by Stefan Zweig
His enemies the servants have gathered around the door, wonderingly, eavesdropping. They grin at one another, and say: “To whom is he chattering, with whom is he laughing, the old fool?” Tapping their foreheads significantly, they clatter downstairs again to their wine, and leave Casanova to himself in his garret. The outer world has forgotten him. The angry old eagle, alone in his eyrie at Dux, might almost as well be living on the top of an iceberg. When at length, at the end of June, 1798, his tired heart has ceased to beat, and the poor, withered frame which had once been so ardently embraced by a thousand women is committed to the tomb, the church register cannot even get his name right. “Casaneus, Venetian, 84 years of age,” is the entry; wrong name, wrong age, so little do those among whom he has lived for years, and among whom he has now died, know of him. No one troubles to erect a monument, and no one pays any heed to his manuscripts. While the body molders in an unnamed grave, the letters crumble, and even thievish hands are not interested enough to open or to steal the folio volumes of his memoirs. From 1798 to 1822, for a quarter of a century, no one could have seemed more hopelessly dead than this most living of all the men that ever lived.
GENIUS FOR SELF-PORTRAITURE
Courage is the one thing needful.
PREFACE TO THE MEMOIRS
His life had been adventurous, and his resurrection was to be the same. On December 13, 1820 (who, at that date, remembered Casanova?) the famous publishing firm of Brockhaus received a letter from an unknown correspondent named Gentzel, inquiring whether the Histoire de ma vie jusqu’à l’an 1797 by a certain Signor Casanova would be acceptable for publication. Brockhaus asked Gentzel to send along the folios, and secured an expert opinion on them. You may imagine that they created a sensation! The manuscript was instantly purchased, was translated into German, abominably mutilated one may presume, plastered over with fig leaves, and adjusted for public consumption. By the time the fourth volume appeared, the success had been so tremendous that a Parisian pirate retranslated the German translation into French, the work being thus mauled a second time. Thereupon Brockhaus, with an eye to his own profits, shot a second French retranslation after the first. In a word, Giacomo, the rejuvenated, had come to life again. He now enjoys a vigorous reincarnation in all the towns he ever visited — but his original manuscript is solemnly entombed in Herr Brockhaus’s safe, and only God and Brockhaus know through what devious and thievish paths the volumes wandered during their three-and-twenty years of incognito, or how much of their precious contents has been lost, mutilated, castrated, falsified. In the genuine Casanova style, the whole affair reeks of mystery, adventure, dishonesty. Still, all these drawbacks notwithstanding, we can congratulate ourselves on the miracle of possessing the most impudent and racy picaresque romance of all ages!
Casanova himself had never seriously believed in the public appearance of this monster. “For seven years I have been doing nothing else than write my memoirs,” confesses the gouty old hermit on one occasion, “and it has gradually become a necessity for me to carry the matter through to an end, although I greatly regret having undertaken it. But I write in the hope that my history will never see the light. Apart from the fact that the censorship, that extinguisher of the intellect, would never allow it to be printed, I look forward to being rational enough in my last illness to have all the manuscript burnt before my eyes.” Fortunately he remained true to himself, and therefore never became “rational.” What he once spoke of as his capacity for “secondary blushing,” for blushing at his inability to blush, did not prevent his taking up his pen, and, in his fair, round hand, writing folio after folio for twelve hours a day. He said of this occupation: “It was the only way in which I could hinder myself from becoming crazy, or from dying of the spleen — of vexation on account of the disagreeables and annoyances I had to suffer daily at the hands of the envious brutes who lived under the same roof with me in Count Waldstein’s castle.”
