Joshua Sperling, A Writer of our Time: The Life and Work of John Berger (London: Verso, 2018), 293 pp., $29.95.
Towards the end of Berger’s 1972 novel, G, a pre-World War I Slavic revolutionary named Bojan who is sequestered in Trieste shows his sister a picture of his comrade, Nedeljko. Bojan is worried. His friend had been party to the fateful assassination in Sarajevo of the Archduke Ferdinand by a 19-year-old Bosnian, an event that precipitated the War. Nedeljko has been brutally captured and tortured. Berger’s novel exposes the radical disparity between the historical intentions of the poor, working-class activists seeking to dramatize the terrible reality of Austria’s colonization of the Slavs and “the phantasmagoric unrealities of Great Power diplomacy” claiming that the Serbian government perpetrated the murder. “Without evidence,” leaders of the key European powers all lined up behind Austria, enthusiastically endorsing “a view of war and national interests which no longer had any basis in reality. Not one of them foresaw the simplest facts about the war they were about to launch” (G. 228). For a man writing in the early 1970s about a cataclysmic event in the early 20th century, few lines can be more prescient about our 21st-century cataclysms. In our times, such “phantasmagoric unrealities” as fake news, alternative facts, climate change deniers, QAnon conspiracy theories, post-truth-age mendacity, “fascist” vaccine mandates, and the Big Lie about rigged elections all serve as lucrative fodder for the programmed virality of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, the platform corporations that market these destructive memes so as to produce billion-dollar profits.
Berger died in 2017, just months after the election of Donald Trump, and he was fully engaged in the pursuit of justice to the very end. Yet listen to the resonance of this 1990 claim of Berger’s that “All the imaginable dangers of history are waiting in the wings—bigotry, fanaticism, racism” (quoted on 237). As Joshua Sperling argues, Berger “predicted so much of what has since become our present reality: resurgent nationalism, the voraciousness of the neoliberal economy, the sense of historical unmooring” (236). Indeed, there are compelling reasons why Sperling titles his biography of Berger, A Writer of Our Time. This often “impertinent rabble-rouser” (2), as the English press branded him, hauntingly speaks to twenty-first century socio-economic cruelties. In our age of anti-immigrant hysteria, we may need more than ever to listen to someone who developed “an aesthetic of radical hospitality” (14) and who never gave up hope in the possibilities of social transformation towards a more just society.
Trying to capture that life in an intellectual biography, however, proves to be as challenging as trying to represent the intersections of aesthetics and politics, freedom and commitment, historical particulars and theoretical generalizations. As Susan Sontag once put it, Berger was “peerless,” and it is difficult to narrate a life without peers because there are no comparable life stories. Despite these obstacles, Sperling’s friendship with Berger clearly intensifies the biographer’s commitment to his subject while also sustaining some understandable reserves regarding Berger’s intimate relationships. But this book is effectively more than a biography to the extent that it may interest many not previously familiar with Berger’s work. Sperling expands Berger’s ideas and life into a story that “is alive … driven onward year after year by a sense of history and the principle of hope” (2). And, as Berger well knew, hope bears risks, especially if you are an outspoken critic of any form of injustice.
Anyone familiar with Berger’s rise to fame in the 1950s-60s will recall his notorious excoriating of the Booker-McConnell corporation on the very evening (November 23, 1972) when he received from them the Booker prize for G. Berger unflinchingly decried the “distasteful competitiveness” of such rewards and pointed out the irony that if he spent the prize money on his “next project on migrant workers, the book would be financed by the exploitation of the relatives of its subjects” (140). Berger also donated half the prize money to the Black Panthers. By the time later that year when Ways of Seeing had, as Sperling puts it, “detonated” in its premiering on the BBC, Berger’s fame became truly international partly because professional compromise was not part of his vocabulary.
