When John Berger’s novel G won the Booker Prize in 1972, he gave half the
money to the British Black Panthers; the other half supported his work on
the study of migrant workers. It was a great cultural-political gesture,
emblematic of a decade of bitter confrontation. Now his novel From A to X —
which consists of letters from a woman to her imprisoned lover, both of whom
are in revolt against an oppressive regime — has been longlisted for the
Booker. So what will he do if he wins this time?
On the face of it, another protest would seem consistent. The first time
around it was a protest against Booker-McConnell’s activities in the African
sugar market. But now it’s called the Man Booker, and the sponsor, Man
Group, is in financial derivatives, the deep core of contemporary
capitalism. So? “If I was you,” he says, “I would ask that question; if you
were me, you could say you don’t know. When the time comes — if it comes —
I’ll think about it. One should say in general nothing repeats itself. The
time is different, the Booker Prize is different. But, for the moment, I
don’t think about it.”
We are sitting in the big kitchen of Berger’s farmhouse in the Haute-Savoie, a
region of France bordering Italy and Switzerland. He is wearing a striped
shirt and work-stained trousers. He speaks with a slight lisp, which, if you
close your eyes, makes him sound a bit like Tom Stoppard. His hair,
meanwhile, is Samuel Beckett. It was cut by Beverly, his companion, who is
topping and tailing green beans but listening intently. His eyes are grey
and sparkling, his manner is grandfatherly and sweet. He is intensely
solicitous of my welfare. Would I be too cold if we ate outside? Would I
like an almond croissant to be going on with? All of which I mention because
I was, in fact, expecting something quite different.
Berger’s record is that of a firebrand of the left, and, on the whole, I don’t
get on with Fs of the L. The last time I saw Harold Pinter he said he was
going to kick me in the balls. Berger’s record is no less alarming. His
first novel, A Painter of Our Time (1958), was withdrawn from publication as
it was seen as sympathetic to the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. His
1972 TV series, Ways of Seeing, was a deliberate refutation of the patrician
manner of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation. (It was also, and remains, one of
the most influential visual art documents of our time.) A couple of years
ago, he led a campaign for a cultural boycott of Israel. Not long before we
met, he’d been visiting the Zapatistas, a revolutionary group in Mexico, and
he regularly visits Palestine, on the subject of which he becomes incoherent
with grief and rage — “Don’t ask me about that.” He is 82 this year, but the
red glow is undimmed.
But why isn’t it dimmed? After all, with 200m corpses of their own people and
unimaginable suffering to their credit in the 20th century, the record of
the revolutionaries of the left is worse than of anything or anybody they
oppose. I ask him if, after the revelations of Stalin’s terror emerged, he
changed his position. He curls into an almost foetal ball. There’s a long
silence interrupted by “erms”. Then finally: “I hesitate because I want to
be truthful about dates. Okay. After the 20th Congress and the revelations
of Khrushchev . . . from the very beginning I accepted them completely.
Then, not only did I accept them, only a few years later I was in the Soviet
Union smuggling out works by dissident Russian artists. Come 1968 in Prague,
I was there with the students and I returned to their last meeting in 1969.”
But didn’t Stalin’s terror make him revalue his basic position? “No, but this
is quite complicated because my position was never quite what probably many
people believed it was. For example, in fact I was never a member of the
Communist party because I didn’t want to be because I had certain
reservations about several things.”
In the cold war he backed Moscow until the Soviets attained nuclear parity
with the United States. But he is still anti-American — the oppressive
forces in from From A to X have F-16 planes. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez is
quoted in the book, saying 200 years of American history have been a plot to
impoverish the world. Does he agree? “Yes, I believe that is one way of
defining what is happening, but it is not the only way.”
He remains a Marxist, but with a crucial note of dissent. “The problem with
Marxism is there is no real space for ethics. Okay, there is plenty of space
in it for the struggle of justice against injustice, but the notion that an
act is good or bad in itself — there is no space for that. There is no space
for that which is outside time or, if you wish, for the eternal . . . There
is the possibility of it being combined with another philosophical view
which is not simply materialist.”
This is a remark more culturally than politically loaded, and it places Berger
in the English radical tradition of the young Wordsworth, of William Blake
and William Morris, and this is how he is most exactly understood — as a
radical who sees not just human struggle in the material world but also
transcendence. This, and his genuine passion and, of course, his exceptional
gifts. Whatever its political shortcomings, From A to X is an exquisitely
written and constructed novel that may win the Booker.