As fly-flapper to ward off boredom, a remedy against intellectual ossification — surely this is a strange motive, the objector will exclaim, for the writing of one’s memoirs. But it would be a mistake to underrate the importance of tedium as an incentive to literary creation. We have to thank the weary years spent in prison by Cervantes for the boon of Don Quixote; the best pages written by Stendhal were penned during his exile in the marshes of Civita Vecchia; even Dante’s Divine Comedy might never have come into being but for the author’s banishment, for had he stayed in Florence he would have written in blood with sword and battle-axe instead of committing his thoughts to rhyme. The most brightly colored pictures of life can only be fashioned in a camera oscura. Had Count Waldstein taken the worthy Giacomo with him to Paris or to Vienna, fed him there on the fat of the land and allowed him to smell the flesh of women, had he been fêted as a wit in all the drawing rooms, these wonderful narratives would never have got beyond the stage of talk over chocolate and sherbet, would never have achieved permanent incorporation in black and white. Like Ovid beside the shores of the Euxine, the old fellow sat alone and shivering in his Bohemian exile, and there told his story as one looking back on life out of the realm of the shades. His friends were dead, his adventures had been forgotten, his senses had ceased to glow. A neglected ghost, he wandered through the chilly rooms of the castle. No woman came to visit him; no one had any respect for him; no one wanted to hear him talk. The venerable sorcerer, therefore, wishing to prove, to himself at least, that he was still alive, or at any rate had lived (“vixi, ergo sum”), exerted his cabalistic arts once more to conjure up the past, recounted for his present enjoyment the enjoyments of days long dead. Hungry men lacking money to buy food must feast upon the odor of roast meat; victims on the field of war and the field of Venus must content themselves as best they may with telling the story of their adventures. “I renew the pleasure by reminding myself of it, and I can laugh at past distresses since I can no longer feel their smart.”
Casanova’s sole purpose in operating this peepshow, this old man’s toy, is to please himself; he wants his vivid memories to distract his attention from the dull present. It is this negative element of absolute aloofness and unconcern which gives his work its peculiar psychological value as self-portraiture. Generally speaking, when anyone tells the story of his own life, he does it purposively, and somewhat theatrically. He puts himself on a stage, is aware of the audience, unconsciously adopts some particular attitude, poses as an interesting character, calculates the effects of every gesture. Benjamin Franklin writes his autobiography as a work of edification; Bismarck, as a historical document; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to make a sensation; Goethe, as a work of art and an imaginative exercise; Napoleon on St. Helena, as a justification and as a monument. They all expect the work of self-portraiture to have a specific influence in the moral, historical, or literary field and for every one of them this conviction imposes a burden or exercises a restraint in the form of a sense of responsibility. Famous men are never free from fears and scruples when writing autobiography, for they know that their self-portrait will be confronted with a portrait that already exists in the imaginations or experiences of countless fellow men. Willy-nilly, therefore, they are compelled to adapt the autobiography to the preformed legend. Being famous, for the sake of their fame they are constrained to have regard to their country, their children, morality, honor. Instinctively they watch the image of their personality that has shaped itself in the minds of their contemporaries; and one who already belongs to the public is bound by many ties.
Casanova, on the other hand, can enjoy the luxury of absolute freedom from restrictions, and can indulge in the impudence of anonymity. He is under obligations to no one, has no ties, either to the past, which has forgotten him, or to the future, in which he does not believe. He is not troubled by any considerations for family feeling, by any thought of morality, by any circumstantial hindrances. His children, if he has any, have been hatched out of cuckoos’ eggs laid in strange nests. The women who gave themselves to him in t
he days of his youth have been moldering long since in Italian, Spanish, English, or German earth. He has no fatherland, no home, no religion. Whose feelings need he consider? What he has to tell can no longer advantage him in any way; nor can it harm him, since for practical purposes he is a dead man, is beyond good and evil, beyond respect and contempt, beyond approval and disapproval, expunged from men’s memories, a dead star, or one which glows only in its hidden core. “Why should I not tell the truth? A man cannot deceive himself, and I am writing for myself alone.”