Nor were disciplinary borders. Berger had such an irrepressible sweep of interests and worked in such an array of fields and media—politics, history, sociology, economics, novels, poems, stories, essays, film, photography, documentary, drama, screenwriting, painting, art history, multi-media photography, TV productions, radio broadcasts--that the traditional chronological structure and periodizing of a life gets stretched to the limits. He was a hero for many precisely because he refused specialization, running that risk in an age where specialization means employment and often survival.
Sperling mitigates the narrative difficulty of this Bildungsroman by roughly dividing Berger’s life into three phases based primarily on his geographical location (although this too was variable), and also by navigating back and forth in time to demonstrate important overlapping consistencies in Berger’s life even amid the amazing diversity of his interests.
The first phase includes his early life in England (including a stint in Italy where he developed his life-time affinity for Antonio Gramsci), and his rising fame in London as a painter and art critic, especially through his work on the New Statesman where he became a vigorous, if often moralizing, voice of the British New Left. Then, in 1961, at 34, he left England for good with the Russian translator, Anna Bostock. He felt he had “escaped” what for him had become the stultifying art and political situation in London, and he settled for a while in Paris, and then in a suburb of Geneva where he tried to reinvent himself through his various collaborations with, among others, the photographer, Jean Mohr (who later published After the Last Sky with Edward Said), and with the Swiss filmmaker, Alain Tanner. In 1972, at 45, he left Bostock for an American, Beverly Bancroft, and they moved to the peasant village of Quincy in the Haute-Savoie where he would live for the rest of his life.
The early 1970s were, indeed, a time of personal crisis punctuated by his ongoing exile from England and his shifting of life partners. But it was also a time of political crises. Sperling highlights these intersecting crises by showing that, beyond his frustrations with the artistic and intellectual confines of London, Berger was coping with the failures of the 1968 revolutions, the loss of hope, and the violence that ensued. Like many on the left during the 1960s, he had shifted focus from nation-state socialism to global anti-imperialism.
Sperling captures the impact in the early 1970s of Ways of Seeing because Berger taught so many of us the striking insights offered by a materialist way of interpreting visual art. In the widely broadcast BBC series, Berger upended the dominant formalist and idealist traditions of Western art history which he saw as ahistorical because of their evasion of the political economy. As a highly visible TV personality, his casual, open-shirted demeanor dramatized his opposition to the aristocratic Kenneth Clark who saw in Western art a glorification of high culture, the triumph of European ways of being (as well as seeing). Berger simply refused the idealist pretentions that tried to glorify the power of hierarchies, social classes, and the emerging forms of capitalist wealth. Berger also attacked the sexism of the “nude” as a form of male voyeurism and a symptom of “the possessiveness of … patriarchal European capitalism” (187). As Berger put it in the book version: “Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity” (Ways 87). This book sold more than a million copies and YouTube recordings of the BBC series continue to reach millions more.
Sperling also provides new ways of understanding the complexities of what many critics saw as Berger’s inconsistencies in his relationship to the Communist Party and his apparent ambivalences about Karl Marx. Sperling documents that Berger’s criticisms of the CP were based on deeper consistencies regarding his understanding of Communism. At various times during his career, Berger could emphasize anarchism, socialism, communism, but he also could turn his critical eye on any of those counter-movements when they betrayed his underlying commitments to the possibilities of human flourishing and social justice. Berger understood that communism was at root communitarian and totally opposed to fascism and other authoritarian forms of centralized state control that suppressed the freedoms of workers and peasants. Like Marx, Berger was in favor of worker self-directed production, shared profits, mutuality, and reciprocity. Berger never joined the Communist Party, in part because he was always willing to criticize the slide of Communist Party rulers in Russia, China, and elsewhere towards centralized state control of capital—Berger always understood that Marx was on the side of the workers and the equitable distribution of the proceeds in any socially-necessary production or exchange process.
