John Berger

225 Pages·2012·0.8 MB·English

by  Berger

John
Berger
Andy Merrifield

John Berger
Titles in the series Critical Lives present the work of leading cultural
figures of the modern period. Each book explores the life of the
artist, writer, philosopher or architect in question and relates it to
their major works.
In the same series
Georges Bataille Fyodor Dostoevsky Edweard Muybridge
Stuart Kendall Robert Bird Marta Braun
Charles Baudelaire Marcel Duchamp Vladimir Nabokov
Rosemary Lloyd Caroline Cros Barbara Wyllie
Simone de Beauvoir Sergei Eisenstein Pablo Neruda
Ursula Tidd Mike O’Mahony Dominic Moran
Samuel Beckett Michel Foucault Octavio Paz
Andrew Gibson David Macey Nick Caistor
Walter Benjamin Mahatma Gandhi Pablo Picasso
Esther Leslie Douglas Allen Mary Ann Caws
Jorge Luis Borges Jean Genet Edgar Allan Poe
Jason Wilson Stephen Barber Kevin J. Hayes
Constantin Brancusi Derek Jarman Ezra Pound
Sanda Miller Michael Charlesworth Alec Marsh
William S. Burroughs Alfred Jarry Jean-Paul Sartre
Phil Baker Jill Fell Andrew Leak
Coco Chanel James Joyce Erik Satie
Linda Simon Andrew Gibson Mary E. Davis
Noam Chomsky Franz Kafka Gertrude Stein
Wolfgang B. Sperlich Sander L. Gilman Lucy Daniel
Jean Cocteau Lenin Simone Weil
James S. Williams Lars T. Lih Palle Yourgrau
Salvador Dalí Stéphane Mallarmé Ludwig Wittgenstein
Mary Ann Caws Roger Pearson Edward Kanterian
Guy Debord Gabriel García Márquez Frank Lloyd Wright
Andy Merrifield Stephen M. Hart Robert McCarter
Claude Debussy Karl Marx
David J. Code Paul Thomas
John Berger
Andy Merrifield
reaktion books
For John
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
33Great Sutton Street
London ec1v 0dx, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2012
Copyright © Andy Merrifield 2012
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission
of the publishers.
Printed and bound in Great Britain
by Bell & Bain, Glasgow
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Merrifield, Andy.
John Berger. –(Critical lives)
1. Berger, John.
2. Authors, English –20th century –Biography.
3. Art critics –Great Britain –Biography.
I. Title II. Series
828.9’1409-dc23
isbn 978 1 86189 904 0
Contents
Introduction: The Blackbird, the Badger and the King 7
1 Seeing Eye 26
2 G.and Un-G. 49
3 Van Gogh’s Boots 67
4 Showing Voice 88
5 Animal Humanism 106
6 Amongst Other Things a Marxist 124
7 About Time and Space 146
8 Confronting Walls 165
9 Spinoza’s Motorbike 185
References 205
Select Bibliography 218
Acknowledgements 222
Photo Acknowledgements 223
In Play Me Something.
Introduction: The Blackbird,
the Badger and the King
Dressed in full-length leathers, riding his giant Honda Blackbird
1100cc motorbike, John Berger cuts a curious figure for one of
Europe’s greatest living intellectuals. Residents of Quincy, the sleepy
Savoyard village he’s called home since 1975, are used to seeing this
expat octogenarian (born Hackney, north London, 1926), this
costaudwhite-haired novelist-playwright, film scriptwriter-poet,
art critic-essayist, organic intellectual engagé, dart through windy
Alpine passes at breakneck speeds, looking like a cross between a
portly Batman and a real-life Jean Ferrero, Berger’s alter ego from
To the Wedding.
When Berger first moved to his Haute-Savoie beat, home was
several modest rooms near Mieussy’s Baroque church, with its
striking bulbous spire. Summers then were passed on the alpage
at Roche-Pallud, high up around 1,500metres, in a chalet that had
neither electricity nor running water. Descending into the vallée
du Giffre, Berger later settled at a more clement 700metres in
a spacious old farmhouse, replete with barn and ornate spruce
balcony, that had been empty for twenty years before his occu -
pation. The property was constructed long before skiers and
tourists and kitsch wooden holiday cabins colonized the area.
Once upon a time, in a traditional abode like this, denizens ate
and slept next to their beasts.
Berger had come to the Haute-Savoie from Geneva, some
50kilometres due west, where he had lived since 1962, after
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cold-shouldering what he said was a closeted, provincial London in
those days. So he uprooted himself, initially to an apartment next
door to Geneva airport, at avenue de Mategnin, seemingly ready
for a fast getaway, only to extricate himself again a decade or so
later, dramatically in spite of the short distance, bedding himself
down in the hay and in the land of semi-literate mountain peasants.
In coming to alpine France what had Berger forsaken? Phoniness,
comfy literary cliques, the limelight, seductive city lights? Perhaps.
What had he sought? Authenticity, the need to see and feel oppres -
sion close up, in its concrete form? Probably. What had he become?
An immigrant? No, he had come here by choice, as a free man,
as a privileged man – not as a seventh man. Besides, Berger’s
migration was against the migratory flow of the impoverished
masses, those who move exclusively from the countryside to the
city and not the other the other way around, not in a direction
that corroborates privilege. That is presumably why he prefers
to call himself a stranger, somehow always a stranger, even after
35years of belonging, a stranger in a disappearing culture.
Perhaps Berger was trying to avoid what Guy Debord called
‘the society of the spectacle’, the topsy-turvy world in which falsity
becomes an ultimate truth we are now compelled to respect, even
worship. Debord quit Paris not long after Berger had quit London;
the former had gone to the most lost of lost Auvergne villages, to
a cottage, he said, ‘that opened directly onto the Milky Way’. But
Debord had come to cut himself off, to turn his back on society,
playing no part in local auvergnate life. He lived behind a high
stone wall, a wall a mason had built even higher at Debord’s behest.
Berger’s house, by contrast, has no walls and is completely open
to the street. Berger hates walls, walls of separation, walls that cut
people off from one another, walls that keep people in as well as
out. Anybody can come and knock at Berger’s front door; his is
one of the first houses on the left as you enter Quincy, just as the
lane bends and narrows.
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