A new window on Casanova

— George Fetherling, writing in the Vancouver Sun, January 8, 2005

"A fictional character takes up with the legendary and complex lover.
The ramifications span two centuries."

SUSAN SWAN, the Toronto novelist, is a blond woman of Amazonian height, with eyes the same shade of blue as a 10-milligram Valium.

Her books are sometimes spoken of in the same breath as those of her contemporary, Barbara Gowdy, but such comparisons are inexact, for Gowdy is rather gothic. But both writers are known for their daring feats of style as they grapple with the turmoil, both social and selfgenerated, afflicting the generation of Canadian women now in their 50s. They both tend to be seen as over-the-top — and are loved for it.

Swan's novels The Biggest Modern Woman of the World, The Last of the Golden Girls and The Wives of Bath have given her an audience in 20 countries. Her new one, What Casanova Told Me (Knopf Canada), stands apart from the rest by its greater complexity and subtlety — and especially by the way it deals with history, a structural matter that concerns many writers these days.

Beginning in the late 1980s, there was a real vogue for literary fiction “about” literary figures of the past. The most notable ones, as with Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes or Mme. Proust and the Kosher Kitchen by Kate Taylor, were working within the conventions of postmodernism, which made it easier to leap back and forth between past and present. Through the use of a lost manuscript, misplaced diary, or cache of old letters discovered beneath the floorboards, two stories could be interpolated, producing a novel that was more than the sum of its parts.

Then come those novelists such as A.S. Byatt and Carol Shields, writing about someone who's writing about a dead writer who's entirely fictional. But recently, I believe, many readers have grown weary of such devices. Some writers, too.

That's doubtless why Katherine Govier in Creation, her novel about the painter and writer John James Audubon, decided to work on the historical story and leave the present be. A current example is Author, Author (Random House of Canada), David Lodge's novel dealing with the last years of Henry James.

SWAN'S BOOK doesn't abandon the lost diary idea in connecting a story of the present with one of what happened in the past, and hopping back and forth between the two. But it works the genre in a way that seems fresh. I ask her how she achieved this.

“I think in my case what happened was that I had an ancestor who disappeared. So rather than work with the device of letters or a forgotten manuscript, I worked with the story of my Great-Uncle Harry, who was [a railway-building] engineer and worked at the end-of-steel and was the brother of the Liberal whip under Laurier. (There are a lot of politicians in this branch of the family.) Great Uncle Harry, who lived in Sarnia, Ont., walked out one night and just disappeared. Nobody knows whether he drowned himself in the St. Clair River or went to live a wonderful new life somewhere else. There was some speculation about that. So I was always fascinated with the idea that the ancestor I didn't know had an unfinished life as far as the family is concerned.

“Since I'm a woman, I made the character [inspired by Harry's story] a woman. Then she would have a journal about her travels. She would be a traveller. For I was also quite taken with the narratives of the British women travellers like Eleanor Stanhope who ended up dying in a nunnery in Lebanon after an extraordinary career as a traveller dressed in men's clothes in the Middle East, riding galloping camels through towns and seeing men fall to their knees at the sight of her. It was possible for British women of the upper class to forget about their claustrophobic society and have a different cultural experience — and more freedom. I couldn't find any record of American women of that period who travelled this way, though there must have been some. Anyway, the lost ancestor is what resonated with me.”

How this idea was transmuted to the novel is a perfect example of the literary imagination at work.

As its title suggests, What Casanova Told Me turns on the story of Giovanni Giacomo Casanova de Seingalt (1725-98), the Venetian writer, gambler, spy and (yes) lover, who, after being expelled from divinity school for moral turpitude, began a life of adventure that took him across Europe. Swan became interested in him through one of her relatives by marriage.

“He was always telling me that non-fiction was better than fiction at capturing the truth of human experience. This is really one of those silly arguments that you can't win. We would talk like this and then one day he came in with Casanova's Memoirs and said, ‘I want you to read this.' ” He drew her attention to Casanova's account of how he busted out of prison in Venice in 1756, thus setting in motion his career going from one royal court to another, seeking refuge and opportunity. “I was very polite and I took the book away; and soon I was transfixed. I think it's one of the great works in western literature.”

