A Flamboyant, Impatient Rebel | Los Angeles Review of Books

IN 2009, BRITISH ARTIST, writer, and broadcaster John Berger (1926–2017) donated his personal archive to the British Library. Though he was 82 at the time of the gift, his body of work proceeded to grow for another eight years. Berger continued to write until his death at 90. The collection—which included drawings, sketches, and paintings along with novels, poetry, art criticism, art historical monographs, and lyrically idiosyncratic essays—was, unsurprisingly, massive. Berger offered the entire catalog to the library free of charge. But the gift came with a catch: to retrieve the documents, he asked that the library’s archival staff travel to his remote home in the French Alps to pick them up.

The task initially fell to Jamie Andrews, the library’s head of modern manuscripts at the time of Berger’s donation. Writing in The Guardian, Mark Brown points out that getting the papers was a major “coup for the British Library in a competitive field.” Massive US institutions like the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, according to Brown, are often quick to snatch up the valuable archives of British writers. For Andrews, Berger’s caveat seemed fair: “If he’s giving us this incredible archive for free,” he told Brown, “then the least I can do is roll up my sleeves and help out with the harvesting.”

Tom Overton, an archive curator at London’s Barbican Centre who was tasked with editing the acquisition, also worked to bring the collection process to its completion. The project retained its original treasure-hunting flavor with Overton at the helm: at times, the work seemed less like that of the stereotypically anchoritic librarian and more like the swashbuckling archaeological acquisitions carried out by Abigail Chase in the film National Treasure (2004). It reached beyond Berger’s home and brought Overton into forgotten nooks and crannies of the Old World, such as a Cold War fallout shelter in Geneva where he and Berger’s daughter Katya retrieved two massive suitcases of lost documents from the years 1960–72.

During an interview from around the time of his donation, Berger claimed the coexistence of the living and the dead is a fundamental part of what separates humans from other animals. Archives, he suggests, are among the most valuable tools at our disposal in maintaining this relationship, not only with the people we might have known but also with “the people perhaps whom one only knows by what they did, or what they left behind.” Unsurprisingly, he took on an active role in helping Overton edit, curate, and archive his work for posterity.

Berger and Overton developed a close friendship while collaborating on the project. Overton’s intimate familiarity with Berger, on both a professional and a personal level, positioned him as a public authority on all things Berger. In the 2010s, he edited Portraits: John Berger on Artists (2015) and Landscapes: John Berger on Art (2016), a pair of excellent collections of Berger’s writing on the titular modes of painting. Since the books’ publication, Overton has contributed chapters to several scholarly books dedicated to Berger’s writing, defended Berger’s 1972 television series Ways of Seeing from its crude appropriation by the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery, and championed the underappreciated work of Berger’s third wife, Anya (née Anna Bostock), who translated several works of Georg Lukács. After Berger died, Overton offered an obituary to The Telegraph, penned a moving retrospective on his life and work for Frieze, and contributed to a memorial television program aired by the BBC.

Near the end of Berger’s life, Overton asked for permission to write his biography. Berger assented—on the condition that the book was not to see print until after he was dead. Aptly published months before Berger’s centenary in November, Overton’s skillfully researched John Berger: From Life has just been released by Verso. The book joins a suite of reissued editions of Berger’s writing that includes well-recognized mainstays, such as his Booker Prize–winning novel G. (1972), alongside collections of essays from his early years as a firebrand art critic at The New Statesman, and overlooked experimental work from his late period, such as Bento’s Sketchbook (2011), a playful, illustrated meditation on the thought and writing of Baruch Spinoza.

In From Life, Overton blends the patient, meticulous, clear-eyed archival research we might expect from a professional historian with the subjective and intimate familiarity of the memoirist to offer a complete and comprehensive portrait of his subject. The biography provides an excellent introduction to new readers who may have first encountered Berger through the recent rerelease of G. For the already initiated, From Life draws useful connections between Berger’s myriad projects, explores the surrounding context from which they arose, and teases out through lines that remained consistent across his lengthy career.

