GoKawiilJohn Berger had one of the longest and richest lives among British writers, but he never quite made it to 100. In his absence, the centenary of his birth this year sees a flurry of publications and republications. Verso have put out a, so far, thirteen-volume series of reprints and new editions; Tom Overton’s long-awaited biography is due in the autumn; and a series of illustrated books have been published or republished by Objectif, run by the filmmaker, artist and Berger collaborator John Christie. Among these is a new book that is perhaps the strangest of the anniversary publications: Four Horizons, an account of Berger and Christie’s journey to Le Corbusier’s Chapelle Notre-Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, in the company of two Benedictine nuns from Connecticut. One quality of Berger’s later works – off-putting to some – was a certain folksy soulfulness, and this account of an actual pilgrimage brings out especially sharply what is both significant and frustrating in the writer’s voluminous late works.
Berger’s reputation is assured and immovable on the basis of a series of books, documentaries and films, largely of the 1970s: above all, two unimpeachable works, the audacious popularization of Walter Benjamin’s aesthetics and feminist theory Ways of Seeing (1972), and the account, with the Swiss photographer Jean Mohr, of immigrant lives in Europe, A Seventh Man (1975). The new Verso editions reveal just how consistent Berger’s preoccupations were, even when writing about subjects to which he would seem ill-suited. Art and Revolution (1969), for instance, sets itself up as an account of Soviet Constructivism – about which Berger was ill-informed, forgivably, given how little had then been translated – but then moves into territory he is far more passionate about, the Khrushchev-era ‘severe style’ of the modernist-realist sculptor and Gulag survivor Ernst Neizvestny. Corker’s Freedom (1964), meanwhile, inhabits a similar petit-bourgeois London world to that of the mid-1960s British New Wave films of Karel Reisz or Tony Richardson, but centres on dreams of sex and travel as an escape from the boredom of wage labour and the pressures of the metropolis. The human body – suffering, pleasure – as represented in art and connected with the miseries of capitalism, (sometimes) Stalinism and the dream that things could be otherwise recurs throughout, before it eventually finds its apparently natural home in Berger’s many works on the peasantry, after his permanent relocation to rural France in 1974.
I have always found much of this subsequent work harder to take, caught between being moved by its hard humanity and irritated by its sententiousness. Re-reading Berger’s collection of sketches and essays Hold Everything Dear (2007), I admire much more now the trenchancy of his positions – especially on Palestine, to which Berger was a frequent visitor. There are statements of immense courage – in the West Bank, Berger reflects on being ‘among not the unconquered, but the defeated, whom the victors fear’, and with his family’s Jewish roots in Central Europe, stating that ‘here I unhesitatingly identify myself with the just cause and the pain of those whom the state of Israel (and cousins of mine) are afflicting to a degree that is tragically totalitarian’. Here, we could wish he were with us today, knowing how powerfully he would have written about the complicity of his home country in the devastation of Gaza. But alongside this power and acuity, there are moments of gnomic piety, evoking a comfortably-off Londoner living in a French farmhouse writing about others’ misery. ‘Today, the infinite is beside the poor’, he tells us. ‘The lives of the poor are mostly grief, interrupted by moments of illumination’. Here is a writer who could sound like Platonov one moment, the next like Alain de Botton.
One welcome constant of Berger’s work was brevity, a conscious avoidance of pomp. His many, many books did their best to break with what Benjamin, a key imaginary interlocutor, called ‘the pretentious, universal gesture of the book’ – their paper is cheap and standard, the photographs are, in Berger’s words, ‘simple memoranda’ and not artworks, and in later books, his own sketches have the quality of the lithographs in old paperbacks. Portraits (2015) and Landscapes (2016), the two excellent collections of Berger’s essays edited by Overton, sit oddly on the shelf next to a row of these economical slim volumes. Nobody seems to know how many books Berger published – the Verso volumes contain a list of 28 books, but I can see on my own shelves several that aren’t included: from Railtracks (2011), a delightful prose poem written with Anne Michaels, on trans-European train travel, to At the Edge of the World (1999), a tribute to his close collaborator Jean Mohr. But unlike, say, Slavoj Zizek, Berger was always the same and always different, and he seldom if ever copies and pastes.
