John-Berger-Introduction-Critical-Lives
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001_203_Berger pages 02/03/2012 17:03 Page 6 In Play Me Something. 001_203_Berger pages 02/03/2012 17:03 Page 7 Introduction: The Blackbird, the Badger and the King Dressed in full-length leathers, riding his giant Honda Blackbird 1100 cc motorbike, John Berger cuts a curious figure for one of Europe’s greatest living intellectuals. Residents of Quincy, the sleepy Savoyard village he’s called home since 1975, are used to seeing this expat octogenarian (born Hackney, north London, 1926), this costaud white-haired novelist-playwright, film scriptwriter-poet, art critic-essayist, organic intellectual engagé, dart through windy Alpine passes at breakneck speeds, looking like a cross between a portly Batman and a real-life Jean Ferrero, Berger’s alter ego from To the Wedding. When Berger first moved to his Haute-Savoie beat, home was several modest rooms near Mieussy’s Baroque church, with its striking bulbous spire. Summers then were passed on the alpage at Roche-Pallud, high up around 1,500 metres, in a chalet that had neither electricity nor running water. Descending into the vallée du Giffre, Berger later settled at a more clement 700 metres in a spacious old farmhouse, replete with barn and ornate spruce balcony, that had been empty for twenty years before his occu - pation. The property was constructed long before skiers and tourists and kitsch wooden holiday cabins colonized the area. Once upon a time, in a traditional abode like this, denizens ate and slept next to their beasts. Berger had come to the Haute-Savoie from Geneva, some 50 kilometres due west, where he had lived since 1962, after 7 001_203_Berger pages 02/03/2012 17:03 Page 8 cold-shouldering what he said was a closeted, provincial London in those days. So he uprooted himself, initially to an apartment next door to Geneva airport, at avenue de Mategnin, seemingly ready for a fast getaway, only to extricate himself again a decade or so later, dramatically in spite of the short distance, bedding himself down in the hay and in the land of semi-literate mountain peasants. In coming to alpine France what had Berger forsaken? Phoniness, comfy literary cliques, the limelight, seductive city lights? Perhaps. What had he sought? Authenticity, the need to see and feel oppres - sion close up, in its concrete form? Probably. What had he become? An immigrant? No, he had come here by choice, as a free man, as a privileged man – not as a seventh man. Besides, Berger’s migration was against the migratory flow of the impoverished masses, those who move exclusively from the countryside to the city and not the other the other way around, not in a direction that corroborates privilege. That is presumably why he prefers to call himself a stranger, somehow always a stranger, even after 35 years of belonging, a stranger in a disappearing culture. Perhaps Berger was trying to avoid what Guy Debord called ‘the society of the spectacle’, the topsy-turvy world in which falsity becomes an ultimate truth we are now compelled to respect, even worship. Debord quit Paris not long after Berger had quit London; the former had gone to the most lost of lost Auvergne villages, to a cottage, he said, ‘that opened directly onto the Milky Way’. But Debord had come to cut himself off, to turn his back on society, playing no part in local auvergnate life. He lived behind a high stone wall, a wall a mason had built even higher at Debord’s behest. Berger’s house, by contrast, has no walls and is completely open to the street. Berger hates walls, walls of separation, walls that cut people off from one another, walls that keep people in as well as out. Anybody can come and knock at Berger’s front door; his is one of the first houses on the left as you enter Quincy, just as the lane bends and narrows. 8 001_203_Berger pages 02/03/2012 17:03 Page 9 Even now, every year, the white-haired writer picks up a scythe and lends a hand with the summer haymaking, paying in kind for the farmhouse he continues to rent off old neighbours Dédé and his wife. Meanwhile, not only does Berger write about ordinary people; unlike most intellectuals he lives next door to a few, too, and has them around for dinner from time to time. (Writer Geoff Dyer, a Berger disciple, recalls dining at the Bergers’ sandwiched between a Mieussy plumber and photographer Henri Cartier- Bresson.1) Rather than turning his back on locals, Berger has embraced them, has integrated himself within village life with his American wife, Beverly, even raising a kid there – Yves, an artist, born in 1976, who attended the local school and now lives next door; he uses papa’s barn as his studio. (Berger