{"id":175222,"date":"2026-09-24T10:00:48","date_gmt":"2026-09-24T14:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=175222"},"modified":"2026-09-24T11:30:20","modified_gmt":"2026-09-24T15:30:20","slug":"john-berger-deaths-secretary-a-conversation-with-tom-overton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/09\/24\/john-berger-deaths-secretary-a-conversation-with-tom-overton\/","title":{"rendered":"John Berger, Death\u2019s Secretary: A Conversation with Tom Overton"},"content":{"rendered":"
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John Berger in 2014. Photograph by Amarjit Chandan, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>. Licensed under CC BY 4.0<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

The British writer and artist John Berger is best known for two things: his 1972 book and BBC series, <\/span><\/em>Ways of Seeing, <\/em><\/span>a canonical work of criticism that challenged traditional views of art history;<\/span> and his acceptance speech that year, after winning the Booker McConnell Prize for his novel <\/span><\/em>G<\/span>.<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>during which he announced that\u2014in opposition to the prize\u2019s founders, an organization with ties to the slave trade\u2014half 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<\/span><\/em>, <\/span>John Berger: From Life<\/span><\/a>, he spent fifteen years of his life piecing Berger\u2019s together.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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Courtesy of Verso Books.<\/p><\/div>\n

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<\/em>, <\/span>And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos<\/span>,<\/span><\/i> he calls storytellers \u201cDeath\u2019s Secretaries.\u201d A life, as he saw it, doesn\u2019t become a story until it ends, and the writer\u2019s task is to bear witness to that process, connecting us to the past. In his essay \u201cTwelve Theses on the Economy of the Dead,\u201d Berger asks, \u201cHow do the living live with the dead?\u201d<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

This is the through line Overton finds in Berger\u2019s 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. \u201cYou don\u2019t have to dig very deeply into Berger\u2019s work to find his sense of the continued presence of the dead,\u201d said Overton, whom I reached over video call to discuss his biography of Berger, and who previously edited two volumes of Berger\u2019s writings on art,<\/em> <\/span>Portraits <\/span>(2015) and <\/span><\/em>Landscapes <\/span>(2016), the latter of which was reissued this year by Verso Books on the occasion of Berger\u2019s centenary. Our conversation ranged from his early encounters with Berger\u2019s work to getting to know him in life, his efforts in the book to do justice to the people who were involved in Berger\u2019s more complicated relationships, and Overton\u2019s formal decision to sometimes write directly to Berger\u2014part of his attempt to get as close to his subject as he could.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

You\u2019ve been on John Berger\u2019s trail for a long time. When did you first read his work?<\/span><\/p>\n

TOM OVERTON<\/span><\/p>\n

I was aware of the work that had made Berger famous, such as <\/span>Ways of Seeing<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>but the first pieces I read were his art criticism from the fifties. A lot of that work in <\/span>The New Statesman<\/span><\/i> 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 <\/span>Ways of Seeing.<\/span><\/i> 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

What led you, while you were working through his papers, to reach out to Berger?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

OVERTON<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2014he 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\u2014the physical letters from others that he had kept in his files.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

What was your first letter to him about?<\/span><\/p>\n

OVERTON<\/span><\/p>\n

The first letter I sent him was about a print he\u2019d made, which was in the archive\u2014a Chagall-inspired Virgin Mary standing on a donkey, a sort of romantic, biblical, whimsical image that he\u2019d 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, \u201cWhat\u2019s this?\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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\u2014the way everyone does, I suppose. But in his first reply to me, he wrote, \u201cAsk me anything,\u201d and gave me his phone number. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

You write in the book that he would call you up and say, \u201cCan I tell you a story?\u201d When did you realize you wanted to write about him?<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

OVERTON<\/span><\/p>\n

The first phone call from him, hearing that voice coming through, was hallucinatory. It was about a trip he\u2019d 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I also had the archives in front of me\u2014lists of publication dates and postmarked letters\u2014which 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\u2019t think there was any dishonesty there, just how stories wear over time.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

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?<\/span><\/p>\n

OVERTON<\/span><\/p>\n

By the time I asked him if I could write his biography, John and I had already worked together on <\/span>Portraits <\/span><\/i>and <\/span>Landscapes. <\/span><\/i>I got to a certain point where I realized that I knew all this stuff, and I had a very Berger reflex\u2014a feeling that if I didn\u2019t 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\u2019d amassed all this material that I thought I should write it down in some way.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Tom Overton. Photograph by Owen Richards.<\/p><\/div>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

What was your writing process like?<\/span><\/p>\n

OVERTON<\/span><\/p>\n

I spent a long time putting everything into an enormous, searchable timeline\u2014births, deaths, letters, articles, house moves\u2014so 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\u2014to 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 <\/span>The Storyteller<\/span><\/i> to its current form, <\/span>John Berger: From Life<\/span><\/i>. When it was called <\/span>The Storyteller, <\/span><\/i>it was about three times as long, which became a sort of stone from which I had to carve. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

In the book, you identify Berger\u2019s 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?<\/span><\/p>\n

OVERTON<\/span><\/p>\n

My main problem in writing the book was the sense that, in all of John\u2019s variousness, there was so clearly a unifying spirit, a quality of attention that I hadn\u2019t seen adequately articulated. I had read his writing about how we live with the dead, but I didn\u2019t know what it meant. I didn\u2019t really believe it. It seemed suspect to me, because I couldn\u2019t 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\u2014that the question of how we acknowledge the dead is the core of politics.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

