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The cultural critic John Berger was still alive and kicking when he donated his literary archive – heaped boxes of letters and notepads, sketches and scripts – to the British Library in 2009. From his home in the Alps, he proceeded to liaise with the collection’s curator, Tom Overton, sorting each item and recounting the wild stories behind them. When Overton sought permission to write Berger’s biography, though, the critic insisted that he wait a few years. Death changes the relationship between the writer and his subject. More often than not, it complicates and enriches it. Berger – who spent much of his career in passionate conversation with the past – probably knew that better than anyone.
Berger typically described himself as a storyteller, an elastic job title which allowed him to swing between fiction and poetry, essays and screenplays. Implicitly, too, the term helped frame his criticism as something propulsive and inclusive, an invitation to dance as opposed to a judgment from on high. Berger had no time for the “great man” theory of art as espoused by the popular historian Kenneth Clark and instead urged his audience to view each piece as a manifestation of society and politics: the tainted fruit of capitalism, inseparable from the marketplace. Oil paintings were status symbols. Nudes were the product of the lusty male gaze. Looking itself was a political act. “You cannot reply to me,” he would tell 1970s TV viewers, breaking the fourth wall to highlight the medium’s limitations. He liked pointing out the mechanics behind the manufacture of art, demystifying the process to better appreciate its results.
These days Berger’s reputation largely rests on Ways of Seeing, the insurrectionist 1972 BBC series which made him the critics’ equivalent of a rock star or cult leader. Enterprising viewers can still find him on YouTube. He’s the eloquent firebrand with a messianic gleam in his eye; the Marxist intellectual in open-necked patterned shirts. Overton, though, is at pains to stitch Ways of Seeing into its wider context – showing it as part of a continuum, one political project among many. His exuberant biography is thick with detail and lit by wonder. It strains to paint the whole canvas and give us the man in full, warts and all.
Raised in London, a child of the blitz, Berger suffered through boarding school and the army before a visit to a Picasso exhibition knocked the scales from his eyes and blew up his middle-class world. He enjoyed moderate success with his paintings and greater acclaim for his novels (one of which – the fractured, sporadically fabulous G – won the 1972 Booker prize). But he was at his most assured and compelling when using the art of others as a springboard to further, deeper inquiry. Berger regarded each work as a portal between time and space and was enthralled by the ways it could be lost and found in translation. Tellingly, his first broadcasting gig was with the BBC World Service, describing pictures in the National Gallery to listeners in west Africa.
“We never look at just one thing,” he said. “We are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.” That’s certainly the case with John Berger: From Life. Overton is fascinated by Berger but also fascinated by his relationship with Berger and his approach is therefore unashamedly subjective, sliding from the familial third-person (always “John”, never “Berger”) to the direct address (“You”) and between the past and present tense (sometimes in the space of a single sentence). Like Berger in his TV studio, Overton points out the wires, referring to “the book you’re reading now” and “the old man who squats on my pages” and occasionally fretting that he’s left out important information. It’s an elaborate conceit, but it by and large works. There is no single version of a story, Berger argued. Each storyteller can’t help but bend the tale to their will.
Overton reveres Berger but he is frustrated by him, too. His life’s a hot mess; his very presence turns oppressive. He’s so authoritative on the page and so contradictory in the wild, a jumble of red-blooded Marxism and High Tory traditionalism. Berger writes elegantly and angrily about forced migration, mourning the loss of the old rural communities, but he lives as a self-imposed exile in Switzerland and France, splitting his time between different houses and women. Language, he concludes, is “potentially the only real human home”, but even this isn’t fixed; it can be breached at any time. By the end of his life, Overton notes, the man’s spoken English has taken on the grammatical patterns of French.
Berger’s health was already starting to fail when he donated his boxes to the British Library. Overton recalls their queasy close-quarter encounters in London and Paris: “Strong smell of leaky prostate, top-note of cigarettes and event wine.” Berger in the flesh is diminished, disappointing, “less present here than you are in the archive”, which is probably the case with most ageing artists. They’ve put the best of themselves on the canvas, page or screen. That’s where we’ll find them – in their work, in the past.
If there was a bright running thread through Berger’s portmanteau career, it was this preoccupation with the past and its connection to the present. The dead and the living are interdependent, he said. The stronger the link, the happier and healthier the society. Great paintings in a gallery allow us to travel in time. So too do some people, if they are skilled and sensitive enough. Berger’s 1967 book A Fortunate Man paid gorgeous tribute to Dr John Sassall, a country physician from the Forest of Dean whose work at times bordered on the supernatural. “The doctor,” Berger wrote, “is the familiar of death … the living intermediary between us and the multitudinous dead.” He might just as easily be talking about the role of great artists and critics. Possibly British Library curators as well.
“Do biographers always remake their subject in their own image?” Overton wonders as he sets about trying to transfer Berger to the page. Most likely they do, but that’s only half of the equation. The past whispers to the present; the dead and living coexist. Overton is a writer in part because of reading John Berger. The biographer’s prose style is his own but he writes in the same spirit – fired by curiosity and close-marking his subject; gesturing out to the reader as though to engage them in debate. His aim, he confesses, is to convince us that the critic is “sat across the page from me, reading every word, a part of the process,” and in fits and spurts he achieves just that.
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Technically Berger’s no longer with us: he died in 2017 at the age of 90. But he’s still speaking on YouTube, still being reprinted and still provoking and inspiring a fresh generation of writers. That’s the kind of community and continuity that he always hungered for in his life; sweet karmic payback for a career in the arts. Switch sides, reset and keep the conversation flowing. Berger once spoke to the past from the present. Now, as if by magic, it is the other way around.
