Eleanor Wachtel Interviews John Berger

John Berger began as an artist. In fact, he says that "if the world were more hrmwn, I wouldn't write ot all. !would onlv draw." He left boarding-school, at sixteen to studr art. He taught drawing. hut then in the 1950s he became an art critic for The New Statesman. Br illuminating its social and political context, Berger changed how people thought about art. For instance, his clwpter on women as visual objects became a cornerstone offeministtheorr in the 1970s.

When Berger won the Booker prize for his novel, G., his acceptance speech denounced the Booker-McConnell Corporation for its labour practices and he donated half Iris pri::.e moner 10 black revolutionary organi::.ations. it was also around this time thar Berger left England. /le :1· lived Oli the continent ever since and, for the last t11 •e nty years or more, in a village in tlrej(wthills of the French Alps. it:~ Ir e re that he wrote his peasanttrilogr, three novels called. Into Their Labours, starting with Pig Earth. At the same time he's HTitten plavs, screenplars, poetry and collections of essars- more than t11 •e nty books 11011". His newest nm·el is To the Wedding. it :San eloquent prose-poem aboLI! tire triumph of lo1·e over death, about o roung woman who's HIV positi1•e. Eleanor Wachteltalked to John Be1ger this summe1; just (rjierlwr-making season. Tire inten·ie11• H'as prepared in collaboration with MatT Stinson and was broadcast on CBC Radio's Writers & Company.

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EW: In a recent essay. where you talk about your brief stint as a film actor. you say that you've always tried to lend your imagination to lives other than your own. Not as a virtue. but as a compulsion. Why do you think that

JB: Probably, like most things that arc given, it springs from a weakness. I think that capacities arc usuall y born of a certain weakness. It' quite wrong to think that capacities arc strengths. They are way of overcoming a weakness.

EW: What would the weakness be?

JB: It may be because I have a very fragile sense of my own identity. It may seem strange, and especially when people meet me it probably would seem very strange. I know that I have quite a strong presence, but in fact my own sense of my own identity is extremely fragile. Quite often it almmt dissolves and I really fcelthatl am nothing. I think that began in my very early childhood. It"s strange, because I had a close relationship with my mother. but during my early childhood she was very seldom there. So perhaps there was no one to say all the time- as mothers say to their children- "John. Our John. John!" I think perhaps it began there. In some ways I had a childhood which was. without being pathetic, a little bit like an orphan's.

EW: Why was that? When you say your mother wasn't there, you mean literally, physically she wa n't there?

JB: Yes. She wasn'tthcre because she was working. She was working a great deal, because we didn't have much money, so I saw her very I ittle. Then I was ent away to boarding-schools where, obviously, she wasn't there. Nobody was there. They were for me a quite traumatic experience. What happens. if you have a rather weak sense of your own identity. i~ that maybe it is easier for you to perceive or to take on in some way the identity of

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