A Natural History of Love (15 page)

Every romance was a quest for the golden fleece, so it’s not surprising that he referred to his penis as “valiant steed.” Always genuinely in love with the woman he was pursuing, in his ardor he became irresistible. “When the lamp is taken away, all women are alike,” he once said of his occasional escapades with horny hags in the dark. But he also swore that “without love this great business is a vile thing.” Over and over he lost his heart, and over and over he lost his worldly possessions. But in his private reckoning they were the same thing. Searching for respect, he conned and ingratiated and bedded his way into high society. A handsome raconteur, he devised ingenious scams, found a way under the skirts of countless women, often at crowded events (no one wore underwear, so sex in public became a special delectation), and had dozens of careers—as a military officer, spy, priest, violinist, dancer, silk manufacturer, cook, playwright, pimp, and cabalistic necromancer-soothsayer-magician, to name only a few. He rubbed elbows with emperors, popes, and guttersnipes; fought duels; relished the theater; was a cat burglar; spent years in prison and many hours carousing with royalty; translated the
Iliad
and other classical texts, wrote two dozen learned books, and enjoyed the company of Rousseau, Voltaire, Franklin, and other thinkers. He lied about his parentage, and lived in fear that the truth might be discovered. What were the feeble frauds he performed compared to the inner fraudulence he felt? Living on the edge kept his wits sharp, but it also made him notorious. When he entered a city, the police took note, as did desirable women and their husbands and lovers.

People often speak the names Don Juan and Casanova in the same breath, and they did have something important in common—both felt unwanted and dismissed as children. Discovering, in time, that their good looks and sexuality could bring the attention they craved, they instinctively relied on seduction, eroticizing every relationship, just as Marilyn Monroe would. However, the fourteenth-century Don Juan bedded women to assure himself he was a virile man, whereas Casanova needed to prove he was a desirable child. Desperate for love, respect, family, a sense of belonging, he disguised his insecurities in bravado and heartiness. He tried to hide the fact that he was drawn to mother figures, and to fleecing the rich and aristocratic just to prove that a poor boy could.

Casanova wanted to compel all women to fall in love with him, but when they did he left them, as he had been left by his mother. She was the first woman he had loved, a serious heartbreaker, and he spent his life chasing her shadow in other women. When he caught it, he discovered to his surprise that he held nothing in his hands, and so he chased the next shadow he saw, with the same result. However, there was one type of woman he found truly magnetic, whom he couldn’t resist, couldn’t win, and from whose clutches he couldn’t escape, though she drained him of money and power and made mincemeat of his self-respect. He couldn’t save himself from a tease, a woman who led him on without giving in, alternately tantalizing and dismissing him. When such a woman entered an affair with him, all she had to do was not show any concern about the outcome. The uncertainty kept him dangling over a fiery pit; he found it too much like the random love and rejection that had bedeviled him as a boy. It defused his explosive sensuality, short-circuited his lust, rotted his self-confidence, and yet he kept going back for more punishment. But he kept this secret well. For the most part he married life itself, and became so engaged in living flamboyantly, so full of randy good humor that doors sprang open for him, skirts lifted, and bosoms heaved. It is ironic that dictionaries define a
casanova
as a man who is promiscuous, libertine, and heartless in his dealings with women. The real man was an emotional risk-taker, who wagered heavily in games of love and often lost. His secret weapon was the language of scars, which drove him to do, say, become anything, in order to love and be loved. It was all illusion, shadow animals against a wall. But it was a hell of a ride, and at the end of his life he said wistfully, “I regret nothing.”

   Casanova was one type of eighteenth-century lover, dangerous and indiscreet. But Ben Franklin epitomized the gallant gentleman of the era, both as thinker and as lover. He knew Casanova in passing, because they sometimes met at court and talked ideas with Voltaire and others; but they were very different cats in the night when it came to love. Unlike Casanova, who was tempestuous and risky, Franklin was levelheaded, playful, and sincere. The French welcomed him into their hearts and boudoirs; indeed, they idolized him.

When we were a nation of shopkeepers, Ben Franklin was a man of the world. In a time of kings, he was proud to be a printer. Equally good at persuading monarchs, small children, and lynch mobs, he became a budding revolution’s secret charmer, advancing its cause in Europe. In the heyday of abstract theories, he could turn complex facts on the lathe of a simple idea. Witty by taste and trade, he reduced life’s homespun truths to the rigorous pungency of epigrams. He was as at home in the bluster and debate of open politics as in the sly innuendoes and intrigue of French salons. Though not a churchgoer, he had a great vision of universal law and order, down to waves of light, up to the perfectibility of people.

