Writer and artist John Berger on a new chapter

Published: 02 June 2011
by JOHN GULLIVER

JOHN Berger, the writer and artist, is one of this country’s most original thinkers. But  he can be nerve-wracking to talk to. He makes long pauses while he searches for the words. He groans. He blows air through his cheeks and looks at the ceiling. 

He is clearly delving deep into his mental reservoir of thoughts and opinions, built up over the years – and filtered through a Marxian view of the world.

I discovered this two years ago when I spoke to him over the phone at his French home about his eviction from the National Gallery for daring to sketch the likeness of an exhibit.

On Friday evening, at the London Review of Books shop in Bloomsbury, I was relieved to find that this approach is not limited to journalists. 

The film director Sally Potter, who is a friend of Mr Berger’s, tried to interview him about his latest collection of drawings and essays, Bento’s Sketchbook (Verso, £14.99) – in which the gallery incident also appears. After answering several questions with silence or single syllables, Mr Berger got up and left the stage to fetch a wad of papers. He had decided to end the conversation and read instead.

“Protest is not principally a sacrifice made for some alternative or more just future,” he read aloud. “It is an inconse­quential redemption of the present. The problem is how to live, time and again, with the adjective ‘inconsequential’.”

A woman at the back asked if stories “had had it”. Mr Berger twisted his face and grabbed his temples. 

“Of course not,” he eventually replied. “Storytelling is an absolutely essential ingredient of the human imagination and spirit. How are the dead with the living and the living with the future if not through storytelling?”

Like protest, Berger continued, storytelling was a way to redeem 

the present “when democracy and the free market has fused into a single predatory organism”.

He paused and weighed his thoughts again.

“With the disappearance of the Soviet Union the whole world’s situation has changed because there is nothing to challenge global financial capitalism, which as I see it is a form of economic fascism. That change means that the reference points of hope have also changed. The kind of storytelling which the world needs now is different from what was needed 25 years ago.”

Do words still count? Mr Berger, in the care with which he handles them, shows they do.