{"id":172472,"date":"2025-12-18T10:07:36","date_gmt":"2025-12-18T15:07:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=172472"},"modified":"2025-12-19T10:17:39","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T15:17:39","slug":"the-new-way-of-seeing-in-anya-bergers-archives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2025\/12\/18\/the-new-way-of-seeing-in-anya-bergers-archives\/","title":{"rendered":"The New Way of Seeing: In Anya Berger’s Archives"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Anya Berger in the early 1960s. Courtesy of Katya Berger.<\/p><\/div>\n

Anya Berger (1923\u20132018) is most famous for being the wife and \u201cmuse\u201d of art critic and novelist John Berger. In 2018, after both John and Anya Berger were dead, their daughter Katya Berger was with John\u2019s archivist and biographer, Tom Overton, when they unearthed paper records in the family\u2019s basement. These suggest that the work published in John\u2019s name during their relationship, from 1958 to 1973\u2014The Success and Failure of Picasso<\/em>, Ways of Seeing<\/em>, G.<\/em>, and A <\/em>Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor<\/em>\u2014could <\/span>be considered joint projects. The private family archive documents a period largely missing from John Berger\u2019s main archival holdings at the British Library.<\/p>\n

N\u00e9e Zisserman, Anya Berger was born in Manchuria to a noble Russian father and Viennese Lutheran mother, considered Jewish by the Nazis. She came to England as a refugee in her teens, first on scholarship to St. Paul\u2019s boarding school, and then to read modern languages at St. Hugh\u2019s College, Oxford. She was a polyglot, responsible for shaping the English-speaking left with her translations of Marx, Lenin, fallen Freudian Wilhelm Reich, and architect Le Corbusier.<\/p>\n

The collaborative nature of her relationship with John was no secret; they once signed a telegram \u201cjonanya.\u201d Although Anya was the linguist, they worked together \u201cofficially\u201d on a few translations, most famously Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire\u2019s Return to My Native Land<\/em> (1939, trans. 1970). Ways of <\/em>Seeing<\/em> (1972), the TV show and subsequent book which made John Berger a household name,drew heavily on Walter Benjamin\u2019s writings on art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Anya, a fluent German speaker, had introduced her husband to Benjamin\u2019s ideas before the Arendt-Zorn translation of Illuminations<\/em> was published in English in 1968.<\/p>\n

Anya Berger appears in the second episode of Ways of Seeing<\/em>, on \u201cWomen and Art.\u201d The show presents the concept of the male gaze to a mainstream audience a year before Laura Mulvey would write her canonical essay \u201cVisual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.\u201d Part of a roundtable of women tasked with responding to female nudes, Anya is the first to speak, seated across from her husband, leaning forward assertively over her widespread knees. \u201cOf course, weall have an image of ourselves, and it\u2019s a visual image, but I wonder how much this sort of classical, European painting has shaped that image.\u201d She is animated.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I look at the paintings that you show in your film, I can\u2019t take them seriously, I cannot identify with them because they are so immensely exaggerated always, they fasten on to some sort of secondary sexual characteristic, these enormous breasts and great big bee sting bottoms [John Berger\u2019s laughter], huge things like that, and they just aren\u2019t real \u2026 Nearly all the paintings you have shown are what is called idealized, and therefore they are to me very unreal in connection with any deep down image that I might have of myself, and in connection with any deep down pleasure that I might have in looking at another female body.”<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Anya Berger advances and complicates the show\u2019s narrative arc. Her frame of reference is centurial, looking beyond decades and cities to eras and continents. Yet her name only flashes up on the screen during the closing credits for fewer than five seconds. John and Anya were close to breaking up by the time the book from the show was published. It became one of the most widely read art books on record, with sales in the UK alone totaling 1.5 million. It fails to register her contribution.<\/p>\n

There was a degree to which she conceptualized her role as that of the muse: her daughter Katya has suggested \u201cmentor\u201d is a better fit. She saw herself participating in the creative work of her lovers, and those in her networks, as both an inspiration and as an interlocutor, shaping the work from the inside. \u201cI wanted to partake of the creative life,\u201d she told her granddaughter Sonia Lambert, \u201cbut I knew that I myself was not a creative artist, I didn\u2019t have the wherewithal. I loved partaking of it.\u201d One of the things that began to irk Anya Berger after separating from John, though, was the sense that she had been exploited as part of their creatively collaborative relationship.<\/p>\n