SO GREAT UNCLE HARRY, now transformed into a fictional woman named Asked For Adams, niece of the American president John Adams, takes up with the aging Casanova and keeps a journal telling of how they travel from Italy to Istanbul via Greece. The manuscript eventually is handed down to a late 20th-century descendant who, to be absurdly brief, finds that reading it spurs her personal growth in various ways. The novel seems to me expertly done from first to last.

Swan says she rather enjoyed creating the fictional Adams while digging deeply into the historical Casanova and getting beyond the common image of him as a simple lecher.

“I suppose I had a bit of a mission about him, because I was fascinated with his complexity,” she says. “He was certainly a man of his times, but somehow he avoided the contempt for women and their bodies that was typical of the rakes of that period — like James Boswell for example. Casanova once famously said, ‘I never made love to a woman whose language I didn't speak. I wish to enjoy myself with all my senses at once.' Friends ask me what his secret was. They believe he must have known some kind of gynecological trick. But it was just the quality of his attention that women loved.”

His memoirs, which weren't published in unexpurgated form until the 1960s, record 122 affairs of the heart. “He kept in touch with most of these women,” Swan says, “and most of them stayed his friends and were still in love with him. He even found rich husbands for some of them. He had many good traits. So I became fascinated by the paradox between this person who has an image as a kind of user and predator of women and the truth of the man. And of course he was very literary. He wrote an opera, he wrote a science fiction novel.”

The book evolved a great deal in the course of being written, as novels will. Swan first planned to write the entirely fictional tale of a female Casanova, “but drifted into another story — the love between generations.” That is, she tried to bridge the chasm between Casanova in the 18th century and a young woman in the present day who suffers from highly complicated family relationships. “The theme of the female Casanova seemed more like a short story, and maybe it's already been done. After all, we have Sex and the City now. Just to focus on the sexual aspect seemed kind of boring to me.”

ONE OF THE problems of setting fiction in so distant a past is how hotly to seek verisimilitude by sticking to language that's now archaic.

The matter is particularly tricky when intercutting sections set in the past with others set in the present. Swan struck a happy medium but only after much trial and error.

“I've been reading Bedlam by Greg Hollingshead where he tries to use only 18th-century words, and I did have a similar idea at one point that I would attempt to be faithful to 18th-century vocabulary and usage. But the trouble with 18th-century words is that sometimes they sound more modern than 19th-century words. I finally realized that I really wanted just to evoke the 18th-century way of speaking without trying to duplicate it. So Asked For Adams in her journal is constantly asking philosophical questions of herself, and I think the formality of these instantly puts us in that world of language.

“I did have quite a bit of trouble at one point trying to decide whether to use contractions or not; I went through several times putting them in, then taking them out. In the end, I decided not to use them, though with Casanova's Memoirs it's hard to know [if he did] without seeing the original. The translations sometimes use contractions and sometimes don't. And so in the same way Asked For uses them only occasionally. It's more intuitively sensed than academically worked out. In my case, I wasn't sure that one way would be any more convincing than the other. I didn't want any ponderousness.”

SWAN WROTE 30 drafts over seven years. One reason the book took so long is that Swan wrote the two stories — the one past, the one present — at the same time, rather than doing each separately, then shuffling them together like the two halves of a deck of cards. “So if I took a wrong turn in the 18th century, I would take a wrong turn in the present day as well. I had the same sense you have when you're travelling in Crete or Corfu where you feel the palimpsest of civilization —the Romans, the Phoenicians, the Greeks. When you're looking at a Roman viaduct on Lesbos, say, you're standing in the past and living in the present at the same time.

“As a result, I had the idea of the novel really being in only one tense — the historical present, if you like. The reviews have been really wonderful. They quite often say that the past is seamlessly woven in.”

The American novelist John Gardner, in his admired book The Art of Fiction, uses the term “architectonic novel” for ones like What Casanova Told Me, in which two parallel stories emerge based on the actualization of characters and situations. He claims it is the hardest of all to write. “I wish I'd read that before I started,” Swan says with a laugh. “But I just plunged in. I was so excited about Casanova and the 18th century.”

She teaches creative writing at York University, where in 2000 she took part in something called the Millennial Wisdom Symposium, in which archeologists, historians and novelists discussed the past and whether we can learn from it. This only hardened her resolve to write the novel in the order in which we're reading it now. “Many of my fourth-year prose students are writing double narratives, and I say, ‘Don't do it my way. Sure, I'm getting rewarded for it now. But you're making yourselves too vulnerable to a wrong turn.'”.