HISTORY OF MY LIFE. <i> By...

According to his own account, the 18th century Venetian Giacomo Casanova was a man “of no importance.” Cheat, charlatan, spy, ex-priest, quack doctor, indefatigable pursuer of women, constantly on the run from his last sexual indiscretion or the last debt on which he had defaulted, he made no contribution of any consequence to the revolutionary times through which he lived. His legacy to posterity is his memoirs, 12 volumes of libertinage so scandalous that they could not be printed in their entirety until the 1960s.

Casanova was born in 1725, the son of small-time theatrical parents. He made and lost several fortunes in a lifetime spent desperately seeking rank, status and, above all, respect for as little outlay of effort as possible. Generally this meant attaching himself devotedly to obvious sources of patronage, capitalizing on every small social advantage in terms of financial gain and political prospects and gaining intimate access by way of the bedroom to those with influence. On a number of occasions, his stratagems were exposed as fraud, and he was obliged to flee to another part of Europe; the inquisition naturally pursued him constantly as a freethinker and for his sexual misdemeanors. Unlike his contemporary Voltaire, however, whose contempt for authority was part of a considered philosophical position, Casanova’s “philosophy” is neither original nor remarkable. Indeed, Casanova in his “History of My Life” does not bother to offer much more intellectually than apologetics for his persistently rakish conduct. He never achieved any position of real influence and died in his 70s in Bohemia in 1798, a minor figure in a provincial backwater, having spent the last 15 years of his life writing and rewriting his autobiography.

Nevertheless, the endorsements on the covers of the elegant new paperback issue insist that the 2,000-odd pages of the 12 volumes of memoirs are as important as other monumental testaments to an age and its thought. “The eighteenth century as you get it in no other book; society from top to bottom; Europe from England to Russia.” (Edmund Wilson); “Rousseau, Stendhal, even Saint Augustine, must take their proper place, a half step behind this greatest of storytellers.” (Paul Zweig, The Nation); “No memoirist gives us a more vivid impression of the social background of his period.” (Peter Quennell).

“History of My Life” chronicles an action-packed lifetime of sublime sexual conquests, lightly glued together with contemporary anecdote, social vignettes and local color. Its language is a triumph of richly crafted French prose (we know its author worked and reworked his narrative), which was first rendered into excellently apt English by Willard Trask in the 1960s. It is vital, sharp, racy but mercifully discreet--no Anglo-Saxon four-letter words but only “conquests,” “combats,” “pleasures” and “crimes” committed in the name of “love.”

The pace never flags--for all of the customary repetitiveness of Casanova’s sexual exploits, this is a grippingly good read. Here is all the explicit content of that anonymous classic of 18th century erotica, “My Secret Life,” conveyed in the decorous language of John Cleland’s fictional Fanny Hill. The 12 volumes come seductively packaged by Johns Hopkins University Press in six thick pale green paperback volumes, across whose combined spine a sumptuously painted “Resting Venus” reclines, clad in nothing more than a gold chain and a string of pearls.

But are we really to take Casanova’s memoirs seriously as history? There are some fascinating glimpses to be had of the details of everyday 18th century life. We learn about early reusable condoms (tied on with ribbon), that chocolate was taken as a stimulant and aphrodisiac, that nitrous oxide was taken for syphilis and precisely which culinary delicacies graced the tables of the well-to-do from London to Moscow. We catch glimpses of famous contemporary figures, including Rousseau, Voltaire, Mozart, Benjamin Franklin and countless crowned heads and nobility. Nonetheless, such detail for Casanova is merely the narrative machinery needed to get from one sexual exploit to the next. Mostly, historians have pretended not to notice the sexy parts. Occasionally they might pay tribute to the erotic contents as exceptionally perceptive--”Casanova’s accounts of seduction,” they tell us, “are notable for their psychological acuteness and physical accuracy”--thereby, presumably justifying the fact that the scandalous passages have given them many happy hours of reading.

Armed with such scholarly endorsements, Lydia Flem in “Casanova: The Man Who Really Loved Women” seizes upon Casanova’s memoirs as an invaluable opportunity to get inside the mind of an 18th century philanderer. “Casanova,” according to the publisher, is “a deliciously entertaining account of Europe’s most benevolent lover.” Flem, a Belgian psychoanalyst, has a distinct advantage over historians, for whether Casanova’s septuagenarian recollections are fact or fantasy does not matter to an analyst.

Behind the boastful stories of gifted women perfectly satisfied, of mothers and daughters simultaneously delighted by his sexual attentions, of celebratory incestuous encounters with the teenage progeny of previous escapades, enthusiastic orgies and endless flirtations, Flem solemnly detects a man made permanently fragile and insecure by his unhappy childhood. In a lifelong attempt to win back the favors of women, after being abandoned by the promiscuous actress-mother he adored, Casanova grew up to become a man of profound generosity, devoting himself unstintingly to giving pleasure to an endless sequence of adored members of the opposite sex.

