The Lasting Influence of John Berger
Biographers do not advertise themselves as mediums. Still, the fantasy is there—that a book’s subject will rise from its pages, like some stranded ghost, to clap one hand on the writer’s shoulder and the other on the reader’s. It is a fantasy that imparts romance to the work of intruding on the dead: flattering the family, interrogating the neighbors and lovers, sorting through mostly useless documents in the archive. Left unchecked, however, it can turn a biographer into a sentimental illusionist. He touches a finger’s smudge on a letter. He walks into a bedroom and sniffs the air. He seems to see the man himself: his features fine and lined, his white shirt unbuttoned at the top of his chest, his mouth open, as if about to speak.
I am looking at the photograph on the cover of Tom Overton’s “John Berger: From Life,” the second biography of the British art critic and novelist that Verso Books has published since his death, in 2017. The first, Joshua Sperling’s “A Writer of Our Time” (2018), was a brisk study that appraised Berger as a leftist popularizer of the Western tradition in art. Berger made his reputation as a critic by the age of twenty-five, asserting himself in contrast to the patrician figures of his era. A friend recalled how he would pull up to gallery openings on his motorcycle, cigarette dangling from his fingers and “lips always poised for utterance”—against private collectors, museums, and the cold, cerebral designs of abstract art, and for the people, the land, and largely realist paintings of the human body. Berger argued that art should be for everyone, rich or poor, no matter their country or creed. His low, deliberate voice could be heard over the radio and on television—most notably, in the BBC series “Ways of Seeing”—a gorgeous man with a startling impudence of gesture. In the first episode of “Ways of Seeing,” he held a knife and appeared to carve Venus’s head out of Botticelli’s “Venus and Mars.” The series united the country in the simultaneous acts of looking at him and listening to him deliver his judgments. He became known, Overton writes, as “the thrusting, tieless Marxist taking the tweedy establishment down a peg or two.”
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This month marks the centennial of Berger’s birth, with numerous events arranged to celebrate his enduring influence. Overton’s biography arrives on the heels of Verso’s the Essential John Berger, thirteen reissues of various novels and essay collections. To pick through this haul is to realize that Berger’s reputation rests not on a single, incomparable novel, and not even on his sizable and varied œuvre, but on a kind of attitude, adopted since his earliest reviews were published, in the nineteen-fifties. For Berger, the artist did not simply perceive the world; the world trained the artist’s perceptions, teaching him what to look at, from what perspectives, and in what proportions. The artist, in turn, could wield his brush against the world’s accepted values, its tendency to see people from a unitary, fixed perspective. He could paint “old, tired prostitutes” (Toulouse-Lautrec), “holy humble peasants” (Millet), or “the great sexual image of the nude” (Giorgione, Rembrandt, Watteau, Courbet) so that the viewer would glimpse these subjects from an odd angle, with tenderness and clarity. Berger formulated an idiosyncratic notion of Marxist criticism: an evaluation of an artist’s greatness based on whether his creations could “encourage men to know and claim their social rights.”
In reading Berger, one discovers that his Marxist aesthetic is less a doctrine than a vague and ennobling justification for why he liked the art that he did. What makes Berger special are, as he wrote about Picasso, “not his individual works, but his existence, his personality,” his “new ways of looking at the world.” Berger was an ideologue; most charismatic people are. As they age, they risk shrivelling into preachers or bores. Berger was saved from this fate by his restless searching, among mediums and forms, for the purest expression of his way of seeing. His novels, in particular, drew inspiration from Cubism’s use of overlapping perspectives to arrive at a collective sense of reality. In “A Painter of Our Time” (1958), an artist’s enigmatic journal entries are annotated by an art-critic friend. “G.” (1972), which won the Booker Prize, is the story of a seducer, presented in a collage of memories, histories, essays, sheet music, and naughty doodles. The blind narrator of “To the Wedding” (1995) has splintered visions of a father, a mother, and their daughter, who is dying of AIDS. A woman writes anguished letters to her imprisoned lover in “From A to X” (2008). These novels concern very different characters, in very different times and places. But their common subject is human perception, in all its variousness and instability—what Berger heralded as “the functioning of sight itself.”
