The many revolutions of John Berger

You must remember this. In 1973, Marlon Brando won the best actor Oscar for his turn in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. But Brando, like many an instinctive talent, was contemptuous of his gift and chose not to show up for the award. In his place, he sent along one Sacheen Littlefeather, a putative Apache activist, to protest the depiction of Native Americans as savages in Hollywood westerns. It made for great television, and not simply because it fell to a somewhat less than cool, calm and collected Roger Moore—then the brand-new Bond—to present Brando’s stand-in with that gold-plated statuette. 

Still, licensed to thrill though that moment be, it is as dishwater next to the hijinks that had taken place at London’s Café Royal four months earlier. We are talking of the 1972 Booker prize ceremony, at which a judging panel comprising Elizabeth Bowen, George Steiner and chairman Cyril Connolly named John Berger’s G. the winner. It was an offer that Berger didn’t so much refuse as, to quote his speech (reprinted in full in Bloomsbury’s handsome new reissue of the novel), “turn… against itself”. 

Resplendent under shoulder-length hair and in a suede suit of what his latest biographer Tom Overton calls a “vaguely military amber”, Berger tells the Booker audience that G. had taken five years to write. He thinks his next project, a study of migrant workers in Europe, will take at least as long. He will therefore be using half his £5,000 winnings to fund the research. Which is fitting, he says, since Booker McConnell, the company behind the prize, got rich by exploiting the Caribbean and immiserating the locals—with the result “that hundreds of thousands of West Indians have been forced to come to [work in] Britain”. How delicious, Berger goes on, as Steiner contrives to both weep and giggle, and a boggle-eyed Connolly scopes the room for a fainting couch, that his new project will be “financed from the profits made directly out of” immigrant labour. Oh, and as for the other £2,500, he’ll be giving that to the British Black Panthers to help fund their fight against racial oppression.

And there you have him. Whatever Berger was—and, as well as a novelist, he was an art critic, a poet, a screenwriter, a documentary-maker, a television presenter, not to mention a kind of designer peasant who, to the merriment of his genuinely classe-ouvrière neighbours in the Haute-Savoie, insisted on retaining an outdoor thunderbox—he was forever hoping to foment revolution. In place of Alexander Pope’s “Whatever is, is right”, Berger held that pretty much everything about the way the world is organised is wrong. As he writes in the introduction to his first collection of art criticism, 1960’s Permanent Red (one of several of Berger’s books being reissued in a uniform edition by Verso), “The question I ask is: Does this work help or encourage men to know and claim their social rights?” Reviewing it for the Spectator, Andrew Forge opened with the words, “John Berger, Marxist”, for all the world like the hanging judge in a kangaroo court.

Berger was born 100 years ago this month, on 5th November 1926. He came into the world in Stoke Newington, the “possibly Sephardi, probably Ashkenazi” issue of a slightly rackety working-class mother and a father who, his son mocked, played a big part in the invention of management theory. Berger loathed his schooling, running away from St Edward’s in Oxford at 16 and demanding that he be allowed to study at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. Still, he remained friendly enough with a teacher from his prep school days at Sunnydown in Guildford, Arthur Kenneth Stowe. So friendly, says Overton, that Stowe is surely the basis of a character in one of the stories in Here is Where We Meet (2005), in which Berger’s narrator remembers having “felt a burning in Ken’s erect member” in a “bed damp with spunk and tears”.

Be that as it may, Berger seems in the main to have made beds damp (not to mention pillows teary) in the usual way. Very damp. Very teary. For Berger, not unlike the Don Juan figure at the centre of G.—that “great erotic god which every woman in her imagination either feeds or starves”—turns out to have been a serial seducer. Having shacked up with an early girlfriend at only 17, he would go on to marry four times, with, Overton makes painstakingly clear, plenty of action on the side. Doris Lessing, Eva Figes, Nuala O’Faolain—such are just a few of the more famous of Berger’s conquests. At one point, Overton wonders whether the heckling Berger got from Ernest Gébler at the Booker ceremony wasn’t because of the distress he was causing the sponsors and judges, but because he’d had his way with Gébler’s former wife, Edna O’Brien.

All this rather distresses Overton, a judgemental gen Y-er ill at ease with the bedhopping antics of a bourgeois gadabout. He quotes a Berger book review that talks of “the confidence and generosity of multiple love, and the insecurity and jealousy which insists we have only one mortal life”, and wonders—in one of several excruciating entreaties to his subject’s ghost—“what are you thinking[?]” as you dictate this to the wife who types all your manuscripts. Later on, when Berger’s son’s girlfriend is told she is HIV-positive, Overton (who has written for the Guardian and the New Statesman) comes over like a millennial Mary Whitehouse. Surely Berger “must have realized he would not still be alive had the Aids crisis arrived earlier”. Must have realised? Would not still be alive? Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.

What’s worse is that Overton seems to think Berger’s penchant for passion pulls the rug from under his sexual politics. This is prudish nonsense. There is nothing to indicate Berger mistreated any of the women in his life. And even if there were, it wouldn’t follow that his ideas and ideals are invalidated by his inability to live up to them. Regardless, the fact is that Berger’s 1972 TV series, Ways of Seeing, probably did as much for feminism as Germaine Greer’s then recently published The Female Eunuch. 

“Men act and women appear,” Berger argues in the book he wrote to accompany the series. “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.” Half a century on, this is still extraordinary stuff. Indeed, Ways of Seeing has some claim to being the most influential work of criticism of the second half of the 20th century.

