Introduction

In the nineteenth century there was a tradition whereby novelists, storytellers and even poets offered the public an historical explanation of their work, often in the form of a preface. Inevitably a poem or a story deals with a particular experience: how this experience relates to developments on a world scale can and should be implied within the writing itself – this is precisely the challenge posed by the resonance of a language (in one sense any language, like a mother, knows all); nevertheless it is not usually possible in a poem or a story to make the relation between particular and universal fully explicit. Those who try to do so end up writing parables. Hence the writer’s desire to write an explanation around the work he is offering to the reader. The tradition became established in the nineteenth century exactly because it was a century of revolutionary change in which the relation between the individual and history was becoming a conscious one. The scale and rate of change in our own century is even greater.

Thus wrote John Berger at the beginning of the ‘Historical Afterword’ to his collection of stories of peasant experience, Pig Earth, the first part of the trilogy Into Their Labours on which he is still engaged.

Today John Berger is well known for his novels and stories as well as for his works of non-fiction, including several volumes of art criticism and his work with the photographer Jean Mohr. Throughout his career John Berger has also been active as an essayist, writing regularly for a wide audience. It is this aspect of his writing in particular which this volume presents.

This is his fifth volume collection of essays and it is the most comprehensive in the period of time it embraces, in the range of types of writing and in the issues it addresses. Anchored in the concerns of his most recent work, it allows one a sense of the development of his writings. Representative of John Berger the essayist, it throws light on the impulses behind much of his work in other media and genres. Love and passion, death, power, labour, the experience of time and the nature of our present history: the many themes that run through this volume are important not only as foci for John Berger’s work but are also urgent contemporary concerns. Selecting and arranging the material was relatively simple. Introducing it is less so.

I remember well my surprise when I first sat down to work with John Berger. I had been invited by him to spend a week talking about photographs and about his long essay on photography (‘Appearances’, in Another Way of Telling). I had come armed with detailed comments on the first draft of the essay. I found I could refer easily and confidently not only to writers such as Walter Benjamin and Susan Sontag who had clearly influenced the essay, but also to John Berger’s own previous writings on photography.

What came as a surprise was just how unhelpful this academic and essentially linguistic facility turned out to be, for the nature and intensity of John Berger’s concentration astounded me and provided a kind of instantaneous instruction. Almost at once I realized that where I had approached the whole exercise as if the problem were to make these various statements and analyses (which had already proved for me their power of illumination and explanation) merely consistent with one another and to push the argument along, for John Berger, even at such a late stage in the process of writing, what mattered was what could be seen, what could be read from appearances themselves, almost to the exclusion of the familiar words and formulations. These he had clearly put aside – even the phrases in the essay on which we were working were almost forgotten. The words which mattered were those called forth by what we could see. The focus was entirely on images and appearances, on the photographs on the desk and occasionally on the worlds that appeared through the open window.

The affinity between this discipline, which is clearly now habitual and largely unconscious in John Berger, and the philosophic methods of the early phenomenologists is not an accidental one; there are many traces of the influence of that tradition in European philosophy in Berger’s writings. But Berger clearly owes less to any philosophic training than to his own early passion for painting and drawing and his life-long involvement with the visual arts. It is appropriate to borrow his own shorthand and to say that with John Berger seeing really does come first. And despite the career he has made in writing, and despite the levels of complexity and abstraction present in his writing, there is a sense in which seeing, perceiving and imagining, has retained its primacy as a way of understanding the world.

John Berger was born in London on 5th November 1926. A kind of inner exile and emigration began for him when he was sent away to a school he loathed. It could only be reinforced by his precocious reading of the anarchist classics. At sixteen, and very much against the wishes of his family, he left school in order to be an artist. His studies at the Central School of Art were interrupted by the war. He refused the commission to which he was expected to accede and spent the war as a private and then a lance corporal. That meant living with working-class men in a kind of proximity not normally possible for anyone of his background. It proved to be a decisive influence. When he left the army he enrolled at the Chelsea Art School and began to involve himself in current politics.

