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Giacometti kept on trying to sculpt a head or figure which would satisfy him. None did. The heads never seemed lifelike, while the figures kept on getting smaller and crumbling to dust in his fingers. The results baffled him, but he was not discouraged. What he saw had ceased to be as important as how he saw, and therefore the whole purpose of creativity had changed. In the search for a vision uniquely personal, it must eventually seem that the works of art which embody that vision can never be quite equal to the expressive potential of the aesthetic experience. A search for the absolute entails a clear-eyed recognition that its destination is failure—or death. In those terms, the principal reason for creating works of art will be to demonstrate the continuing possibility of that which as a basic premise is acknowledged to be impossible. No wonder Alberto could go on working with such constancy and assurance. He had reached the state of mind which was to become the very substance of his eventual fulfillment.

Alberto was not the only man in Paris at that time to whom such a singular, contradictory state of mind was beginning to seem the basis for creative fulfillment. There was at least one other: an unknown Irish writer in his early thirties named Samuel Beckett. No less—but no more—than Giacometti, Beckett had found his contradictory artistic faith in the confusion and incongruity of his life experiences.

“I have little talent for happiness,” he said. He grew up with an awareness of being different from those who are altogether happy, strong, and healthy. But he was an excellent student and, after taking his degree, received a two-year fellowship for further study in Paris, returning afterward to become a professor at home. However, he soon became oppressed by a sense of the absurdity of trying to teach others what he felt unsure of himself, and resigned. In the last week of July 1933, his father died of a heart attack. For the twenty-seven-year-old son, the death was shattering. Thereafter, a kind of apprehension toward life remained with him, a suspicion of outward events, a mistrust of apparent happiness. He became a voluntary exile from his homeland, a foreigner in the countries where he chose to live, and a writer who finally elected to write in a language not his mother tongue. Further to complicate his alienation from everyday life, there was a difficulty in sustaining significant relationships, especially with women. In one of his earliest works, Beckett speaks of the “morbid dread of sphinxes.” Such a dread was apparently a real and active aspect of his imaginative life, for the theme of impotence recurs throughout his work, coupled with the motif of sterility. Tall, handsome, with piercing but benevolent blue eyes, Beckett was attractive to women and not a few became infatuated with him, but he was unable to make a positive commitment.

The first several years of Beckett’s exile were spent miserably in London, walking the streets, oppressed by the contempt of the English for the Irish. Later he went wandering through Germany, but the persecution of Jews and preparations for war made life there unbearable. In the autumn of 1937 he returned to Paris, where, except for the interruption of the war years, he was to make his home for the rest of his life. He met some of the artists and authors who frequented the cafés of Montparnasse and Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He started writing poetry in French. It seemed that Beckett’s life was about to become stable and harmonious. But an incident soon occurred made to order to symbolize the absurd vanity of such an expectation.

While walking with friends along the Avenue d’Orléans, Beckett was accosted by a stranger, a pimp, who made his proposition with such tenacity that the writer pushed him away, whereupon the man plunged a knife into Beckett’s chest. The wound came close to the heart, without injuring it, but perforating the layer of tissue surrounding the left lung, requiring some time in hospital. When recovered, he was obliged to be present at the trial of his assailant and had an opportunity to ask him why he had committed such a senseless crime. “I don’t know, sir,” the prisoner replied.

Beckett’s art reveals deep sympathy for the injuries of everyday experience. It deals with solitude, with man isolated, alone, lonely, alien, out of touch with anyone. It is steeped in a sense of mortality, of the frailty and impermanence of life. Early in his career, Beckett stated his stark artistic creed: “The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.” Art is not the way out of the artist’s dilemma. To be an artist is to fail, and the embrace of failure is his main spur in striving to succeed. Beckett’s career became a veritable apotheosis of this forbidding belief.

Giacometti and Beckett met casually at the Café de Flore. They could hardly have been better made to appreciate and respect each other, and it seems inevitable that they should have become friends. It was a friendship very gradual in growth, for neither man was looking for solace or reassurance. On the contrary, what they eventually found in each other’s company was an affirmation of the supreme value of a hopeless undertaking. They met most often by chance, usually at night, and went for long walks, the only destination of which was the conclusion that, having, as it were, nowhere to go, they were compelled to go there. It was a very private, almost secretive, and secret friendship. However, it did not exist in the vacuum of austere speculation. It came to be recognized by others as a confirmation of something which—even if they did not understand it—they could recognize as valuable. Many years later, when both men had become famous, a prostitute who knew them both saw them seated together on the terrace of a café. Going inside, she said to the proprietor: “It’s your luck to have two of the great men of our time sitting together right now on your terrace, and I thought you ought to know it.”

