“Uncomfortable Casanova” an essay by literary critic Edmund Wilson

“Why has Jacques Casanova attracted so little attention in English?

“…We have had an immense amount of controversy as to whether Casanova told the truth in connection with this or that incident, and a good many inaccuracies have been proved on him. But whether he falsified the facts unconsciously or deliberately makes very little difference. In his own way Casanova was truthful; it may even be said that one of his most admirable traits — not as a man but as a writer — was precisely a fidelity to truth. He may have invented some of the adventures in the Memoirs, but his story follows reality for all that. Someone has said that if the Memoirs is a novel, Casanova is the greatest novelist who ever lived…It is not true, as popular legend seems to have it, that he represents himself as triumphing easily over innumerable complacent women. On the contrary, he will sometimes devote the better part of a volume to a detailed description of some siege in which he ignominiously failed. The ultimate aim of Casanova is not so much to glorify himself as to tell an astonishing story that illustrates how people behave, the way in which life works out…” (1, pp. 148-150).

Comment: I may read an abridged version of Casanova’s very lengthy Memoirs.

1. Edmund Wilson. “Uncomfortable Casanova,” pp. 148-158 in Edmund Wilson’s The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature [1941/1947]. Brattleboro, Vermont, Echo Point Books & Media, 2018.

2. Wikipedia. “Edmund Wilson.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Wilson. 

Added Apr. 2, 2023: I stopped reading after the first hundred pages of this 500-page abridgment of Casanova’s Memoirs (3), because he hadn't shown the psychology often found in fiction writers.

3. Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798). The Story of My Life. Translated from the French by Stephen Sartarelli and Sophie Hawkes. New York, Penguin Books, 2001.