A family man, with relations sprawling over two continents, whom he tended with patriarchal devotion—especially his own illegitimate son and that son’s illegitimate son—he stayed married for forty years, but spent fifteen of them living abroad without his wife. We remember him as the old, shrewd man of economy and common sense, but even in his seventies he was courting the great beauties of France in sizzling letters and wickedly witty flirtations. Well-rounded both in outlook and physique, he was a whole man whose parts worked in unison. While other men fretted over trifles, he imagined the complete experience of American life, filled with hospitals, paved streets, academies, insurance companies, libraries, fire engines, and personal freedom.

Franklin was a playful problem solver. His passion was to make the scientific theories of his day practical, to improve the daily lives of common people. When electricity was little more than a parlor trick, he used it to roast turkeys. He invented the bifocals he himself wore. He invented the lightning rod that he used in his own home, and those marvels of efficiency, the Pennsylvania furnace and the Franklin stove. A keen observer of symptoms, he diagnosed lead poisoning, suggested treatments for his private bugbear, the gout, and wrote an insightful treatise on the contagiousness of the common cold. An ace meteorologist, he predicted storms and studied eclipses, waterspouts, thunder, and the northern lights. He was the first person to try to map the Gulf Stream. In spare moments, he studied fossils, spelling reform, marsh gas, smallpox, the possibilities of manned flight, sunspots, the hot-air balloon (when asked what use it was, he replied: “What use is a baby?”), and so many other commonplace curiosities of life that it would take paragraphs to list them. “Ideas will string themselves together like ropes of onions,” he wrote about his nomadic, penetrating mind that knew to the penny what each flower bulb cost, but also took pains to introduce the yellow willow to America, invent a flexible catheter for his ailing brother, and write this epitaph for a distraught little girl’s dead squirrel: “Here Skugg/ Lies snug/As a bug/In a rug.” His technique, in matters of science and of the heart, was to begin with general principles, then move to practical application, and finally to simple advice. To a saucy young heartbreaker, he wrote: “Kill no more pigeons than you can eat.”

There was a tough, moral streak to Franklin that drove him to search out and think about virtue, debate it with friends at a philosophical club he founded, and write about it often in pamphlets and in
Poor Richard’s Almanack
(which sold 10,000 copies a year at a time when Philadelphia’s population was only 20,000). But, having identified and related what virtue was, he felt under no obligation to live a virtuous life. His years in France were lavish by American standards. And he was one of the great skirt chasers of all time. Legend paints him as an old lecher, but this is light-years from the truth his letters reveal. He was the lifelong advocate of women’s rights, and of the dignity, beauty, and value of women of all ages and classes. One of his funniest, best-known, and also wisest letters is about the advantages of making love to older women, in which he notes among other things, “They are so grateful.” Not only was he protective of his lady friends, at times providing them with money, legal help, housing, advantages for their children, and carefully thought-out advice when they presented him with problems, he also had great intellectual respect for them. Women, like lightning, were a force of nature, and Franklin loved to study both. He did so calmly, at length, and without fear.

It comes as no surprise that, in France, in his seventies, he became the symbol of ageless vitality. It was all the rage to put his portrait on things: pocketknives, vases, entire dinner services, handkerchiefs, inside chamber pots. Frenchwomen, who took the subtle roller coaster of flirtation and raised it to a high art, found in Franklin a player of exquisite mastery. Women craved his attentions, and swore their love to him for the length of their lives, in forthright and heartfelt letters. His French ladies sent mittens and dolls to his grandchildren in America. His wife sent homely, countrified gifts to his friends in France. On at least two occasions he asked Frenchwomen to marry him, and they lovingly refused. But, in all fairness, they were as much as forty years younger and already married, and they lamented their plight in letters of devotion. There were no telephones, and he enjoyed letter writing as a robust and eloquent love game, sending impish, wickedly flirtatious letters to his lady friend Madame Brillon, whom he visited at least twice a week, on some occasions playing chess with her while she bathed, on a board placed over her bathtub. His reputation was based on anecdotes such as this: Unexpectedly, one winter evening, he met a woman to whom he had made love some months before. A trifle hurt, she said, “You haven’t seen me all summer. I fear you no longer desire me.” “Madam, nothing could be farther from the truth,” Franklin replied. “I’ve merely been waiting for the nights to get longer.”

