You could say he dedicated himself to practising writing like a violinist. Behind Berger’s writing, there are similar things going on.
With painters like Frank Auerbach, or Leon Kossoff-Berger corresponds with him in Portraits-think of the surface of paint built up on their work, and their habit of scraping it off and starting again.
Even with a lot of the drafts apparently destroyed before it arrived, the archive at the British Library still shows a lot of rewriting in process. The idea whether one has to practise more as a painter than a writer is less clear. The reason he gave is that the political ends he wanted to meet with his work seemed less direct in painting, and he could be more campaigning in prose. Does writing enable such a life? Does this characterise his writing style? In the preface to this book he says he gave up painting because he would have had to practise everyday, like a violinist, and he wanted to live more. That’s why working on a biography of him is so interesting one of the ways he evolves as a story-teller is through writing things that are basically biographies. But, if you’re being a critical reader, it’s also a persona he’s carefully constructed. “In the process of trying to write about someone’s life, Berger realises there’s always this distance which it’s the work of literature to negotiate, to examine, but to realise ultimately is never bridgeable.”įor Berger, rather than be an isolated novelist, he wanted to be a story-teller, to be a conduit through which other people’s stories travel. So he seems to have established this relationship where, in return for them not beating him up, or ‘protecting’ him, he would write letters home for them: lots of them couldn’t write themselves. In Ireland he was a PT instructor, doing physical training with these recruits who were all a lot tougher than he was. So, because they thought he was being awkward, they sent him to Ireland. He’d already fallen in with various anarchist thinkers and recognised the ridiculousness of this and turned it down. That was apparently how conscription worked then. Because he’s been at this public school, he was offered a commission straight away. In the preface to Portraits he denies being an art critic, in quite sweary terms. The way he characterises himself instead is as a storyteller. When he was writing his series of novels about peasants in the French Alps, he looked back at the rest of his works and said, “even when I was writing about art, it was really a way of story-telling.”The genesis myth for this storytelling involves his being called up for military service after having run away from public school. Foreign Policy & International RelationsĬan you characterise John Berger as a writer?.
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