Peter Trachtenberg - The Casanova complex

This book made available by the Internet Archive.

To the men I spoke with and the women who loved them, and to the Twelve-Step programs of recovery.

Acknowledgments

For their help in shepherding this book from its inception to its present form, I thank my agent, Gloria Loomis; her assistant, Beth Vesel; and Elaine Pfefferblit, my editor. The care they gave my work and the influence they had on my thinking make them the true godmothers of The Casanova Complex. For helping me formulate the questions with which my research began and then for lending shape to the answers that emerged from it, I am grateful to Dr. Michael Plautt, Dr. Eli Coleman, Dr. Jaime Nos, Dr. Barry Singer and Dr. Joseph Coltrera. I owe special thanks to Dr. Michael Weissberg, who helped me translate the alien language of psychoanalysis into one I could think and write in. Nancy Levine took on the harrowing job of typing up the transcripts of several hundred hours' worth of interviews. For his literary perspective and his copy oi Byron: A Portrait, which I subsequently ruined, I thank Mark Rasmussen. My family, Mila Trachtenberg, Ellen Trachtenberg, Charlotte and Michael Weissberg and the late Bella Weissberg, gave generously of their love, patience and support. So did my friends and more-than-friends Peter Leviton, Shellie Leviton, James McCourt, Midge Pax-ton, Frederic Tuten, Jenny Keith, Richard Aberbach, Robert Reichel, Charles Wyler, Cindy Bloom, Christine Duke, Luther Miller, Raphael Rudnik, Marijke Rudnik, Gay Milius, Molly Fle-wharty, Will Bennett, Sheila Keenan, Helen Willis, Carol Steel, Mary Wallach, Marc Chimsky, Judy Schank, Cassi Loving, Emily Paine, Anne Trachtenberg and Mary Fuller. Thanks beyond saying go to Dineke Blom, who has loved and challenged and heartened me in ways that neither of us could have predicted, and that go on moving and astonishing me with every day that passes. Some of these people listened. Some of them guided. All of them taught me whatever I know about loving; thank God none of it was too late.

/ had intended to marry her when I loved her more than I loved myself, hut as soon as I was away from her side I found that self-love was stronger than the affection with which she had inspired me.

Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, Memoirs

Casanova loved many women hut hroke few hearts That he knew

himself well enough never to take either wife or mistress must he counted as a virtue.

Havelock Ellis

"I think the best

Way to descrihe you, sir, would he

As a locust to whom girls are grass...

Whenever you're ahout to arrive

Towns should he warned: 'Here comes the plague

Of women in a single man

Who is their cheater and hetrayer

The greatest trickster in all Spain.'"

Tirso de Molina, The Rake of Seville

He is

charming, so, he sure that you keep him like fire heyond the tips of your fingers.

Diane Wakoski, "The Catalogue of Charms"

No man who is really a man can read Casanova's Memoirs for a few hours without feeling envious.

Stefan Zweig

Male promiscuity exists along a continuum.

Otto F. Kernberg, Internal World and External Reality

Casanova likes being seen in the luster of a seduction; he does not hold

with being recognized [His] untimely coquetry is tempered by the

wisdom of the adage: not seen, not captured.

Chantal Thomas, Casanova: Un Voyage Libertin

Ah desire! It's cold as ice

And then it's hot as fire.

Ah desire! First it's red

And then it's blue

And every time I see an iceberg

It reminds me of you.

Laurie Anderson, "Smoke Rings"

Introduction

when I was nineteen I had two girlfriends. I didn't plan it that way. What happened was that one night in my sophomore year of college I slept with a girl I knew from my writing class. The next night I slept with another woman, whom I had just met at a dorm party. Overcome by gratitude for I was shy and sexually awkward and had spent most of my adolescence yearning for even the mildest recognition from the opposite sex I decided that I was in love with both of them. That is how I fell in love in those days. And because I thought I loved them and, more important, desperately wanted them to love me, I never told Iris about Cathy or Cathy about Iris and continued to see them in secret. This was a peculiar practice in the early 1970s, when sex was a public entertainment and most people wore, not their hearts, but their genitals on their sleeves. I still have no idea how Iris or Cathy felt about me. From the very first I reduced them to the roles they played in my erotic life: the women I slept with; the women I loved; the women whom I

INTRODUCTION

wanted to love me; the women I betrayed, each with the other the objects I acted on.

Although they were physically different and attractive in different ways (Iris was short, buxom, dark-haired and a gifted writer; Cathy a tall art major with a lioness's golden skin and hair), they aroused in me the same feelings of excitement, triumph, omnipotence and guilt. And they elicited ffom me the same euphoric and panicky busy-ness that cocaine induces in the addict. For six months I saw them on alternate nights, dashing between their rooms like a harried urban commuter, never quite sure whose room I was leaving and whose I was heading toward. In bed with them, I flogged myself into heroic displays ofimagina tion and endurance. Yet for all the a tten tion Iga ve to the body parts I was licking or caressing, I scarcely knew whom those parts belonged to. The more frenziedly I tried to plunge into the carnal, the more abstract the carnal became.

I presented each of these women with an edited version of myself. With Iris, I came across as a severe, sharp-tongued intellectual, the kind of kid who had won his schoolyard fights by quoting Nietzsche. With Cathy, I was all skinless vulnerability, overflowing with poetry and tears. And for all the affection and sexual nourishment these women gave me, I felt unfulfilled with both of them, as though some essential part of me were languishing unseen and untouched.

It never occurred to me that I might have something to do with this, that what felt neglected was precisely what I kept hidden. Instead, I sought fulfillment through more sex, more intrigue and emotional fireworks. I went from seeing Iris and Cathy on different nights to seeing them both in the space of a few hours. I took more elaborate measures to deceive them, until I was no longer just lying about where I had spent the previous evening, but about who my friends were, what courses I was taking, when I visited my family. I developed a separate itinerary for each girlfriend and dared not take either any place where the other might show up. I took to migrating between trysts with my head down and my shoulders hunched, like an embezzler scurrying to make the next flight to Rio. I stopped answering my phone unless I was alone. I was perversely convinced that discovery would mean the end of both affairs and a loneliness keener than any I had felt before. So I tried to make my lovers give me some assurance of commitment. To Cathy, I fantasized out loud about having her move in with me the next year; with Iris, I talked about us spending the spring break together in