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fibers on end. I would have said it was successful, and provocative,
beyond their wildest dreams; perhaps they looked at it too hard, un–
able to recognize the moment at which it settled down into something
utterly appropriate because it could not be pinned down as tree or
whatever. They both, as Megged shows, try too hard not to try too
hard, and the fatigue conducts them into laconic misery, with Gia–
cometti sounding like a Beckett character and Beckett seeming all
the time to head for the denudedness , the strippedness, of sculpture,
and its silence too.
I would not have expected it, but, maybe because Beckett is so
sparing with comment on his art, I found that Giacometti elucidates
Beckett better than any commentator I have read, with Megged com–
ing in behind to touch in some of the finer points with worthwhile
assists from Dore Ashton and Maurice Blanchot. For instance, all
these Beckettisms come from Giacometti, who sometimes seems the
latest recruit to what Beckett calls his troop or platoon of fools, his
"vice-existers":
I do not know whether I work in order to make something or in
order to know why I cannot make what I would like to make .
Why this compulsion to record what one sees? . .. It's the mod–
ern form of adventure for men who are left on their own .
I have always failed . -
If
only I could draw! - I can't. That's why
I keep on drawing.
And, where Giacometti doesn't quite come out with it, Megged fills
deftly in : "The unlimited possibilities of nonrepresentational art are
even more frightening than the impossibility of representing reality."
One might sometimes push the thought of either man, or their pre–
senter, a bit further, as when Megged notes that Giacometti "believed
he really
saw
living beings only through their gaze"; yes, maybe the
creatures of both these artists are trying to gaze at themselves only,
and all else is extraneous.
Significantly, there is more to quote in this book from Giacometti,
whose explanations always go beyond himself, telling us about not
only Beckett but modern literature in general, and especially about
the American fiction writers I have come to dub The Lost Tribe, who,
without ever adding up to a movement or a school , have actually
picked up where Joyce and Beckett left off, and have formed organic
links with the
nouveau roman,
magical realism, and abstract expres–
sionism, not to mention Schoenberg, Messiaen, and Cage. What