also has a daughter, Katya, a translator and film critic, and Jacob, a filmmaker, both from an earlier, formative relationship with the Russian-born linguist Anya (‘Anna’) Bostock, with whom Berger penned several essays and translated the poetic works of Aimé Césaire and Bertolt Brecht. G., Berger’s Booker Prize-winning novel, is dedicated to Anya, and to ‘her sisters in Women’s Liberation’.) Berger claims he came to the Haute-Savoie to learn, to under - stand an endangered species, to see and feel oppression first-hand, mimicking with the French peasantry what Karl Marx’s old comrade Frederick Engels did with Manchester’s working class, understand - ing their ‘condition’, their worsening condition. Berger wanted to see where Europe’s migrant workers set off from, wanted to witness the old life they had left behind. ‘I came to listen’, he says, ‘in order to write, not to speak on their behalf. I wanted to touch something that had a relevance way beyond the French Alps. Far from retreating, I was homing in on a point that touched a nerve bud about a very important development in contemporary world history.’ Chez Berger there is still no inside wc, and every May – after the snow has gone and before the summer flies swarm – the writer 9 001_203_Berger pages 02/03/2012 17:03 Page 10 Haymaking in the 1970s. 001_203_Berger pages 02/03/2012 17:03 Page 11 Haymaking in the 1980s. exchanges pen for spade and pushes his wheelbarrow across the backyard to clear out a year’s worth of shit – his own, his family’s and his guests’. He has consecrated the act in a suitably pungent, scatological essay, ‘A Load of Shit’, pointedly autobiographical, laying into ‘elite intellectuals’ like Milan Kundera because they don’t like getting crap on their hands, because they look down on muck and on those who shovel it. ‘In the world of modern hygiene’, Berger says, ‘purity has become a purely metaphysical or moralistic term. It has lost all sensuous reality.’2 It would be wonderful to be a fly on the wall somewhere nearby, watching Berger at his outhouse shovelling shit. And to meet Mick, the neighbour’s mischievous dog, who mauls sheep and comes to lend Berger a paw. ‘The shit slides out of the barrow when it’s upended’, he says, ‘with a slurping dead weight. And the foul sweet stench goads, nags teleologically.’ The smell is of decay, to be sure, like pig excrement, because like pigs humans are carnivores and our appetites are indiscriminate; but it’s not a smell of shame or sin as puritans would insist: decaying shit should have nothing to 11 001_203_Berger pages 02/03/2012 17:03 Page 12 do with a loathing of the body. ‘Its colours are burnished gold, dark brown, black: colours of Rembrandt’s painting of Alexander the Great in his helmet.’ You have to hand it to Berger, invoking Rembrandt, bringing art criticism down to earth, waxing poetic about putrefaction. And that little parable about the rosy apple falling into cow dung, a story from the village school son Yves recounts to his papa: ‘Good morning, Madame la Pomme’, the cowpat says, ‘how are you feeling?’ No response from la pomme: such a conversation is below the apple’s dignity. ‘It’s fine weather, isn’t it? Madame la Pomme?’ Again silence. A few minutes later somebody walks by, picks up the apple and bites into it. ‘See you in a little while, Madame la Pomme!’ says the cow shit, irrepressibly. It’s not that Berger likes shovelling shit. It seems that confronting shit, knowing what it is, where it comes from, how it smells, keeps him in contact with his nose and his body, with sensuous reality. And sensuous reality seems to be what Berger yearns for: the need for authentic experience, for a life without rubber gloves, unmediated by mod cons and gadget commodities, by air conditioning and central heating. Berger’s body seems to want to feel and smell just as his brain wants to think. Perhaps Berger sought, still seeks, wants us to seek, the rawness of experience Spanish poet Federico García Lorca called ‘deep song’, something ‘imbued with the mysterious colour of primordial ages’, akin ‘to the trilling of birds, the crowing of the rooster, the natural music of forest and fountain’. Maybe Berger himself is searching for a deep sense of place, for a sense of belonging, for a foyer in a vast world, a world that’s increasingly getting flattened and compartmentalized by neoliberal capitalism. A foyer, he says, in a barely disguised biographical essay, ‘L’Exil’ (appearing in French), incarnates ‘the centre of the world’ – not a geographical centre but an existential centre; a foyer establishes itself like a Leibnizian monad, like a ‘mirror of the 12 001_203_Berger pages 02/03/2012 17:03 Page 13 Intellectual with wheelbarrow.