The Critic’s Keeper: A Review of Tom Overton’s Biography On John Berger

To think of the prolific writer, activist, and artist John Berger, is, at its most familiar, almost inevitably to imagine the radiant blue of his eyes in photographs and on film. “His listening eyes were lakes in the high mountains,” Arundhati Roy writes of him in her memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me. Roy was his friend, but even those who merely know him through his work will recognize what she means, the way his attention seemed to reflect the world rather than to merely perceive it. When he described a painting or an idea or an injustice, he wasn’t just showing us the object on which his eyes fell. He was welcoming us to look with him, suggesting in the process that we were the ones being seen.

Thanks to his monumental 1972 four-part BBC series Ways of Seeing and the book of the same name adapted from it, Berger is still best known today as an art critic. He sometimes bristled at that term, which never quite captured the range of a career that encompassed so much more, but it was surely his study of paintings that taught him to attend as lovingly to art as to the voices of his friends. As Tom Overton explains in his new biography, John Berger: From Life, the British National Gallery was largely emptied of its contents and moved to Wales for safekeeping during World War II. In place of its many holdings, the museum would display a single painting each month. Studying these solitary canvases, Berger, then a teenager aspiring to be an artist, found in them what Overton calls “an apprenticeship in looking.”

Decades later, Berger would write of the way that certain portraits look back at us, seeming to notice us as we notice them, thereby welcoming us into a mutual circuit of discovery and recognition. It was a lesson he continued to learn and teach throughout his long, productive life, but it was one he surely began there, making the most of whatever artifact was available, trying to give back what it gave to him.

It’s understandable, then, that almost everyone who has cared about Berger has been fascinated with the animal machinery of his gaze, and Overton is no exception. “From early childhood, one eye was longsighted, one short, and this was how his imagination zoomed and panned,” Overton writes on the first page of his biography. That interplay of hyperopia and myopia becomes an organizing metaphor over the chapters that follow, a physical manifestation of Berger’s simultaneous long view of history and fixation on the present, each as political as they were passionate in his expression of them. Overton’s biography aspires to treat these twinned experiences—then and here, time and space—with care. Unfortunately, the book never properly balances those two vantages, showing us its subject in rich pieces and parts, but never finding the distance from Berger that would let him snap into view as a whole. Most puzzlingly, the book too often glances past the particulars of Berger’s own social world—his many marriages, his friendships, his affairs—in favor of a stylistically eccentric fixation on Overton’s own connection to his subject. That in its own right may be revealing, if accidentally so: Berger was an artist of intimacies, and it is little wonder that his most attentive admirers sometimes lose their own perspective when caught in the spell of his generous eyes.

Berger, who died in 2017 but would have been 100 this November, was born in 1926 to an upwardly mobile family who “passed a hyperawareness of the English class system on to him.” He would soon revolt against that old order, beginning as a schoolboy to read the communist thinkers of his day—among them the critic Herbert Read and the Stalinist leader Rajani Palme Dutt—and he remained a committed, if somewhat equivocal, Marxist throughout his life. After training as an artist and serving in the Army during WWII (he did not see combat), Berger eventually talked his way into a job describing art on the radio to listeners who couldn’t see it. This was work that would shape the rest of his career, and from the start it found him lending his curious and searching vision to an audience that would learn to see by listening to the way he paid attention.

In the decades that followed, Berger wrote a busy succession of newspaper columns, book-length studies of artists, and novels, efforts that brought him some small notoriety but only minor commercial success. The real hinge of his life arguably arrived in 1972, the year that his television series Ways of Seeing—a relentlessly political rebuke to conservative accounts of art—appeared and his novel G won the Booker prize. When Berger learned that the prize was funded by colonial exploitation in the Caribbean, he devoted his acceptance speech to tearing the organization down, vowing that he would spend half of the money researching and writing a book about immigrants, which he published three years later as A Seventh Man. The rest, he promised, he would donate to the British Black Panthers. He cut a check to that effect just after the ceremony.

The events of 1972 would sketch an outline of the years that followed, which Berger spent smuggling the energies of the periphery into the centers of power while also carrying that same center’s treasures back out to the edges. Jewish on his father’s side, he became a passionate advocate for Palestine by the late 1960s, a cause that he wrote about throughout his life. In that and other cases, his activism was shaped by his friendships, and those connections, too, would often give shape to his writing.