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Berger’s work was protean. At the start of his career, which spanned six decades, he staked out territory as an uncompromising voice for the British Left while working as an art critic at The New Statesman beginning in 1951. He would remain a persistent presence in the periodical press for his entire life. In the 1960s, he and the Swiss photographer Jean Mohr channeled the work of James Agee and Walker Evans, whose Depression-era journalism had blended text and image to chronicle the lives of Alabama tenant farmers. Together, Mohr and Berger produced politically charged documentary projects such as the book A Seventh Man (1975), which offers a glimpse into the lives of displaced migrant laborers in 1970s Europe.

After cutting his teeth in broadcasting as a scriptwriter and reader for the BBC’s West Africa Service in the 1950s, Berger later made regular appearances on television as a cultural commentator. This reached its high point when he produced his innovative miniseries Ways of Seeing, which made esoteric art theory accessible to a wide audience without compromising intellectual rigor. Like Raymond Williams, a fellow-traveling Marxist theorist who shared his interest in the chasm separating the lives of urban and agricultural laborers, Berger effortlessly wove the political, social, critical, and personal concerns that shaped his work as a critic into a run of novels that, taken alone, would stand as an exceptional lifetime achievement. Berger also dabbled in screenwriting and cinema, contributing to the production of films by avant-garde directors such as Pier Paolo Pasolini and Timothy Neat.

From Life begins with Berger’s childhood. He was born in 1926 in the Stoke Newington neighborhood of London. Stanley, his father, was raised in what Overton describes as an “aspirant bourgeois” household, briefly attended Kelham Theological College, and earned a Military Cross during the Great War for his service as a second lieutenant in the Robin Hood Battalion of Sherwood Foresters regiment. In the war’s aftermath, Berger’s father stayed in France to work for the Imperial War Graves Commission, where he supervised the identification and transfer of fallen soldiers’ remains—a role Overton compares to working as an “urban planner” in one of Rudyard Kipling’s “‘Silent Cities’ of the dead.” Berger’s mother, Miriam Branson, came from a working-class family. Her mother’s death, which left her to care for her siblings when she was only 11, robbed her of the prospect of attending school. She became a cook at 18, joined the London Vegetarian Society, and befriended the socialist progressive Charlotte Despard, who led her to take up political activism. She would later brag about her role in bringing England’s “first socialist government to power” while working for the Labour MP Susan Lawrence, and she eventually reached the apex of her upward trajectory when she served as a secretary to the mayor of Holborn’s wife, Lady Frances Smith.

Overton writes that Berger’s parents imprinted a “hyperawareness” of the rigid English social structure onto him at an early age. He and his brother Michael came of age long after their father’s service in the war had faded from memory. As business returned to normal, the Berger parents’ ascent hit a ceiling. “They had both been tourists in upper-class lives,” writes Overton. “They felt their banishment and wanted to work their way back: for themselves, and for their sons.” Their desperate efforts to restore their lost prestige remained an ambient presence in Berger’s otherwise comfortable childhood. His experience as a scholarship student at the prestigious St. Edward’s School in Oxford helped to draw out the contrast between his own modest rank in the rigid class hierarchy and that of his upper-crust peers.

As an adolescent, Berger’s budding sense of class-consciousness led him to cultivate a contrarian, outsider persona that prefigured the reputation he later earned for both his firebrand polemics in the periodical press and the self-imposed exile that led him to abandon London for Continental Europe. “I was a flamboyant impatient rebel,” he writes in “Myself When Young,” an autobiographical essay from 1961. Working hard to express his hostility, Berger antagonized the St. Edward’s faculty by taking up outlandish positions during in-class debates and provoked the ire of his classmates by wearing a hammer and sickle lapel pin he bought from an Oxford bookshop. He kept his peers at arm’s length and spent much of his school days in solitude.

Where Berger’s youth was embattled, it was not without passion or curiosity. During his isolation at St. Edward’s, Berger nurtured a growing love for art and literature that Overton attributes to the influence of Arthur Kenneth Stowe, one of his teachers at the Sunnydown preparatory school in Surrey. Berger would later honor Stowe by featuring him in a set-piece chapter of Here Is Where We Meet, a 2005 pseudomemoir of imagined conversations between Berger and those who shaped his life and work. In a brief passage entitled “Krakow,” a semifictionalized version of Stowe appears in the guise of “Ken,” a composite character that, as Overton explains, blends “every idea and individual which took John into the adult world.”