A WAKING SWOON

In time, the boomerang of public opinion traveled around Europe, and society changed its mind about life and love once again. Rationalism was out, Romanticism was in. A middle class, grown large enough to be powerful, could not express its worth through noble birth. Instead, it proclaimed that each individual was of value, regardless of lineage or class. Industrialism’s “Promised Land” included noisy, filthy cities, from which people wanted to escape; the middle class had the money and the leisure to seek novelty and go on country jaunts. The British monarchy seemed less august; the philosophers were talking ardently about democracy; and the French and American revolutions set the world ablaze with new ideals. Eighteenth-century scientists had been dogmatic and absolute, and their rigidity made the Romantics cringe. Much of life was mysterious and unknown, much of one’s experience was deeply personal. For ages, society had been suffocatingly programmatic, issuing moral laws like so many straitjackets. The Romantics wanted a free society, open to experiment and personal response. They delved into orientalism, glamorized the Middle Ages for its flights of emotion, felt that society was evolving toward some utopia, urged people to follow the heart rather than the head, adored wildest nature as a state of Edenic grace, encouraged artists to be confessional in their work, and, most radical of all, admired originality for its own sake—because something new and unheard of and untried was a precious addition to the world of sensation. Love as a board game no longer made sense. Treasuring the self, soul-searching with a vengeance, brimming with sensibility and tender feelings, the Romantic felt love as a waking swoon, an all-consuming force strong as a tidal wave.

No composer personified the passion of the age better than Beethoven, a tempestuous and defiant man who wrote avant-garde music full of majesty and organized alarm. Hampered by the rigors of traditional music, he fed his own anger, heartache, and struggle into his work. Expressing so much feeling would have been impossible in shopworn musical terms, so he invented a new vocabulary, one richer and more volatile, one closer to pure emotion. His music spurned the skillful embroidery of the past, it surged with raw feeling. Instruments were stretched to encompass a wider range of sounds, and performers had to learn new techniques to play them. As the old rules crumbled, Beethoven’s music became even more personal, alive with suffering and intensely human.

He wrote thirty-eight piano sonatas, and I am especially fond of the “Pathétique” and the “Appassionata,” the first written when he realized in horror that he was going deaf, the second when he resolved to fight his destiny with all the creative fury he could muster. “I shall seize fate by the throat,” he vowed, “it shall certainly never overcome me.” With these sonatas, piano music changed for all time, becoming huge, powerful, broad as orchestral works, deeply felt. Later in life, when he was completely deaf, Beethoven wrote his most confidential and intimate, some say his purest, music—sixteen string quartets. But it is in his piano sonatas, where hope alternates with despair, that I hear how he struggles with love.

Ludwig van Beethoven was born in 1770, the son of a father who sang for a living and whose alcoholism made his family’s life a fright and a misery. Discovering his son was a musical prodigy, he decided to capitalize on it and use him as a cash cow—or calf. After all, Mozart had been paraded around Europe and made a fortune for his parents. He ordered young Ludwig to spend all day at the piano. Sometimes he returned home after all-night binges, staggering drunk, and dragged the boy out of bed, demanding that he practice in the dark. When Ludwig made mistakes, as any boy would, his father beat him. Considering the emotional Molotov cocktail of lovelessness, physical abuse, and a childhood shackled to a piano, it’s a wonder Ludwig developed any regard for music at all. Add to this the fact that he was reported to be quite ugly, slovenly, and understandably shy, and it doesn’t sound as if he had much chance. His mother, though devoted to her children, was brutalized by her husband and always miserable; she died young of tuberculosis. Ludwig was only eight years old when he gave his first public concert, and by fourteen he was assistant to the court organist. With his mother gone and his father out of work, this position allowed him to support the entire family, though barely. But he was no gentleman. Short, blockish, unrefined in manner, with a pockmarked face and a heart scarred by neglect, he was a bad-tempered and intolerant young man, who became easily excited and fought fiercely. He didn’t put up with insults or criticism (both of which his music inspired), and he didn’t suffer fools. Coming as a sequel to the deprivations of his childhood, his growing deafness was excruciating. Not because of his composing—he could hear the music in his mind whether he heard the actual sounds or not—but because of the even greater distance it put between him and the world. He became a tortured spirit, a phantom of life’s opera. Just imagine in what self-eviscerating pain he wrote these words: “O ye men, who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn, or misanthropic, how greatly do ye wrong me, you do not know the secret cause…. For me there can be no recreation in the society of my fellows, refined intercourse, mutual exchange of thought; only just as little as the greatest needs command may I mix with society. I must live like an exile…. O providence—grant me at last but one day of pure joy—it is so long since real joy echoed in my heart—O when—O when, O Divine One—shall I feel it again in the temple of nature and man—Never? No—O that would be too hard!”