“Perspective centres everything on the eye of the beholder. It’s like a beam of light from a lighthouse, only instead of light travelling outwards, appearances travel in.” John Berger, speaking to camera in the first episode of his 1972 BBC television series Ways of Seeing, is conscious of saying something arrestingly different from the kind of thing art critics usually say.
With his loose, cotton-print shirt and tousled hair, he presents an antithesis to the grey-suited Sir Kenneth Clark, whose series Civilisation, shown on the BBC only three years earlier, served as a benchmark for the kind of “seeing” Berger wants to supersede. Clark’s very presence embodied a cultural tradition in which works of art were approached with reverence and the critic’s job was to enhance that mystique.
Berger was riding a wave of generational change: he was the beneficiary of expanding budgets in public broadcasting and a buoyant phase in literary publishing. The book of essays based on his series became a bestseller and a defining text for students in the burgeoning discipline of cultural studies.
He and his ways of seeing appealed to young readers and audiences who were only too keen to abandon cultural solemnity but all too ready to transfer the reverence to Berger himself. Looking back on it now, the trail-blazing persona comes across as overblown and, dare I say it, pretentious. The upper-crust accent, the exaggerated intonations and hand gestures, are those of someone striving for effect.
If daring is called for in admitting to this impression, it’s because the reverence endures and has, if anything, grown stronger over the decades. Two new books testify to Berger’s deep and abiding influence on people’s lives. Both also serve as counterpoints to the image of Berger the radical art critic and television personality.
Iona Heath, author of John Berger: Ways of Learning, is a London GP whose vocational commitment was formed in response to Berger’s A Fortunate Man, which she first read as a medical student soon after its publication in the late 1960s. It is, she says, “the best book ever written about general practice.” She is not the only doctor whose career orientation was inspired by Berger’s account of the life of a local GP on the edge of Gloucestershire’s Forest of Dean.
Although his fortunate man is given a pseudonym, the book is essentially a documentary. In collaboration with landscape photographer Jean Mohr, he seeks to communicate the lived realities of a place he chose as an adopted home when the cultural milieu of the London intelligentsia began to pall early in his career.
Berger’s technique of “going in as close as you dare” — as he described it in a BBC interview — is demonstrated in an opening scene in which the doctor has been called to help rescue a man trapped by a falling tree. The effect of the prose is cinematic: the camera tracks a vehicle moving over rough ground on a hillside, the line of fencing barely visible in the mist, to the accident site where the patient is still screaming his lungs out. Extracting him involves prolonged manual labour, followed in close-up.
All this was a world away from the art galleries and television studios in which Berger continued his double life. As a cultural refugee from middle-class England, his quest to immerse himself more deeply in a life “wrested from the earth” had led him first to the Forest of Dean and then in the early 1970s, to join the peasants of Quincy in the Haute-Savoie region of the French alps. He exchanged a culture of progress for a culture of survival among people who had developed their own unwritten laws, codes of belief, traditions of knowledge — and medicine.
Berger’s influence, says Heath, taught her how to look and how to listen to other lives. While the doctor/patient relationship might be encapsulated in brief consultations — just as the still photograph breaks the flow of events — the healer’s continuity of care is a potent medicine in itself. Heath’s engagement with Berger’s work is itself an important continuity in her career.
The process of reading and rereading became a meditative discipline so dedicated that Heath learned many passages by heart. It wasn’t until 2000 that she met Berger for the first time when he accepted her invitation to give a talk to medical professionals in London; soon after, they began a regular correspondence that continued until his death, aged ninety, in 2017.
Heath moves across a spectrum from connecting, touching and hope to fear, doubt and death. She finds parallels throughout between the socially fraught lives of Londoners battling with austerity and the often brutal business of survival on the land as Berger witnesses it. But these are very different kinds of localism, documented from very different positions.
Heath carries the burden of maintaining a level of communal wellbeing, seriously against the odds, during the pandemic years and with the increasing breakdown of the National Health Service. Berger’s role is overlaid by a determination to identify with a people whose hereditary burdens he does not carry. While he may accompany and assist neighbours working the land, his own work is in the local café, smoking while he writes or hosting a succession of visitors come to discuss ideas and interpretations.
