Annette Arm left Geneva by train on July 5, 1946, a romantic girl from the suburbs, daughter of an obscure schoolteacher, on her way to a rendezvous with history and fame. What she may not have considered, however, is that satisfactions have consequences. Had she had an inkling of those, she might have gotten down from her train at the first stop and gone back as quickly as possible to the place and life from which she wanted Alberto to free her forever. On the other hand, alas, she might very well have gone right on her way.
Alberto was at the station to meet her. His greeting was not what young women in love usually look forward to after several months’ separation. He was casual, matter-of-fact. No romantic excitement transfigured the drab platform of the Gare de Lyon. To have agreed to Annette’s request in Geneva had been one thing. To find her expectantly in Paris was another. It would have been very unlike Alberto not to wonder what he had let himself in for. Heretofore she had not been clinging, but how could she be otherwise now? The question would have seemed all the more irksome for being provoked by the very person who feared the answer.
Alberto was fascinated by the opposite sex. His fascination, however, had always been fraught with a sense of peril and menace, and those who are apprehensive tend to be aggressive. Because he allowed people to take advantage of him, while repressing resentment in order to avoid unpleasantness for everybody except himself, sometimes he behaved as if with hostility toward others when in fact he was taking advantage of an opportunity to become his own enemy. For him to live with himself was not easy. Living with someone else may have seemed impossible.
When Annette first saw her lover’s studio and lodgings, the picturesque dilapidation of the place probably appeared congenial. Concerning material circumstances, she was prepared to accept whatever need be for as long as necessary. Concerning other circumstances, she could thus afford to be expectant. The meeting with Diego went well. She thought him handsome. He found her pretty, pleasant, unassuming. That they should be compatible was cardinal for Alberto. In this regard, at least, the advent of Annette seemed promising.
Alberto took her to Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where they spent the evening at the Cafe des Deux-Magots with Picasso and Balthus. So her Parisian career started at the top. Before long, she had been introduced to all of Alberto’s friends. They found her silly and uncultivated but eager to be liked and ready to please. The contrast to Isabel must have come as a surprise. But even Annette had no idea of what she was capable.
Tonio Pototsching had not improved. Cancer of the liver was the trouble. He was in and out of the hospital, though the eventual denouement was beyond the help of medicine. Increasingly cadaverous, his skin the color of yellow ivory, he lay in the room adjacent to the one occupied by Alberto and Annette, complaining and cursing, tended by Madame Alexis, visited occasionally by his neighbors. Death came at three o’clock in the morning. The date: July 25. Alone, distraught, the bereaved mistress went for help to a person she was sure to find awake, the sculptor working in his nearby studio.
So Alberto found himself again face to face with the paltry impermanence of human life. “No corpse,” he said later, “had ever seemed to me so null, a miserable debris to be tossed into a hole like the remains of a cat. The limbs were spare as a skeleton, outstretched, spread apart, cast away from the body, the enormous swollen belly, the head thrown back, the mouth open. Standing motionless in front of the bed, I looked at that head which had become an object, a little box, measurable, insignificant. At that moment a fly approached the black hole of the mouth and slowly disappeared inside.
“I helped to dress Tonio as well as possible, as if he were to appear before a brilliant gathering, at a ball perhaps, or leave for a long journey. Raising, lowering, moving the head like any other object, I tied his necktie. He was strangely dressed, everything seemed as usual, natural, but the shirt was sewn onto the collar, he had neither belt nor suspenders, and no shoes. We covered him with a sheet and I went back and worked until morning.
“When I went into my room the following night, I found that by a curious chance there was no light burning. Annette, invisible in the bed, lay asleep. The corpse was still in the adjoining room. The absence of light was disagreeable, and as I was on the point of going naked across the dark corridor to the bathroom past the door of the dead man’s room, I was seized by a veritable terror. Although I didn’t believe it, I had the vague impression that Tonio was everywhere, everywhere except in the lamentable corpse on the bed, that corpse which had seemed so insignificant; Tonio had become limitless, and, though terrified of feeling an icy hand touch my arm, with an immense effort I crossed the corridor, went to my bed, and, keeping my eyes open, I talked with Annette till dawn. What I had just undergone was in a way the opposite of what I had experienced a few months before with the living.”