But when Casanova speaks of telling the truth, he does not imply a determination to drive mineshafts into his own interior, to disclose psychological depths. He means no more than that he will have no inhibitions, no shame. He will strip off his clothes, and, comfortably naked, will warm his body once again in the stream of sensuality, will splash cheerfully in the current of memories, taking no heed of the presence of actual or imaginary spectators. He does not recount his adventures like a literary man, a soldier, or a poet, like one who talks for his own honor and glory; he writes in the spirit in which a bravo vaunts the murders he has committed, or a poor old harlot tells of her hours of love — with no thought of shame. “Non erubesco evangelium,” I do not blush at my confessions, such is the motto written underneath his “Précis de ma vie,” the first draft of his memoirs. He tells his story simply and directly. Thus while he may seem coarse at times, writing as frankly as Lucian, and (like a vain athlete showing off his muscle) making too public a display of his phallic activities — assuredly this shameless parade is far more to our taste than the cowardly furtiveness of a weak-loined galanterie in eroticis. Look, for contrast, at the other erotic treatises of his day; at the rose-tinted, musk-smelling frivolities of a Grécourt, a Crébillon, or at Louvet de Couvray’s Faublas, in which Eros is draped as a shepherd-boy and love is displayed as a lascivious chassé-croisé, a gallant amusement, in which one neither procreates children nor catches syphilis. In Casanova’s memoirs we have nothing of this sort; we have precise descriptions of the wholesome and exuberant joys of a vigorous man of the senses, whose elemental virility and elemental naturalness we can fully appreciate. In Casanova, masculine love is not depicted as a delicate, gently flowing rivulet in which sportive nymphs can cool their feet; but as a mighty river, reflecting the world in its surface, and at the same time sweeping along in its depths all the slime and foulness of existence. Assuredly no other autobiographer can rival him in his limning of the Pan-like intensity of the male sexual impulse. At length we find someone with courage enough to disclose the intermingling of flesh and spirit in masculine love; with courage enough to describe, not only sentimental amourettes, but also the adventures of the brothel, stark-naked and skin-deep sexuality; the whole labyrinth of sex, through which every real man threads his way.
Not that the other great autobiographies, like those of Goethe or Rousseau, are positively unveracious. But there is a falsehood that finds expression in telling only half the tale, and there is a falsehood that takes the form of concealment. Now both Goethe and Rousseau (like all autobiographers, with the possible exception of the bold Hans Jaeger) are careful (deliberately or forgetfully) to avoid saying a word about the less appetizing, the purely sexual episodes of their amatory life. They dwell exclusively upon spiritualized, sentimentalized love affairs with Claras and Gretchens. They tell us only of those women who, mentally as well as physically, are reasonably clean, are persons with whom they would not be ashamed to walk arm-in-arm down Main Street. The other women with whom our autobiographers have had carnal relations are kept carefully out of the way in dark alleys and in two-pair backs. Thus, unconsciously of course, these writers falsify the picture of masculine eroticism. Goethe, Tolstoy, even Stendhal who in other respects is no prude, having uneasy consciences, skate swiftly over the thin ice. They tell us nothing of their numerous encounters with Venus Vulgivaga, the earthly, all-too-earthly love. Were it not for the splendidly shameless Casanova, who boldly draws back all the curtains and lets us look freely into his inner rooms, world literature would lack a thoroughly plain and straightforward account of the complexities of masculine sexuality. In Casanova we are shown the whole sexual mechanism of the senses at work; we are shown the world of the flesh even in its miry and marshy parts; we are allowed to glimpse its abysses. This idler, adventurer, cardsharper, rogue, shows more straightforwardness than the greatest of our writers, for he presents the world as a conglomerate of beauty and ugliness, of refined spirit and gross sexuality; and he does not pretend that it is nothing more than an idealized, chemically purified entity. In sexual matters, Casanova does not merely tell the truth, but (how immense is the difference) the whole truth. His love world is true to reality.
Casanova true? I hear the academicians stirring indignantly in their chairs. For the last fifty years they have been directing a machine-gun fire at his historical blunders, and they have caught him out in many an outrageous falsehood. Gently, brothers, gently! No doubt Casanova was an accomplished cardsharper, was a habitual liar, was a professor of rodomontade. In his memoirs he arranges his cards here and there, “il corrige la fortune,” being an irreclaimable swindler, with a taste for giving lame chance a leg-up. He adorns, garnishes, peppers, spices his aphrodisiac ragout, mingling therein all the ingredients of an imagination inflamed by abstinence. Often he does this automatically, without being aware of it. We must remember that in course of time embellishments and even falsehoods are justified by memory, so that in the end a genuine fabulist can no longer be certain what parts of his story are fact and what fiction. Casanova, be it remembered, was a rhapsodist. He paid for his invitations to dine at great men’s tables by being a good conversationalist, by recounting strange adventures. Just as court singers of old intensified interest by interweaving new and ever new episodes into their lays, so was he constrained to put a fresh romantic gloss upon successive recitals of his adventures. For instance, every time he had to retell the story of his escape from the Leads it was expedient to heighten the interest by a further exaggeration of the risks, and he thus continually found himself at a greater remove from the actual facts. He, poor fellow, could never have anticipated that more than a century after his death the members of a sort of historical Casanova Police Force would be busily engaged in combing through a mass of documents, letters, archives, in order to check every detail in his memoirs, and in order, with the ruler of science, to rap him on the knuckles for every mistake in a date.
