John Berger

Letters: John Berger obituary

 Thursdady 12 January 2017

Lisa Appignanesi writes: Quincy, in the Haute-Savoie, was not where John Berger made his first home in mainland Europe. In 1962 he moved to Geneva, where his then wife, Anya Bostock, was working. There, too, he met the photographer Jean Mohr, whose stark black-and-white images were central to several of his books. He also began to collaborate with the film director Alain Tanner, writing scripts for The Salamander (1971), The Middle of the World (1974) and Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (1976).

After his first novel, A Painter of Our Time (1958) – the story of an imagined refugee artist who returns to Hungary during the 1956 Revolution – had been recalled from bookshops through political pressure on the publishers, he spent less time in London. Initially there were periods spent working with various groups of artists in Provence.

In 1974, at the start of his marriage to Beverly Bancroft, he moved to Quincy, the agricultural village in the Alps which was to remain their family home. I first met John in the same year, as one of the four founders of the Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative. He was one of several established writers who decided that small publishing, with decision-making in the hands of those who actually made what the industry sold, was a good thing.

John enjoyed collaboration. While he did not put money into the group himself, he made its financial existence easier by not taking advances when books were published, and was there to advise, finding pleasure in going to meetings when he went to London. I imagine that it was a similar pleasure to that he took in being part of the community in Quincy, where everyone participated in haymaking, and John’s table was ever busy with neighbours deliberating on problems or engaging in that gossip which is also storytelling.

Writers and Readers started an art list, republishing John’s backlist, including A Painter of Our Time. There was also the brilliant A Fortunate Man – standard reading for all GPs – and his new books. In the ways of 1970s collectives, the organisation fell apart in the early 80s. But John and I remained fast friends. We didn’t always agree on politics, but his sense of justice was ever an inspiration and his volcanic laugh a joy. We even went on to win the Scott Moncrieff prize for literary translation together, for Nella Bielski’s The Year Is ’42 (2004).

When Losing the Dead (2014), a memoir about my parents’ war and its aftermath, came out he gave me a drawing he had made inspired by Rembrandt’s The Polish Rider. He was extraordinarily generous, and paid singular attention to young writers and artists, let alone to people needing a hand or a lift. A true listener, he said it was what his storytelling was all about. He listened with an ear for everything in the other, not only what was spoken. And he managed in his encounters and in his stories, as well as his essays, somehow to confront despair and turn it into hope.

Paul Gordon writes: The life and work of John Berger displayed an extraordinary range and power. While Permanent Red represented the writings of a young and angry man, the essays that followed, including The Moment of Cubism (1969), The White Bird (1983), About Looking (1991) and The Shape of a Pocket (2001), show a kinder writer, more humane. This is the Berger who wrote in 2005, “I can’t tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that art has often judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past has suffered, so that it has never been forgotten.”

His novels also reached new heights of lyricism as he got older, not just To the Wedding, but the equally evocative Here Is Where We Meet (2005), in which he hauntingly imagined encounters with people from his past. Then there is the sheer daring of Bento’s Sketchbook (2011), a wonderfully unclassifiable book, about the 17th-century philosopher Spinoza (the “Bento”’ of the title), about seeing, about drawing the world.

THE GUARDIAN