A Poor Man’s Don Giovanni :...

I’m not going to score any points with the woman in my life by telling you this, but for about the first half of “The Living Sword: A Fencer’s Autobiography,” I wished I was its author.

To get the obvious out of the way immediately: The title is a double entendre . Aldo Nadi, who may or may not have been the greatest fencer of the 20th Century, was certainly one of the world’s champion womanizers. Although the sport of swordplay required him to keep his foil buttoned, no one ever said anything about his pants.

Here’s what happened in Aldo Nadi’s life: He was born in Livorno, Italy, in 1899. He learned to fence. He learned to make love. He fenced. He made love. He gambled. He fenced again. He made love again. He gambled again. Sometimes he fenced, made love or gambled for the sheer joy of it. More often, he picked his opponents--swordsmen, women and gaming tables--with an eye toward financial remuneration. Along the way he caught a lot of colds.

He also starred in a Jean Renoir silent swashbuckler (“Le tournoi dans le cite”), coached fencing and did double work in Hollywood (for “Frenchman’s Creek” and “The Captain from Castile”), had four words to say in “To Have and Have Not” (“Come with me, please”), taught fencing to chubby women on diets at Elizabeth Arden’s Maine Chance Farm and wrote scathing newspaper commentary on the general inferiority of those fencers who had the misfortune not to be him.

Nadi penned this inadvertently hilarious autobiography in 1955, but it was not published until Laureate Press decided to add it to its growing catalogue of fencing classics. It’s easy to find reasons why the unimaginative book trade had deemed the thing unmarketable. But those very reasons are what make it such a hoot to read.

First of all, the author’s stilted English sounds like a bad translation from the Italian (for example: “A statement to the effect that Ruby’s overdraft in the bank was diminishing would not exactly correspond to the truth”).

Second, much of the material is repetitious. His conquests, both on the fencing strip and in the bedroom (and in cars, trains and open fields) become indistinguishable from one another. Characters flit in and out of his life, but most of them, even the famous ones, are merely names; the totally self-involved author has no insight whatsoever into other human beings, even into how they really feel about him.

But his occasional unconscious hints are delicious. We meet, for instance, the woman who, immediately after having sex with him, reads aloud from the letters of her other lovers. His response? “I have been the victim of such displays of confidence on the part of prostitutes or semi-prostitutes, from which seemingly they cannot refrain, a great many times. But although such outpourings may perhaps be interpreted as a need for companionship, and due to a certain extent to the inherent loneliness of mankind, still I gave up long ago trying to understand them.”

Third, the volume is clearly a self-indulgent vanity affair. On the surface, Nadi’s tale is an ineptly written celebration of himself by a larger-than-life blowhard and rake. But with a slightly deeper reading, it also becomes increasingly evident, as he recounts the story of his life, that the author is motivated mainly by an as-yet-unsatisfied need to justify his existence.

Amateur psychologists of all schools will be thrilled as they try to figure out, from the disingenuous recitation of the “facts,” exactly what role his lifelong sibling rivalry played in Nadi’s detestation of “noise of any kind,” or how the doctors of the world could find “nothing organically wrong” when he kept catching pneumonia (until some genius finally thought to prescribe Thorazine) or even why, exactly, his two marriages failed (my own conclusion: other women and too much sneezing).

The most hysterical--in both senses of the word--parts of the book are those in which Nadi tries to settle old scores with overrated rivals, with cheating judges, with Americans who do not appreciate fencing. He has a grudge against the then-Austrian town of Merano because “the women were very unattractive”--how dare they?--and with the Statue of Liberty for the “rather patronizing inscription on its pedestal” referring to him as “wretched refuse.”

Hollywood comes under particular attack for its use of “fourth-rate” fencing coaches. (In an interview with an unnamed Warner’s executive, Nadi says: “Between me and so-and-so there is the difference between Our Lord Jesus Christ and the stink of my feet.” Then, lest readers get the wrong idea, he adds in an aside: “Of course, it was only an expression . . . since not only my feet do not stink, but, having walked very little in my life, they are actually one of the few parts of my anatomy still in perfect condition.”)

Aside from its humorous value, which is considerable, this collection of anecdotes becomes a sort of fable of the lifestyles of the rich and famous in Europe between the world wars. Throughout its pages, bored but overwrought men and women glory and gloat, sob and sigh, getting righteously indignant over trifles while all around them the oh-so-sophisticated universe they inhabit is coming to its end. Aldo Nadi and the people he loves and/or hates barely seem to notice what we, with hindsight, recognize as an earth-shattering era; for them, the rise of the various -isms was, when they thought about it at all, nothing more than an unpleasant inconvenience infringing on their love of libertinism. “This Hitler is certainly no white lily,” Nadi opines as he flees to the United States.

It’s perhaps stretching a point to say that there’s a lesson here. But there’s certainly enough food for thought between the pages of “The Living Sword” to make a simple book reviewer glad, in the end, that he is not Aldo Nadi.