Sperling emphasizes that there was a softening and ripening of some of Berger’s masculinist and Eurocentric ideas upon his apparent retreat to the Haute-Savoie. Many on the left were troubled by this move because Berger “was one of England’s most renowned leftists living in the French countryside when Thatcher was ascending to power, the welfare state crumbling, and coal miners on strike” (195). But Berger never idealized his immersion in the life of the peasants in Quincy. He did, however, listen carefully to them, and represented them in his late writings as struggling for survival amid the pressures of a relentlessly expanding global capitalism. When he moved to Quincy, “There was much in G. that Berger would leave behind: the aggressive modernism, the clinical austerity, the fixation on orgasm and revolution, the Oedipal feuds, the blind spot of misogyny. His later fictions—importantly stories, not novels—give up the revolutionary individual for other concerns: the loving couple, the threatened community, the complications of prolonged care, convalescence after loss” (157). Yet, as Sperber always makes clear, the political economy is ever-present in his late work as it was a consistent concern throughout his life.
Juxtaposing the earlier novel G. with the trilogy beginning with Pig Earth (1979), Once in Europa (1987), and Lilac and Flag (1990) dramatizes these changes in Berger’s life and work. What Sperling calls Berger’s “aggressive Modernism” in G. spilled out of his resistance to the dogmatic tensions between realism and Modernism that so divided many early and mid-20th-century writers. Communist doctrine required a fidelity to realism as the basis for confronting the realities of class struggle, and thus Modernism was seen as an aesthetic retreat to formal experimentation. Berger clearly understood the complexity of the representational and narrative gaps not just in literature but in any uses of language and politics. His early work on the New Statesman reveals his commitment to realism even as he refuses to reduce the arguments to polemical dogma.
In his later work, however, the sensuous detail of the prose vividly renders the vitality, vulnerability, and strengths of the individual characters without ever losing a sense of the communal life so crucial to their survival. His characters now seem warmer, less abstract, more individualized than, say, G, the protagonist in his famous novel, who seems less an embodied person than a phallic machine, a reduction compounded by Berger’s aesthetic efforts to “‘translate Cubism into literary terms’” (quoted on 143). This was, for Berger, a complex aesthetic project because like many art historians he had a long engagement with cubism, including his most sustained theoretical elaboration in his 1967 essay “The Moment of Cubism.” But Berger’s analysis was quite unique: “what he said of the movement deviated wildly from art-historical convention…. Cubism was not extended by abstraction…but betrayed by it” (78).
Berger always objected to the oversimplified division between abstract forms and political content. For Berger, the aesthetic revolution of breaking conventions could not be dissociated from the political revolution engaged with more humane forms of political economy than capitalist exploitation. Cubism certainly had its moments of betrayal, but he also understood that “cubism freed the visual arts from anachronism” (84): the spectrum of visual angles and the dynamism of “still life in motion” (102) had an emotional resonance Berger saw as deeply aligned with the rising student, feminist, civil rights, and workers’ movements. In other words, the best of cubist experimentalism freed artistic expression from the pressures of commodification and the historical evasions of a formalist aesthetics.
The non-linear, fragmented, formal experimentalism of G. certainly unsettled any clear boundaries between foreground and background, and so it has often been characterized as a “postmodern” novel. But Berger’s self-appointed task of writing the “cubist narrative” meant simultaneously giving credence to distorted perceptions, hybrid representations, and radical differences while also honoring the realist depiction of human beings living and suffering under very particular historical and political conditions that are beyond individual control. Remarkably, as Sperling argues, Berger achieved many of these goals, but there was also a cost: “the characters are taxidermied artefacts: they were never alive to begin with” (149). The main character is designated only by the single letter which seems appropriate for the kind of cypher he serves. He rarely speaks, he is never described, yet the picaresque series of sexual adventures demonstrates that sexuality carries revolutionary possibilities for breaking personal and political inhibitions. But it also meant that it ran into some fairly stereotypical male seduction scenes because many of the women begin to seem so similar. Sperling puts it well: “G. is not really a character.…He is quite literally a man without qualities…. G. is a desiring and travelling and seducing machine. But he is not a self” (148). And many of the characters also get reduced: “everyone else is so socially fixed as to verge on stereotype. They all represent their nation and class, and are analysed as such” (148). So, despite his commitments to oppose patriarchy, Berger slides into what many feminists have criticized him for, and these tendencies during this period of his life were exacerbated in his 1970s collaborations with Alain Tanner whose films seemed far too accepting of gender stereotypes. Tanner struggled much of his life with the critiques of the feminists, and those tensions were among the reasons that Berger ended his collaborations with the filmmaker.