In a characteristically lucid passage of From Life, Overton uses Berger’s approach to memoir in Here Is Where We Meet to illustrate the way much of Berger’s literary writing sits at the interstice between “historical fact and fictional play,” comfortably inhabiting the peculiar liminal space between the two. Though it’s tempting to take “Krakow” as a transparent window into Berger’s distant past, Overton cautions that this would be a mistake. When Ken and the fictionalized Berger begin to rattle off a list of authors that whetted the latter’s literary appetite as a child, the citation of James Joyce, Laurence Sterne, and Marcel Proust invites us to raise a suspicious eyebrow at Berger’s pretense to precocity. Overton encourages us to indulge our doubts. As a documentary account of his formative years, the inventory of influences in “Krakow” obscures as much as it reveals about Berger’s youth; as a dubious catalog curated by the author 60 years later, “Krakow” candidly divulges the way Berger hoped we might read his life story.

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Berger graduated from St. Edward’s in 1944, served a brief tour of duty during World War II, then enrolled in art school, first at the Chelsea School of Art, then at London’s Central School of Art and Design. He taught drawing in the late 1940s and early 1950s and held his first commercial exhibition in 1948 at the Kingly Gallery. Though the show was well received, he would soon devote far more energy to talking about art than to practicing it, after his friend Mary Treadgold set him up with a radio job describing paintings at the National Gallery for the BBC’s West African Service. Berger leapt at the opportunity to engage a mass audience, including listeners as far away as Kenya, using new media. Taking his cue from Orwell’s plainspoken avoidance of “multi-clausal, accumulating sentences which get lost in the air,” Berger began to cultivate the economical prose that gave his later writing much of its rhetorical force. Before long, he had parlayed his newfound talent for scriptwriting into his first full-time writing position as a columnist at The New Statesman.

Though he never officially joined the Communist Party, Berger’s commitment to radical politics only deepened in the years that followed. Despite the Statesman’s orientation toward Labour politics, Berger tended to outflank his colleagues at the magazine from the Left. Overton writes that he “generated, and fed upon, debate and anger in the magazine’s letters pages.” Controversy, Overton goes on, boosted “John’s own profile as a writer, while degrading what would now be described as his mental health.” In the years that followed the 1956 Soviet crackdown on mass protests in Hungary, which opened a rift between Britain’s “Old” and “New” Left, Berger paid a psychic toll for his contrarian punditry. In the invasion’s aftermath, the Statesman issued an open letter condemning the actions of the Soviet government that was signed by colleagues including Eric Hobsbawm and Doris Lessing. Berger stubbornly refused to sign the letter and dragged his feet for several years longer than many of his fellow-traveling contemporaries in withdrawing support for Moscow.

Stalinism, writes Overton, “caused John at least one major breakdown.” When his support for the USSR finally began to waver in the 1960s, Berger found himself working to clarify his position on the relationship between art and politics. In the preface to a later edition of Permanent Red (1960), a collection of his Statesman essays, Berger does not yield his opposition to the “injustice, hypocrisy, cruelty, wastefulness and alienation” endemic to bourgeois society. He goes on to bluntly state that the goal of his writing was, and remains, to “help, in however small a way, to destroy this society.” Yet if Western capitalism continued “to frustrate the best in man,” the USSR, writes Berger, no longer offered a viable alternative. Faced with a binary choice between two opposing powers, Berger recalls feeling trapped between unavoidable poles. He believed that, in the early 1950s, the USSR, despite its “deformations,” represented “a great part of the force of the socialist challenge to capitalism.” By 1960, this was no longer so.

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In the same preface, Berger singles out a short piece from his time at the Statesman that later served as the germ for The Success and Failure of Picasso (1965), Berger’s first book-length work of criticism, which Overton sees as a defining step toward an original and fully realized critical vision. The book, Overton explains, explores the “global transition from free competition to monopoly capitalism” that brought forth changes in science, technology, and industry that fundamentally altered the way we perceive and navigate the world. Berger saw the global economy as a structure of invisible forces that enmeshes agricultural and industrial laborers, merchants, financiers, entrepreneurs, and consumers in an increasingly dense network. Because it entails a multiplicity of interconnected points of view, the linear, unified perspective so painstakingly developed by Renaissance painters was no longer up to the task of depicting our changing world. Picasso and his cubist colleagues, Berger argues, stepped up to this new representational challenge by prioritizing the way objects interact, over and above centering the objects themselves.

