ROBIN LIPPINCOIT

One Big Canvas: The V\brk of John Beiger

"John Berger writes about what is important, not just interesting. In con-
temporary English letters he seems to me peerless; not since Lawrence has
there been a writer who offers such attentiveness to the sensual world with
responsiveness to the imperatives of conscience. Less of a poet than
Lawrence, he is more intelligent and more dtizenlymore noble. He is
a wonderful artist and thinker,"-Susan Sontag
"ONE OF EVIL'S PRINCIPAL MODES OF BEING, " John Berger wrote in an essay
on A-bomb drawings, "is looking beyond (with indifference) that wfiich
is before the eyes" {The Sense of Sight 295). Berger himself could never
be fairly accused of this mode of evil, for just a quick glance at some of
his titles reveals that "looking," "seeing," and "telling" are the primary
preoccupations of his life's work: Toimrd Reality: Essays in Seeing, About
Looking, Ways of Seeing, Another Way of Telling, The Sense of Sight. These
titles, collections of Berger's art criticism, speak of vision, perception, com-
munication, interpretation, of making sense ofand giving meaning to
experience. And Berger's recent fiction, chronicling peasant life before
its imminent disappearance, is another form of looking and telling, of
to use a favorite word of BeTger's witnessing. What Berger looks at, and
how he seesboth in his fiction and nonfictionare part of a whole, a
seamless oeuvre. All of his work could be said to embrace two primary
issues, which Berger himself spteUed out in a recent interview: "I would
like to emphasize two things that are so deeply inside me that they are
hardly even at the level of informed ideas. One is a relation to what I
have always felt to be the 'mystery' of art. The other is a gut solidarity
with those without power, with the underprivileged" (Dyer 382),
Whatever the medium, therefore, Berger always has a message, a mis-
sion, and his work is guided and infused - though rarely sabotagedby
these passions. Within these two main concerns lie a host of others, off-
shoots: the importance of storytelling, the value of work, a sense of
history, and the necessity of hope, all emanate from Berger's
work: "Hope," he has written, "is a marvelous focusing lens" {About Lock-
ing 128),
What follows is a look at some of Berger's interests, particularly in his
fiction, and a discussion of how- whether he is writing about art or about
peasants-John Berger's life and work is one big canvas.

Bom in 1926 in London to middle-class parents, his father a successful

businessman, Berger was sent away to school when he turned six and

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saw relatively little of his family from then on. At age 16 he was at a school
in Oxford but ran away, back to London to study art, enrolling at the
Central and Chelsea Art school. World War II, however, interrupted his
schooling; Berger served two years with the British Army in Ireland and
then returned to London to continue his art studies. During the next few
years he got involved with the Communist Party, though he has never
joined, and in 1952 he began ten years as an art critic for The New Statesman,
later also contributing regularly to The Guardian and The New Society. In
the intervening years, Berger has become an eminent and widely regarded
writer, publishing over fifteen books of art critidsm and fiction, including
The Success and Failure of Picasso, Art and Revolution, and A Painter of our
Time. In 1972 Berger achieved something of a celebrity status when he
hosted the BBC specialand then authored the subsequent book - Ways
of Seeing; his novel G (a picaresque, experimental four de force) won
England's prestigious Booker Prize that same yeeir. He has also written
filmscripts in collaboration with the director Alain Tanner, notably Jonah
Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000.
But in 1973, Berger's life was turned around while he was working with
the photographer Jean Mohr, a frequent collaborator, on The Seventh Man,
a book about the workers who migrated from Turkey, Portugal, and North
Africa to work in the industrialized areas of Europe, "I began to under-
stand," Berger has said, "that the majority of them were peasants. Now
certain things about their lives I could imagine as a writer: the city's im-
pact, the solitude. But I couldn't imagine what they had left behind. . .
I wanted to see if I could write about peasants, , , , And to write about
them in this way - to understand their experience of their world- I'd have
to live among them, I wanted to tell the peasants' story before they were
gone from the earth" (Mazorati 46), Herein is an example of Berger's
refusal to look beyondwith indifference.
In 1974, Berger moved to the French Alps, to the Vallee du Giffre in
the region known as the Haute Savoie, where he currently lives in the
small village of Quincy, There, he rents a house from a neighbor in ex-
change for a small cash fee and chores, usually helping make hay and
tending to cows. Pig Earth and Once in Europa comprise the first two
volumes of a projected trilogy to be called "Into Their Labours" (from
John 4:38: "Others have laboured and ye are entered into their labours").

