In 1983 John Berger and Susan Sontag appeared together on the highbrow British television show Voices, which usually took the form of a panel discussion hosted by the writer Al Alvarez, and might include contributions from the likes of Stuart Hall, Elizabeth Hardwick, or Umberto Eco. This time, however, it was just Berger and Sontag, head-to-head, on the subject of storytelling. Both critics spent the later decades of their careers insisting they were primarily novelists, while book reviewers and the reading public were not wholly convinced. The pair had more in common than narrative ambition, especially by this point a tendency to oracular pronouncement if not outright pomposity, though in this particular conversation (also filled with profundity), it’s Berger who comes across as lofty and vague, Sontag as the wry skeptic: “You’re trying to conflate writing a story with telling a story!” The most abiding impression of Berger’s performance: here is a writer in middle age working hard to assure us, or himself, that he is not the man he has already been.
Tom Overton’s biography of Berger has been a decade and a half in conception, research, and composition; the English writer and scholar was first employed to catalog his subject’s archive before taking on the intimate and wide-ranging—Berger was prolific, well connected, also long-lived—task of writing his life. From Life is an ambiguous title that surely incorporates the sense that here was a creative intellect awkwardly posed between an idea of artistic and personal authenticity, and a feeling that this needed always to be designed in advance. One of the key insights, not necessarily original, in Berger’s 1972 book and TV series Ways of Seeing—the work for which he was and remains best known—is that the cultural forms we accept as obvious or even natural (nude, portrait, still life) are historical artifacts and deliberate inventions. Perhaps it is always true of an artistic or literary life, but with Berger (like Sontag) there seems to have been a strenuous effort to construct and maintain the writing “I.”
It was first of all a painterly self. Indebted as much to his beloved Picasso as to the more realist end of the School of London, he studied at the Chelsea and Central schools of art in the 1940s, and began to teach before turning his hand to art criticism, most famously for the New Statesman. Like most of us he was a conflicted creature of his mentors, accidental and elected. He sought out the mandarin art historian Kenneth Clark as an ally and referee while he pursued recognition as a painter. (They would later, a little erroneously, be cast as opposites when the BBC Ways of Seeing seemed to undermine Clark’s earlier series Civilisation.) His second, or overlapping, education was political. Born in 1926 to upwardly mobile parents, he joined the army late in World War II but did not see action: his military service instead introduced him to working-class contemporaries and their perspectives: the starting point of his postwar Marxism. Back in London he fell under the influence of older Communists, though he never actually joined the party.
As an art critic, Berger’s tastes tended to a kind of sturdy, heroic version of modernism, not its pessimistic late styles. He viewed Picasso as having abandoned his properly revolutionary purpose, was unpersuaded by Francis Bacon, and wrote a study of the Russian sculptor Ernst Neizvestny, whose work Berger said exemplified a “phase in the world struggle against imperialism” rather than much in the way of artistic innovation. There’s a good argument for saying that Berger’s writing and his growing public persona were more profound and provoking than his choice of subjects. But isn’t this true of many great critics? You don’t read Baudelaire on painting and modern life because you’re convinced Constantin Guys was the greatest artist of the nineteenth century. Berger’s criticism is a bit like this: his urge to champion is really secondary to the force of what he has to say about art and society, about the perils of looking and the urgent necessity of making.
Politically, Berger’s self-described radicalism could make him seem principled and canny at one moment—he used his winnings from the Booker Prize in 1972 (for his experimental novel G.) to fund both the British Black Panthers and A Seventh Man (1975), his book on migrant workers—and wildly naive at another. Whatever one makes of Salman Rushdie’s own politics, or the proliferation of Islamophobia since the fatwa of 1989, Berger’s insinuation that Rushdie had brought a death sentence on himself really does him few favors. Overton rather scants the matter, perhaps because it is leapt on so gleefully by Berger’s right-wing detractors as proof that he was a political poseur. But the biographer is less forgiving of his subject’s tireless sexual infidelities, and of what they might say about Berger’s avowed feminism. The man who gave over an episode of Ways of Seeing to feminist writers and critics was also capable of brutal betrayal and careless affairs (including with one of those feminist contributors, Eva Figes).
Overton is a sensitive and canny biographer, alert to the intellectual, formal, and emotional complexities of writing a life. He sometimes addresses Berger in the intimate second person, and in one such passage says of Berger’s third wife Anya that she “never believed in what you were trying to do next; to become a storyteller, a vehicle, a conduit for the experiences of others.” In the end, perhaps with the exception of G., Overton is in the Anya camp when it comes to the writer’s turn away from criticism toward fiction—though not, I think, in agreement with her about the entire project of submitting himself to others’ stories. (That would be an odd attitude for a biographer; Overton is adept at give and take towards his subject.) The best of Berger, in my view, is in the brief books—A Seventh Man, or his study of a country doctor A Fortunate Man (1967), or his writing on animals—where as essayist rather than novelist he turns and turns again his attention, and urges us to do the same.
