itself to absurdity, with
the discovery by the theorists that there were no authors. There weren’t even any books, only texts, and there wasn’t any history for the texts to emerge from, because history was just
a set of signs, too.

Well, here are the books, with not a text in sight except as a reasoned agreement on what the author actually wrote. Every volume in the Library has a chronology to help you follow the life of
the author (who actually existed), with pertinent notes to place him in the context of history (which exists, too). Armed with this subsidiary information, the student will be able to give a book
the only ‘reading’ that counts – the one by which the book brings something to him, without his bringing a load of hastily acquired pseudoscience to it. The authors will emerge as
the living human beings who made the larger Constitution, the one behind the document. And one author will emerge as even more alive than the rest, stricken by tragedy but unquenchable in his
delight, shaking his head as if he had seen everything – even the future that is our frightening present – and not given up.

New Yorker
, 14 June, 1993

Casanova, outed long ago as a flagrant heterosexual, is out again. This time he’s out in paperback – the whole of his memoirs, in six hefty double volumes (Johns
Hopkins). What a pity he couldn’t be here for a launch party at, say, the Algonquin. He always said that his literary career was the one that really mattered. In his small talk for the
assembled
prominenti
he would have said it again, even as he put the moves on the younger and more personable females at the thrash: the editors, the journalists, the PR hacks, the bimboid
wannabes toting the canapés. Feeling his age but galvanized by the attention, he would have taken on the biggest challenge in the room: the drenchingly beautiful, impeccably refined junior
editor on the point of marrying the tortoise-necked publishing tycoon jealously quavering in the background. As the lights dim for a screened montage of his big moments on film, Casanova talks his
target out the double doors, down the stairs and into a cab. Most weekends, like the modest, well-brought-up girl she is, she takes the jitney home to East Hampton, but when Cas explains that he
gambled away the last of his
per diem
stash the previous night she immediately offers to cover the cab fare with her spare change. Step on it! The publisher’s heavies are already on
the sidewalk and scoping the street through their dark glasses. Back upstairs, the indignant publisher has personally lifted the phone to consign the entire print run of Casanova’s great book
to a garbage scow, but our hero’s authorial ambitions never did stand a chance against his primal urge.

Lesser writings aside,
History of My Life
is Casanova’s main claim to the literary importance that he always dreamed of in the intervals – sometimes lasting for days on end
– between chasing skirt. The claim has to be called successful, if with some reluctance. When the first instalment of the hardback edition came out, in 1966, bigwigs of the literary world
united to rain hosannas on its editor and translator, Willard R. Trask, for restoring a masterpiece to just preeminence after its long history of being bowdlerized, rewritten by interfering hacks,
truncated, mistranslated, and attacked from the air. (A Second World War bomb through the roof of the Brockhaus office, in Leipzig, almost did to the manuscript what the bomb through the roof of
the Eremitani church in Padua did to Mantegna’s frescoes.) Since then, there has been time to think, and wonder whether many of the mandarins who heaped Casanova’s
capolavoro
with praise ever read it again, or even read in it. For one thing, it isn’t a book for a literal-minded age in which the authenticity of a quotation has to be guaranteed by marking supplied
words with square brackets. What about all that dialogue, remembered in detail over the stretch of decades? Did he carry a tape recorder? A limiting judgement would have plenty to go on.

But that’s just it: plenty is what the book has – plenty of everything, even without the sex. There are swindles and scandals, pretensions and inventions, clerics, lyrics and
bubbling alembics, sword fights at midnight and complots at the palace, bugs in the bed and bedlam in the tavern, masked balls, balls-ups and shinnying up drainpipes, flummery, mummery and summary
executions. All that, as the journalists say, plus a pullulating plankton field of biddable, beddable broads, through which Casanova moves with the single-minded hunger of a straining whale, yet
somehow brings the whole populated ocean of eighteenth-century society to phosphorescent life. The book teems. It flows. It does everything but end. Written in his old age, the memoirs, recounting
his picaresque manoeuvres almost day by day, could get only so far before he croaked, leaving uncovered his most fascinating and possibly most edifying years – the declining years, when the
old magic had finally and forever ceased to work. But the memoirs got far enough to establish a pattern that becomes as predictable to the reader as a flimflam man’s tent show on tour.
Casanova checks into the inn, checks out the upmarket talent, screws the pick of the bunch, screws up a business deal, and moves on. Roaming the whole of Europe, he penetrates the local high
society in each new place, penetrates all the attractive females up to and including the nobility, works some scam to raise funds, blows it, and blows town. (The two previous sentences say the same
thing with the words changed. Casanova’s prose works the same effect for thousands of pages, the miracle being that it isn’t worked to death.)