The former experience had been the instant of revelation in the theater. It was not an opposite, however, so much as an affirmation of the same awareness, induced by an inversion of the same experience. He had seen death in the faces of the living; now he had seen once more that the dead reveal the truth about life. Sight begot terror in both cases. The man schooled in terror is a man prepared for possibility, because he will expect nothing and therefore be ready for everything. A man familiar with anxiety will look at the world with awe, because each day duplicates the miracle of birth. Inured to absurdity, he will become more and more free to assert the significance of life.
Times continued hard, money scarce. Annette had pledged to earn her keep and was expected to do so. Secretarial work being the only kind for which she was fitted, Alberto found her a position as secretary to an old friend from Surrealist days, a writer named Georges Sadoul, a critic and historian of the cinema. She
worked for him every afternoon and the money earned came in handy not only for her expenses but for some of his as well. Still, it was not enough. They were obliged to keep on borrowing and to take advantage of kindnesses which may sometimes have been mortifying. Annette had inadequate clothes. Alberto could not afford to buy her any, so she had to accept coats and dresses handed on by Simone de Beauvoir and Patricia Matta. There were nights when they had nothing to eat but bread and Camembert cheese. At other times Alberto would go off by himself to dine with friends, leaving Annette to shift for herself. On one such occasion, when he and Diego were sitting at the Café de Flore with Bianca, her husband, and her brother, who were visiting Paris, Annette appeared and said that she hadn’t enough money for dinner. He told her to borrow it, naming a possible lender, but she had already tried that person, whereupon he named another, whom, as it turned out, she had also tried. At this Alberto irritably said, “Well, I’m going to have dinner with my cousins, and I can’t do anything about it now.”
Chagrined, Annette turned away, half in tears, and went off alone. Bianca said, “You can’t just send her away like this without a penny.” Whereupon Alberto reluctantly went after her, limping.
To Bianca it seemed that Alberto’s limp was much more noticeable when the sympathy of others might be called for. So his infirmity could, if necessary, be a source of strength. Its importance, in any event, was great, for he spoke of it often, and everyone who knew him knew that one of the great events of his life had occurred in the Place des Pyramides, followed by many painful weeks in hospital.
People thought Alberto was sometimes deliberately disagreeable to Annette, making fun of her naivete in front of friends, criticizing her for trifles, sending her curtly off to bed when she became drowsy in cafes. But she did not seem to resent it. She accepted his hardness with her just as she accepted the hard life they lived together. Her endurance was evidently her pleasure. By being unkind to her, perhaps Alberto was doing her a kindness. What he was doing for himself may have been something of the same sort. He was not a callous or cruel person. And he was profoundly
attached to Annette. If he had been indifferent, he would have been polite. There was great reciprocal affection and tenderness in their relationship despite its underlying strangeness. Of that strangeness there were strange illustrations.
Albert Skira had founded in Geneva a monthly review of art and literature called Labyrinthe. It, and other publishing projects, brought him often to Paris, where he was pleased to find friends who had been intimates of the Place du Molard, Alberto among them. One October Saturday in 1946, a convivial group invited by Skira gathered at a restaurant for lunch. During the meal, which was accompanied by plenty of wine, talk turned to the topic of keeping a daily journal and of everything that might prevent this. To his surprise, Alberto felt a desire to begin such a journal at once, starting that very moment. Taking quick advantage of an opportunity, Skira asked him to write for the next issue of Labyrinthe the story of Pototsching’s death, which he had recently heard. Though skeptical of success, Alberto agreed.
