Selected Essays of John Berger

by John Berger

  ‘I am very much occupied with time,’ he says, ‘you are young but you will feel it one day. Some days I see a little black spot high up in the corner of the studio and I wonder whether I will have the time to do all that I still have to do – to correct all my sculptures which are not finished. You see that figure there. It is all right up to the head. But the head needs doing again. All the time I am looking at them. In the end, if you’re a sculptor, there’s very little room left for yourself – your works crowd you out.’

  Zadkine’s masterpiece remains his monument to the razed and reborn city of Rotterdam. This is how he wrote about it:

  It is striving to embrace the inhuman pain inflicted on a city which had no other desire but to live by the grace of God and to grow naturally like a forest … It was also intended as a lesson to future generations.

  1967

  Le Corbusier

  It was on market day in the nearest town that I saw the headlines announcing the death of Le Corbusier. There were no buildings bearing the evidence of his life’s work in that dusty, provincial and exclusively commercial French town (fruit and vegetables), yet it seemed to bear witness to his death. Perhaps only because the town was an extension of my own heart. But the intimations in my heart could not have been unique; there were others, reading the local newspaper at the café tables, who had also glimpsed with the help of Corbusier the ideal of a town built to the measure of man.

  Le Corbusier is dead. A good death, my companions said, a good way to die: quickly in the sea whilst swimming at the age of seventy-eight. His death seems a diminution of the possibilities open to even the smallest village. Whilst he lived, there seemed always to be a hope that the village might be transformed for the better. Paradoxically this hope arose out of the maximum improbability. Le Corbusier, who was the most practical, democratic and visionary architect of our time, was seldom given the opportunity to build in Europe. The few buildings he put up were all prototypes for series which were never constructed. He was the alternative to architecture as it exists. The alternative still remains, of course. But it seems less pressing. His insistence is dead.

  We made three journeys to pay our own modest last respects. First we went to look again at the Unité d’Habitation at Marseilles. How is it wearing? they ask. It wears like a good example that hasn’t been followed. But the kids still bathe in their pool on the roof, safely, grubbily, between the panorama of the sea and of the mountains, in a setting which, until this century, could only have been imagined as an extravagant one for cherubs in a Baroque ceiling painting. The big lifts for the prams and bicycles work smoothly. The vegetables in the shopping street on the third floor are as cheap as those in the city.

  The most important thing about the whole building is so simple that it can easily be taken for granted – which is what Corbusier intended. If you wish, you can condescend towards this building for, despite its size and originality, it suggests nothing which is larger than you – no glory, no prestige, no demagogy and no property-morality. It offers no excuses for living in such a way as to be less than yourself. And this, although it began as a question of spirit, was in practice only possible as a question of proportion.

  The next day we went to the eleventh-century Cistercian abbey at Le Thoronet. I have the idea that Corbusier once wrote about it, and anybody who really wants to understand his theory of functionalism – a theory which has been so misunderstood and abused – should certainly visit it. The content of the abbey, as opposed to its form or the immediate purposes for which it was designed, is very similar to that of the Unité d’Habitation. It is very hard indeed to take account of the nine centuries that separate them.

  I do not know how to describe, without recourse to drawing, the complex simplicity of the abbey. It is like the human body. During the French Revolution it was sacked and was never re-furnished: yet its nakedness is no more than a logical conclusion to the Cistercian rule which condemned decoration. Children were playing in the cloister, as in the pool on the roof, and running the length of the nave. They were never dwarfed by the structure. The abbey buildings are functional because they were concerned with supplying the means rather than suggesting the end. The end is up to those who inhabit it. The means allow them to realize themselves and so to discover their purpose. This seems as true of the children today as of the monks then. Such architecture offers only tranquillity and human proportion. For myself I find in its discretion everything which I can recognize as spiritual. The power of functionalism does not lie in its utility, but in its moral example: an example of trust, the refusal to exhort.

  Our third visit was to the bay where he died. If you follow a scrubby footpath along the side of the railway, eastwards from the station of Roquebrune, you come to a café and hotel built of wood and corrugated roofing. In most respects it is a shack like hundreds of others built over the beaches of the Côte d’Azur – a cross between a houseboat and a gimcrack stage. But this one was built according to the advice of Le Corbusier because le patron was an old friend. Some of the proportions and the colour scheme are recognizably his. And on the outside wooden wall, facing the sea, he painted his emblem of the six-foot man who acted as modular and measure for all his architecture.

  We sat on the planked terrace and drank coffee. As I watched the sea below, it seemed for one moment that the barely visible waves, looking like ripples, were the last sign of the body that had sunk there a week before. It seemed for one moment as though the sea might recognize more than the architecture of dyke and breakwater. A pathetic illusion.

  Across the bay you can see Monte Carlo. If the light is diffused, the silhouette of the mountains coming down to the sea can look like a Claude Lorrain. If the light is hard, you see the commerce of the architecture on those mountains. Particularly noticeable is a four-star hotel built on the very edge of a precipice. Vulgar and strident as it is, it would never have been built without Corbusier’s initial example. And the same applies to a score of other buildings lower down on the slopes. All of them exhort to wealth.

