Casanova and Don Juan

{Photo by rocketlass.}

In The Mirror of Ideas (1998), Michel Tournier contrasts Casanova and history's other great seducer, Don Juan. Of the latter Tournier writes,

It has been said that he did not like women, that he disdained them. He treats them like prey, and the list of his conquests read by the valet Leporello [in Tirso de Molina's The Seducer of Seville] is no more than a list of kills. Such is the eternity of Don Juan that he lives on among the young toughs of the suburbs whose favorite sport is "scoring with chicks."* But for Don Juan, sex is inseparable from religion. Woman is the great temptress, and the man who succumbs to her evil charms is damned.

Casanova, on the other hand, "a poor commoner, relies on his personal charm to seduce, and

Even though he is not handsome, women cannot resist him because they know from the beginning that he loves them with all his body and all his heart. . . . Wandering adventurer, gambler, cheater, incorrigibly unfaithful, he is nevertheless loved because he loves the whole woman, including her most intimate secrets.

For Casanova, the object of his desire is paramount. It is not, as with Don Juan, about notching another conquest; rather, it is about the fact that women are what interests him most of all the world's glittering beauties, and that, as Stefan Zweig notes in his brief study of Casanova, he loves to make them happy:

To Casanova, the first and last word of enjoyment, and all enjoyment that lies between, is to see women happy, amazed with delight, rapturous, laughing, carried out of themselves. As long as he has money left, he lavishes presents on the woman of his momentary choice, flatters her vanity with luxurious trifles, loves to deck her out splendidly, loves to wrap her in costly laces before he unclothes her that he may enjoy her nakedness, loves to surprise her with gifts more expensive than she has ever dreamed of, loves to overwhelm her with the tokens of his extravagant passion. He is like one of the gods of Hellas, a bounteous Zeus, that thereafter he speedily vanishes into the clouds. "I have always loved women madly, but I have always preferred freedom even to them." This increases his attraction, for the stormy phenomena of his appearance and disappearance enshrine him in their memory as something unwonted which has brought them rapturous delight, so that association with him is never staled by habit.

Every one of these women feel that Casanova would be impossible as a husband, as a faithful Celadon; but as a lover, as a god of a passing night, they will never forget him.

That is what makes Casanova so delightful, reading his memoirs so relatively guilt-free. Oh, when you get right down to it, no, of course Casanova can't be defended; no matter how convincing his portrait of himself as Don Juan's opposite, he surely left some damage in his wake.** But he is never caustic, never cruel, never inattentive; his whole existence is built on attention to the present moment (and the lady of it). The future is unknowable, the past negligible, the present all--and the verve implied by such a worldview is irresistible.

I sought out Tournier's thoughts on the pair of seducers because, by coincidence, the book I read last week right after Zweig's Casanova, Steven Millhauser's The King in the Tree (2003), features a novella about Don Juan. Millhauser's Don Juan, like so many of his characters, is weary, a bit confused, and beginning, against his wishes, to suspect that the very foundations of his life might be cheap constructs of paste and muslin:

In his brief life he had bedded more than two thousand women and killed fourteen men--five in duels, eight in self-defense, and one by mistake, through a curtain at which he was thrusting in sheer high spirits. He feared no man, mocked the machinery of heaven, and was heard to say that the devil was a puppet invented by a bishop to frighten children in the nursery. Men envied him, women of stainless virtue stood in the window to watch him ride by. And yet this man, who walked the earth like an immortal, who did whatever was pleasing to him and who satisfied his every desire, felt that a darkness had fallen across his spirit. . . . He was not bored. Don Juan didn't know whether he loved women,but he knew that he loved the pursuit and conquest of women, loved the feeling that he was following pleasure to the farthest edges of his nature. No, he felt restless in some other way, dissatisfied deep in his blood; and he began to feel that he was looking for something, though he didn't know what it was, exactly, or where he might find it.

Millhauser's Don Juan has, to put it crudely, lost his mojo, and that loss--the exploration of vaguely understood loss being Millhauser's metier--transforms him into, for the first time, a sympathetic character. The love triangle into which Millhauser leads Don Juan is wonderfully imagined and rendered, and the denouement (which perhaps shouldn't surprise either Don Juan or us, but does) is perfect.

So for these dark and wintry months, I prescribe some Casanova, leavened with Millhauser. The former will be like opening a window and breathing deep the air of spring; the latter will be like remembering a spring from your youth, when you did . . . something . . . something . . . something marvelous.

Have you checked the children?

{Photo by Odlandscape.}

Yesterday I used some lines from Michel Tournier's The Mirror of Ideas to describe adult fears. Later in that essay, Tournier notes,

The child walking in the dark comforts himself with a song. Jean Cocteau tells that when he tried this remedy, he ended up being terrified by the words he invented to the song.

