John Berger in 2014. Photograph by Amarjit Chandan, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.
The British writer and artist John Berger is best known for two things: his 1972 book and BBC series, Ways of Seeing, a canonical work of criticism that challenged traditional views of art history; and his acceptance speech that year, after winning the Booker McConnell Prize for his novel G., during which he announced that—in opposition to the prize’s founders, an organization with ties to the slave trade—half his award money would go to the British Black Panthers. That speech is partly why Berger became famous enough for his papers to go to the British Library, where the writer Tom Overton got a job cataloguing them. It is also why, as Overton writes in a new biography, John Berger: From Life, he spent fifteen years of his life piecing Berger’s together.
Courtesy of Verso Books.
John Berger was born in North London a hundred years ago this November and died in the French countryside in 2017. He trained as a painter before deciding to write, and his trenchant art criticism, formally inventive biographies, and uncategorizable fictions make him one of the most influential writers of the postwar generation. Berger referred to himself as a storyteller, and, in his 1984 book, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, he calls storytellers “Death’s Secretaries.” A life, as he saw it, doesn’t become a story until it ends, and the writer’s task is to bear witness to that process, connecting us to the past. In his essay “Twelve Theses on the Economy of the Dead,” Berger asks, “How do the living live with the dead?”
This is the through line Overton finds in Berger’s widely varied life and work: a conviction that the dead, by dying, leave us with their stories, and that our common life depends on how well we remember and tell them. “You don’t have to dig very deeply into Berger’s work to find his sense of the continued presence of the dead,” said Overton, whom I reached over video call to discuss his biography of Berger, and who previously edited two volumes of Berger’s writings on art, Portraits (2015) and Landscapes (2016), the latter of which was reissued this year by Verso Books on the occasion of Berger’s centenary. Our conversation ranged from his early encounters with Berger’s work to getting to know him in life, his efforts in the book to do justice to the people who were involved in Berger’s more complicated relationships, and Overton’s formal decision to sometimes write directly to Berger—part of his attempt to get as close to his subject as he could.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve been on John Berger’s trail for a long time. When did you first read his work?
TOM OVERTON
I was aware of the work that had made Berger famous, such as Ways of Seeing, but the first pieces I read were his art criticism from the fifties. A lot of that work in The New Statesman is unsigned, but I kept on hearing this distinctive voice in it. It was very much out of step with much of the other criticism I was reading. And then I realized this voice was the same writer who did Ways of Seeing. So I had been reading him for some years when I heard on the radio about the donation of his archive in 2009 to the British Library, and I wanted to get my hands on it.
What led you, while you were working through his papers, to reach out to Berger?
OVERTON
At the time it seemed quite natural to write to him while I worked on his archive. I would scan things and email them to him, and then Beverly, his wife, would print them off—he used an iPhone but not a computer. And John would write back in longhand, which began a kind of temporal confusion for me. When you see something in an archive, it feels like history, but suddenly I was getting letters from him that felt like the kind of material I was seeing in his papers—the physical letters from others that he had kept in his files.
What was your first letter to him about?
The first letter I sent him was about a print he’d made, which was in the archive—a Chagall-inspired Virgin Mary standing on a donkey, a sort of romantic, biblical, whimsical image that he’d turned into a Christmas card but never sent. An unsent letter felt like an open invitation, so I forwarded a copy of it to John, basically asking, “What’s this?”
I already had a sense of how visual his imagination was, and I wanted to engage him in conversation. By some degree of luck I had sent him something that didn’t conjure any painful memories. As I say in the book, when I did send him something that was more difficult for him, he would sidestep it and talk about something else instead—the way everyone does, I suppose. But in his first reply to me, he wrote, “Ask me anything,” and gave me his phone number.
You write in the book that he would call you up and say, “Can I tell you a story?” When did you realize you wanted to write about him?
The first phone call from him, hearing that voice coming through, was hallucinatory. It was about a trip he’d taken through Italy just after the war had ended, when he was trying to find his way as a painter, full of this new sense of freedom and possibility. After that, he would ring me up. I started writing about him before I even realized what I was doing. I would instinctively grab bits of this acid-free paper that you wrap archives in and try to note down the stories he was telling me.
I also had the archives in front of me—lists of publication dates and postmarked letters—which created a kind of imbalance. John would be talking about something, and I would have something on my desk which contradicted the sequence he remembered. It was quite peculiar. His movements during the Prague Spring were one example. And sometimes the gap between listening to his story and finding a contradiction was longer. He described his father not wanting to talk about his war service, and then I found notes on their conversations about it. I don’t think there was any dishonesty there, just how stories wear over time.