Overton, who grew close to Berger while cataloguing his archives at the British Library, and who found, in a fallout shelter Berger once used for storage, a tranche of sooty diaries and drafts, had a mass of material from which to sketch a dense and sober portrait. Yet his biography is anything but rigorously archival. Like Berger, Overton wants to create the illusion of a life seen from many different perspectives. He calls his subject “John,” sometimes addressing him directly, and often breaks into the present tense, to speculate about what John is, at this very moment, thinking or feeling. The smallest details are magnified, whereas significant events pass with almost no mention. I could not keep the procession of Berger’s wives and lovers straight, but I did get a vivid impression of the blue window shutters, on which he painted lines from “A Winter’s Tale,” at a house in Gloucestershire where he lived for a time. The biography is as random, repetitive, uneven, and blurred as life itself, which makes it an unusual and exciting experiment, if not an entirely successful one.
Overton recalls Berger snarling, “My fucking biography.” Not very comradely, John. But one respects his resistance to a genre whose conventions he resisted so strenuously in his novels—in particular, the heroic individualism of an exceptional protagonist. One respects, too, Overton’s effort to graft Berger’s literary techniques onto the story of his life, as if to revive his consciousness in the present. “John liked the idea of stories as a way of rebuilding the connection with the dead,” Overton writes. “What he did uniquely was to use paintings, drawings, photographs to drill holes in time.” Biography can also open a portal between past and present, admitting the ghost. He is here, hunched over the biographer as he writes.
Berger rarely spoke about his childhood. His only extended pieces of writing about it are two essays, “Mother” (1986) and “Ulysses” (1991). His mother, Miriam, the daughter of a warehouse foreman in South London, was a thrifty and secretive woman who reminded Berger of an agouti, a kind of Latin American rodent that he once saw at London Zoo. Stanley, his father, was a fastidious petit-bourgeois boy from Liverpool. An aspiring Anglican priest, Stanley had left theological college at the beginning of the First World War, to enlist. After the Armistice, he worked at the Institute of Cost and Works Accountants, ascending its ranks—by 1941, Berger wrote, he was doing “work for the government on the question of how to increase factory production.” Priestly and actuarial leanings conspired to make Stanley an anxious father. He audited his son’s reading, for fear that the boy’s soul would come to a bad end. When Berger was fourteen, Stanley confiscated his copy of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and locked it in a safe. Berger retaliated by painting a diabolic portrait of his father “with the colors of Mephistopheles.”
Still, the impression one gets is of a typically mid-century English upbringing: rigid, reserved, irreproachable. After his parents died, Berger contemplated writing an autobiography so that he might keep their company a little longer. “Yet I have no wish to do so,” he wrote. “All that interests me about my past life are the common moments. The moments—which if I relate them well enough—will join countless others lived by people I do not personally know.” This is the sort of declaration that makes the biographer’s heart sink, before he rolls up his sleeves and gets to work padding things out. From the records of the War Office, Overton tracks Stanley’s battalion through the French trenches. In court filings, he discovers that Miriam was married before, to a man named Alfred, who suffered from “frigidity and impotence.” The meteorological report issued for the month of the Bergers’ wedding documents shifting winds. Overton’s account of Berger’s birth, on November 5, 1926, Guy Fawkes Day, is pure, overwrought conjecture:
Berger was sent to St. Edward’s School in Oxford, where he scowled and wrote morbid little stories. With only a smattering of childhood diary entries and letters to hand, Overton cites “boarding-school syndrome” to explain his surliness. Berger’s own descriptions are cheekier, more self-ironizing. “I was in revolt against Caesar, whose histories I had to read, the school chaplain, the school barber who cut my hair too short, middle-class philistinism that had no time for poetry and art, the Officer’s Training Corps,” he wrote. He read Labour Monthly and wore a hammer-and-sickle pin in the buttonhole of his school jacket. His parents and teachers assumed, improbably, that he would stay in Oxford and attend the university that had minted colonial administrators like so many dirty banknotes. Instead, he won a scholarship to London’s Central School of Arts and Crafts, where he studied for just over a year before being called up to the Army, in 1944. Aiming to get himself “psycho’d out” of service, he burned himself with cigarettes and ended up manning the library at a military psychiatric hospital near Belfast.