Children's fears burgeon that way--kids aren't yet all that good at the sort of denial of unwanted thoughts that most adults master; they're not as good at coaxing their minds away from the things that have scared them. If adult fear is rooted in death, a child's fear is rooted in a more general not-knowing: the world is large and little-understood, even by a perceptive kid. There is much to fear.

Returning once more to the book that kicked off I've Been Reading Lately's ghost and monster week, 'Salem's Lot: Stephen King marks that distinction between children and adults, writing that adult fears are

pallid compared to the fears every child lies cheek to jowl with in his dark bed, with no one to confess to in hope of perfect understanding but another child. . . . with the thing under the bed or in the cellar every night, the thing which leers and capers and threatens just beyond the point where vision will reach. The same lonely battle must be fought night after night and the only cure is the eventual ossification of the imaginary faculties, and this is called adulthood.

That openness to fear lines up, too, with the position held by many who actually believe in the supernatural that children are more open to and aware of the otherworldly. They haven't yet, the argument goes, set limits on which of their perceptions they're willing to accept, which to dismiss before they even reach the level of consciousness. Rebecca West, in The Fountain Overflows (1957), her somewhat autobiographical novel of growing up in a poor and talented family, allows her young characters some of that perceptiveness. For a few months the children live with--and maybe even psychically generate--a poltergeist. In another particularly striking scene, late at night in a deserted stables, the young narrator's sensitivity is nearly powerful enough to bring to life--even for her mother--the spectral horses she sees stamping and snorting in the stalls:

My mother's eyes moved to my face. The horses in the stalls became luminous shapes. We knew that if we willed it, if we made a movement of the mind comparable with the action of throwing all one's weight on one foot, we could make them visible as ourselves.

All of which returns me to my own story of seeing a ghost, about which I wrote last October:

I have no memory of it, but I've been told by my parents, no wild-eyed new-agers they, that it happened when I was three or four, while our family was being given a tour of a house in Colonial Williamsburg. I turned to my mother and, pointing to the empty corner of a room and said, "Look, Mommy--there's a ghost." The guide blanched and told my parents that the house was rumored to be haunted.

Even though it's not much of a story, and I don't remember a bit of it, that surely has to land me squarely in the large category of "I don't believe in ghosts, but . . . ."

I suppose one could keep far worse company than William James.

Twenty Lines a Day

{Photo by rocketlass.}

One of the inspirations for this blog was Harry Mathews's Twenty Lines a Day (1988), a brief book that Mathews wrote following an instruction Stendhal gave himself in the course of working on a novel:

Twenty lines a day, genius or not.

Mathews explains his intentions in his introduction:

Like many writers, I often find starting the working day a discouraging prospect, one that I spend much energy avoiding. . . . I deliberately mistook [Stendhal's] words as a method for overcoming the anxiety of the blank page. Even for a dubious, wary writer, twenty lines seemed a reassuring obtainable objective, especially if they had no connection with a "serious" project like a novel or an essay.

When I began this blog, I wasn't doing any writing regularly outside of work. I've never been one to keep a journal, and while I would regularly find myself--especially while running--thinking at length about, or even arguing with, the books I had been reading, absent any outside pressure I would eventually just open up a new book and move on. So with Harry Mathews in mind, I decided that I would commit to writing at least a couple of times per week about books and see if I could turn it into a habit--a concept that Michel Tournier explains, cryptically yet unforgettably, in The Mirror of Ideas (1994), with reference to the brain:

The role of the brain is precisely to elaborate the past for the needs of present life. It keeps only the learned movement, eliminating the date and circumstances that surrounded its acquisition.

We cultivate a habit, and eventually it becomes so ingrained, so natural, that we don't even remember quite how we developed it in the first place. So I signed up for a blog and got to work.

While I set myself a specific writing task, Harry Mathews seemingly let his mind work through whatever topic floated to the top when he sat down. Twenty Lines a Day includes entries that essentially take the form of a journal, some that border on automatic writing, a few that are fable-like, and others that resemble Oulipean experiments. Not all of them are interesting or successful on any terms other than that of the original impulse to write something; the entry for December 13, 1983, for example, begins:

I have nothing to write in particular. I'm writing these lines because of my rule that I must write them.

Though I know that some days my posts are better or more inspired than others, it's got to be a good sign that I haven't yet had a day when I felt that I was writing solely out of obligation. (To be fair, Mathews had a good excuse for being empty of ideas that day: he was in the middle of writing his masterpiece, Cigarettes.)