Pig Earth, a collection of Berger’s stories published in 1979, is introduced with an essay on the peasantry written from the Marxist perspective to which Berger adhered throughout his life. Then he switches to the role of participant observer. Going in as close as he dares, he details the actions of a father and his teenage son butchering a cow in a farm slaughterhouse. Then, in starkly economical prose, moment by moment, he recreates a scene in which an old woman is trying to get two goats to mate in the bitter cold, as the light fades and snow starts to fall.
A first-person narrator takes over, recalling a childhood in which survival was the overriding imperative in the face of brutal weather, accidents and cruel dips in the prices paid by city traders. These are realities passed on from his parents and grandparents in a world that extended only as far as the eye could see and the feet could walk in the course of a day.
Meticulous and scrupulous as his evocations of it may be, Quincy is not Berger’s world for the simple reason that it is not his only world. An immigrant in the community, carrying alien cultural baggage that he doesn’t always know what to do with, he continues to maintain a residence in the outskirts of Paris where he spends half the year. This conflicted, dual personality is the subject of Nikos Papastergiadis’s John Berger and Me.
Papastergiadis travelled from Melbourne to Quincy to interview Berger for his doctoral thesis in the early 1990s, and subsequently became a regular guest, spending weeks with the family and involving himself in the work of the place. The man he got to know is not the intense, self-conscious conversationalist recorded in television interviews but someone with whom he developed an easy rapport based on unspoken commonalities.
The book’s cover photo shows them walking side by side on a country road, hands in the pockets of their rugged jackets: two of a kind, they might be father and son, with a focus “tied to the ground.” They share a determination to find modes of writing true to the realities of life in this environment combined with an intellectual involvement with larger questions of political culture.
Exile, immigration and diaspora are dominant in the work of both. Unlike his mentor, though, Papastergiadis has peasant ancestry. Going back through centuries in the mountains of Northern Greece, that heritage of working in “stone and mud” remained a formative influence through his childhood.
His grandmother lived in a house similar to the one Berger occupies, built over a cowshed, with an adjacent barn. His father knew the function of a copse and the appropriate location of a vegetable patch without having to write about it; after the family migrated to Melbourne he became a taxi driver, but scenes from his early life as a shepherd on the hillside returned to him as he succumbed to the delirium of Parkinson’s disease.
Yet questions of authenticity in Berger’s identification with Quincy don’t seem to trouble Papastergiadis. If anything, he seems devoted to the task of showing how and why they don’t arise. In one conversation — they are sitting outside looking towards the mountains — he directly raises the issue of belonging. You were raised in South London, he says, lived in the Forest of Dean and now live half the year in Paris. “Where do you want to be buried?” The reply is, “Right here in Quincey.”
Though the presence of the earth and landscape provide an encompassing sense of atmosphere in the book, it gives a somewhat fragmented, deliberately unresolved picture of its subject. The minimalist style of the writing itself, with short sentences predominating, is a fault in the right direction, true to the portrayal of a stark, stripped-back way of life, but it does little to engage a reader not already persuaded of Berger’s enduring wisdom and importance.
Where do these retrospective testimonials leave us, then, as reflections on someone who was a public intellectual of enormous influence? Berger’s Marxist political philosophy is touched on only indirectly, and never at length. Asked about it in interviews, he said he would only own the label “Marxist” to someone who had read as much Marx as he had. But he took some uncompromising public stances, most significantly when he won the Booker prize in 1972 and announced he was donating half the money to the British Black Panther movement. The rest would be to fund research on his next project, a study of the conditions of migrant workers in Europe.
The accompanying statement — still, to the Booker’s credit, posted on its website — includes an indictment of the prize itself for its role in promoting a competitive ethos he finds distasteful, a polemic on neo-colonialism and the hereditary evils of the slave trade, and an assertion that the British Black Panthers have “arisen out of the bones of what Bookers and other companies have created in the Caribbean.” However fiercely readers may have agreed with him (and still do), he was taking stunning advantage of the platform he had been given.
Berger is a conflicted and in many ways troubling figure. The untested sense of righteousness, the countercultural aesthetic that became an orthodoxy, the dual life of the peasant and the public intellectual: what are we to make of these now? It would take another kind of book to untangle these questions. •
John Berger: Ways of Learning
By Iona Heath | Oxford University Press | $40.99 | 142 pages
John Berger and Me
By Nikos Papastergiadis | Giramondo | $32.95 | 206 pages
