Behind Blue Eyes
.
John Berger: From Life, Tom Overton, Allen Lane, 2026, 400 pages, £25.00
.
John Berger was an essayist, novelist, journalist, memoirist and screenwriter, but he was originally and always an art critic, and as a critic he never hid the fact that he saw art first of all as a product and instrument of politics. ‘We can only make sense of art’, he writes in the introduction to his 1960 collection of essays Permanent Red, ‘if we judge it by the criterion of whether or not it helps men to claim their social rights.’
The artists he felt might help men claim these rights tended to be representational painters who depicted working life, such as Josef Herman and L. S. Lowry (whose work he called ‘a potential seedbed for the emergence of a realist art based on humanitarian socialist values’). His first book, published in East Germany, was about Sicilian Communist painter Renato Guttuso. The artists he disapproved of included such decadent bourgeois as Jackson Pollock (‘the equivalent of the monkey on the typewriter’), Francis Bacon (‘a brilliant stage manager rather than an original visual artist’) and even, ultimately, Picasso, whose genius Berger considered wasted because he ‘sacrificed everything to ideas which are not worthy of the sacrifice’.
These judgements are not very inspiring, and if they were all you knew about Berger, you would be perfectly justified in writing him off as an ideological scold. Even at the end of his long career, there were those who thought of him this way. But in fact not a page of his work reads like that of a doctrinaire Marxist. Berger’s writing is exquisitely sensitive to the pleasures of art and to the sensuous world in general. He wrote movingly about supermarkets, cows, moonshine brandy, Italy, olive trees, refugee camps, Millet and Cézanne, Turner and Matisse. He wrote about Pollock, Bacon and Picasso passionately and repeatedly. The same person who declared that in European art ‘painting becomes the metaphorical act of appropriation’, could describe an evening scene drawn by Millet ‘absorbing dusk like dunked bread absorbs coffee’ or Turner’s painting Peace – Burial at Sea as ‘like an image of a wound being cauterized’.
It’s hard to think of another writer whose work swings so rapidly between dogmatism and brilliance. When he visits a Palestinian refugee camp, he comes as a fellow traveller and writes admiringly about suicide bombers. But he also watches children playing in an alley and notices that ‘[t]he dexterity with which the boys flick a marble with one thumb, the rest of the body motionless, is not unconnected with the familiarity of very cramped spaces.’ In an essay about food, ‘The Eaters and the Eaten’, he declares with a straight face that ‘[t]he bourgeois overeats. Especially meat. A psychosomatic explanation may be that his highly developed sense of competition compels him to protect himself with a source of energy – proteins.’ But in his novel G., he mentions that the ‘smell of gun oil, for all its graphite, has something about it of the smell of butter in shortbread or pastry when they are still very hot in an iron oven.’
This tension – between committed Marxist and born aesthete – can be felt in nearly every one of his books and sometimes within a single essay. His long and productive life, as described in John Berger: From Life, a new biography by Tom Overton, seems to have been full of similar tensions. Berger really did wish for men to claim their social rights, yet he refused to condemn the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956. He was a confident public speaker but apparently took so much anti-anxiety medication that during particularly stressful periods ‘he rattled as he moved’. He seems to have been both a feminist and a womaniser. He was friends with his exes. For periods of his life he divided his time openly between different women in different cities. He was famous but lived mostly in a remote village in the French Alps. He was apparently charming and seductive despite almost totally lacking a sense of humour. And perhaps most surprisingly, despite his uncompromising Marxism, he emerged from the twentieth century an uncontroversial and much-admired figure, achieving in old age ‘the status of world elder’, as Joshua Sperling, an earlier biographer, put it.
How did he do it? One hundred years after his birth, with many of his books being reissued for the occasion, a biography that tried to understand some of the contradictions in Berger’s life and work would be valuable indeed. John Berger: From Life is not that book. It is well researched and often lively, and you can’t read it without learning an enormous amount about Berger’s life and times. But it’s a kind of authorised biography, written by a Berger protégé, and will be of interest mainly to those who already love Berger and agree with his politics. Berger is quite beloved and this is not a small number of people. Even by this standard, though, Overton’s book could have done with a little more distance from its subject.
