A REAL CASANOVA

THE MAN WHO GAVE HIS NAME TO LOVE WAS FAR, FAR MORE THAN A DASHING ROUE

Author: By Elizabeth Benedict

Date: SUNDAY, November 30, 1997

Page: G1

Section: Books

This son of actors, whose profession was held in such low regard in 18th-century Venice they might as well have been Gypsies, ricocheted back and forth across Europe all his life. He journeyed from St. Petersburg to London to Rome and points in between, at an 18th-century equivalent of breakneck speed, in search of women, work, prestige, and safe harbors. On countless occasions, he fled cities one step ahead of the law. He devoted an entire book, written long before the memoir, to his infamous escape from Leads Prison, in the Doge's Palace in Venice, where he was serving a sentence for immorality and blasphemy. And though he was the man whose name is a household pejorative, he was no ordinary Casanova. Far from pouncing on every woman he wanted, he was a protofeminist, an admirer of women's intelligence and an enthusiastic accomplice in their pursuit of their own sexual pleasure. Still, we should be grateful he didn't live longer: the unfinished ``History of My Life,'' some 4,000 pages, ends when he is 50, thus depriving us of another few thousand pages and a recap of his last 25 years.

Men and women given to such excesses of the flesh and the pen are ripe targets for ridicule, and objects, when we quit chortling, of envy: I'd make love / write like that if only I weren't so responsible, conventional, dull, and lazy. Enter Lydia Flem, a Belgian psychoanalyst who has made room on her couch for Casanova's 12 volumes and subjected his version of his life to an analysis so witty, smartly written, lyrical, concise, and free from the jargon of her trade, you would never know she is a mental health professional.

She has managed to locate the essential Casanova, or, more precisely, the psychological impetuses for his essential self. Using excerpts from his memoir and her own interpretations, she offers a notably brief biography that is a reader's companion to his massive tome and a provocative meditation on the uses and abuses of pleasure. Part of her accomplishment is in presenting the facts of his life with a narrative momentum, but deftly subordinating the mass of biographical data to her own coruscating observations and insights.

Like her subject, Flem has a flair for seduction. Even her table of contents is difficult to resist, with chapter titles such as ``The Curtain Rises,'' ``Stratagems of Voluptuousness,'' ``Gardens of Love,'' and ``The Backstage of the Body.'' Each chapter has half a dozen named sections, including ``The Writer and His Double,'' ``Life Is Theater,'' ``The Omnipotence of Women,'' ``The Pleasure of Women,'' ``The Libertine Nun,'' and ``Epilogue on Tiptoes.''

Flem is no ordinary shrink, and her Casanova is no ordinary biography, but she sticks pretty close to the conventional Freudian model, that the early years with Mom and Dad are the template for all that follows. One of the great pleasures of her book is her dramatization of Casanova's remarkable childhood, with its pendulum swings from illness and deprivation -- he was a sickly, silent child, given to profuse nosebleeds, and ignored by his parents because they were sure he would soon die -- to being ``cured'' by exorcism, by his grandmother's immense love, and his first exile in Padua, where, at age 11, he shows himself to be a prodigy. It is his mother's sudden devotion, once she deems him talented, and her tantalizing absence that seem to leave the most dramatic imprint. Widowed at 25, she decides to support her five children by acting, from a distance, in companies throughout Europe and, eventually, in the court of Dresden.

``Casanova's mother,'' Flem writes, ``was marvelously beautiful and inaccessible, distant and enchanting. The only thoughts the son associates with the woman who gave birth to him are beauty and absence. . . . To avoid the pain of sadness, Giacomo idealizes his mother. . . . In order to reach this inaccessible mother, he must identify with her and live an exceptional life. He will stand above, apart, or beyond the common laws of men. He strides across frontiers, flouts the rules, braves the lightning, escapes from prisons, conquers every woman he falls in love with, and considers no enterprise impossible. Casanova has extravagant ambitions, and the nerve, guts, and inexhaustible energy to match.''

A few paragraphs down, Flem lights on another iteration of the same set of character traits: ``He enjoys playing with taboos and impossibilities, but with a light touch. Tragedy is not his element, and he flees from it more than from anything.'' It is not until Casanova's waning years, when the ``perpetual carnival of his life'' has quieted down, that he must confront his own limitations, and the irreversibility, the tragedy of old age. With the vanity of an aging movie star -- I'm thinking of Marlene Dietrich, who refused to allow herself to be filmed for a documentary about her in the 1980s, though her voice made up much of the soundtrack -- Casanova excuses himself from the sexual fray, rather than reveal his decrepitude. He spends his last years as librarian in a Bohemian castle, penniless but rich in memories, writing the story of his life at a furious pace, with as much zest as he lived it.

Flem is content to go along with Casanova's assessment, that the pleasures of reminiscence and writing are almost as intense as the original event, that this life dedicated to gratification of the senses has a shelf-life longer than we had imagined, because we are allowed another taste of it when we write it down. ``Now, before the large open book of his recollections, pen in hand, primed to capture the faintest thrill of former happiness, he celebrates the quest for pleasure by the cult of memory.''

I like it that Casanova's life had -- in Flem's version, anyway -- a sort of happy ending, but I could not help thinking, once I got the hang of his habits and appetites, that his great tragedy was not that he got old and couldn't do it anymore but that he fled so reflexively from lasting attachments, even to his children, that his only companion in old age was his pen. How sad that that seemed to be sufficient, and how fitting for this master, as Flem says, ``in the art of evasive pirouette.''