In giving us the concept of the male gaze, ‘Ways of Seeing’ did a lot to invent both film and media studies

If Berger’s Booker prize outburst put what would become postcolonial studies on the intellectual map, Ways of Seeing rewrote the rules of the humanities in toto. The show’s emphasis on the socioeconomic forces underpinning artistic creation had as much impact on art history as EH Carr’s What Is History? had on the study of history proper. In giving us the concept of the male gaze, it did a lot to invent both film and media studies. And if you want to know why today’s arts undergraduates talk as much about Coronation Street as Coriolanus, Berger’s show (which you can watch on YouTube) is the place to start.

Not that he was any kind of relativist. Overton is quite wrong when he argues that Berger would “spend his working life eroding” the distinction between “high” and “low” art. What he did was define it more closely. Like Theodor Adorno before him, Berger believed that high art helped hurry the revolution along. Low art was the stuff that kept the people in their place.

Overton doesn’t mention Adorno, but he is otherwise gratifyingly good on whence Berger burgeoned. He knows how much Ways of Seeing owed to Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (which had only been translated into English a few years before the show was made). And he follows Geoff Dyer—whose first, long-out-of-print book is an uncharacteristically clunking monograph on Berger’s work—in seeing how vital the thought of the Marxist political philosopher Georg Lukács was to Berger’s early art criticism.

A fervent anti-modernist, Lukács preached the necessity of socialist realist literature. Permanent Red is full of pieces insisting that British painters steer clear of what Berger saw as empty-headed Americana—Pop, Ab-Ex (in one New Statesman column, he claims that Jackson Pollock’s “smack-slap-and-dribble abstracts” are no more than “the equivalent of the monkey on the typewriter”)—in favour of social realism.

Theoretically less orthodox than socialist realism, social realism, at least in Berger’s hands, turned out pretty doctrinaire too. In his early monograph The Success and Failure of Picasso (as contentious as it is clever, and—hélas—only available second hand), Berger argues that Picasso’s work thinned out with the years not because he lived a long life and almost of necessity ended up tamely repeating himself, but because the great wealth his success had ushered in served to insulate him from the concerns of the people. And in 1969’s Art and Revolution, Berger goes the whole insurrectionary hog, conflating the sculptor Ernst Neizvestny’s unimpeachably anti-Stalinist intentions with his—how to put this?—rather more impeachable achievements.

What is odd about Berger is that, when he began to write fiction, he forsook all the strictures set forth in his criticism. Granted, there are passages in his first novel, A Painter of our Time (1958), so humdrum and homespun they wouldn’t look out of place in Room at the Top. But his third novel, Corker’s Freedom (1964), which signifies shifts in levels of consciousness by shuttling between roman and italic type, is an attempt at doing to prose what cubism had done to one-point perspective. By the time of G., Berger had gone full-on experimental. Here is the novel as self-consciously allusive, aggressively non-linear, wilfully incoherent and, I fear, as unreadable gibber. You don’t have to agree with Auberon Waugh, who dismissed G. as a “morass of pomposity”, to concede Overton’s point that Berger’s “talent was not for storytelling. He had no ear for rhythm, or gift for narrative”. 

Unfortunately, this is a case of pot, kettle, black. Overton may be an industrious archivist, but he lacks one of the biographer’s most basic skills—getting things down in the right order. Shorn of a properly chronological armature, From Life can’t help but drift along, from book to book, incident to incident, affair to affair. Overton is forever letting people enter his story without having properly introduced them. Often enough, they’re then either left stranded on stage or made to shuffle off it in sheepish silence. At one point, we learn that Berger is divorced from someone we didn’t know he’d married.

So numinous did Berger turn that his later work is dominated by the idea that, whatever capitalism, with its insistence on perpetual futurity, might tell you, death is not the end. In a piece for the Guardian on the paintings in the Chauvet caves, Berger wrote of how, for nomadic peoples, “the departure of the dead is felt as a loss but not as an abandonment”. As Overton makes clear, Berger came increasingly to see the storyteller’s function as that of mediator twixt the dead and the unborn. We have come a long way from base and superstructure.

What Overton never touches on, perhaps because he suffers from the same disease, is Berger’s utter humourlessness. He could make FR Leavis look like Jerry Lewis. As far as I can see, the only time he cracked a joke was when he said he went to art school in order to be able to look at naked women all day—and now that I’ve read Overton on Berger’s shenanigans between the sheets, I’m not even sure it was a joke. Seriousness is to be applauded, of course, but Berger could be solemn to the point of being sombre.

And yet: for all his over-earnestness, Berger called pretty much every major issue right. More often than not, he called them right before anyone else did. Not many trailblazers go on blazing trails throughout their lives. But the essays and articles Berger was writing in the run-up to his death, aged 90, in 2017, are as off-message and on-point as anything in what is perhaps his best collection of essays, The Moment of Cubism (1969). 

Art, Berger used to say, “should be an inspiration to life, not a consolation” for it. Nobody could call his fiction even vaguely consoling, but his criticism and analysis remain a goading guide to painters and paintings, history and herstory. I will think of him on Guy Fawkes’ Night, the night he would have turned 100, when the sky is lit up with the kind of frantic, glittering abstractions he would have dismissed as escapist trivia, even as he bemoaned the failure of the revolutionary plot that birthed them.