  Then I noticed near the modular man the imprint of a hand. A deliberate imprint, forming part of the decoration. It was a few feet from a Coca-Cola advertisement: several hundred feet above the sea: and it faced the buildings that exhorted to wealth. It was probably Le Corbusier’s hand. But it could stand for his memorial if it was any man’s.

  1965

  Victor Serge

  Victor Serge was born in Belgium in 1890. His parents were Russian émigrés who fled Russia as a result of his father’s revolutionary activities.

  On the walls of our humble and makeshift lodgings there were always portraits of men who had been hanged. The conversations of grownups dealt with trials, executions, escapes, and Siberian highways, with great ideas incessantly argued over, and with the latest books about these ideas.

  Serge left home at fifteen, was quickly disillusioned by the Belgian socialist party, and became an anarchist. In Paris he edited the paper L’Anarchie and in 1912 was arrested and sentenced to five years’ solitary confinement for being associated with the Bonnot gang who were terrorizing Paris. (One of the recurring features of Serge’s life was his ‘guilt’ by association with those whom he refused to condemn or betray but did not necessarily agree with.)

  After his release from prison he went to Barcelona where he became a syndicalist agitator. His one idea following the October revolution was to return to his own country – where he had never yet been – and to work for and defend the revolution. On his way through France he was interned as a suspect Bolshevik. In Petrograd he worked closely with Zinoviev on the founding of the Communist International, and joined the Communist Party. By 1923 he belonged to the Trotskyist left opposition – which at that time was still treated as a loyal opposition. In 1927 he was expelled from the party and afterwards imprisoned and exiled. His life was probably saved by the intercession of certain French writers on his behalf. Deprived of Soviet citizenship, he was allowed to leave the U.S.S.R. In the
late thirties, he arrived back in Paris without papers. He broke with the Trotskyists because he considered the Fourth International sectarian and ineffective. He escaped the Gestapo at the last moment in 1941, by sailing to Mexico. There he died, penniless, in 1947.

  Serge wrote about twenty books – books of political comment, history, novels, poems, autobiography. All are related to his own experiences.

  Writing, as distinct from agitational journalism, was for Serge a secondary activity, only resorted to when more direct action was impossible. He began writing his serious books in 1928 when his position in the U.S.S.R. was extremely precarious and he was awaiting arrest. He saw writing

  as a means of expressing to men what most of them live inwardly without being able to express, as a means of communion, a testimony to the vast flow of life through us, whose essential aspect we must try to fix for the benefit of those who will come after us.

  It was an ambitious view, and it was justified. We, who come after, indeed have the benefit.

  I know of no other writer with whom Serge can be very usefully compared. The essence of the man and his books is to be found in his attitude to the truth. There have of course been many scrupulously honest writers. But for Serge the value of the truth extended far beyond the simple (or complex) telling of it.

  His Memoirs1 open with the following sentence:

  Even before I emerged from childhood, I seem to have experienced, deeply at heart, that paradoxical feeling which was to dominate me all through the first part of my life: that of living in a world without any possible escape, in which there was nothing for it but to fight for an impossible escape.

  The truth for Serge was what he found in his search for the ‘impossible’; it was never a mere description of the given as it appears to appear.

  Early on, I learned from the Russian intelligentsia that the only meaning of life is conscious participation in the making of history.… It follows that one must range oneself actively against everything that diminishes man, and involve oneself in all struggles which tend to liberate and enlarge him … This conviction has brought me, as it has brought others, to a somewhat unusual destiny: but we were, and still are, in line with the development of history, and it is now obvious that, during an entire epoch, millions of individual destinies will follow the paths along which we were the first to travel.

  He recognized the forces of history traversing his time and chose to inhabit them, entering into them through both action and imagination. Yet general truths could never obliterate particular ones for him. He never saw anybody as an anonymous agent of historical forces. He could not write even of a passer-by without feeling the tension between the passer-by’s inner and outer life. He identified himself imaginatively with everyone he encountered – workers, peasants, judges, crooks, rich lawyers, seamstresses, spies, traitors, heroes. It was methodologically impossible for a stereotype to occur in Serge’s writing. The nature of his imagination forbade it.

  Such a wide-ranging and ready sympathy combined with his sense of historical destiny might have made Serge a latter-day, inevitably fifth-rate, Tolstoy. (Inevitably because Tolstoy’s view of the world was spontaneously possible only for a few decades.) But Serge was not primarily a creative writer. He wrote in order to report on what he had seen as a consequence of his actions. All his life these actions were those of a socialist revolutionary. Unlike Malraux or Koestler in their political novels, Serge was never writing about a phase of his life that was over; writing was never for him a form of renegation. Those with whom he imaginatively identified himself – whether enemies or comrades – were those on whom his life could depend. Thus, just as his imagination precluded stereotypes, his situation precluded any form of sentimental liberalism.