Returning to London when the war was over, Berger began to paint in earnest. His work was featured in several exhibitions, with modest success. When he met an illustrator named Pat Marriott, she represented for him a kind of limitless “physical freedom.” In 1949, they married and immediately clashed over money: he wanted to spend his days at the bell foundry in Croydon, drawing the workers’ hands as they adjusted pulleys and chains; she wanted him to write for magazines, which, in those days, paid quite well. An early essay, “Drawing,” from 1953, stages a rapprochement of sorts. Berger describes sketching a nude model as a delicate interplay between looking and sensing the pressure of each pencil stroke, one after the other, turning “the infinite, opaque possibilities of the blank page” into a “particular and lucid” image. “I saw that the line down the center of the torso, from the pit of the neck, between the nipples, over the navel and between the legs, was like the keel of a boat,” he writes.
As a draftsman, he was a sensualist, enraptured by the human body and scornful of abstraction. As a critic, primarily for the The New Statesman, he railed against Pollock’s “great walls of silver, pink, new gold, pale blue nebulae,” signs of a decadent culture whose artists refused to connect with the public. A lumpy Henry Moore sculpture of a woman in repose expressed “nothing about the way a body moves, grows or is controlled.” But Poussin’s nymphs, Courbet’s nudes, and Goya’s “Maja” struck him with an “intensely sensuous vision of the human body” and protested against its unfreedom in the modern economic order.
Berger’s polemics received a more astringent airing in his first novel, “A Painter of Our Time.” The book is presented as the journal of Janos, a proud and neglected Hungarian painter. Janos cannot bear the corruption and greed of London’s curators and collectors. Yet he has no desire to return to Budapest and become a “professional revolutionary,” surrendering his canvases to socialist-realist kitsch. He is a kind of double émigré: there is no country where he can reconcile the demands of his artistic ambition with the obligation he feels to serve mankind in its struggle for a more just social order. “We become half-men, sophisticates, cynics, time-servers,” Janos writes. “Such half-men abound in this society, for it is a society incapable of recognizing or using the capabilities of a vast majority of its citizens.” His entries are interspersed with commentary from his art-critic friend John. In italicized sections around the journal entries, John tells a story that grounds Janos’s abstract ideas in believable figures. Together, these two half-men create a whole picture of the vexed position of the socialist artist in a capitalist world.
“A Painter of Our Time” seeded the idées fixes that Berger would tend for the next half century. Among them was the nude as “a revolutionary subject.” The nude was a pictorial genre that, historically, turned a woman’s naked form into an “erotic ornament,” and was “closely associated with values of tact, luxury and wealth.” The artists Berger admired painted nudes that negated these values, whether through choice of subject—the “ ‘vulgar’ nakedness” of Courbet’s countrywoman washing her clothes in a river—or through choice of style, as with Rubens’s “compulsive painting of the softness of fat flesh.” Berger ascribed a similarly revolutionary potential to sex. To unleash this potential, the artist would have to lay bare “the shared subjectivity of sex,” a phrase that Berger repeated across several essays and defined as the way two people in bed can jointly inhabit a reality available to no one else.
“It is easy enough to treat sex as a comic aspect of John’s life, or in some ways a reprehensible one,” Overton writes. “It caused plenty of hurt.” The exact timing of this “hurt,” of Berger’s many flirtations and infidelities, is difficult to follow. Berger eventually divorced Pat Marriott to marry Lady Rosemary Kilmarnock, whom he had met when she purchased one of his paintings. Then, in 1958, he divorced Kilmarnock to marry Anya Bostock, a Russian translator with whom he had corresponded for years. Together, they moved to Geneva—she could get good translating work there, and Berger was keen to leave England behind—and had two children. He dedicated his next three books to her: two novels of British middle-class life, “The Foot of Clive” (1962) and “Corker’s Freedom” (1964), and his moving nonfiction account of an English country doctor, “A Fortunate Man” (1967). Even in that book, when the bodies being documented are in disrepair, eros comes crashing through. “Her overworked brown arms, her deeply lined face, her creased strained neck were suddenly denied by the whiteness of her breast,” Berger writes, of a wheezing old woman who will die later that day.