In \u201cThe Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol,\u201d Berger\u2019s novella within <\/span>Pig Earth<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>there\u2019s 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?<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

OVERTON<\/span><\/p>\n

John\u2019s central question\u2014\u201cHow do we live with the dead?\u201d\u2014is 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 \u201cthe company of the past,\u201d and it was the same for how he looked at the Old Masters. It isn\u2019t about returning to the past. It\u2019s a constant, vibrant reminder of how different life has been in different times and places\u2014that the way we live now isn\u2019t inevitable, and that we might be able to change it.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

As you were translating Berger\u2019s life into meaning for the present, how did you think about the subjectivity or objectivity of the biographer\u2019s task?<\/span><\/p>\n

OVERTON<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m increasingly aware of how people paint their subjects in their own image. And I\u2019m sure there will be people who were in John\u2019s life who won\u2019t 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. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

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?<\/span><\/p>\n

OVERTON<\/span><\/p>\n

I think of his line in <\/span>Here Is Where We Meet<\/span><\/i>,<\/span> \u201cThe number of lives that enter our own is incalculable.\u201d 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\u2019t 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\u2019s one thing Berger\u2019s books were really good at\u2014recording the texture of human experience and the quality of social life. <\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

What was it like for you to be the biographer while also getting to know some of the people in Berger\u2019s life so personally? In the case of Anya, you describe holding her hand when she was in the hospital.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

OVERTON<\/span><\/p>\n

I wasn\u2019t 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\u2019s 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\u2019t quite the same thing as, What would they say if they were here? Because they aren\u2019t here. We have to make our own decisions. Biographers are often approached as an avatar of their subject. But that\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Your account of Berger\u2019s 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\u2019s life?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

OVERTON<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s easier not to address the pain in his relationships, and the other way is to be straightforwardly judgmental, which seems pompous and irrelevant. There\u2019s a kind of self-satisfaction in criticizing someone else\u2019s life. It\u2019s very easy to do that. But it\u2019s 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\u2019s a part in his drafts for <\/span>Corker\u2019s Freedom\u2014<\/span><\/i>which I found in a bomb shelter in Meyrin\u2014where Corker and his author talk about the unfolding shape of the book. And John writes directly to Rosa Luxemburg in <\/span>Confabulations.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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. \u201cI wish you hadn\u2019t \/ caught that cold, but the dead we miss are easier \/ to talk to.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Your draw to his work had to do, in part, with his politics. He famously wrote that he didn\u2019t drag politics into art\u2014it 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?<\/span><\/p>\n

OVERTON<\/span><\/p>\n

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 <\/span>Brief as Photos<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>when he writes about language as \u201cpotentially the only human home,\u201d he was thinking about the twentieth-century political upheavals that forced millions to uproot their lives and migrate\u2014when 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\u2019s also where the energy of anti-immigrant politics comes from. It\u2019s why Palestine is such a focus in <\/span>Hold Everything Dear<\/span><\/i>\u2014as someone with European Jewish heritage, he feels the pull of the place, but he can\u2019t look away from the injustice.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Speaking of language, Berger referred to himself as a storyteller, but you say you don\u2019t think storytelling was his central talent. Do you, like Geoff Dyer, think of him as a writer?<\/span><\/p>\n

OVERTON<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019m walking on a tightrope when describing Berger\u2019s life and work. One wrong step and it can sound pretentious. It is strange to call him a writer, because he didn\u2019t 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\u2019t Proust, for instance, though he loved Proust, and he wasn\u2019t James Joyce. Both of those writers luxuriate in language. John didn\u2019t find writing intoxicating in that way.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m interested in the way you frame Berger as a life-writer, and not only in his three biographies, <\/span>The Success and Failure of Picasso<\/span><\/i>,<\/span> A Fortunate Man<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>and <\/span>Art and Revolution. <\/span><\/i>If<\/span> he was a portraitist, what did you learn from him about writing your own portrait of him?<\/span><\/p>\n

OVERTON<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the things I learned from him is that it might be for others to tell me what I\u2019ve 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\u2019t the same thing as reproducing the image in photographic detail. It\u2019s about fully accepting the subjectivity of the person who is in front of the image. There\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

In John\u2019s essay about drawing his father\u2019s corpse, \u201cDrawn to That Moment,\u201d he says a drawing of a tree shows \u201cnot a tree, but a-tree-being-looked-at.\u201d It has an identity because it contains the experience of the person who made it. I tried to get at that in the subtitle <\/span>From Life<\/span><\/i>, in not shying away from my own involvement.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m 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?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

OVERTON<\/span><\/p>\n

I mostly wrote very early in the morning, before everyone else woke up in the house, when there\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One draft of this book was actually called <\/span>Go Closer<\/span><\/i>. There\u2019s that line about him being asked in an interview to define his practice, and he quotes the photographer Robert Capa. \u201cIf the picture isn\u2019t good enough, go closer.\u201d I realized that quote was a kind of instruction to me. I wasn\u2019t close enough yet.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Scott Schomburg\u2019<\/span>s <\/em>The Lost Years of Joseph Mitchell<\/a> is forthcoming from New York Review Books in winter 2027.<\/em><\/div>\n
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