John Berger was a household name amongst the British literati in the three decades before the end of the twentieth century. A biography, published this week, invites a fresh appraisal of his life and his work.
Sean Sheehan
Berger shot to instant fame in 1972 for two reasons. His BBC television series “Ways of seeing” in 1972 (available on YouTube) was broadcast and he won the Booker for his novel “G”.
Some of the prize money went towards a study of migrant workers in Europe and this became the book “A seventh man” (1975).
A self-declared Marxist, there are good reasons for applauding the man and his achievements.
The Arab-Israeli Six Day War in 1967 led him to state – as events would similarly do so for others nearly sixty years later – “I’m not ashamed of being a Jew, but I’m profoundly ashamed of Israel”.
When he accepted the Booker he declared his intention to use half of the prize money to help the Black Panthers because the wealth of the sponsors, Booker McConnell, was not unconnected with the exploitation of labour in the Caribbean.
An enduring theme of value in his writing is the thread that binds the present and the future with the past, the living with the dead; as his biographer notes: “This is why the Israeli Defence Forces target Palestinian graveyards as consistently as they target hospitals”.
Over the last seven years of Berger’s life, he died in 2017, Tom Overton came to know him through cataloguing his archive at the British Library.
The closeness that Overton comes to feel towards him explains his use sometimes of the second person singular so that, for example, he addresses Berger directly when describing the speech he gave at the Booker ceremony as ‘one of your two or three best pieces of writing’ and how the ‘diners start banging things to interrupt you like jeering children at a boarding school’.
He also writes about the difficulty at times in respecting him and some readers may come to share my sense of actively disliking him for the disorder he brought to the lives and feelings of women who shared in his life.
It is hard to pin down but there is something overly authoritative and humourless about Berger that occasionally gets in the way of appreciating what he is saying.
As well as a number of books on art and culture – Overton’s succinct summaries and commentaries of these are an invaluable reading guide – Berger also wrote novels and the first of these, “The foot of Clive” (1962), shows his success but also his limitations in the field of fiction.
The story is set in a hospital’s men ward in the 1950s — only a few years after the introduction of a free health service – and it serves as a reflection of British life at that time.
“John Berger from life” by Tom Overton is published by Allen Lane. “The foot of Clive”, by John Berger, is published by Canongate.
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