  The truth for Serge was something to be undergone. And, if I understand him rightly, in a rather special way. Despite his very considerable intelligence and courage, Serge never proved himself a revolutionary leader. He was always, more or less, among the rank and file. This may have been partly the result of a reluctance to take any final responsibility of command (here his early anarchism corresponded with a temperamental weakness); but it was also the result of a deliberate choice concerning the category of truth he sought. If the role of the proletariat was to be as historic as Marx had declared, it was the truth of their experience, between the possible and the impossible, which must be judged crucial, which must define the only proper meaning of social justice.

  Birth of Our Power, a novel,2 refers to the Russian Revolution, and the book is written in the first person plural. The identity of this we changes.

  We suffocated, about 30 of us, from seven in the morning to 6.30 at night, in the Gambert y Pia print shop.

  – this in Barcelona on the eve of an abortive uprising in 1917.

  We had a quiet little room with four cots, the walls papered with maps, a table loaded with books. There were always a few of us there, poring over the endlessly annotated, commented, summarized texts. There Saint-Just, Robespierre, Jacques Roux, Babeuf, Blanqui, Bakunin, were spoken of as if they had just come down to take a stroll under the trees.

  – this is a group of revolutionaries thrown together in an internment camp in France in 1918.

  The times when it was necessary for us to know how to accept prison, exile, poverty and – the best and strongest of us – death itself are in the past. From now on we must persist obstinately in living and only consent to everything for that.

  – these are the defenders of Petrograd in the winter of 1919, starving, without fuel, the White Army closing in, nine miles away. It might be more accurate to say that the identity of Serge’s we multiplies rather than changes.

  His belief that the truth must be actively pursued, his sense of history, his power of imaginative identification, his decision to remain within the mass – this is what equipped Serge to be an exceptional witness of events. His evidence seems to carry the weight of collective experiences which he never renders abstract but which always remain precise and existential. Perhaps no other writer has been so genuine a spokesman for others.

  A large part of Serge’s testimony has acquired a further value. The supreme event of his life was the Russian Revolution. Everything before 1917 is attendant upon it. The revolution itself, in all its extraordinary diversity of triumphs and desperations, has no precedent. Everything that happens afterwards Serge refers back in one way or another to the opportunities taken and lost between 1917 and 1927. Very few witnesses of that decade survive to give evidence. Of the few who did, most were concerned with self-justification. Serge’s testimony has become unique.

  His political judgement of events can often be questioned. He tended to criticize rather than to propose. He contributed little to the theory of revolution. But on behalf of thousands of those who made, and lived through, the Russian Revolution, he set down his evidence. The possible conclusions to be drawn from this cannot be compressed into a short essay. Many of them relate to the central question of why the first successful socialist revolution occurred in an industrially backward country. Bolshevism was itself an expression of this fact – as was also the bureaucracy and the autonomous secret police which it created. Years before Stalin’s dictatorship and the so-called cult of personality, this bureaucracy tended towards a totalitarianism which inevitably weakened revolutionary morale.

  For Serge the first warning came with the Kronstadt uprising of 1921. Significantly, he recognized that the uprising had to be put down; what shocked him, even more than the unnecessary brutality with which this was done, was the fact that the truth about the revolt was systematically suppressed.

  In 1967, the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the Russian Revolution revealed how grossly Soviet history continues to be falsified. This falsification, which deprives not only Soviet citizens but people all over the world of the benefit of learning from certain crucial mistakes (and achievements) of the revolution, can be said to be a counter-revolutionary act. The official criteria of the U.S.S.
R. are no longer those by which all revolutionary activities in the world are forced to be judged. Such is the context in which Serge is likely to be read. His life and its choices demonstrate an exemplary truth to which he was prophetically sensitive and which we should now accept as axiomatic. Institutions can be defended by lies, revolutions never.

  1968

  Walter Benjamin

  Walter Benjamin was born of a bourgeois Jewish family in Berlin in 1892. He studied philosophy and became a kind of literary critic – a kind such as had never quite existed before. Every page, every object which attracted his attention, contained, he believed, a coded testament addressed to the present: coded so that its message should not become a straight highway across the intervening period blocked with the traffic of direct causality, the military convoys of progress and the gigantic pantechnicons of inherited institutionalized ideas.

  He was at one and the same time a romantic antiquarian and an aberrant Marxist revolutionary. The structuring of his thought was theological and Talmudic; his aspirations were materialist and dialectical. The resulting tension is typically revealed in such a sentence as: ‘The concept of life is given its due only if everything that has a history of its own, and is not merely the setting for history, is credited with life.’

  The two friends who probably influenced him most were Gerhard Scholem, a Zionist professor of Jewish mysticism in Jerusalem, and Bertolt Brecht. His lifestyle was that of a financially independent nineteenth-century ‘man of letters’, yet he was never free of severe financial difficulties. As a writer he was obsessed with giving the objective existence of his subject its full weight (his dream was to compose a book entirely of quotations); yet he was incapable of writing a sentence which does not demand that one accept his own highly idiosyncratic procedure of thought. For example: ‘What seems paradoxical about everything that is justly called beautiful is the fact that it appears.’