Berger was born in London in 1926 to middle-class parents. His father was an accountant with the civil service, a child of Jewish immigrants from Hungary. Berger went to the exclusive St Edward’s School, Oxford (which he later described as ‘an absolutely monstrous place, a little totalitarian system’), and then, after a brief period in the army, to art school in London, where he trained as a painter. He had some success as an artist in his early twenties but soon switched to writing, partly because it was more directly political and partly because he was newly married and worried about money, and writing paid better. His columns in the New Statesman launched his career, and soon he began writing novels. His public success peaked in the 1970s with his hit TV series Ways of Seeing and his novel G., which won the Booker Prize, but his productivity, stylistic experimentation and political engagement never flagged.
Tom Overton was Berger’s archivist. He catalogued Berger’s papers at the British Library while he was still alive and after Berger’s death discovered two more big suitcases worth of diaries, drafts, letters and miscellany from the 1960s in his ex-wife Anya’s basement in Geneva. He has obviously read the archive carefully and lovingly. There are many great finds in From Life – for example, the transcript to some of Berger’s first broadcasts, a series of ten-minute talks from 1950 titled ‘Calling West Africa’ in which he discussed a few of the paintings in the National Gallery in London for the BBC West African service. This lecture, written and read by the twenty-four-year-old Berger, is, in Overton’s description, already perfectly Bergerian: ‘assured, confident, fully formed’, combining a strong left wing sensibility with appreciation for the individual painters he discusses (including the ones he disapproves of). Overton observes how, from the beginning of his career as a broadcaster, the future Ways of Seeing star had the ability to establish a sense of intimacy with his audience, and even invites us to imagine the scene:
[S]witching on a radio set in Mombasa or Nairobi, the scared, lonely wife of a colonial officer, or the child brought up on textbooks from a place they’d never been, could have home, built word-by-word around them by the voice of a clever young man who couldn’t pronounce his r’s.
Overton is at his best here, combining careful research, thoughtful analysis and imagination. He knows how to use his broad reading to render Berger’s life vividly. When he discusses his early career, he can describe the New Statesman’s ‘absurd multi-issue letters-page arguments’ that Berger’s polemical reviews tended to provoke. Later on, he gives a memorable description of the 1972 Booker Prize dinner at which Berger announced, to the outraged heckling of the assembled literati, that he was giving half the prize money to the Black Panthers. Overton lists all the alcohol available at each table and concludes, ‘People have no real excuse for not knowing what’s about to happen, but they’re all hammered.’
The conditions seem to be in place for a very good biography. The problem is that Overton has attempted something more ambitious than a straight biography: a sort of poetic homage to Berger in a style inspired by Berger’s own. Overton’s prose has the genre-bending looseness of Berger’s later work, which mixed philosophical asides, theoretical digressions and personal reflections. It also has Berger’s earnestness and lack of irony. But Berger balanced this wondering mood with forceful arguments and a kind of rage for precise observation. Overton’s writing lacks these qualities and too often feels slack, if not downright sloppy. ‘What he did uniquely’, Overton writes of Berger, ‘was to use paintings, drawings, photographs to drill holes in time, to make channels to the future as much as to the past.’ What does this mean? An editor should have pressed Overton to make descriptions like this clearer, or to cut them. Too many passages sound fluffy like this – for example, when Overton writes about Berger’s love of motorcycle riding:
It’s about absorption. You find yourself stilled by speed, calmed by the total, instant connection of thought and action, mind and body […] some of the calm of riding the bike comes from the sense of extreme danger, which is, for you, a little like orgasm, and only a little tilt to either side away from death.
These musings only draw attention to the biographer and distance us from Berger. If he told Overton all this in person, it seems to me Overton should say so and preferably quote him.
Overton has also borrowed Berger’s technique of addressing his reader or subject directly, referring to Berger either as ‘John’ or ‘you’ throughout the book. In Berger’s hands this can communicate a sense of urgency, as if we were right there in the room with him while he tried to figure out some problem of art or politics. In Overton’s book it comes off as an affectation that reminds us that the biographer is too close to his subject. Here he is, for example, writing about Berger’s complicated love life, specifically a period in the 1970s when he left his third wife, Beverly Bancroft, for the French actress Nella Bielski:
I sat with you once, across the table from Nella Bielski in Paris, asking the two of you about how you met. You shot the same glance at each other which you must have done then, across her husband’s shoulder as you handed him your review of the film she’d starred in, Les Gauloises bleues. You went back the next day with flowers. For the next ten years, the rest of life was in your way. Until, suddenly, in the summer of 1978, it isn’t any more. If you really have the confidence and generosity of multiple love, why didn’t you tell Beverly?