 

Efstratios Eleftheriades was a wily Greek who came to France during the First World War to study law but very shortly discovered that he was more interested in art than in jurisprudence. Ambitious to make a name for himself, he began by adapting his own to the Gallic tongue and called himself Tériade. He soon made the acquaintance of another Greek, equally wily, named Christian Zervos, also interested in art, and together they founded the influential art review Cahiers d’Art. The two Greeks, however, did not prove compatible. Perhaps they found each other a little too wily. They parted company, Zervos keeping control of Cahiers d’Art. The years following were lean ones for Tériade. Determined, however, to make his way as a publisher in the field of contemporary art, he eventually had the good luck to meet Albert Skira, a young man from Switzerland with the same ambition. Together they produced a review of art and literature called Minotaure. It was handsome and avant-garde, but Tériade wanted to put out something of his own. Verve was the result. Neither innovative nor adventuresome, this review did achieve and maintain for almost twenty-five years a level of quality in content and presentation which no other review had before attained or has since equaled. It was via the pages of Verve, perhaps, that the School of Paris showed its most splendid, though final, flowering. However, it was to be as a publisher of sumptuous books illustrated by the outstanding artists of the time that Tériade made his most distinguished contribution to cultural history. Matisse, Picasso, Bonnard, Miró, Chagall, Léger, Le Corbusier, Laurens were among the many who collaborated with Tériade to produce books which as creations in their own right are masterpieces. Of them all, however, none is more important or impressive than the one created by Giacometti. It occupies a place apart in his oeuvre, and in his life. Appearing posthumously, it became a kind of testament. Tériade was a fitting person to publish it.

Giacometti had attracted his attention when the young artist’s early sculptures were first shown by Pierre Loeb, but they did not become friends until Alberto resumed work directly from nature. That was appropriate, as Tériade’s taste was decidedly for figurative art, and each was able to stimulate and strengthen the conviction of the other. Both loved to talk, especially about art. Their long conversations lasted late into hundreds of Montparnasse nights. Giacometti’s art and Tériade’s publications matured together.

There were several photographers in Paris at that time who seemed likely to have brilliant careers. Man Ray, the American Surrealist from Philadelphia, was the oldest and best known. The Hungarian Gyula Halasz and the Rumanian Elie Lotar also showed exceptional promise. The former changed his name to Brassaï after arriving in Paris, where he soon became friends with painters, writers, and prostitutes, all of whom he made memorable in photographs. Lotar was the illegitimate son of a famous Rumanian poet named Tudor Arghezi. He suffered much from the overshadowing celebrity of his father, and that may have motivated his early expatriation. Highly talented, charming, Lotar was also inclined to take life as lightly as possible. Though he had worked with Luis Buñuel on several films and published photographs in Verve, his career never seemed destined to come to much; at the very end of it, though, he managed with Alberto’s help to make a success of failure and slip rather furtively through the back door of history. Henri Cartier-Bresson took the main entrance in stride. Youngest of the brilliant photographers, he came from a rich family, had meant originally to be a painter, associated himself with the Surrealist group, and made his first important photographs during long voyages throughout the world. Numerous artists were among the people of whom he caught images which crystallize experience with uncanny precision; those of Giacometti at the end of his life are some of the most telling.

If it seemed that Alberto was acquainted with almost every artist and writer of consequence of the time, not to mention a host of other people who never had any claim to fame, he was. Genius attracts people. Alberto attracted more people than most, because he was himself so irresistibly attracted by others. He responded to them with an eagerness all the greater for his awareness that, even as genius attracts others, its uniqueness is a barrier which keeps them at a distance. That, in part, is why Giacometti felt a deeper kinship with the great, anonymous mass of people than with some of the intellectuals who were his close friends.

 

As events in Europe drifted toward catastrophe, the drift of Sefton and Isabel Delmer’s marriage seems to have been going the same way. The assignments of the foreign correspondent led to prolonged absences from Paris. It became impractical to maintain an expensive apartment. Besides, Delmer seems to have wearied of Isabel’s bohemian companions. More than once, he came home to find a party in progress and ordered the guests to get out. The Delmers moved to London. Isabel was not pleased by the change. Loath to forgo the company of her artist friends, she still spent much time in Paris, living in hotels. Alberto’s relationship with her continued as inconclusive as the outcome of his work in sculpture. Both were his principal preoccupations. He kept working with stubborn persistence on the heads and tiny figurines, destroying almost everything. He did not cease relations with other women, but none of them compared for him with Isabel, and he took care to let her know it.

It was a disturbing time. And things far more troubling than frustration with work or with Isabel were happening in the world. On the last day of September 1938, the representatives of England and France, meeting in Munich with the leaders of Germany and Italy, surrendered to the demands of Hitler for occupation of a part of Czechoslovakia. War was now a matter of time. On October 10, Giacometti celebrated his thirty-seventh birthday. More than half his lifetime had already gone by. One of its critical events was to occur just eight days later.