John Berger burns his book

John Berger is one of my mother’s favorite authors, so a while ago I borrowed a few of his books from her so I could check him out for myself. The first one I read was Keeping a Rendezvous, a collection of essays on art and other topics.

I knew that Berger had lived in France for a number of years—“a small peasant village in the French Alps” according to the bio in this collection—but I didn’t expect how much his critical writing would read as if were translated from French. It is abstract, political, and sometimes convoluted in way that brings back memories of reading Merleau-Ponty in college. There are sweeping pronouncements that leave you breathless, like this one: “Watteau’s recurrent theme was mortality; Rodin’s submission, Van Gogh’s work, Toulouse-Lautrec’s the breaking point between laughter and pity.”

The occasional anecdotes were my favorite parts of the book, which makes me think I may like Berger’s fiction better than I do his essays. Here is one:

Recently, a new book of mine came out. I received the first copy from the publishers. It was so badly designed, so grubbily laid-out, and so carelessly produced that the sight of it, instead of affording a small pleasure was sad and discouraging—like dirty clothes can sometimes be. My son Jacob was with me and we decided to burn it.

We dropped the book into the wood stove which was heating the kitchen. Outside, it was snowing. A few minutes later, far from discouraged, we were watching it burn. The lines of print, the black words turned white, whiter than the paper. Then an entire page became uniformly incandescent, and radiant with energy. The pages burning were like ideal pages being written.

I wonder how his publishers felt when they saw that. The essay is dated 1988, so the book he’s referring to might be The White Bird, published in England in 1985 and reprinted in the US as The Sense of Sight.