Berger's style and approach to discussing paintings and photographs

relies heavily on the narrative, "I often think that even when I was writing
on art," Berger said recently, "it was a way of telling stories" (Dyer 382),
Thus his writing about art and his recent fiction about peasants has
meshed into the fullness of an artist's mature vision in that both are a
form of storytelling, Berger's preference in his art critidsm and in his fic-
tion has always been for content, and the content that Berger often treats
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in both is a concern for the underprivileged, those without

power: Caravaggio's popokcdo. Millet's "Sower," Van Gogh's worker
(and workmanship), August Sander's photograph of country musicians,
Europe's migrant workers, and the peasants of the Haute Savoie, Inter-
twined with these subjects, whether he is telling a story about a painting
or about a peasant's cow, is Berger's belief in the importance of history.
In a recent interview, Berger gives a wonderful example of the
peasant's sense of time: ", , , (H)istory is alive for the peasant as it is
not for others. Here is a story: I was walking , , , with a friend by the
foot of a cliff, and he told me of a young girl who had fallen to her death
right there, and that I had better be careful. And I asked. When was that?
And he said, in about 1800!" (Marzorati 46), This sense of history, of the
seamlessness of time, and of connectedness, is something Berger has
long been after in all of his work. When writing about art, Berger
contextualizes his subject instead of isolating it. For example, in The
Success and Failure of Picasso, Berger never separates Picasso's Ufe and times
from his painting, (In fact, it is Picasso's own separation from history that
Berger sees as his "failure",) And what Berger gets from the peasants
he has long been giving back, for as Carrie Rickey has written: "Berger
, , . identifies the class injuries most art historians mask with cosmetic
language" (31), His purpose is no less ambitious than to provide, or
reclaim, a history of culture to which the working class can relate.
Berger's marvelous meditations on and extrapolations from painfings
lead directly to hisfiction.And what of this project, the chronicling and
witnessing of peasant life? It is somewhat curious that Berger-essayist
extraordinairechose to tell it in fiction, Berger answered this question
long ago in his book on Picasso when he wrote, "Yet only in fiction can
we share another person's specific experiences. Outsidefictionwe have
to generalize" (129),
In thinking about Berger's recent ficfion, certain comparisonsin terms
of subject matter, intensity of compassion, and even style-seem
unavoidable: James Agee's and Walker Evans's Let us Now Praise Famous
Men, Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia, and yes. Dear
Theo, Van Gogh's letters to his brother. And so it was fascinating though
not surprising to leam that in the early 1950s Berger spent six months
in a foundry in Croydon, clocking in and out with the workers and
systematically sketching (Berger still paints), and that sometime later he
spent four months on the coast of Brittany, drawing fishermen: work
reminiscent of Van Gogh's living with the mining family, Orwell's life
in England's industrial north among the unemployed and at the Aragon
front during the Spanish Civil War, and Agee's and Evans's time spent
with the Southern tenant farmers. These efforts of Berger's should not
be seen as stints or mere assignments but as sincere efforts to look, to
see, to understand and then to convey, to bear witness, Berger's life with
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the peasants in the French Alps of the last fifteen years is a project, yes,
but also a way of Hfe. "I have become so attached, you see," he said recent-
ly, "1 feel as if I belong here, if 1 belong anywhere. And I don't miss the
city, certainly not the social life, I mean, for fun in the city, people get
together at a party and swap opinions. Opinions. Here, when people relax,
get together, they drink, play cards and sing-sit in a room and sing.
And of course, they tell stories" (Marzorati 54),
At the beginning of "The Storyteller," one of the essay-stories collected
in The Sense of Sight (and reproduced, in part, as "An Explanation" in
Pig Earth) Berger puzzles over "a certain look of complicity" between an
old man of the village and himself, "And suddenly I realized what it
was, , . , we are both historians of our time. We both see how events
fit together" (14): both are storytellers, Berger continues the essay with
a meditation on the central place occupied by storytelling in his small,
peasant village, and alsoin what is almost a manifestoon his own
role or raison d'etre as storyteller. Distinguishing between the old
man's oral tradition and his own written one, Berger writes: "The act
of writing is nothing except the act of approaching the experience
written about,, ," (14), He then goes on to acknowledge and to celebrate
his own fortunate and necessary, but somewhat precarious, perspective-
"And so the act of approaching a given moment of experience involves
both scrutiny (closeness) and the capacity to connect (distance)"-which
others have commented on: that he is both part of the community and
also apart from it, his position as a writer being both link and barrier (15),
And so back to that time in 1974 when John Berger moved to the village
of Quincy in the Haute Savoie region. At some point he sits down to
begin his project, to begin writing what will become Pig Earth. He is un-
sure what form the writing will take, but soon realizes it will not be a
novel: "The classic novel, in essence," he writes, "is a book about choices,
and then the consequences of the choices made. Now, in peasant Ufe,
the choices are extremely Umited, Where to live, who to marry, how to
survive, and so on: There is Umited range, these choices are pretty much
made for you. The choices a peasant actually makes are largely ones he
is forced to make-choices of reaction" (Marzorati 54), As the peasants
struggle to survive, Berger struggles for a way to render their experience,
and he conceives of this struggle as the labor of the storyteller. As such,
Berger's design becomes more ambitious: he is trying to preserve not
only a way of life but a way of telling as well,
Berger's recent fiction-in style (the painstaking realism, strong nar-
rative tendency) and content (peasants or the underpriviledged as sub-
ject) - mirrors both how and what he writes about art, Berger writes that
Millet's paintings of peasants fail, because there is no is unity between
figures and surroundings. In Pig Earth, Berger-as he writes of Van
Gogh-"unites the peasant with his surroundings by the energy of his
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brushstroke (substitute prose)" {About Loddng 77). Berger's use of language