Some of these books, especially late on, are deliberately oblique and personal. Take the last volume published in his lifetime, Confabulations (2016), a cussed return to the mass market and his old publisher Penguin, that is a pure piece of ‘late style’ in its paradoxes, puzzles and refusals; or Bento’s Sketchbook (2011), whose twee premise (Berger finds a sketchbook and tries to imagine what Spinoza, who kept a long-lost volume of drawings, might have sketched in it) is everything I dislike in Berger, but has enough surreal humour and sudden, unexpected anger to make it bearable. Some of this is not his fault – viz., the jacket copy, all those reviews and blurbs in which everything is always ‘precious’, a ‘meditation’, ‘confiding’, ‘beautiful’, ‘serene’ and ‘deeply moving’ – but he was not entirely blameless for this portrayal by others as a secular saint.
Four Horizons – something relatively new among these books, both in terms of its unpublished material and in its subject matter – sees Berger confronting, as in the sketches of Lissitzky or Gabo in Art and Revolution, the sort of modernist that he would normally hold in great suspicion: Le Corbusier, modern architecture’s great technocrat and super-urbanist. The book, self-published by Christie, emerged from telling circumstances. The pilgrimage of Berger, Christie and the nuns Lucia Kuppens and Telchilde Hinckley was intended to be the basis of a television documentary, a genre in which Berger made much of his best work. But in the 21st century, the BBC and Channel 4 prefer reality TV or patronizing, drone-assisted, ‘I’m taking you on a journey’ documentaries, and so the programme was never made. What we have instead here are fragments: photographs, an unfinished text by Berger based on a dialogue between the four pilgrims (presented unedited), an obituary of Corbusier written for the New Statesman in 1965, and essays in response by Teju Cole and the Irish architect Paul Clarke. The book’s format is based on that of Le Corbusier’s own books (which were in some cases translated into English by Berger’s former wife Anna Bostock). The photographs, as in Berger’s other books, are intimate and immediate – wisps of mist on the hills surrounding the chapel, closeups of stained glass and concrete, the complete building at sunrise, and a rather charming, artless snapshot of a gilet-clad Berger and the nuns under one of Corbusier’s murals, all three grinning infectiously.
Berger’s obituary is superb, capturing with the least rhetorical means the central paradox in Le Corbusier’s work, the humanism and egalitarianism of his best buildings co-existing with his influence on the most aggressively capitalist, hierarchical architecture. On the one side, the Unité d’habitation social housing complex in Marseille, a building with ‘no glory, no prestige, no demagogy and no property-morality’; on the other, a new luxury hotel in Monte Carlo, a ‘vulgar and strident’ building which ‘exhorts to wealth’ and ‘would never have been built without Corbusier’s initial example’. It would have been easy for a Marxist, humanist and occasional ruralist like Berger simply to condemn Le Corbusier, especially in the mid-60s; he does not.
But Ronchamp, unlike the Unité, is the sort of Corbusier building that even those who hated modern architecture could compromise with: arcadian, organic, roughcast, rustic, monastic, ‘spiritual’, a one-off; unlike the Unité, this small, cave-like chapel was not intended to be reproduced. The slightly religiose style Berger had adopted is here more appropriate, as he wrestles with his own atheism and the intense but thoughtful belief of his friends in their wimples. Berger’s fixation is again ‘poverty’, or rather, as he corrects himself (‘that sounds too extreme’) what the absence of wealth can do to thought, space and form. In the dialogue, Ronchamp is seen as ‘a refusal of easy, exaggerated wealth and power’. His devout interlocutors respond to this in turn, speaking of spaces that seem ‘to be catching, somehow, the vibrations, whatever would come to them, from around the countryside’.
So much of Berger’s writing in his last two decades returns to the question of hope, and defeat. In books like Hold Everything Dear, his acknowledgement of the defeat of the communism in which he was a lifelong, if nonconformist believer, often appears alongside the notion of resistance as itself a virtue, a belief in togetherness and comradeship even in futility, a kind of Beckettian Marxism. This is sometimes attractive, but it spins virtue out of appalling necessity. Here, however, he sees hope as the crucial quality embodied at Ronchamp, and in Le Corbusier’s career culminating in a remote chapel built on a bombsite; Berger’s metaphor is Pandora’s box, which releases all manner of horrors, but retains hope inside of it. Le Corbusier’s modernism, he writes, represents the ‘promises, all the potential of man’ that have never really been realised. Here, Berger is thinking aloud, and I prefer this mood to the gnomic, careful style of his rewrite of the dialogue into another prose poem. Off the cuff, he says:
I think of that legend because in a strange way it is remarkably applicable, perhaps always, but especially to the time we are living, and especially because in the generation of Le Corbusier, it was very much a time of political optimism, of universality, all the promises of Modernism, increased productivity, in a good sense and so on. The box has been opened and many of the promises have, for the moment disappeared and gone but Pandora was just quick enough to keep Hope leaving.
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