Space, Berger later writes in The Moment of Cubism and Other Essays (1969), is not an empty container that houses events and objects. Rather, the space around and between objects is as much a part of the structure as the objects themselves. The success of the cubists in general and Picasso in particular, he believed, lay in the way their art elevated process and relation over static entities. “The content of their art,” he writes, “consists of various modes of interaction.” In an early draft of the book, Berger explored structuring The Success and Failure of Picasso as a letter addressed to his newborn son. From its inception, Overton points out, the book was directed toward an audience situated in some unspecified future where the painter had faded into irrelevance. In the final version, Berger’s Picasso is a symbol of “what happens to even unkillable genius in a bourgeois world.” The book frames Picasso’s life as a heroic struggle to render legible the structures and systems that shape our world, only to find himself tragically assimilated into that world before his audience could find a way to change it.

For Overton, Berger’s Picasso book was the first in a sequence of three loosely biographical projects infused with the formally innovative, late-modernist sensibility the author had cultivated in his first forays into fiction just a few years earlier: A Painter of Our Time (1958), The Foot of Clive (1962), and Corker’s Freedom (1964). Shortly after The Success and Failure, Berger published Art and Revolution: Ernst Neizvestny and the Role of the Artist in the USSR (1969), another long-form work of art criticism focused on the dissident Soviet sculptor Neizvestny. In that volume, Berger offers a full-throated critique of the Soviet Union’s dogmatic “academicism” for imposing abstractions that “schematize and inhibit the artist’s imagination before he even begins to work.” Between the two monographs, Berger also completed A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor (1967), the first of several collaborations with Mohr, which blended the latter’s photos with Berger’s words to depict the life and labor of John Sassall, a country doctor, as he served his remote community. This experimental approach to biography, coupled with the theoretical rigor of The Moment of Cubism, shows the diversity of Berger’s output during the 1960s and points directly toward the developing sensitivity to form and clarity of vision that came to characterize his mature work.

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In From Life, Overton argues that this maturity reached its fullest expression in the watershed year of 1972, when Berger completed his two most important projects. The first of these was the debut of Berger’s BBC program Ways of Seeing, a miniseries on the theory, history, criticism, and reception of art. The series remains Berger’s most enduring achievement and continues to stand as an art-school touchstone. As Overton observes, it has also taken on an “afterlife as a series of illegally uploaded YouTube videos, constantly sampled by internet artists.” Central to the series are questions of how images work to call forth the appearance of something absent. “No other kind of relic or text from the past can offer such a direct testimony about the world which surrounded other people at other times,” Berger writes in the companion volume to the series. He goes on to claim that works of art grant us access to “the artist’s experience of the visible” in a way that documentary forms of evidence cannot.

But Berger also gives a stern warning against the presumption that we can ever fully inhabit the artist’s perception of their world. He devotes the bulk of Ways of Seeing to untangling and interrogating our assumptions about “Beauty,” “Truth,” “Genius,” “Civilization,” “Form,” “Status,” and “Taste,” which distort, block, or warp the way we receive images. Through its four information-rich installments, Ways of Seeing offers compelling sociological explorations into how we approach art when it becomes fundamentally altered by technology and new media, when it raises questions of objectification and gender difference, when it is converted into property or used to denote status and wealth, and when it is appropriated by advertisers, marketing executives, and branding agents.

Among the series’ high points are a prescient discussion about the male gaze between Berger, his wife Anya, and a diverse group of panelists—an exchange that continues to look progressive more than 50 years after it originally aired—and a conversation Berger held with a group of children that touched on the conscious decisions artists make about what and what not to include in a painting. In the series’ first episode, its strongest, Berger places one of his greatest gifts as a writer and broadcaster on full display. Beginning with Art and Revolution, he had developed a knack for parsing the dense ideas of aesthetic philosophers, distilling their esoteric thought into terms accessible to nonspecialists. “Camera and Painting,” the debut episode of Ways of Seeing, takes full advantage of the TV medium by using Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” to illustrate Berger’s argument that copying and reduplicating works of art fundamentally alters the way we receive them.