Exploring relationships between visual and verbal meaning, between words and images has been a recurring preoccupation of John Berger’s work. But before he began to explore their interrelation he experienced a kind of divided loyalty. As a boy he painted pictures and wrote poems and stories in equal numbers. While still at school this lent his painting a literary, anecdotal quality and invested his writings with a preoccupation with visual description. His painting continued after he left school and he had a series of successful exhibitions. Even today he still draws. But he began earning a living by talking about art and later by writing art criticism. Writing became his main vehicle, his own means of communication, but in a sense his primary reality and his constant concerns were visual.

In 1952 he began ten years as the art critic of the New Statesman. With his outspoken politics and his sensitivity to the actual processes of painting he soon established himself as one of the best-known and most controversial critics. At the end of a decade as the only Marxist art critic in Britain writing regularly for a wide audience, Berger left Britain for good. At more or less the same time he escaped finally from having to express everything he thought or felt in terms of art criticism.

Art, politics and exile are the key elements in his first novel, Painter of Our Time (1958), which drew on the several friendships he had formed with emigré artists living in London, most of them in exile from Eastern and Central Europe. Janos Lavin, the main character of the novel, is a deeply political painter, living and dreaming the legacy of Modernism and meditating on the imperatives of a new and critical realism needed in socialist art and thinking. At the end of the novel he disappears from London, drawn back to his native Hungary by the events of 1956, leaving even those who know him most intimately (his wife, the writer of the novel, and its readers) utterly uncertain about what course of action he might have followed or what might become of him. A novel which demonstrated so compellingly the intractable complexity of political realities was unlikely to find a welcome in the polarized Cold War climate just two years after the invasion of Hungary. So fierce were the attacks on the book from right and left that it was discreetly withdrawn by its publishers after only a few weeks. Today few would question its wisdom and integrity.

The struggle to consolidate the legacy of Modernism in new social and political contexts is at the heart of two major studies of individual artists, one under communism, the other under capitalism, which followed; The Success and Failure of Picasso (1965) and Art and Revolution. Ernst Neizvestny and the role of the artist in the U.S.S.R. (1969). From this period and exemplifying the flexible and far-reaching Marxist approach the seminal essay, ‘The Moment of Cubism’ (1966–8), is reprinted here as the centrepiece of the section on ‘The work of art’.

But the work of Berger’s which undoubtedly had the most widespread impact on the study of the visual arts was the BBC TV series and the book which resulted, Ways of Seeing (1972). As a crucial milestone in the dissemination of a historical and materialist approach to art Ways of Seeing appears on a great many reading lists. It remains one of the most succinct and challenging statements on the social role of the dominant traditions in Western art, and on the ideological and technological conditioning of our ways of seeing both art and the world.

As a polemical masterpiece Ways of Seeing lends itself to superficial misreading, and even some of the people it has influenced most have found it difficult to reconcile its forceful argument with John Berger’s approach in his many essays on individual masters and particular paintings. When he examines the work of Rembrandt or Hals, of Monet or van Gogh (as he does in essays in this collection) he is not concerned to root out elements of class ideology and historical limitation. Precise historical and biographical information is often used, but the intent is to learn from the paintings themselves.

One chapter in Ways of Seeing is about women as visual objects. Its argument became a milestone in feminist analysis of art and the media. The earlier books on Picasso and on Neizvestny both contained important passages on the force of sexual passion, its elemental nature and its liberatory possibilities. These two perspectives were brought into tension in the novel G (1972), which narrates, amongst other things, the sexual obsession of its protagonist, G. In this volume the essays in the section entitled ‘Love’s ABC’ explore the particular experiences of love and passion of a series of artists, and the essay ‘One night in Strasbourg’ records thoughts on passion set down while Berger was at work on the film script Le Milieu du Monde.

G ends in Trieste, described as the nodal point at which developed and underdeveloped regions meet. Among the many prizes awarded for the novel was Britain’s premier literary prize, the Booker McConnell. In his acceptance speech Berger denounced the Booker McConnell Corporation with its sugar plantations and gave half his prize money to West Indian revolutionary groups opposed to the neo-colonialism of which the Booker corporation was part. The other half of the prize went to finance A Seventh Man (1975), a book about the experience of 11 million migrant workers in Europe and about the economic mechanisms which fed off their personal aspirations and ensured Europe’s continued active underdevelopment of the states on its periphery.