The urgency of human connection may well be his central theme across his career: Almost all of his major works—fiction, criticism, and drama alike—read as if they had their origins in love letters, and some of them did. Both collectively and individually, they exhibit his concern with ways we come into touch with each other, forging new bonds across the dividing lines of class, nationality, and race, defying the conditions of what he sometimes called our age of walls. “One was born into this life to share the time that repeatedly exists between moments,” he wrote in a late essay. His writing makes a mission from that observation, aspiring to be a sort of campfire around which we gather to breathe in the night’s quiet together, unburdened for a spell from the ongoing catastrophe of history, but always aware of its accumulating weight.

As Overton shows, Berger’s own longing for connection shaped his personal life, too. He repeatedly married, divorced, and remarried with the speed of a rain-swollen brook, carrying out a seemingly endless series of affairs throughout. Overton entered Berger’s orbit in 2010, early in his academic career, when the much younger scholar began cataloguing the aging thinker’s archives for the British Library, and the two came to know one another well in the six years after. Their friendship aside, Overton may well know Berger’s work better than anyone alive, and his book is best when it is attentive to his subject’s oeuvre. No mere hierophant, Overton is a thoughtful critic of his subject’s limitations and failings. He writes, for example, that though Berger always thought of himself as a storyteller first, “his talent was not for storytelling. He had no ear for rhythm, or gift for narrative.”

Unfortunately, Overton himself is a peculiar storyteller. He tends to elide crucial developments in Berger’s life, which lends the narrative a herky-jerky stop motion quality. These omissions are especially galling when they relate to the details of Berger’s turbulent personal life, all the more striking because Overton had access to previously unpublished elements of Berger’s extensive correspondence. On one occasion, Overton describes the married Berger going to dinner with another woman, only to jump jarringly to a scene of him waking up the next morning. The implication seems to be that they slept together, but Overton leaves it there. On another occasion, he writes that “John decided he did not feel the same way” as his wife did about his second marriage, to Rosemary Kilmarnock. It is a characteristically oblique moment, not least of all because up to this point, Overton never mentions that the two were married, allowing only that Berger had become “a kind of stepfather to Rosemary’s younger son.” It is still less clear what one should make of Overton’s passing observation that Berger’s “lovers were mainly women,” or the suggestion much later that Berger “must have realized he would not still be alive had the AIDS crisis arrived earlier,” when Overton fails to explicitly elaborate on his subject’s apparent bisexuality.

No biography of a life fully lived can be capacious, of course, but each still deserves to be examined on its own terms. If Overton had merely sought to write an intellectual biography of a great thinker, his squirrelliness about his subject’s personal life might have been apt. He, however, rightly wants to capture the whole man, a man whose thoughts almost always emerged in dialogue with lovers and friends. This makes it all the more frustrating that it’s often difficult to discern what happened, when, and with whom. Even in that light, it is one thing to let certain mysteries be—among the most eyebrow-raising questions here is what transpired between Berger and the future Nobel-prize winner Doris Lessing, an experience that he described, in a letter to his third wife, as a “sad affair”—or to pass over other details outright. But it is another thing altogether to make a chopped salad out of consequential matters of chronology or to otherwise confuse details that one does mention and could lay out plainly.

These narrative issues are only amplified by Overton’s frequently baffling stylistic choices. Most distractingly, he regularly shifts between the past and present tense, sometimes repeatedly leaping from the one to the other in a single paragraph without explanation. The present tense can, of course, be used to convey a sense of immediacy, and immediacy is the key of intimacy. In that sense it might have been both a bit of revealing conceptual play for an elastic stylist like Berger, who treated the dead as an ongoing presence in the lives of the living. In Overton’s prose, by contrast, it tends only to confuse the basic facts of actual historical sequence, which further amplifies the book’s other leaps and omissions. More maddeningly, still, it’s often difficult to say why he shifts tenses when he does. “In June 1963, John and [his third wife] Anya are back in the Forest of Dean,” Overton writes at one point. He continues in that key for a few sentences more before noting, “[Berger’s son] Jacob was born on the 24th,” before immediately flipping back to present tense as the paragraph continues. Oddly, the effect here is to deemphasize the birth of Berger’s child, but if there’s some meaning to that choice, it remains entirely obscure.

