John Berger: Selected Essays of John Berger

John Berger’s achievements as a writer are both widely recognised and — because of their diversity — difficult to grasp. Even admirers tend to know him in only one or two of his many incarnations. The questions ‘Which is his best book?’ or ‘Which book should I read first?’ are unanswerable. It is the entire body of work that is remarkable; no single volume represents Berger adequately. However, the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday, in November 2001, provided a timely opportunity to try to come up with just such a book.

Throughout his working life Berger has written essays. Far from being adjuncts to the main body of work, these essays are absolutely central to it. Many of the ideas in the ground-breaking book and TV series Ways of Seeing — ideas which have since become part of our received cultural knowledge — were presented first and, in some ways, more sensitively, in essays for New Society. Polemical, meditative, radical, always original (‘The moment at which a piece of music begins provides a clue to the nature of all art’), Berger’s essays are, of course, extremely wide-ranging. It is not just that he has written on photographers, artists, thinkers and peasants, on zoos, museums and cities he has travelled to; these diverse concerns are often combined in the course of a single essay. Taken together, however, this signature variegation emphasises the continuities that have underpinned more than forty years of tireless intellectual inquiry and fierce political engagement. Viewed chronologically they do not simply show how his views have changed or how his thought has evolved; they add up to a kind of vicarious autobiography and a history of our time as refracted through the prism of art.

More than any other writer of the post-war period, it is Berger who has explored and expanded the possibilities of the essay. Essays by the usually cited contemporary masters of the form such as Gore Vidal or John Updike are marked by apparently effortless eloquence. In Berger’s case, by contrast, we come close to witnessing thought as an act of almost physical labour. Partly this is due to his refusal to separate the two concerns that have dominated his life and work: the enduring mystery of great art and the lived experience of the oppressed (the two come together most clearly in his essay on Joyce’s Ulysses ). Partly it is due to a determination to present complex ideas in the plainest possible language. This has not been without its ironic consequences. In 1980 Berger recommended John Barrell’s The Dark Side of the Landscape to ‘all those interested in how class ideology produces cultural codes’. He concluded that, together with T. J. Clark, Barrell lent hope to the idea ‘that an internationally relevant English school of radical art history studies may be in the making’. The prophecy was no sooner uttered than it was fulfilled and betrayed. The ‘radical art history’ that Berger had done so much to usher in quickly barricaded itself in the cultural-studies departments of polytechnics and universities where second-rate Eagletons discoursed away in the confident belief that no one with any sense was likely to be paying attention. Nietzsche was right: ‘Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity; those who would like to seem profound … strive for obscurity.’

Berger was one of the first British writers to absorb the influence of Europeans such as Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin whose work helped lay the foundations for media studies and so forth. The fact that he has lived abroad since the early sixties reinforces the notion of Berger as a European rather than English writer, one who has more in common with Sartre or Camus than with Kingsley Amis. Fair enough, but it is also possible to trace a highly selective, specifically English line of descent. Richard Holmes’s description of Shelley applies just as readily to Berger:

a writer in the most comprehensive sense: poet, essayist, dramatist, pamphleteer, translator, reviewer and correspondent. He was moreover a writer who moved everywhere with a sense of ulterior motive, a sense of greater design, an acute feeling for the historical moment and an overwhelming consciousness of his duty as an artist in the immense and fiery process of social change of which he knew himself to be a part.

Holmes goes on to observe that ‘the encroaching condition of exile plays a highly significant part in his story’. Then there is D. H. Lawrence, another nomadic self-exile with a similarly unruly output. It is no surprise that for a man of Berger’s generation Lawrence was a vitally important figure — especially, as Berger once remarked, because of ‘his hatred of England’. More relevant in this context are Lawrence’s essays, their polemical intermingling of autobiography and art — never more evident than in his ‘Introduction to These Paintings’ — generating surges of wild illumination. Finally there is George Orwell, another writer in the ‘comprehensive sense’ intended by Holmes. Orwell felt that historical circumstances — the unavoidable awareness ‘of the enormous injustice and misery of the world’ — had led him away from ‘a purely aesthetic attitude’ to life and literature and forced him ‘into becoming a sort of pamphleteer’. The ‘invasion of literature by politics’ may have been inevitable but Orwell was somewhat grudging about having to forgo the single-minded literary devotion of Henry James in favour of the manifold obligations of pamphleteering (though his distinction as a writer depends precisely on this abandonment). For Berger, there was no tension or regret on this score. Responding to his critics in a letter to the New Statesman (4 April 1953) he insisted that ‘far from my dragging politics into art, art has dragged me into politics’. In a poem published nine years later in Labour Monthly , he declared:

Men go backwards or forwards.

There are two directions

But not two sides.

Differences aside (and there are, of course, many), what unites Shelley, Lawrence, Orwell and Berger — not a tradition but a trajectory — is the way that they arranged their lives in such a way as to seek out the experiences appropriate to their respective gifts. Each embodies what Nietzsche considered ‘something very rare but a thing to take delight in: a man with a finely constituted intellect who has the character, the inclinations and also the experiences appropriate to such an intellect’.

In Berger’s case the dilemma famously and falsely encapsulated by Yeats — perfection of the man or the work — is resolved in a fashion similar to that suggested by Camus. ‘The problem,’ Camus confided in his notebooks, ‘is to acquire that knowledge of life (or rather to have lived) which goes beyond the mere ability to write. So that in the last analysis the great artist is first and foremost a man who has lived greatly (it being understood that in this case living also implies thinking about life — that living is in fact precisely this subtle relationship between experience and our awareness of it).’ In keeping with this tentative credo, Berger’s essays are all the time testing his life, probing and assessing it. Particularly in the later works his writing is, if you like, a measure of how far he has gone beyond the mere ability to write.

Although Berger claims that ‘all that interests me about my past life are the common moments’, many of the essays depend on an interrogation of the contingency of his own experience — an undertaking that brings us close to the characteristic preoccupations of many novelists. Much of Berger’s fiction up to and including the Booker-winning G is discursive, analytical, essayistic; his essays, on the other hand, are often marked by the kind of narrative drive associated with fiction. In a 1984 interview he said that ‘even when I was writing on art, it was really a way of telling stories’ (an impulse that finds eventual expression in the trilogy Into Their Labours and To the Wedding ). Not surprisingly, then, the picture of the storyteller in the essay ‘A Story for Aesop’ is also a reflected self-portrait. ‘He observes, watches, recognises, listens to what surrounds him and is exterior to him, and at the same time he ponders within, ceaselessly arranging what he has perceived, trying to find a sense which goes beyond the five senses with which he was born.’