To call Casanova’s
chef d’oeuvre
repetitive is like calling Saint-Simon snobbish or de Sade sadistic. Repetition is what he lived for, especially with beautiful women.
Variety had to be serial, or it wasn’t variety. After he had done all the different things with the same woman, he wanted to do all the same things with different women. He could never get
enough of them, and there were more of them than even he could envision. Think of it: there was one born every minute! Every second! But the eternal problem with which he faces us is that he
didn’t feel like that at the time. He dealt wholesale but he thought retail. Each love affair was the only one that counted for as long as it lasted. Sometimes it lasted only a matter of
minutes, but the liaison got the whole of his attention, even if the Inquisition was waiting for him down on the street. He never had one eye on the clock. He had both eyes on his beloved’s
face, utterly caught up in the moment when her crisis of ecstasy made her soul his. Anxiety that such a revelation might never come again, as it were, conferred the precious gift of delay. He
writes, ‘I have all my life been dominated by the fear that my steed would flinch from beginning another race; and I never found this restraint painful, for the visible pleasure which I gave
always made up four fifths of mine.’ Four-fifths is eighty per cent whichever way you slice it: a lot to give away. But then it was by giving that he took. Even in – especially in
– bed, he could convince them that it wasn’t about him, it was about them. This was, and remains, a winning formula.

There were serving maids whom he routinely leaped on just because he bumped into them on the stairs, and there was the occasional faded
grande dame
he more or less had
to satisfy because it was easier than talking his way out of it, but on the whole he never got it on with a woman who he didn’t think, while she lay in his arms, was the woman of his dreams,
the one designed to appeal to his imagination by the qualities of her mind and soul as well as the beauty of her body. Women knew that about him just by the way he looked at them. He was a great
lover because they knew in advance that he would love them greatly – that he cherished each one’s unique individuality even though he adored them holus-bolus, as a sex, as a race, as an
angelic species. The question remains whether Casanova’s infinitely replicated experience of once-in-a-lifetime love has anything to do with love at all. If you believe it hasn’t, he
and his book are easily dismissed: they have the same significance as JFK jumping a secretary in the White House elevator and telling a crony a few minutes afterwards that he got into the blonde.
If you believe it has, then Casanova is still here, now more than ever haunting the civilized world’s collective consciousness, and the book of his life, for all its mephitic undertow, has
the reverberating ring of an awkward truth: this man is the man you would be if you were free to act.

One of the things you would have to be free from, of course, is sexual morality. But to call Casanova free from sexual morality invites a rejoinder: sexual morality was the only kind of morality
he had. About sex, he had at least a few principles, which are best examined after one notes the thoroughness with which he lacked them in all other departments. Living always beyond his means and
forever running to escape the consequences, in his life as an adventurer, even more than in his loves, he was ready for anything. He made it up as he went along, and it all came true. Even his name
was a fabrication: he really was Giacomo Girolamo Casanova, but his title, Chevalier de Seingalt, was one he gave himself. He was born in 1725, into a theatrical family in Venice, and on the social
scale of the time show folk ranked not far above gravediggers. Casanova’s self-election to noble status was in itself a theatrical coup, and his career is best regarded as a succession of
vaudeville numbers with nothing to link them except a rapidly falling and rising curtain.

As a boy, he bled easily and was thought mentally backward, but his father was astute enough to secure the patronage of the Grimani family, who staked Casanova to a course at the University of
Padua, the idea being that he would have a career in the Church. Casanova graduated – one of the few examples of his properly finishing anything he began – but his entry into Holy
Orders was occluded by his entry into the sister of the priest who was giving him instruction. Back in Venice and into bed with two sisters, he started attracting patrons on his own account –
a talent that remained with him until the end, although the even more useful talent of keeping his patrons sweet was one he sadly lacked. Offered an ecclesiastical post in the Calabrian province of
Martorano, Casanova took one look at the place and called off the deal. He knew he was meant for higher things. In Rome, he met the Pope – big game. Unfortunately, there was some fuss over a
woman, and he had to skip town. After a spell in Constantinople brought him nothing but more women, he moved on to Corfu and there added to his handicaps by acquiring a taste for gambling unmatched
by any concomitant ability: as a general rule, applicable to his entire lifetime, he could quit gambling only when he was in debt, and dealt with the debt by blowing the scene.

In Venice once more, he scraped a living with a violin, mastered at high speed so that he could join a theatre orchestra. A new patron was so impressed by Casanova’s knowledge of the
occult sciences that he considered legally adopting the prodigy into his noble family. Since Casanova’s knowledge of the occult sciences was largely imaginary, there was no reason he could
not have gone on expanding it until the deal was clinched, but once again scandal intervened. The tribunal in charge of religion and morals wanted to question him about possible offences in both
fields. Even worse, Casanova had reason to believe that the Inquisition wanted to hear about those occult sciences. Time to take a powder.

It was 1749, Casanova was twenty-four, and he was on his way, which is to say on the run, seemingly forever. In Lyons, he was a Freemason; in Paris, he wrote plays; in Vienna, he met intolerance
of his amatory success. Back to Venice yet again, where he was charged with sorcery and imprisoned in the notorious Leads. His daring escape was the basis of a subsequent book, which earned him
some measure of the authorial prestige he always craved. Returning to Paris, he founded a lottery, the proceeds of which he neglected to abscond with – a rare lapse. He later established a
silk manufactory there with hopes of success, which his success at getting a titled mistress pregnant soon translated into failure. In Geneva, he met Voltaire. In London, he was presented at court,
presented a false bill of exchange, got busted, and left with little to show for his stay except a fourth dose of the clap. In Berlin, Frederick the Great thought highly of him, and offered him a
post as tutor to the Pomeranian Cadet Corps, but, typically, he aimed higher still, and headed for St Petersburg and fortune. Catherine the Great offered him nothing.