Berger did, indeed, alter his life when he moved to the Haute Savoie, and the evidence can be found by turning now to the trilogy. In contrast to the one-dimensional characters in G., the inner selves of the leading characters in all of the trilogy books are as palpably rendered as the volatile political and economic circumstances in which they are enmeshed. Since Sperling does not address these later books with the same attention to detail as his earlier, more famous novel, I will compensate a bit by offering two brief examples drawn from Pig Earth and Once in Europa, the latter of which Sperling quite appropriately assesses as “one of [Berger’s] greatest achievements” (225).
In the introduction to Pig Earth, Berger explains that all three volumes of the trilogy have “been written in a spirit of solidarity with the so-called ‘backward,’ whether they live in villages or have been forced to emigrate to a metropolis. Solidarity, because it is such women and men who have taught me the little I know” (Pig Earth xxvii). Such truly unforgettable women as Lucie Cabrol in Pig Earth, Odile Blanc in Once in Europa, and Zsuzsa in Lilac and Flag provide the best evidence that Berger has moved far beyond any stereotypical chauvinism. In the final phase of his life and career, he never gave up writing impassioned, and sometimes moralizing, critical essays, but in this new phase his arguments with critics have been either resolved or ignored to the extent that he no longer has discursive, essay-like diversions similar to the one in G. I cited at the beginning of this essay. Even more, the peasants now become articulate spokespeople in the dialogue, but also, many of the stories have women narrators.
In contrast to the right-wing mythology that portrayed peasants as “backward,” and thus deeply in need of capitalist ideology, Berger insisted that “No class has been or is more economically conscious than the peasantry” (Pig Earth xii). The pressures of the global economy on the peasantry have forced many of them “to abandon the village and become wage earners” (xv), like Michel in Once in Europa who is Odile’s lover, a Communist, and a political activist. As Odile herself puts it, “Whenever I went near the factory, I saw the dust. It was the colour of cow’s liver, except that, instead of being wet and shiny, it was a dry kind of sand: it was like dried liver, pulverized into dust” (95). Just as the peasants have been pulverized: it is in that factory that Michel loses both legs in an accident, and a few years later, when Odile is living with Stepan, a Russian exile, he is killed in a fall from the great furnaces. It is 1953. Odile is left pregnant with their son, Christian, and the factory owners will provide no pension and no help to her because she is a “concubine” rather than a “proper wife,” as the factory manager puts it to her.
Equally evident are the peasants’ native intelligence, cunning, and subversiveness. One of the most poignant examples of their resistance to political and economic violence can be found in the final three stories of Pig Earth devoted to Lucie Cabrol. In one scene set in the summer of 1944 Lucie is working with her two brothers in the field when two Maquisards emerge out of the woods, requesting shelter and medical aid. The older one and apparent leader is a peasant; the younger who has sustained a serious leg injury is a Parisian. Recall that the Maquisards were mostly peasant groups working for the French Resistance and trying to avoid their conscription into forced labor for the Germans under the corrupt Vichy regime that collaborated with Germany in the persecution of Jews, Communists, and other political refugees through the S.T.O. (service du travail obligatoire). “Maquis” is most often translated as “scrubland,” reflecting the nearly uninhabitable terrain in the Alpine regions that these groups had to hide in to elude the remaining German forces.