You write in the book that Berger gave you permission to write his biography, as long as you waited until after he died to publish it. At what point did you broach the subject with him?
By the time I asked him if I could write his biography, John and I had already worked together on Portraits and Landscapes. I got to a certain point where I realized that I knew all this stuff, and I had a very Berger reflex—a feeling that if I didn’t articulate the stories I had learned, then no one else could or would. His self-description of being a storyteller is meant to be self-effacing, but it can also become self-aggrandizing as well. It walks the line between the two. But I became a biographer almost by accident. I’d amassed all this material that I thought I should write it down in some way.
Tom Overton. Photograph by Owen Richards.
What was your writing process like?
I spent a long time putting everything into an enormous, searchable timeline—births, deaths, letters, articles, house moves—so that I had it clear in my head what actually happened. But then I had to turn it into a book. At a certain point, I had to make it more like drawing—to give it a physical, bodily rhythm. Near the end of the process, I wrote most of it by hand in a notebook. That was around the shift from it being called The Storyteller to its current form, John Berger: From Life. When it was called The Storyteller, it was about three times as long, which became a sort of stone from which I had to carve.
In the book, you identify Berger’s sense of the presence of the dead as his central subject. How did you come to see that as the through line in his work?
My main problem in writing the book was the sense that, in all of John’s variousness, there was so clearly a unifying spirit, a quality of attention that I hadn’t seen adequately articulated. I had read his writing about how we live with the dead, but I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t really believe it. It seemed suspect to me, because I couldn’t see how that sense of a relationship with the dead connected to his politics. And then I was finishing my book while watching a genocide unfold, and I started to see the connection—that the question of how we acknowledge the dead is the core of politics.
In “The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol,” Berger’s novella within Pig Earth, there’s a scene in which the living and the dead build a barn together. What is the difference between simply writing about the deaths of people and that vision of an active connection between the living and the dead?
John’s central question—“How do we live with the dead?”—is a way of actively remembering, without nostalgia. In his first unpublished radio play, the speaker is talking to his grandchildren a hundred years into the future. Berger said that what interested him about archives was “the company of the past,” and it was the same for how he looked at the Old Masters. It isn’t about returning to the past. It’s a constant, vibrant reminder of how different life has been in different times and places—that the way we live now isn’t inevitable, and that we might be able to change it.
As you were translating Berger’s life into meaning for the present, how did you think about the subjectivity or objectivity of the biographer’s task?
I’m increasingly aware of how people paint their subjects in their own image. And I’m sure there will be people who were in John’s life who won’t accept my reading of his work. He was such a multivarious, prismatic figure, who meant so many different things to different people. My image of him is always going to disappoint someone. But when I felt like I was onto something, and I was following my instincts, I got to something that had a solidity about it. I had the odd sense that, although I knew him personally, I got to know him better when he was dead.
Can you talk more about that? You say it in your book. You got to know him, then he died, and then you got to know him better. How so?
I think of his line in Here Is Where We Meet, “The number of lives that enter our own is incalculable.” Nestled within the experience of getting to know John was getting to know [his second wife,] Anya[,] and Beverly and others. Archives provide factual information, but they can’t really capture the experience of talking to someone face-to-face. Like meeting someone fifty years after John did, and seeing how he could have fallen in love with them. That’s one thing Berger’s books were really good at—recording the texture of human experience and the quality of social life.
What was it like for you to be the biographer while also getting to know some of the people in Berger’s life so personally? In the case of Anya, you describe holding her hand when she was in the hospital.
I wasn’t thinking in those moments that I was there to write a biography. I just became embroiled in their lives. Later, I felt a responsibility to address the difficult parts of Berger’s life, especially his separation from Anya. What does doing justice to her look like? It relates to the way John talked about the dead. It isn’t quite the same thing as, What would they say if they were here? Because they aren’t here. We have to make our own decisions. Biographers are often approached as an avatar of their subject. But that’s a misunderstanding of biography, because it implies that the biographer can tell you what their subject would say at any given moment. What you learn, as you go deeper into the specificity of a life, is how unpredictable people are.
Your account of Berger’s life in 1973, the year he left Anya for Beverly, is one of the more unsettling parts of the book. You write that much of the biographical writing on Berger avoids his complicated romantic life under the guise of politeness or in the name of focusing on the work. How did you decide how to approach the more difficult moments in Berger’s life?