is simple, pared away, earthy, sensuous, fresh, metaphoric, and ap-
propriate to its subject. This is how Berger has chosen to open the book:
Over the cow's brow the son places a black leather mask and ties it to
the horns. The leather has become black through usage. The cow can see
nothing. For the first time a sudden night has been fitted to her eyes.
The cow is electrocuted and dies.
The son cuts by the throat and the blood floods out onto the floor. For
a moment it takes the form of an enormous velvet skirt, whose tiny waist
band is the lip of the wound. Then it flows on and resembles nothing.
Life is liquid. The Chinese were wrong to believe that the essential was
breath. Perhaps the soul is breath. The cow's pink nostrils are stiU quiver-
ing. Her eye is staring unseeing , , . (1)
The story is called "A Question of Place," and that is exactly what Berger
gives us. He does not preface the book, nor does he introduce scene or
character, but launches-in a literally and figuratively breathtaking,
beautiful narrative-into the stunning evocafion and high drama of an
anima] slaughtering; Berger places us among the peasants. For these are
people, as he has said elsewhere, and as becomes increasingly apparent,
whose character is defined by their work. Animals, too, are characters,
not sentimentally, but because they are such a part of the peasants way
of life. In "A Calf Remembered," the birth of a nameless calf-"because
Marie did not give names to the calves they were not going to keep" (17)
is recalled as its owner is taking it to market to sell. Often Berger gets
very close to giving us the point of view of an animal, as here or in
"Addressed to Survivors,"
But it is theficfionalpeasants themselves who are at the heart of Berger's
work, and the best (and longest) story in Fig Earth, "The Three Lives
of Lucie Cabrol," essentially a noveUa, also offers its most memorable
character, "Lude Cabrol," nicknamed "The Cocadrille," something which
comes from a cock's egg hatched in a dung heap and is noted for its
penetrating, killer gaze and indefatigability, is essentially the story of a
powerless but fearless, dwarf-like outcast disinherited by her family, a
story of hard-fought survival spanning nearly seventy years, Here, Berger
personifies the storyteller as a character in the story: Jean, who is bom
in the same village as Lude three years earlier, emigrates and spends
twenty-five years in Argentina and some time in Canada, and then
returns; thus his perspective of closeness and distance is sirrular to
Berger's,
Lude's first Ufe begins with her birth in 1900 and continues up through
W,W, n. Scorned by neighbors and family because of her appearance
and odd ways, toward the end of this section Lude tricks Jean, the nar-
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rator, into making love with her, and then hopes they will marry. But
Jean leaves for Buenos Aires, and at the end of this, her first life, Lucie
is crueUy disinherited by her only remaining family, her two brothers.
The narration of Lucie's second life begins in 1967, when Jean has
returned to the village and meets up with her again: the years between
1945 and 1967-those of Lucie and the storyteller-are then retraced as
Lucie related them to Jean and as Jean remembers his own, Lucie has
survived, has become quite rich in fact, on pure cunning, realizing that
"everything which people go out to pick, she must pick first and take
to the dty (to sell)" (148), Now sixty-seven, Lucie again hopes to entice
Jean, seventy-his wife dead and his two sons gone to America-irvto
marrying her. But as Jean is deciding, Lucie is robbed and murdered;
thus ends her second Ufe, We never leam the idenfity of Lucie's killer,
for Berger does not remove himself from the story or allow himself ac-
cess to informafion the reader doesn't have. Instead, we know only what
the narrator knows, Lucie's third life begins at her funeral, when she
starts talking to Jean. Indeed, all the remembered dead come back to life
and buUd a chalet for Lucie; also, Jean finally agrees to marry her, so
strong is her will.
Berger has written that of his contemporaries, he most admires Garda
Marquez's fiction, to which his own most recent work is often compared.
Perhaps nowhere in Berger's work is this comparison more fitting and
apparent than in "The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol," as illustrated by the
following passage:
Again she said my name as she had said it forty yeeirs before arvd again
it separated me, marked me out from all other men , , , In the pause
between her twice saying my name in the same way, I saw myself as the
young boy I had once been. ,, I saw forty whole years compressed within
the pause. What separated me this time from all other men called Jean or
Theophile or Francois was not desire, which is stronger than words, it was
a sense of loss, an anguish deeper than any understanding. When she said
my name the first time in the alpage, she offered another life to the one
1 was about to live. Looking back I saw, now, the hope in the other life
she offered and the hopelessness of the one I chose. Saying my name the
second time, it was as if she had only paused a moment and then repeated
the offer; yet the hope had gone. Our lives had dissolved it . . . Pleasure
is always your own, and it varies as much and no more than pain does,
1 had become accustomed to pain, and now to my surprise the hope of
pleasure, the hope I had known when I was eleven, was coming from the
