This new readable biography does not shy from Berger’s contradictions abetted by his personal life
John Berger is most widely known for his four-part 1972 BBC TV series Ways of Seeing, which examined the role of art in late-twentieth-century Western civilisation. He once identified himself as a Romantic Marxist, and his writing, in any genre, could be described as romantic: lengthy scenic descriptions, depicting subjects with awe. His new readable biography by Tom Overton initially adopts a similarly sentimental tone, thoroughly detailing the terrains of Berger’s childhood, contemplating how they shaped Berger. He asserts that Berger ‘dreamed about language being hospitable when the planet itself was not’. Overton spent 15 years working on the art critic and novelist’s archive at the British Library, as well as spending time with Berger, before his death in 2017. Overton set out to write a biography in conversation with Berger, inquisitive rather than definitive, striving to understand Berger, who considered ‘stories as the way of rebuilding the connections with the dead’.
Early this year, upon rereading my favourite text by Berger, his collaboration with photographer Jean Mohr, A Seventh Man (1975), I decided to read their first collaboration, A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor (1967). Overton surmises the text as being ‘about the problem of being a doctor, or an artist, in a society which is “incapable of knowing what a human life is worth”’. It follows the work and life of the doctor John Sassall alongside Mohr’s photographs of countryside landscapes. However, the absence of Sassall’s wife, Betty, is jarring. The exclusion of her domestic labour enabling Sassall’s work in Berger’s text, praising the doctor’s role in the community, feels absurd. Berger said in a 1984 interview with Geoff Dyer, when proclaiming himself as a storyteller, whether writing about art or other people, ‘story-tellers lose their identity and are open to the lives of other people’. Whose lives was Berger open to?
My frustrations reminded me of the introduction to A Seventh Man, which documents the migrant experience in Europe through a hybrid of intimate while distant third-person nameless (to evoke universality) narratives, paired with photographs. Berger notes his absence of the ‘probably two million women’ migrants that would require another book. In From Life, Overton explains Berger’s influences, such as embracing George Lukács’s idea of ‘fictional types representing their societies’ in his studies of the human experience. It’s an approach that makes Berger’s writing feel unbound by time. But it also highlights Berger’s preoccupation to distil the experience of exile, labour and fragmentation; of all a person endures and achieves, being exclusively situated in those he most saw himself in. This essentialising instinct is somewhat at odds with his own criticism examining art, where he would often call for less singular viewpoints.
Late last year The Paris Review published ‘New Optic’, an essay by Anya Berger, née Anna Zisserman, Berger’s partner from 1958 into the 1970s, about men’s perceptions of her body and her experience of ageing. She appears in episode two of Ways of Seeing, in a roundtable discussing the female gaze; her name appears only in the credits. An esteemed translator from German and Russian into English, Anya introduced Berger to the likes of Walter Benjamin. Many of her contributions to Berger’s work remain uncredited; she claimed that it was enough to be near creativity. Her writing was unearthed by both Overton and Katya Berger, John and Anya’s daughter, from a bomb shelter in Geneva, following Anya’s passing in 2018. Anya’s archive plays a substantial role in Overton’s biography, illuminating how Berger’s personal life – his relationship with Anya, and many infidelities – may have shaped the stories he evaded in his work of women’s experiences. In response to Berger’s novel G., for which he won the Booker Prize in 1972, Overton asks, ‘Did John write about the Don Juan trope to draw a line round the damage involved in that way of interacting with women and move on from it?’ From Life does not shy from Berger’s contradictions abetted by his personal life. Overton excavates Berger’s avoidances to the forefront, while keeping the prose hospitable to Berger, whom he eventually addresses directly with ‘you’. Overton’s sentimental writing is strikingly tender, but while it first appears idealised, upon the book’s conclusion it mirrors Berger’s own definition of tenderness, which he once classified both as a response to life being full of pain and “a refusal to judge”.
John Berger: From Life by Tom Overton. Allen Lane, £25 (hardcover)