At six o’clock the same afternoon he learned that the Sphinx was about to vanish. The famous brothel, along with its less-celebrated sister establishments, had been voted out of business by the municipal council. Virtue profited. The prostitutes paid its price. Deprived of the protection of madames, driven into bars or onto the sidewalks, they would henceforth pursue their profession at the mercy of pimps and racketeers. Alberto was dismayed. Prostitution would survive, but not in the context he had for so long extolled and enjoyed. The Sphinx had been for him a marvel surpassing all others. It was intolerable to think that he would never again see the place where he had spent so many spellbinding hours. He ran to the Boulevard Edgar-Quinet. Having had too much wine at lunch, he was a little drunk and this last time he did not hesitate to take advantage of the opportunity for which the place was made. It proved to be a memorable farewell, and the artist seems to have assumed at once that significant consequences would come from his final encounter with the Sphinx.
Assuming that he had contracted a disease, he began to watch for symptoms of infection. They came late in the night the following Friday in the form of ivory-yellow pus. He was troubled at
once by what seemed at first sight to have been an involuntary paralysis of mind, which had prevented him from putting an end to the threat of disease. That would have been easy. Nothing, however, led him to believe in a kind of self-punishment. So he insisted, at least, when he wrote an account of these events shortly afterward. “Rather,” he said, “I obscurely felt that the disease could be useful to me, give me certain advantages, though I didn’t know what kind.” The obscurity of his feelings about the usefulness of the disease conveniently obscured the nature of the advantages. As to the possibility of self-punishment, mentioned only in order to deny it, experience would determine the applicability of his candor.
That same night in bed Alberto told Annette of his disease. Laughing, she asked to be shown the symptoms. It seems natural, and necessary, that Annette should have know of her lover’s malady. Considering the unusual conditions of their affair from the beginning, she can have been expected to take this news without indignation, and, perhaps, without aversion. Even without surprise. Mirth, however, gives pause, bringing a somber intimation of ambivalence. The obscurity of Alberto’s feelings called for the obscurity of Annette’s. She responded as an abstract but cruel personification of womanhood.
Presently, with the bedside light inevitably burning, they slept. Alberto dreamed. His dream was bizarre, bewildering. It stayed insistently in his mind after he awoke. It would not leave him. The following day, he wrote an account of it.
“Terrified, I saw at the foot of my bed an enormous, brown, and hairy spider, and the thread to which it was clinging led to a web stretched just above the pillow. ‘No, no,’ I cried, ‘I can’t endure a threat like that all night just over my head, kill it, kill it,’ and I said this with all the repulsion I felt about doing so myself in the dream as well as when awake.
“At that moment I woke up, but I woke up in the dream, which went on. I was in the same place at the foot of the bed and at the very moment when I was saying to myself, ‘It was a dream,’ I noticed, even as I involuntarily searched for it, I noticed, as if spread out on a mound of earth and broken dishes or flat little stones, a yellow spider, ivory yellow and far more monstrous than
the first but smooth, and as if covered with smooth yellow scales and with long, thin, smooth, hard legs which looked like bones. Terror-stricken, I saw the hand of my mistress reach out and touch the scales of the spider; apparently she felt neither fear nor surprise. Crying out, I pushed her hand away and, as in a dream, I asked for the creature to be killed. A person I had not yet seen crushed it with a long stick or shovel, striking violent blows, and, eyes averted, I heard the scales cracking and the strange sound of the soft parts crushing. Only afterward as I looked at the remains of the spider gathered onto a plate did I read a name clearly written in ink on one of the scales, the name of that species of arachnid, a name I can no longer state, which I have forgotten. I see only the separate letters now, the black color of ink on the ivory yellow, letters such as one sees in museums on stones, on seashells. It seemed evident that I had just caused the death of a rare specimen belonging to the collection of the friend with whom I was then living. This was confirmed a moment later by the complaints of an aged housekeeper who came in, searching for the lost spider. My first impulse was to tell her what had happened, but I saw the inconveniences of this, the displeasure of my hosts toward me; I should have realized that the creature was a rare one, have read its name, warned them, and not killed it, and I decided to say nothing about it, to pretend to know nothing and hide the remains. I went out into the grounds with the plate, taking great care not to be seen, for the plate in my hands might have seemed strange. I went to a stretch of plowed earth hidden by thickets at the foot of a mound and, sure of being unobserved, I threw the remains into a hole, saying to myself, ‘The scales will rot before anyone can find them.’ At that very moment I saw my host and his daughter pass on horseback above me; without stopping, they said a few words to me, words which surprised me, and I awoke.”