old woman with the unht cigarette who called me her contraband (186),
For critics, the comparison to Marquez is not only one of content-village
life, history, love, death, philosophy, time, hope, language, etc.-but
also one of technical facility and the fiuidity, the mastery, w t h which
Berger manages his themes. But for Berger, the kinship with and ad-
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miration for Marquez, clearly involves the shared and much valued sense
of time, history and realism, magic or otherwise, "I see him," Berger has
written, ",., asacoUeagueinanartof storytelling" (772e Sense of S!g)if 240),
Once in Europa, Berger writes in a prefatory note, is a collection of love
stories set against the disappearance of village life. But these are no
ordinary love stories. In "The Accordion Player," Berger tells the story
of an unmarried, middle-aged man, Felix, asked to play the accordion
he has not played in years for a wedding. The story moves back and
forth in time, telling the tale of why Felix never married, though he
longed to: work and other circumstances of peasant life have inter-
vened over and over, always at the wrong moment. After his mother
dies, along with his hopes of finding a woman, Felix takes up the
accordion again, playing aloneexcept for the cows-in his bam late at
night, "The accordion was made for life on this earth, the left hand mark-
ing the bass and the heartbeats, the arms and shoulders labouring to
make breath, and the right hand fingering for hopes!" (36) Felix does,
of course, play at the wedding, and at story's end, the accordion has
become his subsfitute lover,
Aristotle defined metaphor as that which "consists in giving the thing
a name that belongs to something else," {Poetics 82) a device that in itself
is a formor the beginningsof storytelling. Berger's use of metaphor,
his descriptive powers, and his painter's eye so often commented upon
by critics (and so apparent in his writing about art) are unsurpassed here.
In "Boris is Buying Horses," Berger suggests the comfort, danger, and
eventual destruction of a peasant in his love affair with a blonde woman
from the city in this one line: "His face fitted into her breast like a gun
into its case lined with velvet" {57). Newly dug-up potatoes "give off a
strange warmth and in the darkness of the cellar they glow Uke children's
shoulders after a day in the sun" (8); a dying woman's breath is said to
be "as weak as an intermittent breeze in grass waiting to be scythed"
(14); and a lonely man's voice "spoke of a kind of neglect. Its hinges were
off, its windows broken, and yet, there was a defiance in it , . ," (41),
Again, Berger is brilliantly uniting the peasant with his surroundings
by the energy of his prose.
In the title story, "Once in Europa," as in "The Three Lives of Lude
Cabrol," Berger again makes the storyteller a character in theficfion,Odile
narrates this lyrical, meditafive story from middle age, looking back on
her girlhood, on her close relationship with her father, on the two men
in her life, and on her two children, The story is set in a village dominated
by a manganese factory where Odile's first lover, Stepan, the father of
her first child, is killed in an on-the-job accident, leaving OcUle, at six-
teen, pregnant and unmarried. Thirteen years later, after Odile herself
has worked in the factory for years, she marries Michel, whom she went
out with once at fourteen, just before he lost both his legs in a mishap
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at the factory. This is another story about survival and the struggles of
the powerless. But where "Once in Europa" could easily have been either
maudlin or depressing, through the full-bodied portraits of his
courageous, spirited narrator, Odile, and of Michel, Berger has
fashioned a transcendent work of ficfion. And though these are love
stories, it is destiny, the peasants' fate, that sadly dominates Once in
Europa: Berger gives such an overwhelming sense of the confines and
limitations of peasant life in this collection, "It had never occurred to me
before that somebody could choose where to live," Odile thinks when
Stepan asks her where she would like to live (144), "When there's no
choice," Michel says late in the story, "it's extraordinary what you can
adapt to," And in what is one of the most moving and revealing lines,
at the very end of "Once in Europa," Michel says to Odile, "Paradise
is rest, isn't it?" (180),
Berger has said that the third and final book of the trilogy Into Their
Labours will treat the peasants' migrafion to the dfies, and that it will
probably be a novel, because "now the situafion has changed: There is
this idea of choice, of movement to somewhere" (Marzorati 54), Berger
has already given us a sampling of the confusion and lack of control
peasants newly arrived in the city feel. In Pig Earth, Jean, the narrator
of "The Three Lives of Lude Cabrol," describes the experience as "like
being a bee against a window pane. You see the events, the colours, the
lights, yet something, which you can't see, separates you. With the
peasant it is the forced suspension of his habit of handling and doing"
(150), But regardless of the form this third volume takes. Into Their
Labours-ahout which one crific has said ". . . perhaps for the first time
in contemporary Westem literature, we glimpse peasants as they are"
(Marzorati 39)-will undoubtedly stand as Berger's masterpiece.