In the summer of 1969, John Berger sought to open their marriage to another woman, Annar Cassam. He was writing the novel G.<\/em>, a book about the gradual politicization of a Don Juan figure in a pre-World War One Europe: it would go on to win the Booker Prize the same year that Ways of Seeing<\/em> was first broadcast. That novel is dedicated to his wife and to her feminist peers: \u201cFor Anya\/ and for her sisters in Women\u2019s Liberation.\u201d<\/p>\n

He was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with his wife\u2019s influence over his writing. Katya spoke to me of how her mother\u2019s support of her father\u2019s work had become so critical that he felt repressed and inhibited. It is significant that his next steady partner, Beverly Bancroft, with her background in the business aspect of publishing, was concerned more with licensing and rights than the content of his work, more agent than collaborator. Anya was unconvinced of John\u2019s vision for the Into Their Labours<\/em> trilogy, a project that would eventually take him over ten years to complete, and tried to persuade him to put his energy elsewhere.<\/p>\n

Katya also remembers the difference in attitude to each of her parents\u2019 literary work in their home. John Berger\u2019s writing time was sacred, and everyone in the house was obliged to be silent. By contrast, Anya Berger wrote only after her many tasks were fulfilled, moments announced by the click and ding of the typewriter. Perhaps it is significant that most of her unpublished archive is fragmentary, or takes the form of diary entries, which can withstand the domestic routine\u2019s many interruptions.<\/p>\n

Papers in the private family archive document a period of massive creative productivity for Anya Berger around the time of their separation, spurred on by a kind of bruised exhilaration. Some of this writing found formal outlets: an article called \u201cWomen of Algiers\u201d for The New Left Review<\/em> in 1974, and a piece called \u201cin the shit no more\u201d for the trailblazing British feminist publication Spare Rib<\/em> in 1976. The latter is billed on the contents page as \u201cThe saga of a lone woman and a broken lavatory seat.\u201d She provides an amusing account of her efforts to replace a malfunctioning toilet seat while her two children are home sick, getting shit on her fingers, and the elation that comes from her ultimate success: \u201cMy duel with the lavatory seat had been the nearest I’d got to pure sport in 51 years. My very own, private Olympiad.\u201d<\/p>\n

There remains a treasure trove of Anya Berger\u2019s unpublished life-writing: journal entries, memoir, poetry, letters, telegrams, doodles, short stories. Katya drew my attention to how the pieces were revised, corrected, and for the most part dated and organized; her mother had carefully archived the work, as if it were intended for readers, possibly eventual publication. In an untitled fragment from the summer of 1974, after her separation from John, she begins: \u201cTo live alone is, first and foremost, not to be seen. No interested eye observes you. You project no image. Unless it be to yourself.\u201d This develops, over the course of two pages, into a reflection on her struggle to write, to find a new way to see herself and be seen: \u201cThen a thought came into my head which seemed more interesting than the previous ones. I played with it for a while & was preparing to let it go like its predecessors. But it occurred to me that, possibly for the first time in my life, I was free to think it through\u2014if not to the end, at least to greater depth. That seemed to be what I wanted to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anya Berger\u2019s writing practice then trailed off for many decades. On her deathbed in 2016, though, when she was slipping in and out of lucidity, speaking to her children in French and in English, she provided detailed outlines of stories that had been circling around in her head, fictionalized versions of people she had encountered and scenes she had witnessed. Some are drawn from her own ongoing private conversation with Katya, about romantic failures and successes, disappointments and hopes. \u201cI am writing a new book in my head,\u201d she said to her daughter, \u201cIt is about Katya, an old lady pushed in the sea by her lover.\u201d For Anya Berger, the things that didn\u2019t happen in her life carried all the force of an event.<\/p>\n

I am working in collaboration with Katya Berger and the feminist writer Mona Chollet to publish a two-volume collection of Anya Berger\u2019s life writing. The fragment The Paris Review<\/em> is publishing, \u201cNew Optic<\/a>,\u201d was written in 1969. It\u2019s a personal essay about eyesight and aging, but it touches on a subject, seeing and being seen, which was never far from her mind.\u00a0 \u201cThe new way of seeing<\/em>,\u201d Anya writes, \u201csuddenly became the normal one and the old way\u2014quite<\/em> tolerable until then\u2014became abnormal and indeed impossible<\/em>.\u201d Here<\/a>, three years before John\u2019s TV show aired, she anticipates\u2014gives it?\u2014its title.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Emily Foister<\/a> researches, writes, and teaches on feminism and women\u2019s work, with a focus on precarious archives.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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