Awake, he looked at his room with terror. A cold sweat ran down his back. His towel was hanging over a chair. He saw it as if for the first time, as if suspended in a terrifying silence, a towel without substance in a stillness never before seen. It no longer had any relation, he felt, to the chair or the table, the feet of which seemed to rest no longer on the floor, or barely to touch it, and
there was no longer any relation between objects separated by incommensurable gulfs of emptiness. He was experiencing again the simultaneous perception of being and non-being, of the living and the dead, which he had experienced after the revelation in the movie theater. It was the same material and metaphysical anguish, and not only of visual origin, but also summoned from the farthest depths of his being by the dream.
The dream obsessed him. It had, in fact, been a nightmare, for it was concerned with matters of life and death, with the earliest, most profound and inescapable anxieties and conflicts to which human beings are subject. Its traumatic effect would persist, precipitating significant consequences. Alberto had lunch that day with Roger Montandon, to whom he related his dream in detail. By a curious coincidence, the dead spider’s burial suddenly reminded him of a childhood experience: he saw himself in another clearing, surrounded by thickets at the edge of a forest, brushing away the snow with his feet, gouging a hole in the hardened earth and burying a partly eaten piece of stolen bread. Nor was that all, though by the association of images and ideas it would already have seemed more than enough. The stolen, buried piece of bread reminded him of another one. He saw himself passing through remote and lonely neighborhoods of Venice, clutching a bit of bread that he wanted to be rid of and which at last, after several unsuccessful attempts on the darkest little bridges, trembling nervously, he managed to fling into the stinking water at the dead end of a canal. He remembered all the events which had led up to that moment, and told Montandon about them: the chance meeting in the train to Pompeii, the newspaper advertisement which had reached him by chance, the journey with the fatherly Dutchman, the death in the rainy mountains. Alberto and Montandon also talked about the dimensions of heads, the dimensions of objects, the relationships and differences between objects and human beings, which led back—as though by an itinerary which compels every man to rediscover incessantly the landscape of his lifetime—to the dream.
After lunch, Alberto went to consult Dr. Theodore Fraenkel, who lived on the other side of the city in an ugly building at 47
Avenue Junot. The two had become close friends. Fraenkel was exceptionally timid, and would sometimes sit for hours in a group without uttering one word. Alberto gave him confidence, drew him out, enabled him to become expansive and talk about himself. This tonic effect was the basis of the friendship between the artist and the doctor, who was more than ready to repay the kindness with advice and medicine when necessary, which was rather often. Despite Fraenkel’s failure in 1930 to have diagnosed an obvious attack of appendicitis, Alberto continued to believe in his competence and proclaimed him the very best doctor in Paris. A perceptive observer might have concluded that such enthusiasm on Alberto’s part could suggest that he was one of the worst. For the complaint which had brought his friend to the office on this day, however, the doctor’s skill was adequate, and he prescribed treatment with sulfa drugs.
Leaving Fraenkel’s office, Alberto crossed the street and walked downhill under the trees to the Pharmacie Centrale de Montmartre, which faces a small square. A stone statue stands in this square, a memorial to Eugène Carrière, the mediocre painter of misty pictures who had once been the teacher of Alberto’s friend Derain. On the base of the statue is inscribed, among others, the phrase: “It is art which renews language by rediscovering the source of our emotions.” Coming out of the pharmacy, holding the medicine in his hand, Alberto hesitated on the doorstep, gazing across the square, and the first thing he saw was a small café on the far side with its name on the awning in bold letters: The Dream.