Still more peculiarly, Overton intermittently refers to Berger in the second person, sometimes in the middle of paragraphs that otherwise describe him in the third person as John. Early in the book, Overton suggests that as he got to know Berger in the years before his death, “He switched from being the third person of the past, the ‘he’ of history, to the immediate second person of the present, the ‘you’ just across the table or the page.” This is a lovely sentiment, but in Overton’s hands it makes for a stylistic morass, since his reasons for employing “John” here and “you” there are entirely personal. “In writing a book about migrants, you are also conscious of being at the edge of a gulf of experience,” he writes of Berger’s A Seventh Man. Why would Overton need to explain Berger’s mindset to Berger? Is this actually what Berger thought at the time—and that he expressed in, say, his letters—or is it merely a biographic reverie? Overton offers no clues. The effect aspires to something like poetic apostrophe, but its haphazard quality lends the proceedings the patina of a rough draft or a diary entry rather than a book meant for public consumption.

It seems likely that Overton’s narrative omissions and stylistic eccentricities share a common source, one that also bedevils many other chroniclers of Berger’s life, as Overton himself shows. Late in the book, he describes the genesis of Geoff Dyer’s Ways of Telling, a biographical study of Berger’s work, which was composed with its subject’s blessing, and which Overton treats with light but appreciative skepticism. “Its problem is the same closeness which allowed it to be written in the first place, however much Dyer praised John for exerting no editorial control,” Overton writes. At no point does he consider that he, too, might be too close to the man to speak clearly of him—or, more importantly, that his own proximity to his subject might be less compelling for the reader than Berger’s bonds with the many others who shaped him.

Examples of this intense intimacy run through much of the writing about Berger that has been published since his death, though not all of it is as muddled as Overton’s effort. In Mother Mary Comes to Me, Roy wrenchingly describes how Berger inspired her to finish her second novel, telling her that if she ever grew discouraged he would be “standing right behind you like an old elephant, flapping my ears to calm you down.” Ben Lerner, meanwhile, elegantly uses his own contact with Berger to illuminate “the active silence [that] surrounds his work” in a brief remembrance for The New Yorker.

Far stranger, but perhaps more revealing, is the British physician Iona Heath’s book John Berger: Ways of Learning, which quotes extensively from her letters to Berger but mostly substitutes quotations from his books for his replies to her. In one of her missives, she describes a passage from his book A Fortunate Man as autobiographical, only to acknowledge that she really meant that his book—a richly written work of narrative non-fiction about a country doctor and his patients, accompanied by Jean Mohr’s black-and-white photographs—was autobiographical for her. This may be the signal experience for Berger’s most ardent readers, the discovery of themselves in his pages, as if his “listening eyes” were a mirror not of the sky but of the reader herself.

It is hard to fault writers for taking this approach, even when it goes wrong, because Berger seemed always to be inviting this kind of intimacy. I think of A Seventh Man, in which he effectively ventriloquizes the immigrant workers he describes, rarely, if ever, quoting them and instead speaking of them as if he knew their minds and lives. It is an approach that might open a lesser writer to criticism, but Berger turns it into a seminar on empathy, so clear is it that he knows and loves these men. And then there is Bento’s Sketchbook, in which he tries to imagine what the philosopher Baruch Spinoza (the diminutively familiar Bento of the title) would have drawn if we could see his art, presenting Berger’s own sketches as if they were the philosopher’s while meditating on passages from Spinoza’s magisterially geometrical Ethics. He even uses the second person to great effect in his achingly elegant And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos. These are the works of a man who could only understand himself by striving to understand others, one who called on us to do the same for ourselves as we sought to keep up with him.

Reading Overton generously, I suspect that he is merely attempting to answer that invitation in kind. At the end of one chapter, he writes of Berger, “He is the old man who squats on my pages,” paraphrasing a letter Berger had written to Edna O’Brien in 1962. “Should I be talking to him directly,” he asks, “facing him head on?” In John Berger: From Life, Overton never settles on an answer to that question, but he himself finds a space to squat between the affirmative and the negative in the final chapter as he describes the material, embodied John Berger he came to know: “Strong smell of leaky prostate, top-note of cigarettes and event wine.” These aren’t biographical details, but they are genuinely intimate sensory ones, earnest and unforced as Berger’s most attentive descriptions of the paintings he loved.

There are surely more stories to be told of Berger—clearer ones. For now, it may be best to stick with his own writings, perhaps to find, as so many of his admirers have, our own biographies reflected within them.