Berger was born in Hackney to a father who was “completely marked” by having
been an infantry officer for four years in the trenches. In civilian life he
was lost, but he met his wife, who was “much less lost”. She found him an
obscure, bureaucratic job. She ran a tearoom. At eight, Berger was sent away
to boarding school and to his political future. “The first school was
absolutely mean and sadistic, and the second organised along lines which
were almost neofascist. There was systematic torture. I’ve never really
written about it and have no desire to. My parents thought I was
exaggerating. Very quickly, as you learn in any totalitarian system when
you’ve been there a while, you realise there is no outside appeal.”
At 16, he ran away to try and get into an art school. At some point, painting
had got to him. He thinks hard to remember when and why, and then suddenly
rushes me out of the kitchen up to their bedroom. He shows me a picture —
probably copied from a Dutch original — painted by his father. “But he
didn’t want to be a painter, he wanted to be a priest, and then one day he’d
told me he painted that.”
Berger got into art school and became a successful painter, but, somehow,
writing intervened. “I’d always written, but I didn’t think about being a
writer. But it was rather more a question of what you intensely feel as a
silence out there that needs to be filled with words . . . The novel [A
Painter of Our Time] was actually a kind of conscious farewell to painting.
It was at the height of the cold war . . . and, at such a time, to go on
painting canvases that would hang in dining rooms or sitting rooms seemed
inadequate. I think now that’s a stupid argument, but that’s how I felt at
the time.”
In fact, the Booker gesture in 1972 marked the beginning of a movement away
from this kind of thinking. It was an anti-corporate gesture. Berger is now
a great fan of Naomi Klein’s anti-corporate writing and is plainly more
concerned with the abuses of capitalism than with its overthrow.
The writing career led directly, in 1972, to Ways of Seeing, the TV series and
book that, more than anything else, made his name. It is still taught, and
I’ve been told by many people that their lives were changed by it. I ask him
about his approach in the series, and he lapses into another prolonged
silence. In the end, he concludes, it was all about the democratisation of
culture.
“Well, look at it another way. If you take institutions like Tate Modern or
the Pompidou Centre, and you made a social class analysis of their visitors,
and you compared it with an analysis of the visitors in the 1950s or 1960s,
there would be a big difference. The institutions are now much more popular
and less exclusively middle- or upper-class. Looking back, I suppose the
impact of Ways of Seeing was because it was symptomatic of this change that
was taking place.”
He left Britain to live in France in the early 1960s. It was not, he says, a
rejection of Britain, but an embrace of Europe. From there he has emitted a
steady stream of books, articles and agitprop. He’s been with Beverly for 35
years. He has three children, Katya, Jacob and, with Beverly, Yves, who
lives next door.
His life in the farmhouse seems closely integrated with village life. He rents
from a farmer, and part of the payment involves helping annually with the
harvest. Though the tourists have annexed much of the Haute-Savoie, much
authenticity remains, not least in the external earth toilet, a slightly
traumatic event for your reporter.
He regards Britain from afar, having evidently relied too much on The Guardian
Weekly, “which is nothing like as good as it used to be”. But his trips to
London have made him — to me, at least — startlingly optimistic. “I have the
feeling people don’t wear masks in London, compared to Paris, for example.
When I go to London, I see people not disguising their vulnerabilities.”
He seems unconditionally optimistic about the young and about technology, the
emphasis on making and on the value of “exchanges between people”.
Berger is an immense figure in his embodiment of the illusions and aspirations
of the 20th century. Try as I may, I cannot understand how any Marxist or
communist sympathiser does not express regret and feel bitter remorse in the
face of the historically unprecedented carnage wrought by Lenin, Stalin and
Mao. Nor do I accept the terms of the old left’s anti-Americanism. These are
scars on what is, in Berger, a kind of greatness. His writing saves him, as
does the warmth and passion of his personality. His politics, meanwhile,
exist in a bubble of withdrawal from reality, the correlative of his
withdrawal to this hillside farmhouse.
In the end we had lunch inside. It was cold outside.
From A to X: A Story in Letters by John Berger is published by Verso at
£12.99.
It is available at the Sunday Times BooksFirst price of £11.69 (inc p&p) on
0870 165 8585
www.bryanappleyard.com