Why indeed. We hardly need Overton to condemn Berger as a philanderer or provide scandalous details about his marriage, but this description has a suspiciously gauzy feel, as though we were seeing his life in soft focus. Throughout, Overton writes as if it were understood that we all loved Berger and wouldn’t want to know anything unpleasant about him. He tactfully declines to ask uncomfortable questions. So: how did the idealistic Berger feel about leaving Beverly and their young son Yves, with whom it seems he only reestablished a relationship much later? What did he have to say later about his own more questionable political stances – declining to support Salman Rushdie after the 1989 fatwa against him, for example? What of his depressions and nervous breakdowns, which Overton mentions only in passing? We never find out. Nor do we get much of a sense of what Berger was like in person, even though Overton spent quite a lot of time with him over several years. I would have loved to know what the wide-eyed, guileless-looking world elder was actually like to be around: puttering around his garage, visiting with neighbours and ex-wives and Arundhati Roy, giving drawing lessons and interviews. Overton witnessed all these things but has almost nothing to report. When in a rare physical description he mentions Berger’s ‘Chaplin-like capacity for physical silliness that simply won’t go into the pages of a book’, my patience just about gave out. ‘Well, try, Tom!’ I wanted to cry.
It is natural for a biographer to admire or even love his subject, and a good biography doesn’t have to expose anyone’s sins. But what From Life is missing is any sense that Overton wants to see past Berger’s public persona or to know him any better than he cared to be known. Overton’s work poring over Berger’s papers and tracking down the people who knew him is extremely impressive, but his lack of curiosity prevents him from using this information to illuminate his subject, and the book’s sometimes sentimental tone and undisciplined writing can end up obscuring it.
If From Life leaves the reader a little in the dark about what Berger was really like, though, this is not entirely Overton’s fault. Berger was, it seems, difficult to know. Quoting the Irish journalist Nuala O’Faolain, who had a brief affair with Berger in the 1970s, Overton writes that he was ‘the only writer she met who looked and behaved like “a writer” all the time […] there was no difference between the persona on the page and off it.’ Ben Lerner, in an obituary of Berger in the New Yorker, writes, of meeting him, that ‘a silence surrounded him – the silence produced by the total absence of small talk, flattery, posturing, etc.’. One can, in a faint way, perceive this silence in his televised interviews, in which, whether talking to a BBC presenter or a panel of British women for Ways of Seeing or a sceptical-looking Susan Sontag, Berger never jokes or preens or bullshits but tries to answer every question and address every argument as precisely and sincerely as he can. He is so beautifully blue-eyed and earnest that you start longing for him to wink, laugh at himself, roll his eyes or just space out and look bored for a moment. He never does. Nor does he do so in his work, through which one searches in vain for a grain of salt, for irony, self-doubt, world-weariness or any other leavening impurity. This unadulterated quality can make his writing difficult, too strong to take in large doses. But it is also what accounts for its wonderful poise and freshness, for Berger’s ability, as the Irish critic Brian Dillon puts it, ‘to seem always a beginner’. I think of this line from Pig Earth, one of his novels of French village life:
The flight of these birds is like a line of stitches, they beat their wings as fast as butterflies and with this they gain height; then they glide and lose height till they beat their wings again and begin another stitch.
Just about everything he wrote has moments like this, where his attention to the visible world verges on the ecstatic. His best books, like Pig Earth or A Seventh Man, his reportage on migrants, combine these observations with great sympathy for his subjects. Too many of Berger’s fans, I think, accept at face value his image as a left-wing sage, ignoring his ideological blind spots and his sometimes exasperating taste for abstractions. But there was obviously some truth to this image. Certainly this is what sages do: stand in mountain pastures and watch birds stitch the air.
.
.
Aaron Labaree’s work has appeared in Boston Review, Literary Review and elsewhere. He lives in New York.
To read this and more, buy our latest print issue here, or subscribe to receive a copy of The London Magazine to your door every two months, while also enjoying full access to our extensive digital archive of essays, literary journalism, fiction and poetry.