It’s easier not to address the pain in his relationships, and the other way is to be straightforwardly judgmental, which seems pompous and irrelevant. There’s a kind of self-satisfaction in criticizing someone else’s life. It’s very easy to do that. But it’s obvious that it was causing John pain as well. I tried different ways of articulating the more complicated parts of his life, and it seemed most balanced to address him. There’s a part in his drafts for Corker’s Freedom—which I found in a bomb shelter in Meyrin—where Corker and his author talk about the unfolding shape of the book. And John writes directly to Rosa Luxemburg in Confabulations.
So I felt an invitation from his work to speak to him, because that was one of the ways that he worked. Suddenly I was back to my conversations with John, where the book started. And I felt, if he is right, and writing can make the dead and living coexist, then that’s where I should go. I still felt a bit mad at first, but I found the company of a tradition here, too. I love when Auden writes to Louis MacNeice. “I wish you hadn’t / caught that cold, but the dead we miss are easier / to talk to.”
Your draw to his work had to do, in part, with his politics. He famously wrote that he didn’t drag politics into art—it was art that had dragged him into politics. How did you hold together his aesthetic commitments to art, say, and his sense of himself as a Romantic Marxist?
I thought a lot about his politics while writing the book. It is difficult to square his Marxism with defined Marxist traditions. Or with the fact that, all through his life, he talks about a connection to place as a human need. In a book like Brief as Photos, when he writes about language as “potentially the only human home,” he was thinking about the twentieth-century political upheavals that forced millions to uproot their lives and migrate—when their connection to a physical home, where their dead are buried, was destroyed. He thought that we feel a need for home because of our connection to the dead. That is why forced migration is the wrench that it is, and it’s also where the energy of anti-immigrant politics comes from. It’s why Palestine is such a focus in Hold Everything Dear—as someone with European Jewish heritage, he feels the pull of the place, but he can’t look away from the injustice.
Speaking of language, Berger referred to himself as a storyteller, but you say you don’t think storytelling was his central talent. Do you, like Geoff Dyer, think of him as a writer?
If what you are is what you spend most of your life doing, in that sense, John was probably not just a writer but a letter writer. That was how he spent much of his time and that was the activity from which a lot of his work sprang. But I’m walking on a tightrope when describing Berger’s life and work. One wrong step and it can sound pretentious. It is strange to call him a writer, because he didn’t have a facility with writing. His natural facility was for drawing, maybe because he was so visual. I got the sense from going to his archive and from talking to him that writing genuinely was a struggle for him. He wasn’t Proust, for instance, though he loved Proust, and he wasn’t James Joyce. Both of those writers luxuriate in language. John didn’t find writing intoxicating in that way.
I’m interested in the way you frame Berger as a life-writer, and not only in his three biographies, The Success and Failure of Picasso, A Fortunate Man, and Art and Revolution. If he was a portraitist, what did you learn from him about writing your own portrait of him?
One of the things I learned from him is that it might be for others to tell me what I’ve learned from him. But I think some of it has to do with this idea of him being a portraitist, because he is so fundamentally visual. Even when he is writing, there is always an image in front of him, which he is trying to get closer to and be more faithful to. And that faith isn’t the same thing as reproducing the image in photographic detail. It’s about fully accepting the subjectivity of the person who is in front of the image. There’s a humility in embracing that you can only show a life through your own eyes. The moment you embrace that as a virtue is the moment you maybe start to make a better portrait. The moment I embraced that coincided with realizing that I thought his work is about our relationship to the dead.
In John’s essay about drawing his father’s corpse, “Drawn to That Moment,” he says a drawing of a tree shows “not a tree, but a-tree-being-looked-at.” It has an identity because it contains the experience of the person who made it. I tried to get at that in the subtitle From Life, in not shying away from my own involvement.
I’m curious about this idea of him trying to get as close as he can to a life. One of the ways you do this in your book is to directly address Berger. What led you to that decision? How did it feel to be writing to the dead?
I mostly wrote very early in the morning, before everyone else woke up in the house, when there’s a kind of quiet. There is maybe something like death about that time of day, when everyone is in their deepest sleep. And who knows if I was completely awake at that point, which might explain the disinhibition of writing to John in the book. I sort of slipped into addressing him, and it felt natural to do it because this project started with writing letters to him. I got to that form through several stages of getting closer to John.
One draft of this book was actually called Go Closer. There’s that line about him being asked in an interview to define his practice, and he quotes the photographer Robert Capa. “If the picture isn’t good enough, go closer.” I realized that quote was a kind of instruction to me. I wasn’t close enough yet.
Last / Next Article
Share