Hammock Reading

THE ROMANCE OF CASANOVA (344 pp.) --Richard Aldington--Duell, Sloan & Pearce ($3).

Flirtatiously billed as "the story Casanova didn't dare to tell," Romance actually has no basis in the 18th Century swoonster's Memoirs. In place of truth, Author Aldington offers learned period sets (descriptions of settecento fortune telling, bills of fare, gambling), plenty of escapes and japes, ructions and seductions.

Aldington's Casanova found Henriette --the one real love of his life--in a Venetian canal, where she was drowning. He rescued her, but before he could even sear her lips with a kiss she was whisked home. When he finally found her again she was in a hotel bed. After exchanging commonplaces, they set up housekeeping without benefit of clergy. But one day, for no apparent reason, Casanova was arrested.

After 18 months he was offered freedom if he would seduce a notorious Austrian spy, bring her back to Venice. He consented, set forth, arrived to find the spy was Henriette. She had been doing a little spying all along, she confessed, to earn pin money, and enough to recover her family estate.

Fearing the wrath of their separate employers, they fled to Switzerland by separate routes. But Casanova was waylaid by a lady, arrived a day too late. Austrian agents had done away with Henriette. On a window in her room he found scratched her fond farewell: "Adieu my love Henriette."

Aldington obviously meant it to be hammock reading, and no more. But except for a few writing tricks, and a display of erudition, no summer reader would recognize it as the work of the man who wrote World War I's bitter Death of a Hero, or that first-rate biography of Wellington, The Duke.

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