On his way home, thinking about his dream, about the memories it had aroused during his conversation at lunch, he recalled that just one week previously, before his final visit to the Sphinx, he had had lunch with Skira, who had asked him to write for Labyrinthe an account of the death of Pototsching. As he walked along, he remembered that wretched event, which coalesced in his mind with more recent memories and images, and he felt that he would be able to write something. What he wanted to write about, however, was not so much Tonio’s sorry end but the dream of the night before, which still obsessed him. It was the dream that seemed to lead to everything else but back to which and through which
simultaneously everything else seemed to lead. It was the dream he determined to write about, and it was for the sake of the dream that he published the text which he began to compose when he reached home that same afternoon. Its title: “The Dream, the Sphinx, and the Death of T.” Of some two dozen texts written by Giacometti for publication, this is one of the most autobiographically important and provocative, along with “Yesterday, Quicksand.” That it should have been written for Labyrinthe is fitting, as it is intrinsically labyrinthine, repeatedly turning inward upon itself, leading from the dream to other topics but returning via their significance to the dream, which leads to still other topics and eventually to the conclusion that in nothing is there either definite ending or sure meaning, as everything in time and space has simultaneous but elusive being within an incomprehensible continuum, which is, of course, life itself.
Dreams have been considered of great moment in human existence since the remotest time and have recently come to be considered virtually essential to it. Regarding their significance and interpretation, there have been innumerable theories—both before and after Freud—but that the significance is profound there has never been any question. The importance of Giacometti’s dream is affirmed by its persistence in his consciousness and conversation, by his having written it down, and above all by his having published it. He took, in short, the trouble to make certain that nobody interested in his life and work should disregard that dream.
It is generally accepted that in the symbolism of dreams a spider is a representation of the vagina; and a fearsome, threatening spider, of the dangerous, devouring vagina. This symbolism is significantly substantiated by the fact that female spiders are well known to have cannibalistic tendencies. Owing to the smaller size of the male and the greater voracity of the female, the male makes his advances to his mate at the risk of his life and is not infrequently killed and eaten by her after pairing. Aware of the danger, he pays his addresses with caution, often waiting for hours in her vicinity before venturing to come to close quarters. In this context, it is worth recalling that Alberto had made many years before a sculpture he called Woman in the Form of a Spider, which he hung for
some time directly above his bed and which in his creative development led to the Tormented Woman in Her Room at Night and then to the Woman with Her Throat Cut, a trio of works spectacularly contrived to convey, though at the same time to sublimate, psychic anguish, sexual violence, and ferocious hostility to women. In his dream, Alberto is unable to carry out himself his desire to kill the spider. He is, in a word, impotent. The dream then becomes a dream within a dream, suggesting that the anxiety caused by the situation is so great that the dreamer must assure himself it is “only a dream.” An even more monstrous spider appears, though it is not frightening to Annette, who caresses it, whereupon Alberto calls for someone else to kill the creature. He wants a surrogate, a third person, someone more powerful and less fearful than he, someone more potent. But when the deed has been done, realizing that he has caused the destruction of something precious, he hopes to do away with evidence of guilt through the ritual of interment, as he had buried stolen bread in his youth and flung bread into a Venetian canal after the death of van Meurs.
When attempting to grasp the meaning of a dream, it is important to know, if possible, what events came before it in the dreamer’s waking life. Alberto went out of his way to provide the information. He had just discovered that as a consequence of relations with a whore he had contracted a venereal disease and had revealed this condition to his mistress, who laughed and asked to be shown the symptoms, a response one might assume to have been humiliating, if not insulting.
Nightmares frequently occur at times of critical developmental progress and express conflicts associated with these changes. One of the essential characteristics of a dream, however, is that it shall seem meaningless or incomprehensible to the dreamer. If Alberto had understood the significance of his dream, he would never have been prepared to talk about it, write it down, and publish it. He specifically stated that the dream had liberated within him certain long-repressed impulses—such as the desire to write about the death of the Dutchman. He had a powerful urge to see, and to tell, the truth. He needed to reveal himself, to show what he was and why, but always in such a way that full understanding
was deferred, one revelation calling for another, ad infinitum. Creativity is an alternative to the conflicts which cause nightmares. The same mechanism which in dreams governs the elaboration of our strongest though most carefully concealed desires, desires often repugnant to consciousness, also governs the elaboration of works of art.