Mathews's good entries, on the other hand, are so varied that it's hard to pick a favorite. Twenty Lines a Day is a book that's best read a bit at a time, here and there, a book to keep next to the chair in which you drink your coffee of a morning. My favorite today, I think, is this one, from just a few days after the uninspired entry above, December 17, 1983:

The fun about things, as about thoughts, is getting them, not having them. They become obvious once you have them, just another part of a familiar landscape. Two days ago I came across my course notes about the imaginary reader--the one the writer invents to listen to his imaginary narrator, and on whom the actual reader eavesdrops--and because I'd forgotten the notion I enjoyed a moment of mild excitement reunderstanding it. But after a moment it was back on its rack among the dusty bottles. This has also happened with what I bought myself yesterday (a day mainly devoted to the purchase of Christmas presents): a tape deck, a cassette rack, an outdoor winter country jacket. I nailed the rack into place last night; the tape deck, having been adequately studied in the instruction manual, has been installed in its definitive place; the jacket hangs on a peg by the front door as if it had been there for years. All three will certainly provide convenience or pleasure in coming days as they are used, but the wonder disappeared from them as soon as they were unwrapped and their price tags removed. The wonder grew from the expectation that they would change something in life (how nifty having one's cassettes so handily arrayed, how delicious acceding to glorious music by slipping cassettes into the deck, how warmly glamorous walking outdoors in a bronze-colored, ring-necked, thigh-long jacket). But "of course" I know that expectation is the stupidest kind of lure. . . . What I know too is that the pleasure of buying the things was a real and sufficient one: the pleasure of giving presents and of allowing oneself to be their worthy recipient.

I think of bringing home a couple of lovely, well-designed books from the bookstore, and of how as I stack them on the windowsill or precariously wedge them atop a row of books in the bookcase, it will seem essential that I read them right away--as soon, that is, as I'm done with what I'm in the middle of reading at that moment. A few days pass, my time and attention are lured away by other books, and soon those books are buried under a newer, fresher layer, becoming an indistinguishable part of the never-diminishing mass of unread words that fills our house. The urgency--that "lure of expectation"--is gone.

But books, unlike cassette decks and cassette racks and jackets, are capable of storing that urgency, unsullied, to surprise you with it some Saturday morning when you're wandering your bookshelves, looking for a novel. You're in the mood for a particular tone, a specific feel, and you just can't identify it . . .

February 22, 1984:

Choosing the next book to read resembles choosing a restaurant or the next Italian town to visit: none ever seems quite right. You want something that corresponds perfectly to your desire, and you can't identify that desire until you find what arouses it. . . . What do you want from a book? No: what do you want from choosing a book? To stand on the threshold of the unfamiliar, the inevitably familiar viewed unfamiliarly, the known capabilities of language yielding opportunities for you to react to them (to reinvent them yourself) with breathtaking, with breathgiving wonder.

Finally you spot it, just the book you needed, and you remember how excited you were when you brought it home. How could you have left that sitting on your shelf, unread, for a year?

And then there are the books we re-read, discovering that they, too, have retained that power, that a single reading hasn't come close to exhausting their possibilities. That's where my wander through my bookshelves took me last Sunday night, to an old favorite, and all week I've been wrapped up once more in Proust--who, incidentally, also had something to say about the blank page.

From The Guermantes Way (1920), translated by Mark Treharne

If only I had been able to start writing! But, however I set about it (all to similarly, alas, to the resolve to give up alcohol, to go to bed early, to get enough sleep and to keep fit), whether it was in a spurt of activity, with method, with pleasure, in depriving myself of a walk, or postponing it and reserving it as a reward, taking advantage of an hour of feeling well, making use of the inaction forced upon me by a day's illness, the inevitable result of my efforts was a blank page, untouched by writing, as predestined as the forced card that you inevitably end up drawing in certain tricks, however thoroughly you have first shuffled the pack. I was merely the instrument of habits of not working, of not going to bed, of not sleeping, which had to fulfil themselves at any cost; if I offered no resistance, if I made do with the pretext they drew from the first opportunity that arose for them to act as they chose, I escaped without serious harm, I still slept for a few hours towards morning, I managed to read a little, I did not over-exert myself; but if I tried to resist them, by deciding to go to bed early, to drink only water, to work, they became annoyed, they resorted to strong measures, they made me really ill, I was obliged to double my dose of alcohol, I did not go to bed for two days, I could not even read, and I would vow to be more reasonable in future, that is to say less wise, like the victim who allows himself to be robbed for fear of being murdered if he puts up resistance.

And with that, because I am, after all, decidedly a creature of habit, I'm off to bed before the hour gets too unreasonable.