Lucie’s two brothers are worried that they could be killed for harboring resistance fighters so they are reluctant to provide any aid. But not Lucie. Diminutive in size (barely above 4 feet tall), she tenderly re-bandages, shelters, and takes the lead in aiding them. When the German SS commandos arrive seeking the “terrorists,” Lucie performs brilliantly in her charade of turning all of them into her friendly but unknowing peasant “cousins,” none of whom have seen anything other than “flies and horseflies,” as the young Parisian puts it while feigning to be slow and dim-witted, “as if he were the dwarf woman’s son” (118). The irony, of course, is that the terrorists are in this instance the German commandos, who are now becoming desperate because they know they are losing the War. In his gratitude towards Lucie, the 19-year-old, injured resistance fighter responds to her care and tenderness so that when she asks him what he will do after the war when he returns to his studies -- perhaps to become a judge, like his father? --he answers with a shy smile, saying only, “No, it is another kind of justice that I believe in, a popular justice, a justice for peasants like you and for workers, a justice which gives factories to those who work in them, and the land to those who cultivate it” (120). He hopes he will be able to start a free press because a “free press is a prerequisite for the full mobilisation of the masses” (120). This scene, like many others in the trilogy, provides evidence of Berger’s contention that even though “peasants are said to be unforgiving, yet this trait, in so far as it is true, is the result of the belief that life without justice becomes meaningless. It is rare for any peasant to die unforgiven” (xxiii).
The last sentence comes from Berger’s introductory essay, but in the story itself, the peasants speak for themselves without any coldly analytical discursive moments such as in G. Shifts of perspective and flashbacks still disrupt any linear narrative in the later works, but they are emotional and associative, thus of a distinctly different quality than the abrupt structural shifts in G. that function like hard cubist edges dislocating us from the immediate present. There is also no trace of sentimentality or nostalgia for a lost pastoralism in any part of the trilogy. Indeed, tragedy and betrayal are recurring themes. For instance, in Pig Earth, Lucie is re-named the “Cocadrille” by her younger brother, Henri who hates her even as a young child, and it is Henri who ends up secretly reporting the encounter with the Maquisards who Lucie later learns were captured and executed within the ensuing 48 hours. Lucie’s brothers also connive to have Lucie removed from their parents’ will so she loses her meager but important inheritance, mainly her family house: she lives the rest of her life alone in an abandoned servants’ shack high on a mountain road. She ends up being brutally murdered with an axe by an unknown villager who seeks to steal from her the small fortune she has saved over twenty years of dawn to dusk work selling the fruit, seeds, nuts, flowers and other things she collects (or makes, such as the scarves and sweaters she knits in the winter), later selling them in the city. Not an easy life.
In short, even with all the attention to detail, the dialectic was always alive: Berger never lost site of the big picture, the imperial and colonial imperatives of global capitalism. For Berger it was always a question of the distribution of resources, and thus always a question of power: who gets to decide? When the economic elite have so maldistributed resources, no amount of charity, philanthropy, or technological advancement can alter the systemic forces of the capitalist world system. As Berger put it in 2005, “’Never before has the devastation caused by the pursuit of profit…been more extensive than it is today … Yes, I’m still among other things a Marxist’” (quoted on 229). Many of us on the left can benefit from what Berger had to say about these still vital issues.
For those who think Berger retreated from the world at the end of his life, consider this fact: his last collection, Hold Everything Dear (2007), has been tabulated (following the criteria for assigning an ISBN) under the categories of international security, causes of war, equality and power, international relations, and the war on terrorism. As Sperling puts it, “In old age Berger drew flowers, but he also penned some of the most searing protests against the war on terror and the war on the poor” (237). He remained a devoted advocate for the Zapatistas and the Palestinians. Throughout his long life he loved many individuals but he hated individualism’s crass complicity with private capital so until the end he remained devoted to ameliorating the exploitation of workers around the planet. Sperling’s biography attests to those commitments.
Works Cited
Berger, John. G. New York: Vintage Books, 1972.
Berger, John. Once in Europa. New York: Vintage Books, 1987.
Berger, John. Pig Earth. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books, 1972.
