CASANOVA MEETS VIAGRA
Title: CASANOVA MEETS VIAGRA , By: Glass, Charles, New Statesman, 13647431, 06/05/98, Vol. 127, Issue 4388
Charles Glass wonders how the greatest serial seducer in history would have reacted to the new stiffening pills
Every age gets the Don Juan it deserves,” wrote Marina Warner in a 1990 essay on LesLiaisons Dangereuses. In this Year of Our Lord 1998, step forward the new don, Frank Bernardo. Aged 70, New York millionaire Frank ended a four-year sexual hiatus on 1 May, which will for ever after be his personal Labour Day. It was then he paid a pharmacist $10 a pill to fill his doctor’s prescription for the wonderdrug Viagra.
How did hunky Frank celebrate the reconsummation of his romance with his mistress of the past decade, 63-year-old Betty Burke? Obvious. Good old Frank gave her one. Then he dumped her. Look, this is New York in the nineties. Predictably, he found a younger woman to absorb his excess energy. And how did the momentarily satisfied “Ms” Burke respond to Frank’s refusal to go gently into that dark night? Well, since this is still New York, she sued him. She may sue Pfizer, the drug’s manufacturer, as well. Her lawyer, Dominic Barbara, hasn’t decided whether to add the names of Frank’s physician and pharmacist to the writs.
Sad to say, Ms Burke, I have to take Frank’s side. You should have left him years ago, when he first went limp. The greatest Don Juan of them all would have been with you then. Giacomo Casanova, the prodigal seducer from Venice who died 200 years ago this week, would have asked no woman to linger if he had been unable to perform his conjugal duty. “Feeling that I was born for the sex opposite to mine,” he wrote, “I have always loved it and done all that I could to make myself loved by it.” This is the man whose name, two centuries after his exploits, is revered wherever men and women celebrate and appreciate erotic congress.
Casanova was a man for his time, the libertine era of the late 18th century, as Frank Bernardo is of ours. Gifted and potent until the final stages of old age, the poet of the boudoir admitted to a fear of failure.
“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. For this reason, nature must abhor old age, which can itself attain ‘, to pleasure, but can never give it.”
If only Casanova, the self-styled Chevalier de Seingalt, had waited two centuries, there would have been a cure for what modern physicians call penile dysfunction. Robbed of the self-doubt that made him a complex character, he might yet have had more amorous encounters and remained on earth more than his lamentably few 73 years. His reflection on impotence comes in the second chapter, Volume II, of his History of My Lift, while he is satisfying a girl disguised as a castrato named Bellino. Convinced she was a woman, Casanova confirmed the fact at a stroke when he took her to his chamber. O temporal O mores! From Giacomo to Frank, we’ve come a long way, down.
Casanova was a friend of Lorenzo da Ponte, librettist of Mozart’s Don Giovanni (as well as Cosi fan Tutte and Le Nozze di Figaro). Based on variations of Tirso de Molina’s 1630 play El Burlador de Sevilla, whose hero is Don Juan Tenorio, Don Giovanni is among hundreds of tales of the seducer, his victims and their revenge. The original Don Juan was a 17th-century Spaniard, who says, “Seville calls me the trickster [burlador], and my greatest pleasure is to deceive a woman and destroy her honour.”
By the 18th century, Don Giovanni lacks that cruelty. He is growing old and, in the opera, he fails to consummate with Donna Anna, Donna Elvira and Zerlina. His servant, Leporello, suggests he give up women. Don Giovanni rages:
Give up women. Madman! You well know I need women more than the bread I eat More than the air l breathe.
Leporello asks why, then, he keeps leaving them, as Frank left poor Betty.
... Because I love them. To be faithful to one alone Is to be cruel to the rest.
It is not hatred so much as love that drives him on. Casanova’s influence on da Ponte is obvious. Da Ponte himself was a minor Don Juan, fleeing Venice when charged with seducing a married woman. Don Juan is a beguiling character, taking different forms in the hands of artists from Moliere, Byron, Gluck and Thomas Shadwell to George Bernard Shaw. Only Faust recurs as often in theatre, opera, ballet, novels and poetry.
In this degraded age Viagra opens the way to new Don Juans in literature. Old voluptuaries need never see their powers wane. Iron lungs will not deprive them of servicing by White House interns. Four books, the Sunday Telegraph reports, have already taken up the Viagra theme in America. Peter Lefcour, who has written the first Viagra novel, is quoted: “The rise of women over the last 20 years has frightened men, and Viagra will enable some of them to become more empowered again.” Even in a country and time given to solecism and hyperbole, Lefcour’s statement stands out. Isn’t the risen member part of nature’s armoury of mutual satisfaction, and procreation, rather than a weapon of war? Which men are frightened? How on earth will a medically induced erection “empower” anyone? Most men have no difficulty acquiring an erection ( impotence is still a minority ailment), but i many are desperate for somewhere to put i it. Empowerment, if it means having confidence with women or indeed anything at all, comes with beauty, charm and wealth. Or at least one of them.
My problem at the moment is more along those lines. I love a woman who, alas, loves someone else. Medical science hasn’t come up with a pill for that. Yet.
The pill it has developed to cure droopy dick, laudable as it may be for an ageing generation, introduces another mechanical element into modern sex. “Excuse me a minute, darling, while I pop my Viagra.”
“And I’d better take my pill.”
“In an hour, when the Viag’ kicks in, I’ll slip on my condom.”
“Charmer.”
This is romance and courtship that Casanova would not have recognised. He flattered, beguiled, lied and challenged women into bed in an age when it was not as easy as it is today, and he loved them long after they departed. His memoirs are honest enough to admit he failed as often as he succeeded. It was only when he tried to be noble that disaster struck, as he learned when he spurned the advances of a caretaker’s daughter named Lucia. He put aside natural desire to leave her maidenhead, and thus her honour, intact. Months later, he learned that Lucia had disgraced her family by becoming pregnant and running away with a lowly courier named L’Aigle.
Casanova blamed himself, “If I had proceeded with her as I did with Nanetta and Marta [two Italian sisters who gave him many happy nights], I should not have left her in the aroused state which must have been the chief cause of her yielding to the scoundrel’s desires.” He had been “proud, in my vanity, that I had been virtuous enough to leave her a virgin; and now I repented the shame of my stupid restraint. I promised myself that in the future I would behave more wisely so far as restraint was concerned.”
He immediately seduced the bride of a rich tenant farmer, pulling her on to his lap in a thunderstorm while the driver of their carriage guided the horses and pretended not to notice. From then, it was all duels, gambling, seduction; imprisonment and escapes.
Old age at Count von Waldstein’s castle in Bohemia induced listlessness in a man whose life had, until then, never lacked adventure, danger and romance. It led him to write the memoirs, and never has boredom achieved more. Twelve fascinating volumes, but he died long before he finished his Scheherazade-like tales. Viagra might have allowed him, and us, a few more. I wonder what Frank’s writing.
ILLUSTRATION
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By Charles Glass
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Source: New Statesman, 06/05/98, Vol. 127 Issue 4388, p22, 2p