Given Berger’s appetite for women—“He considers making love to be the most worthwhile thing in life,” an acquaintance said—Overton’s attention to the dead seems suspiciously partial. He promises to be forthright about sex. Most biographical writing about Berger has tried to “politely ignore it and pretend we can just talk about the work,” he chides. But, in the main, Overton represses sexuality as a momentous force in Berger’s writing and one crucial to his political imagination. This repression ricochets onto the biographer himself; there is an uninterrogated Oedipal longing that has driven many men on the left to adore and emulate Berger. If Berger had stayed merely an art critic and an experimental novelist, then he would not have been the subject of a biography animated by such a distracting desire for his physical company.
For that, Berger had to become a celebrity, an irresistible and unparalleled public figure. His ascent to fame took place in 1972, with two triumphs: the broadcast of “Ways of Seeing” and the publication of “G.” “Ways of Seeing” was a sensation, the first time a British socialist had commandeered a medium as diffuse as “telly” to comment on culture. The first episode was an elegant distillation of Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”: The visual arts had originated as a form of magic, of divine revelation. Then their authority became inseparable from wealth, from the palaces, museums, and fine homes where art works were displayed. Now, Berger explained, images of art had become “ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free.” What was needed was a corresponding change in how images could be used to connect “a people or class” to its past.
The most thrilling of the episodes was the second, on the history of the nude:
From this split self, Berger derived a distinction between nakedness and nudity. To be naked is simply to be oneself, but to be nude is “to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself.” The best paintings manage to turn nudity into nakedness by rendering the body as “impossibly dynamic,” creating a play of light and shadow that deepens the mystery of the sitter’s innermost self as much as it reveals her outer figure.
Much the same words appear in “G.,” Berger’s fragmentary novel about a modern Don Juan whose sexual escapades, in the decades before the First World War, take place against a backdrop of mass uprisings. G. is a vector of history. His father is a nouveau-riche Italian candied-fruit manufacturer, a fat, philandering capitalist, his mother an American heiress who becomes a Fabian socialist. G. is raised in the English countryside by his mother’s family and is seduced by his aunt Beatrice, whose sadistic husband was killed in the Boer Wars. This seduction establishes the blueprint for what follows—that sex will oppose violent, imperial conquest. G. swiftly alights on a series of women: an Italian hotel maid in Brig, where crowds gather to see if a young aviator will be the first to successfully fly across the Pennine Alps; a bourgeois Parisian in Domodossola; a Slovenian peasant and an Austrian diplomat’s wife in Trieste, during clashes there between Italians and Slavs. His seductions seem to gain their exquisitely attentive energy from the people’s anger and hope.
G. is maneuvered around Europe by a peculiarly restless omniscient narrator who may be, in one moment, far removed from the action—in a monoplane circling the Matterhorn, say—and, in the next, under the covers with G. and a woman. Often, the narrator breaks off the story to deliver an aperçu, cite a news headline, draw a dirty picture, or speak to readers in the first person, from Paris in 1972, where he shaves and picks up his dry cleaning. Berger is as present in the novel as he was on television, and he never lets his readers forget that he has deliberately selected the Don Juan story to reveal that political freedom and sexual pleasure are atmospherically connected. But he also cleverly updates the tale. Don Juan is a callous seducer, resented by the women he has deceived and dragged off to Hell for his sins. Berger’s libertine is a liberator, a vehicle of pleasure. He elicits a reciprocal exchange of gazes: sensuous, precise, and awed, equally desiring and equally vulnerable. Both he and the woman have to appear singularly naked, not nude, before each other.
Ben Lerner, in an introduction to a recent reissue of “G.” (New York Review Books), seems to shuffle his feet and look down at the ground, all but apologizing for the novel’s emphasis on sexual penetration. Well, what of it? Berger’s vision of sex hinges not on what goes where but on the shared experience of reality that sex creates. His grammar of sex privileges verbs over nouns. “Applied to the central moment of sex, all written nouns denote their objects in such a way that they reject the meaning of the experience,” he writes. Whereas “sexual verbs (fuck, frig, suck, kiss, etc., etc.) remain less foreign than the nouns,” as they illuminate the shifting “relation between subject and object.” Isolating a moment in sex makes as much sense as isolating a note in an opera, or a sentence in a novel. Each moment derives its meaning from the moments leading up to it, and from the moments that follow. One judges not the individual parts or the positions but the collective rhythm.
