472
PARTISAN REVIEW
In a sense, this makes his job even harder: there is something
solid to mine here, and he has to do it deftly, almost like a minia–
turist - without getting too aphoristic, without squeezing things to
death. He has, at the same time, to cite and explain, to compare and
contrast, without putting off the reader who has plenty of Beckett
but little Giacometti, or vice versa. Remarkably, he pulls it off, fus–
ing hemmed-in exposition with sophisticated commentary, making
throughout the crucial point that, for both Beckett and Giacometti,
style is what maximizes art's virtual incapacity to copy. For both, style
is "more realistic than so-called naturalism," or, to use Giacometti's
own words, ."A realistic picture is a picture too unreal to become
'stylish.' The trouble with it is that it doesn't look like anything." So
too, Beckett notes in his Proust essay, "the copiable he does not see,"
which Megged does not quote, though he might have. Early on,
Beckett saw that art is not a brand of photography, but an irresistible
emanation from within, distorting and deforming and, quite natu–
rally, leading every artist to the brink of expressionism, a mental
and emotional mode that too many American literary critics either
overlook altogether or confuse with surrealism. Megged is good on
these things, steering his way by implication rather than by outright
textbook lessons; he writes for those already a little versed in stylistics,
and he even manages to do justice to Beckett's plays, revealing their
sculptural qualities, linking their visual spareness to Giacometti's own.
It is no surprise, then, to find on the first page the two of them,
in 1961, trying to devise the right set for the revival of
Waiting For
Godot
at the Odeon in Paris. They
built
the set together, juggling a
bare stage, a tree, and a moon. Years later, Giacometti said: "We
experimented the whole night long with that plaster tree, making it
bigger, making it smaller, making the branches finer.
It
never seemed
right to us. And each of us said to the other: maybe." As Megged
makes clear, both men develop lifelong an intense sense of failure,
feeling, as Beckett would put it, a compulsion to express together
with the absence of anything expressible, but they part company in–
asmuch as Giacometti said a great deal about it whereas Beckett has
been rather tight-mouthed except for some sibylline utterances in oc–
casional interviews. It was not that they wanted the tree to be perfect;
they just wanted it to be as useful as possible, as commanding as the
right word, the right contour, in the right place. As it is, this so-called
tree has always looked to me like some ricochet from Kirlian photog–
raphy: a sprayed-out root system electrocuted where it stands - even
a human nerve-ending blown up and made to stand everyone of its