No doubt his dates are not altogether reliable. As for his anecdotes, quite a number of them, when closely examined, collapse like a house of cards. For instance, it has been proved today, almost beyond doubt, that the romantic adventures in Constantinople were nothing more than a voluptuous dream of the old gentleman at Dux, and that he had quite gratuitously introduced poor Cardinal de Bernis as lover and voyeur into the story of his liaison with the pretty nun M. M. He reports meetings in Paris and London with persons who are positively known to have been elsewhere at the time; he gives a date ten years too early for the death of the Marchioness of Urfé, because her presence on the stage had become inconvenient to him; in a single hour, when plunged in thought, he walks from Zurich to Kloster Einsiedeln — thus covering a distance of thirty-one kilometers with the speed of a modern motor-car. Certainly you must not expect to find in him a fanatical zeal for truth in matters of detail, you must not consult him as a trustworthy historian. The more we scrutinize Casanova’s statements in these little matters, the more frequent and the more flagrant are the minor errors we discover. But all these petty falsifications, chronological mistakes, mystifications, and vaporings, these arbitrary and often extremely natural errors of omission, count for nothing as compared with the uncompromising and positively unique veracity of the autobiography as a whole. No doubt Casanova has made free use of the artist’s incontestable right to compress space and time in order to make incidents more picturesquely intelligible; but nothing of this sort affects the straightforward, frank, and lumino
us way in which he contemplates his life and his epoch as a whole. It is not Casanova alone, but the century to which he belongs, that are staged vividly before us. In dramatic episodes, electrifying in their contrasts, he exhibits all strata of society, of nations, of scenes, and paints for us a picture of eighteenth century morals and immorals unrivalled in literature.
At first sight you may regard it as a defect that he does not plumb the depths; and that he does not, like Stendhal or Goethe, view things from a height whence he can secure a general intellectual view of national peculiarities. But for the very reason that his outlook is a superficial one, that he stands within the ambit of the events he describes, looking inquisitively to right and to left of him, his method of contemplation makes his account so valuable a document to the historian of civilization. Certainly, Casanova does not disclose the conceptual roots of the life amid which he lives, and is therefore unable to explain the totality of the phenomena he describes. He is content to leave everything as he finds it, higgledy-piggledy, the sport of chance, without any attempt to assort, to crystallize. For him everything is equally important, so long as it amuses him — that was the only standard by which he and his associates judged. He knows neither large nor small in the world of thought or in the world of things; has no knowledge of good and evil. That is why he describes his conversation with Frederick the Great in exactly the same tone, and with exactly the same amount of detail, as, ten pages earlier, he has described a conversation with a harlot; that is why he has, and expects you to have, just as much interest in a Paris brothel as in Empress Catherine’s Winter Palace. How many hundred ducats he has won at faro, or how many times in a single night he was able to prove his virility with Dubois or with Hélène, is no less momentous to Casanova than are the details of his talk with Monsieur Voltaire. For him nothing in the world has any moral or aesthetic significance, and therefore he remains perfectly natural, perfectly at his ease, whatever he is telling us. If Casanova’s memoirs, intellectually considered, may seem no more than a commonplace story of travel through the interesting landscapes of life, this is as much as to say that there is no philosophy in them; but their very lack in this respect has made of them a historical Baedeker, an eighteenth century cortigiano, and an amusing “chronique scandaleuse,” a most effective cross-section from the everyday life of a century.