The second of Berger’s major achievements in 1972 was the publication of his novel G. Set around the time of World War I, it follows the eponymous character, a Don Giovanni figure, as he fumbles his way across Europe in a series of sexual exploits, mishaps, and awakenings. Through a fragmented narrative that Berger intersperses with digressive vignettes, authorial aphorisms, and occasional essayistic flights of fancy, G. explores the intersection of politics, violence, and eroticism. At first glance, the novel’s premise may appear to tread well-worn ground; however, its kaleidoscopic structure, which neatly translates a cubist sensibility from the visual to the literary domain, coupled with the teeming energy of Berger’s performance, lends the novel a visceral vibrancy that sets it a cut above the mere sexist romp its plot might have become in less capable hands.

After winning the Booker Prize for the novel, Berger would later help secure G.’s lasting cult status during his reception speech. The award, which had only been established a few years prior, is named for the British wholesaler Booker McConnell Ltd. (now the Booker Group), who sponsored the prize beginning in 1969. “Booker McConnell,” writes Overton, “were and are a type of modern capitalist organization, drawing a line from the old Empire to the new, clear and unbroken.” Josias Booker, whose business relied on slave labor from West Africa, worked with his brother George to operate a Guyanese sugar plantation; the brothers founded Booker as a shipping business in 1835 after Parliament abolished slavery two years earlier. Guyana won its independence from Great Britain in 1966. Though the newly free state nationalized the land previously held by Booker McConnell, Overton points out that the “wealth had been moved out of Guyana long before” its independence. By the 1960s, the company had already been diversifying its portfolio for decades and, under the leadership of its new chairman, Jock Campbell, had begun managing literary estates. In what Overton describes as one of Berger’s “two or three best pieces of writing” due to its “moral clarity,” the 1972 Booker winner’s speech viciously excoriated the prize committee and announced his plan to donate half of the prize money to the British Black Panthers.

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From Life makes a concerted effort to weave the diverse threads of Berger’s work into a single, cohesive tapestry without smoothing out its multitextured richness. The sweeping thematic scope of topics that stimulated Berger’s interest, coupled with his restless drift between forms as diverse as narrative fiction, journalistic reportage, lyric poetry, and art-critical essay (sometimes blending these genres within the same text), makes Berger’s work resistant to easy classification or tidy summary. His range has also led to an uneven reception among different audiences. “Ask an artist,” writes Overton, “and John is most famous for reimagining the relationship between art and technology in Ways of Seeing. Ask a medic, and he is most famous for A Fortunate Man, a book about the value of doctors.” A historian is likely to find themselves drawn to his documentary projects with Mohr; a sociologist might be inclined to recognize him for his comparative work on the cultural divisions that distinguish city from country life.

Overton opens the book by acknowledging the near-impossible task Berger poses to anyone seeking a central theme in his work. The “one question” that haunted his oeuvre, Overton suggests, remains the continued, ongoing presence of the dead. At times, this could take on the aspect of supernatural mysticism, but more often, it remained grounded in the tension Berger felt between his acute awareness of memory, in all its slippery ephemerality, and his deeply committed Marxist materialism. In his lyrical, late-period, book-length essay And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (1984), he reflects on “seeing” the dead when he closes his eyes:

I am always aware that if I open my eyes, the faces will immediately disappear, become absent. What is less clear to me is what happens when I shut my eyes. Is it I who cross the barrier that normally excludes them, or is it they who cross it? They belong to the past. The certainty with which I know this has nothing to do with their clothes or the “style” of their faces. They belong to the past because they are the dead, and I know this by the way they look at me. They look at me with something approaching recognition.

Elsewhere in the book (recently reissued by NYRB Classics), Berger claims that human lives play out across two lines: the “horizontal” line of geography and the “vertical” line of history that connects those of us living in the present both to our ancestors and to the generations yet to come. Each line, Berger believed, is governed by its own unique temporality. We move across the horizontal line according to the biological time of our physical embodiment; we move up and down the vertical line according to the more flexible time of consciousness. A biography, Overton claims, should explain the first type of time in order to extend the second and “make the argument that we should keep this consciousness going a little longer.” From Life succeeds in doing that: it stands as a testament to Berger’s faith in the storyteller’s ability to sustain our “companionship” with “those who are no longer alive.”