QI The Book of the Dead

contemporary, the tireless naturalist T. H. Huxley, had died the previous year. He wrote that ‘the great end of life is not knowledge but action’. Genghis Khan conquered most of the known world; Peary and Mary Kingsley explored unknown lands; Humboldt took on the cosmos; Galton and Morris designed the future. For all of them, ‘doing’ was the only setting on their dial. Yet none had happy marriages and only Morris passed muster as a loving parent. They probably hardly noticed: the job in hand was what mattered and absorption in the task was reward enough in itself. All would have agreed for sure with that other nineteenth-century over-achiever, Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol, Oxford: ‘Never retreat. Never explain. Get it done and let them howl.’

CHAPTER FOUR
     

Let’s Do It
     
     
    Personally I know nothing about sex because I have always been married .
ZSA ZSA GABOR
     
    S ex is the most natural but least straightforward of all human urges. It fascinates and repels us, and it’s the ultimate leveller. Rich or poor, prince or plumber, saint or private equity fund manager, we all got here because somebody, somewhere, had sex with someone else. Yet human sexual activity takes up less of our time than eating, sleeping, watching television or even choosing what clothes we wear in the morning. Of the twenty-five years the average couple spends in bed, only two months are spent making love. And, despite what you read in the papers, we don’t think about it all the time, either. The cliché about men’s minds straying to sex every seven seconds is pure invention. The Kinsey Institute found that almost half the men they survey only think about sex once or twice a week.

     
    This was not the case with Giacomo Casanova (1725–98). His twelve volumes of memoirs, The Story of My Life , are a 3,600-page catalogue of debauchery and sexual conquest. They are in French,which Casanova thought more sophisticated than his native Italian, and were not published in full until 1960. They record each significant moment in Casanova’s life up until the summer of 1774 (when he was forty-nine), at which point the narrative stops in midsentence. The author was then in his sixties, a washed-up, impotent, pox-raddled librarian in an obscure Bohemian castle. Bored out of his mind, he began to write as ‘the only remedy to keep from going mad or dying of grief’.
    Giacomo Casanova was born in Venice. His father, Gaetano, was an actor. Even in the most licentious city in Europe, infamous for gambling, prostitution and its wild abandoned carnival, acting was a low calling, scarcely better than burglary. When Gaetano Casanova married Zanetta Farussi, her father, a humble shoemaker, died of shame (or so they said) within a month of the wedding. His son wasn’t proud of him either. His memoirs begin with a tortuous attempt to make up for it by proving that his father was the descendant of a Spanish nobleman, tracing the family tree back three centuries, only to conclude that his real father wasn’t Gaetano at all, but an aristocratic theatre-owner called Michele Grimani. Casanova’s mother, ‘beautiful as the sunlight’, was a flirt of epic proportions: alternative paternities have been suggested for all six of her children. Casanova’s lifelong anxiety over his legitimacy would drive him to create an ideal self – the suave, witty, patrician libertine of legend – but that’s not how it began.
    As a boy, Giacomo had ‘an air of madness’ about him. His mouth hung open slackly and he had a perpetual nosebleed:
    My illness made me a gloomy child, and not the least bit amusing. Everyone felt sorry for me and left me in peace; they thought my time on earth would be brief. My father and mother never spoke to me at all .
     
    Luckily for Giacomo, he had Marzia, an Italian grandmother straight from central casting. She bossed, bullied and fussed over him, took him to see a witch to try to sort out his nose, and then, with the help of the Abbé Grimani (the brother of his true father), arranged for him, aged nine, to be privately educated in Padua. He spent some miserable months starving in a rat-and fleainfested boarding house but Marzia came to the rescue, travelling to Padua herself, tearing a strip off his sadistic Croatian landlady and transferring him to the family home of his young tutor, the Abbé Gozzi. Giacomo proved himself an excellent student and was soon out-pointing his teacher in theological discussions.