The Book of the Dead

looked the better for having a bonfire made outside of it of nine-tenths of all that it held,” he wrote. Far ahead of his time, Morris saw that consumerism would come to oppress those who did the consuming: He foresaw a nation drowning in cheap tat and clutter, its people ruled by their own possessions. “Luxury,” he said, “cannot exist without slavery of some kind or other.”

He also saw how capitalism would get around the growing clamor for freedom and equality. In 1869, long before the Labour Party was founded, he predicted that the establishment would survive by adopting “quasi-socialist machinery” with “the workers better treated, better organised, helping to govern themselves, but with no more pretence to equality with the rich, nor any more hope for it than they have now.” They were prophetic words. Though the overall standard of living has improved in the 140 years since Morris was writing, inequality in British society has actually widened. The top 20 percent in Britain today now earn seven times as much as the bottom 20 percent.

As the novelist Henry James said of Morris, he is “wonderfully to the point and remarkable for clear, good sense.” He wasn’t a sophisticated political theorist; he was a problem solver, a doer, and he was the first major figure to utter the heresy that unless art is accessible to everyone it is worthless.

His personal life, friendships and merriment aside, was painful. His wife, Jane, had two long affairs, one with his friend the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti (who rather cruelly called his pet wombat Topsy) and the other with the louche poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. Her infidelities wounded Morris deeply, although his own emotional inadequacies were partly to blame. His view of romantic love never developed beyond adolescent idealization and fell far short of the emotional intimacy that Jane needed. She was a depressive and Morris escaped her moods by burying himself in his work. Nevertheless, they remained together and he managed the situation over forty years with tact and kindness. By way of compensation for his failings as a husband, he was endlessly attentive to his children—particularly his daughter Jenny, who lived life as a semi-invalid because of her epilepsy. They, in turn, adored him.

In the last two years of his life his great passion was the production of a hand-printed edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in type he designed himself, with eighty-seven illustrations by Burne- Jones. A masterpiece of book design, it is the embodiment of his theory that work should be collaborative and the results both beautiful and useful. Burne-Jones called it “a pocket cathedral.”

In 1895 trouble with Morris’s lungs proved to be tubercular and he started to weaken. But, visiting a badly restored Norman church in Sussex, he still had the energy to unleash paroxysms of fury at the absent architects: “Beasts! Pigs! Damn their souls!” On hearing that John Ruskin had described him as “the ablest man of his time,” he summoned his old jollity to order up a bottle of Imperial Tokay (one of his favorite wines) from the cellar. But he knew the end was near. “I cannot believe I will be annihilated!” he fumed. His final words were defiant: “I want to get mumbo jumbo out of the world,” but his death was peaceful. Several of his friends noted how beautiful he looked lying there in repose—and being motionless, how unlike himself.

Morris’s 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 overachiever, Benjamin Jowett, master of Balliol, Oxford: “Never retreat. Never explain. Get it done and let them howl.”

CHAPTER FOUR Let’s Do It Giacomo Casanova—Catherine the Great—Cora Pearl—H. G. Wells—Colette—Marie Bonaparte —Alfred Kinsey—Tallulah Bankhead

Personally I know nothing about sex because I have always been married.

ZSA ZSA GABOR

Sex is the most natural but least straightforward of all human urges. It fascinates and repels us, and it’s the ultimate leveler. 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 cliche about men’s minds straying to sex every seven seconds is pure invention. The Kinsey Institute found that almost half the men they survey think about sex only 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 catalog 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 mid-sentence. 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 abbe 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 flea-infested boardinghouse, but Marzia came to the rescue, traveling to Padua herself, tearing a strip off his sadistic Croatian landlady, and transferring him to the family home of his young tutor, the abbe Gozzi. Giacomo proved himself an excellent student and was soon outpointing his teacher in theological discussions. Extracurricular activities were also on offer. The priest’s teenage sister, Bettina, seduced him, inflaming his ardor one morning by washing his thighs, using the flimsy excuse that she wanted him to try on a new pair of white stockings. As Casanova recalled, she “struck the first sparks of a passion that was to become the dominant one in my heart.” The eleven-year-old Giacomo quickly lost control (“the sweet pleasure her curiosity caused in me did not cease until it could increase no more”) and then tormented himself, wondering if, after this terrible crime, he should offer to marry her. But Bettina had already turned her attention elsewhere, to older boys— teaching Giacomo another, less enjoyable lesson: After love comes melancholy.