This utterly humorless study takes Casanova’s account of events absolutely literally. His inevitably beautiful conquests smile “gaily” as he wheedles his way into their boudoirs and bedrooms. After a little seemly reticence, they gasp in admiration at his aroused member (a full 8 inches long, as he assures us). Each adorably shy virgin he deflowers understands, without instruction, how to respond to his advances, how to take pleasure in his caresses and (of course) how to reach orgasm. As conquest after conquest is cataloged with incantatory repetitiveness of detail, there is no pain, there are no bruises, no one wakes the next morning with anything worse than telltale dark circles under their sleepless eyes.

On the other hand, there are occasional coquettes, desirable bad girls who we know are not chaste and who consent to financial transactions that are supposed to culminate in Casanova’s sexual satisfaction. When they resist--as pretty 17-year-old La Charpillon does in London--they get what he believed they deserved: insults, blows, attempted strangulation. On such an occasion, our hero is furious and pitiless; how dare the shameless hussy lead him on so? Her lack of cooperation allows him to take a certain pleasure in the controlled violence he uses to “teach her a lesson” and to marvel in retrospect at his own gentlemanly restraint.

These are the stereotyped fictions of soft-core pornography. Where men show off their sexual prowess, women, according to this tradition, are invariably impressed and delighted. In England recently, a young soldier, accused of participating in a gang rape of a young barmaid after a party where pornographic movies were shown, confessed that unlike the girls in the movie, their victim had not been smiling and had, in fact, not appeared to have been enjoying what was going on. Real life had not resembled its fictional counterpart.

Naturally a close analysis of a text composed according to these conventions will, if taken seriously, reveal a lot of very happy, satisfied women, just as it will reveal extraordinarily potent men, aroused at will and able to perform marathon sexual exploits under the most grueling circumstances. In sexual fantasy-land, the only impotent men are absent husbands, there are orgasms for all, and the only pregnancies are those that give rise to welcome, healthy babies and are a testimony to their father’s virility.

And yet Flem, almost in spite of herself, does point us toward some insights into the male psyche in Europe around 1800. In August 1770, for instance, the 45-year-old Casanova met his great love Donna Lucrezia and their daughter Leonilda, after an interval of many years. He discovered that Leonilda’s husband, like himself, was a Freemason, and he learned that the husband knew that Leonilda was his illegitimate daughter. Donna Lucrezia and the husband then conspired to leave Leonilda alone in a garden with Casanova. After taking “certain delinquent liberties,” which he felt were allowed him as her father, Casanova seduced his own daughter, and a son was born nine months later to the hitherto childless couple.

Flem singles out this incident to show that “Casanova, though he might shudder, seems to take pleasure in transgressing the laws, a pleasure that is magnified because he is doing so with authority’s approval. . . . Casanova can be only a play-father, a father who accepts no responsibilities and none of the consequences; he is a father of no importance.” But what happened in the garden (the paradisiacal setting of all Casanova’s favorite conquests) was a piece of patriarchal tidiness. Leonilda’s impotent husband prefers Casanova’s sperm to a stranger’s to continue his family line. This tells us little about Casanova, beyond the fact that he finds it impossible to resist penetrative sex with any woman left in his charge. It tells us a great deal about 18th century class prejudice and the lengths a nobleman might go to ensure an intact male line.

I find it impossible to share Flem’s confidence that women ought to be charmed by and grateful for Casanova. On his own avowal, he pressed sexual consummation on almost any girl over the age of 10 who took his fancy, unless there was a chance of respectable social advancement by way of her family. He never passed up an invitation to indulge in group sex or sex with a stranger or sex with someone else’s wife or sex with a man (if no women were available) or sex with his own children.

In England, we know from a recent set of diaries published with evident pride by a senior politician in the Conservative Party that there are those with the means and the inclination to indulge in such sexual virtuosity. I doubt that many women would hold Alan Clark up as a shining example of “a man who really loves women”--except in the way that he and Casanova also really loved tobacco and a meal of oysters and foie gras.

One final word of caution: As you open each volume of your “History of My Life,” in the new paperback edition, the smooth veneer of the luscious reclining nude on the spine cracks, and by the time you are finished, the flawless figure has become permanently disfigured by a series of parallel vertical creases that I fear the designer never considered. Indeed, the only way to ensure that your six volumes, whose beautiful exterior promises untold riches within, will preserve their delightful and seductive exterior is to stand them on your bookshelf and leave them resolutely unread.