It would be unthinkable to end the consideration of Alberto’s dream, of which the connotations are anyway all but endless, without wondering what impression “The Dream, the Sphinx, and the Death of T.” may have made upon the author’s mother when it appeared in the December issue of Labyrinthe. Maybe, to be sure, she never saw it. But that possibility cannot have been discounted by her son. Annetta was still in Geneva, where the review was published and for sale. Knowing of Alberto’s association with it, she could very well have bought a copy. Alberto was aware of this. A readiness to accept consequences is presupposed by an author’s willingness to publish. It was perhaps predictable that Annette should laugh and be curious when informed of Alberto’s disease. Even more predictable would have seemed to be Annetta’s consternation if confronted with such a fact and its implications. As to the significance of the entire text, if she had, perhaps, been surprised or shocked by “Yesterday, Quicksand,” the high-principled lady would have been stunned at this latest exercise in self-revelation. How, one must ask, when he knew the risk and yet had always gone to exceptional lengths to keep from his mother any worrisome awareness, how could he have taken the chance? The answer must be that the knowledge, and nature, of the risk made taking the chance inevitable, made it, perhaps, desirable, so that it, too, could be united with the fear, fascination, and fructification of the dream.
Giacometti’s sculptures continued to be tall and slender, their feet lumpish and long. His initial surprise at these radically altered proportions seems quite soon to have become a pleasurable familiarity, for there was no reversion to the dimensions of the figurines. These had been devised to convey the veracity and intensity of a vision by reducing the human image to an extreme which could be perceived
at a glance in its entirety. But this extreme entirety, though it succeeded in creating a truthful and imposing image, failed at the same time to radiate the whole expressive power of a human presence. The problem then was how to achieve this wholeness of expression without any loss of perceptual immediacy. It could not be done by simply enlarging the figurines; their essence had been their tininess, and accordingly an equivalence had to be found which would provide for largeness but preserve the essence. This was thinness. It allowed the eye to embrace the entire figure all at once and to receive an impression of appropriate human stature, while at the same time emphasizing by its style that the impression issues from a work of art. It does more. Whereas in the figurines the dynamism of the image is their whole justification, in the tall, thin figures the dynamism of the material generates a vitality of its own. Giacometti made energetic marks on his materials from this time onward, more vital, visible marks than before, indicating in a tactile, recognizable way how the artist’s fingers were governed by his eyes, which were governed equally by his creation and his vision. Rough, rippling, gouged, granular, the texture of his sculptures, though unlike any human integument, has a glimmering animation all its own. This mobile aspect of the sculptural surface amplifies the appearance of volume by more actively engaging the spectator’s eye, and by concentrating attention on its own vitality it effectively situates the human image at a fixed distance. While becoming larger, Giacometti’s figures, almost all of which are women, have not come any closer, nor have they gained the deceptive solidity of everyday life; size notwithstanding, they are prototypes of physical frailty, unapproachable in their hieratic remoteness.
“What is important,” Alberto said again and again, “is to create an object capable of conveying a sensation as close as possible to the one felt at the sight of the subject.”
That is no simple matter, for the sensation caused by the subject cannot be likened to the one created by the object—and yet must be its likeness—just as the object and subject are of absolutely unlike essence. A drama of conflicting imperatives presides over the perceptual process, in which the subjective view must be reconciled
with the objective. In this context of metaphysical give and take, drawing and painting continued to be increasingly important to Giacometti. The linear, two-dimensional mode made it possible for him to experience and explore more directly the uncertain outcome of every undertaking. From that very uncertainty, he forged a style of paradoxical authority. Nervous, fragile lines, tracing and retracing shapes, are charged with a sense of the artist’s skepticism about the outcome. Giacometti’s drawings convey neither the certainty of forms nor the credibility of appearances but rather the importance of an achievement which is confirmed by the evidence, so to speak, of its failure. In this world there can be no final view of things. Those who claim it are asking for tragedy. Disavowing all probabilities, Alberto undertook each work as a fresh assault on the impossible.