Look into the eyes of John Berger, and what do you see?
Berger, the British-born author of such boundary-pushing collections as “Ways of Seeing” (1972) and “About Looking” (1980), stares back from jacket photographs with a magnetic gaze.
How could it be otherwise? Berger (pronounced Ber-jer), who died in 2017 at 90, made a career of looking deeply at art and the visual world. “Ways of Seeing,” a companion to Berger’s breakthrough BBC series, vigorously examined the social context of images and became an instant classic. Yet over six decades, Berger’s creative output ranged across multiple landscapes — novels, short fiction, essays, poetry, biography, film, drama, drawing — often combining several within a single book.
Berger’s output was prodigious, relentlessly inventive and defiantly political. Many of his books became markers of their eras: “A Seventh Man,” his 1975 collaboration with the photographer Jean Mohr, on the lives of migrant laborers; “And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos” (1984), his poetic rumination on time, storytelling and the effects of capitalism; “Here Is Where We Meet” (2005), a novel of encounters with beloved, absent spirits in cities like Lisbon, Geneva and Kraków.
Indeed, the sheer volume of Berger’s work can be overwhelming, evidenced by the growing tower of titles that Verso and New York Review Books have been reissuing over the past year.
Last month, Verso — which has already put out 10 books as part of their Berger Classic series — published “John Berger: From Life,” the long-awaited biography by Tom Overton, who cataloged the writer’s British Library archive.
Three more Verso titles are due out in November, in time for the centennial of Berger’s birth. Meanwhile, New York Review Books published a new edition of “About Looking” this month, with more works to come next year, including his “Into Their Labours” trilogy and collected letters.
If Berger seems to be enjoying a revival, in many ways he never lost his relevance, according to his biographer.
“He kept working long enough to mean different things to different generations,” Overton explained over email. “In the ’50s, it was the energy of his criticism; in the ’60s, it was his presence on TV and his novels; then later on the depth of his compassion for migrant workers, peasants and Palestinians.”
For many contemporary writers, Berger has remained an important touchstone. In her recent memoir, “Mother Mary Comes to Me,” Arundhati Roy calls him “one of the most tender, attentive, beautiful writers I have read.” Michael Ondaatje’s blurb for Berger’s 1995 novel “To the Wedding” is priceless: “Wherever I live in the world, I know I will have this book with me.”
Berger befriended both Roy and Ondaatje, as well as the British writer Geoff Dyer, who perhaps has done more than anyone to raise his global profile. (Dyer wrote “Ways of Telling: The Work of John Berger” in the mid-’80s and edited Berger’s “Selected Essays” in 2001.) Dyer said he has aspired to produce a body of work as “wide-ranging” as Berger’s, “not just in terms of subject matter but in sustained creation of new forms and, crucially, tone.”
Berger — who moved to the rural French Alps in the early ’70s to chronicle its vanishing peasantry — “was a profound thinker,” Dyer noted over email, who “believed that truth was something that had to be hewn from the hard rock of experience.” Dyer likened Berger to Susan Sontag, but stressed that “unlike Sontag, he was also a first-rate writer of fiction.”
The author and photographer Teju Cole was also influenced by Berger’s themes and sensibility. “He wrote about the subjects that interested me: Caravaggio, Vija Celmins, Palestine, the Alps, drawing, heroic individuals, resolutely unheroic ordinary individuals,” Cole explained by email. “And he wrote about subjects I didn’t know I was interested in until I read him.”
While “Ways of Seeing” was “a kind of manifesto,” Cole added, “his essays were that manifesto in practice: how to look at art (and the world) with precision, curiosity, lightly-worn learning and above all a willingness to love what merited our love.”
The novelist and poet Ben Lerner has written the introduction to the New York Review Books edition of Berger’s 1972 Booker Prize–winning novel, “G.” His body of work, Lerner asserted in an email, amounts to an “argument that political materialism must involve wonder before the sensual world.”
Lerner sees “G.,” the story of an Italian Lothario at a time of upheaval in the early 20th-century, as his “major statement about the link between political and erotic energies.” (Berger famously donated half his Booker earnings to the British Black Panther Party; the rest went to fund his study on migration.)
Berger’s work made a strong impression on the writer Amitava Kumar, too, who first encountered “Ways of Seeing” as an 18-year-old student in Delhi. Later, Kumar said, he modeled his book “Passport Photos” on the collagelike quality of “A Seventh Man.” After seeing Berger’s drawings in “Bento’s Sketchbook” (2011), he began drawing himself.
Berger’s intense visual awareness is both a central motif and way of being, according to Kumar. “No other writer has done so much for the verb ‘looking.’ In his books we are always looking at pictures, photographs, paintings, postcards, faces, memories,” Kumar wrote in an email. “We live, as Berger told us, in a world saturated with images.”
The Canadian writer Madeleine Thien — whose latest novel, “The Book of Records,” like “Bento’s Sketchbook,” explores the life of Spinoza — has also been moved by Berger’s “deep looking” and direct, unadorned language.
“The lucidity and precision of his lines change the tempo of our reading,” she explained in an email. “We slow down, we walk with him and we perceive. It isn’t possible to read Berger quickly, just as it isn’t possible to read Spinoza quickly.”
“When I feel hopeless and afraid, I turn to his writing,” Thien continued. “It gives me a pathway because he has described so well how there is a way of telling stories that is … about accompanying the invisible, and thereby passing hope from hand to hand.”
The return of Berger’s voice — engaged, searching, alive to seen and unseen worlds — feels encouraging, even vital, in these fraught times. “A biography is an argument that a consciousness should be kept going,” Overton insisted, claiming that “the common thread that unites all Berger’s variousness is the question of how we live with the dead.”
It is there, he said, in Berger’s early thoughts on the old masters and in later works like “Here Is Where We Meet.”
Like the shadowy figures in that 2005 book, Berger’s legacy continues to exert a palpable force. As Cole wrote in an elegy to Berger in “Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time”: “When I got the terrible news that you’d died, it felt to me like a sudden darkness. But, John, since then, I’ve been discovering a fragment here, a passage there, a drawing over there, signs of you around the world, and these are like feathers you’ve thoughtfully placed in the places where we meet.”
Now there are even more places to encounter the transformative spirit of John Berger.
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