In “G.,” the experience of sexual rhythm is writ large, onto the form of the novel itself. “G.” moves entirely to its own beat. Its sudden shocks and its dramatic leaps in time and place are interleaved with calmer reveries on the revolutionary arc of history. Just as the rhythms of sex convert a single, fixed subjectivity into a shared, dynamic one, so, Berger writes, do mass demonstrations “manifest a greater freedom and independence—greater creativity” than anyone could achieve “individually or collectively when pursuing their regular lives.”
Berger joked that the novel’s utopian coupling of political and sexual desire would make him into a “marxist Stendhal.” When it won the Booker Prize, Berger found the award intolerable, because it had been endowed by a family whose wealth came from plantations in Guyana. The stirring, outrageous climax of Overton’s biography is a present-tense vignette of Berger drunkenly rejecting the prize at the Booker’s celebration dinner and pledging to donate half of his winnings to the Black Panthers of Britain. “That speech is why you became famous enough for your archive to go to the national library in the city of your birth, why I end up cataloguing it, and why I find myself speaking to you now,” Overton writes.
“Is it your best year?” Overton asks. “The next though, 1973, is certainly your worst, the year I find it hardest to respect you.” There had been plenty of affairs—Nella Bielski, Annar Cassam, Lorraine Gill (the names pile up, meaninglessly)—but 1973 was the year that Berger left Anya Bostock and their two young children for Beverly Bancroft, the scion of a prominent Californian family. Having previously read Sperling’s biography, I had no strong judgments about Berger’s treatment of women. It was hardly a shock to learn that men on the left did not extend the same principles of equality and nonexploitation to their wives that they did to mankind in the abstract—that they could be unfaithful or abandon their children, citing, all the while, the punishingly conventional nature of marriage. I was, however, shocked that Overton sees fit to absolve his subject. “Perhaps you didn’t do what was expected of contemporary fathers, but you were there,” he writes. The dead rarely come back as we would like them to. They are covered by the grime and the stink of life. It is not the biographer’s job to wipe them clean.
In 1974, Berger and Bancroft moved to Quincy, a village in the French Alps, where he lived until shortly before his death. He shovelled shit and tended to animals and wrote the loose novels that made up his “Into Their Labors” trilogy: “Pig Earth” (1979), “Once in Europa” (1983), and “Lilac and Flag” (1990). In Quincy, Berger wrote as if he had been transported to a simpler time, when wandering storytellers told tales by the fire and the landscapes of Courbet and Millet had not yet been ravaged by industrial capitalism. Yet these peasant fictions—their local vistas and workaday rhythms, their folksy dialogue and descriptions shorn bare as sheep—feel more affected than the painterly daubs and flourishes that Berger now renounced.
In interviews, Berger described his turn to the pastoral as the outgrowth of his “Romantic Marxism.” Overton seizes on the figure of the Romantic Marxist as a historical type, aiming to replace a “mushy reverence” for Berger among the British left with a more concrete case for his significance. But what type of person is a Romantic Marxist? A class-conscious libertine? A womanizer who supports women’s lib? The vague and stentorian tone of Berger’s late political pronouncements provides a clue. He came out on the side of what was good: the rights of animals, peasants, migrants, political prisoners. He showed no deep interest, however, in the particulars of their histories. If he typified anything, it was not a Romantic Marxist but what the late Hungarian philosopher G. M. Tamás called a Rousseauian socialist: an intellectual devoted to equality among the people, but without a radical commitment to class abolition. Berger longed, instead, to return to “a more natural (and with luck, completely natural) way of life” and championed “the folk-art virtues.”
Class was an abstraction, and Berger hated abstraction. “The people,” however, could be embodied, drawn close to and lived among. But his peasant fictions sapped his writing of its revolutionary energy and replaced it with a moral imperative. The aim was not a way of seeing—sharply, dialectically—but a way of living, nostalgically. Yet Berger had long anticipated this criticism. In “A Painter of Our Time,” the director of a London gallery dismisses Janos as a “Desperate Optimist”: “They’re sentimentalists at heart. They idealize what’s called The People. But, believe me, people just aren’t like that.” The final act of Berger’s life argued otherwise, with a desperate optimism of the will. A little more pessimism of the intellect would have been most welcome. ♦