John Berger’s A Seventh Man

A Seventh Man (1975), John Berger and Swiss photographer Jean Mohr’s composite portrait of European migration, was reissued this fall as part of a bounty of reprints and new volumes marking Berger’s upcoming centenary. A biography by the writer’s archivist, Tom Overton, will appear in January, and a new edition of G. (1972), Berger’s Booker Prize–winning novel of sex and Europhilia, is forthcoming courtesy of NYRB.

Of all his books, Berger liked A Seventh Man best, and it remains a minor classic, though its first printing sold terribly, terminating the authors’ relationship with Penguin. It is a challenging work. Written in fragments, interspersed with hundreds of Mohr’s black-and-white photos, the book attempts to replicate what Berger called the “simultaneity and extension of events and possibilities” in the lives of its unnamed protagonists—guest workers from Southern Europe toiling in the foundries and gravel pits of the north.1 Its loose discontinuous form marks a clear departure from the duo’s earlier, more genteel collaboration, A Fortunate Man (1967), about a physician residing quietly in the Forest of Dean. In the latter volume, text and image operate independently; indeed, photographer and writer came together only at the project’s close, working with the designer Richard Hollis to lay it all out on the page.

What is most striking in the resulting work is the solemnity and confidence of Berger’s voice. Also, a certain tenderness in the way he handles the withering “peasant existence” that came to obsess him over the next decades (he was already writing his pastoral “Into their Labors” trilogy when A Seventh Man was published). In the first pages, he recounts a family of destitute Turks huddled on a wooden pallet, raised above a pen of sheep radiating warmth. A child prepares charcoal in a pit behind the house, though one day he’ll go to Brussels or Stuttgart—such is the implication—to labor in a mine and send remittance home. A hundred pages later, Berger describes an abattoir manned by immigrants, where some eighty cattle are slaughtered each hour: “the hides steamed and were wet as if after a cloud-burst.” Between these vivid tableaux, there are snatches from Marx and Fortune Magazine, and maps of the European continent. The book opens with József Attila’s 1933 poem “The Seventh” (translated by John Batki), from which the title is drawn.

Today, A Seventh Man emerges as a prescient work, when read against a sea of startling images arriving all the time from Lesvos, Lampedusa, the US southern border, the Rafaḥ crossing. Yet the book is also of a piece with experimental art of its own era. Joshua Sperling, author of A Writer of Our Time (2019), sees its abrupt cuts and shifts in perspective in the vein of Jean-Luc Godard and the militant Dziga Vertov Group. Berger was after all a filmmaker—he initially planned to make a documentary with Mohr—and shared Third Cinema’s interests in discontinuity and Brechtian estrangement. With his second wife, the translator Anya Bostock, he published several of Brecht’s poems and liked to quote the injunction to “make the instant stand out, without in the process hiding what you are making it stand out from.”2 A Seventh Man exhibits this radically exposed, unfinished quality, defying bourgeois standards—this might explain the book’s commercial failure. Yet experiments in form also raise questions writers often have trouble answering, most salient the problem of what writing can actually achieve—how a writer can act—beyond exposition, similitude, or formal invention. Is any kind of realism truly transformative?

Unlike Brecht’s plays, and the best experimental films of the 1960s and ’70s, A Seventh Man is neither iconoclastic nor exhortatory. Nor is it an ironic work. Instead it exudes an earnestness and a degree of historical consciousness, as when Berger compares the migrant workforce in Germany, slaving day and night, barely sleeping, with highland peasants, pressed into labor in Manchester and Leeds a hundred years prior. The sense of alienation is enhanced by Mohr’s photos, which present migrant workers as interchangeably dark and mustachioed. In a disturbing sequence, we see several pictures of the men lined up in a clinic, stripped to their boxers. Berger: “They glance hastily (to stare would be to show their astonishment) at the implements being used to examine them.” Another photo is a field of gaunt, expectant faces—the men are queued at a station in Belgrade—illustrating again what’s violent and depersonalizing about the Gastarbeiter system. “They are not born,” Berger writes of the men he apparently studied and interviewed, “they are not brought up: they do not age: they do not get tired: they do not die. They have a single function—to work.”

The statement sounds too conclusive, as if Berger and Mohr were acceding to a bad situation, as witnesses sometimes do. The sense of distance and passive quiescence in fact bothered Berger a great deal. In 1978, responding to Susan Sontag’s idea that photos confuse real lives, places, and histories with “anecdotes and fait divers,” Berger argued for the need “to incorporate photography into social and political memory, instead of using it as a substitute which encourages the atrophy of any such memory.”3 Elsewhere he quotes the photographer Robert Capa, “if your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”4 By the late 1990s, he would tell interviewers that migration, “voluntary or forcible,” had long been his primary interest, and his favorite metaphor for adaptation and storytelling: experience is displaced into words, books are received by strangers from another place and time.5 

Berger saw himself as a restless emigrant, though he knew his own mobility was an emblem of privilege and worldly success. His flight from London to a life among strangers in Geneva, then Paris, then finally—famously—in a hamlet called Quincy in the Haute-Savoie, was driven by a reluctance to continue working as a professional art critic, a job he found confining. He would instead become a novelist and a documentarian, and later a farmer, eventually returning seriously to drawing, his first passion, evincing an ambition that continuously outgrew his abilities, forcing him to experiment. A Seventh Man was a risk he had to take, and it wouldn’t be the last.

John Berger’s A Seventh Man: A Book of Images and Words about the Experience of Migrant Workers in Europe, with photographs by Jean Mohr, is published by Verso.