By exposing in comprehensive and graphic terms the nature of the exploitation of Europe’s migrant workers A Seventh Man posed important problems for the official Marxist ideologies or sectional politics of particular opposition parties and small groups. It reminded Marxism of its claims to be a universal outlook invested with the hopes of all mankind, and not simply a weapon and a set of tactics by which particular groups (albeit not the most advantaged) could further their own particular interests.

Since then Berger has presented another issue which is a troubling reminder: the vexed problem of peasants as a social class. He has done this at a time when all over the world the traditional peasant way of life is being rapidly and often violently transformed.

Today John Berger lives and works in a tiny peasant village in the French Alps. He is accepted as a welcome stranger in the community and to many he has become a particularly well-loved friend. His gift as a storyteller is recognized and appreciated and, over the past decade, it has developed greatly.

In 1935 Walter Benjamin wrote a very great essay entitled ‘The Storyteller,’ which has clearly influenced John Berger’s work. Benjamin distinguishes two traditional types of storyteller: the resident tiller of the soil and the traveller, someone who has come from afar. On several occasions with John Berger at his Alpine home I have seen representatives of both types at table together.

It is not possible to formulate all the ways in which Berger’s own development has led to and been influenced by the peasant experience. To isolate just one important aspect: the peasantry have preserved a sense of history, and an experience of time, opposed to that propagated by industrial capitalism. In Berger’s terms it is not the Marxian or proletarian revolution which plays the role of destroying history, but capitalism itself, which has an interest in severing every link with the past and orientating all effort and imagination toward that which is yet to take place.

Peasants are no strangers to exploitation or alienation but they are less susceptible to certain kinds of self-deception. Like the slave in Hegel’s well-known master-slave dialectic, they remain in more immediate contact with death and with the elemental processes and rhythms of the world. By the labour of their own hands they produce and order their world. In their anecdotes and stories, even in gossip, they weave their own history according to the laws of remembrance. They know who it is that benefits by progress and they keep alive a dream, sometimes silent or secret, of a totally different world. John Berger has demonstrated what it is to learn from them.

The storyteller lends his voice to the experience of others. The essayist lends himself to the specific occasion, or issue about which he writes. John Berger’s own career and development form one context in which the writings offered here can be understood. But the point of learning more about John Berger is in order more effectively to learn from him, to learn more about the various urgent issues and the many difficult questions he raises.

As with most such collections of writings this volume owes a part of its content to accident and circumstance. When considering material for inclusion in this book I had to respect quite incidental and external constraints: for example, very few of the pieces included have appeared in previous collections. Nevertheless the writings selected organized themselves fairly straightforwardly into a simple arrangement under a handful of headings: travel and emigration, dreaming, love and passion, death, art as activity and artifact, and the relation between work in language and the physical labour which produces and reproduces the world. These simple groupings had the advantage of allowing me to place alongside one another writings of a more general and far-reaching nature and pieces which are very specific and limited in the immediate objects or issues they address. Thus the arrangement of writings in the body of this collection ignores chronology (dates can be checked in the list of sources on this page).

The concern with works of art, with the work art does, and the work by which art is produced, provide a natural focus for any collection of John Berger’s writings. The concern with storytelling, and with language, is a concern more all-embracing and more diffuse in John Berger’s life and hence in this work. The section entitled ‘Leaving Home’ introduces the themes of travel, exile and emigration; ‘The Unmade Road’ towards the end of this collection continues these reflections. All the pieces in ‘Love’s ABC’ show John Berger attentive to works of art, and to paintings in particular. Different media and very different circumstances come together in the four essays on death, the ‘Last pictures’; in each it is clear that the dead belong not only to the past – it is never the dead who bury the dead – but also to the present and to the future.

In putting this book together it has occurred to me that it too can be read as a story, or, rather, that it can function, as a whole text, like a story.

Berger once wrote:

‘The story does not ultimately depend upon what is said, upon what we, projecting onto the world something of our own cultural paranoia, call its plot. The story does not depend upon any fixed repertoire of ideas and habits: it depends on its stride over spaces. In these spaces lies the meaning it bestows on events. Most of this meaning comes from the common aspirations of both characters and reader.

The task of the story teller is to know these aspirations and to turn them into the very strides of his own story. If he does this, the story can continue to play an important role wherever the harshness of life is such that people come together to try to change it. Then in the silent spaces of his story both past and future will combine to indict the present.’

Lloyd Spencer

Manchester 1985