In thefifteenyears since his move to Uve among the peasants of Haute

Savoie, Berger has published four volumes of art crificism, the most re-
cent of which is The Sense of Sight. In one of the essays in that collection,
"The White Bird," Berger offers the most comprehensive and up-to-date
expression of his aesthefic, "The White Bird" refers to the doves aafted
from wood that peasants of certain parts of the Haute Savoie used to
make during the long winters. And while Berger readily admits the
absurdity of comparing one of these birds with a Rembrandt or a Van
Gogh, he writes that it is their very simplidty which allows him to discem
what makes them "pleasing and mysterious," Always a passionate
proponent of realism in any art form, Berger writes that the white bird
symbolizes man's aftempt "to translate a message received from a real
bird," and that the authentic emotion we, the viewer, experience before
a man-made object-such as the white bird-derivesfiromthe emofion
we feel before nature (9), Art does not imitate nature, but crea-
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tion: "sometimes to propose an altemative world, sometimes simply to

amplify, to confirm, to make social the brief hope offered by nature. . . .
(W)e live in a world of suffering in which evil is rampant, a world whose
events do not confirm our Being, a world that has to be resisted. It is
in this situation that the aesthetic moment offers hope" (9). It is fitting
that "The White Bird," inspired by peasant art, along with several of the
other essays in the The Sense of Sight, represents the culmination of Berger's
long career of thinking and writing about aesthetics.
Berger's latest work is a play on Goya commissioned by the Royal
Shakespeare Company. In an essay published in 1959, toward the begin-
ning of his career, Berger wrote that no artist had ever achieved greater
honesty than Goya. "The inestimable importance of Goya for us now
is that his honesty compelled him to face and to judge die issues that
still face us" {Toward Reality 192). Today, thirty years later, as he con-
tinues to stretch the continuity and unity of his canvas, the same could
be said of John Berger.

Works Cited
Aristotle, Poetics. London: William Heineman, 1939.
Berger, John. "The Suit and the Photograph" and "Millet and the Peasant." About
Looking. New York: Random House, 1980.
. "The Accordion Player," "Boris is Buying Horses," and "Once in Europa."
Once in Europa. New York: Pantheon, 1987.
. "A Question of Place," "A Calf Remembered," "The Great Whiteness,"
"Addressed to Survivors," and "The Three lives of Lucie Cabrol." Pig Earth.
New York: Pantheon, 1979.
. "The White Bird," "The Storyteller," "The secretary of Death," "The
production of the world," and "Hiroshima." The Sense of Sight. New York:
Pantheon, 1985.
. The Success and Failure of Picasso. New York: Pantheon, 1965.
. "The Honesty of Goya" and "Millet and Labovir." Touxird Reality: Essays in
Seeing. New York: Knopf, 1%2.
Dyer, Geoff. Ways of Telhng: The Work of John Berger. London: Pluto Press, 1986.
Marzorati, Gerald. "Living and Writing Peasant Life." The New York Times Magazine,
Novem.ber 29, 1987.
Rickey, Carrie. "John Berger is a Big Deal." The Village Voice, August 27-
Sept. 2, 1980.