474
PARTISAN REVIEW
they do, in a dozen different ways, takes something from Beckett's
Textsfor Nothing
which Megged (rightly, I think) finds Beckett's most
moving work, in which the words are "spoken just for their own
sake." One thinks of Novalis's view that talking for the sake of talking
is the sincerest thing we do, which in Beckett becomes a recitative of
hereness: spoor, snailtrack, heartprints. And, of course, explaining
that sort of thing to reactionary editors in publishing houses, or even
to students reared on the copiable and the minimal in tandem, is
wretched work. One of the moving things about this diligent, wise,
and moving book is that Megged sees, in Beckett, literary art at last
catching up with visual art, coming to the same problems and the
same impasses, without ever quitting. There is something profoundly
gladdening in the news that Giacometti "lived his life almost like one
of Beckett's heroes," even at one point usefully trekking around on
crutches like Malone himself. The sculpture named
No More Play
surely does evoke Beckett's endgames, and the one named
Life Goes
On
embodies that classic Beckettian
possum quia impossibile
(Beckett
once said that the animal he'd like to be is the possum).
Matti Megged, himself a novelist
(The Last Day ofDanny, Mem),
has done us all a favor, with self-effacing cogency writing a book that
goes beyond itself into the generative core of all the arts . All the same,
I wish it had been longer, with more quotation from Beckett (which
would of course enable him to quote Beckett on himself
in toto!).
The
print is too small. The prose here and there is a bit too monofilamen–
tal for me. The past tense of
strive
is
strove,
not
strived
(page fifty-four),
and one sentence on page thirty is quite misleading: "The atmosphere
of Beckett's first stories in French,
'Texts for Nothing,'
and his novels
is that of a dim twilight. ..." The first stories in French were the
Nouvelles,
translated as the
Stories
in the volume
Stories and Texts for
Nothing
(plus one other, "First Love"). A second edition should tidy
these things up, especially if, as I hope, the book has come to stay.
PAUL WEST
THE QUESTION OF PSYCHOHISTORY
DECODING THE PAST: THE PSYCHOHISTORICAL APPROACH. By
Peter Loewenberg.
Alfred A. Knopf. $20.00.
Peter Loewenberg has crossed disciplinary barriers, and in
doing so he has taken a great deal of flack. His detractors have accused
