Seeing is believing

Tobias Jones

PHOTOCOPIES by John Berger Bloomsbury, £13.99, pp. 192 TITIAN: NYMPH AND SHEPHERD by John Berger and Katya Berger Andreadakis Prestel, £14.95, pp.120 John Berger's To the Wedding was the literary should-have-been of last year. His new work, Photocopies, reads like idle writing, relaxed and lethargic. Its lyrical ballads are soporific, but brilliant. Each story is a still, a photocopy of a 'fact' in Berger's life: put together, they form a silent, autobiographical film.

The need to dissemble and understand through seeing is a central theme running throughout the 29 minimalist chapters of the book. The first piece ('A Woman and a Man standing by a Plum Tree') makes Berger's mission explicit: the woman of the story takes out a lot of plywood, 'the size of a mechanic's tool box', and using this old camera has the excitement of capturing forever a fleeting image: 'Whilst we stood there, we reflected the light, and what we reflected went through the black hole into the dark'. All the stories pivot on this theme, as Berger too tries to twist what he sees into sensual, now verbal images.

Cartier-Bresson, Jack Yeats, Klee, Cezanne, Monet, Renoir, all breeze through the pages. But it's more the peas- antry that Berger romanticises:

So I stood there, stood there, till I heard in the silence his voice shouting and swearing behind the cowbells of the herd in my head.

He invokes folk-tales, rewriting them for modernity; men beg in the metro, girls tell tales on a bus, couples meet in studios.

The stories are all cosmopolitan, occur- ring in France, Greece, Ireland or Spain; none are more than a few pages long. Many are memories of an old man ('after 40 years we both accepted this fatality which was also happiness', he writes in 'Room 19', perhaps the most impressive of the collection), and others are portraits, a few paragraphs long: 'Her laugh — and she only laughed when you did — was light and silvery'.

For my taste he does sometimes weight his prose with too much esoteric learning ('do you know the Zen Buddhist treatise on archery? Braque gave it to me in '43 '; or '50 years later as I read the sonnet by George Herbert ,... '). And the on-going metaphor about sight, the need for accu- rate art, is a little laboured. But it is mostly a simple book, Berger the creative art-critic using each page as a canvas, painting scenes of modern Europe with subtle words. The result is serene and sensitive. There are no lines to the stories, only abstractions:

They were of crowds. Images of countless faces, each person distinct, but together in their energy similar to molecules. The images, however, were neither sinister nor symbolic. When he first showed them to me I thought this multitude of faces were like the letters of an undeciphered writing. They were mysteriously fluent and beautiful.

Titian is an entirely different proposition. Prompted by his daughter ('What do you think about Titian? In one word on a post- card: flesh'), Berger engages in correspon- dence with her, playing the part of teacher and mentor as well as father. ('AII right, flesh. First I see his own, when he's old. Why do I immediately think of Titian as an old man?' is the start of his reply.)

The daughter, Katya, has met a man at the exhibition who is the ghost of the great painter. He appears to be either a genius or a fool: ' "One uses painting," he suddenly said, "to clothe oneself, to keep warm." ' Which is typical of the book; by risking the ridiculous, it veers to the sublime. There are great insights into the lives of an artist, into techniques and inspi- ration, and Berger's elderly naivety is refreshing alongside his daughter's sniping enquiries. His reply to his daughter's sight- ing of Titian's spiritual substitute is the cryptic: 'Was the old man by any chance accompanied by a dog?'

The 'Nymph and Shepherd' painting (c. 1570) is the centre of their discussions. There is the shepherd with his pipe, wooing the reclining figure of the nymph; the gentleness of the angles and the intimacy of the scene suddenly became solid in the monumental painting. But Berger is dis- concerted:

It isn't her own hand. Its anatomical position, its gesture and the fact that it appears to have cuff, make it impossible. It's a roving hand which belongs to nobody.

So he reworks it in his mind; and on paper he recreates the scene. It can sometimes seem terribly earnest, but it's so much more enjoyable than most art criticism. Berger lives each image, tirelessly asking childish questions which, of course, can't be answered. His paintings, not

'It was on Panorama. The bastards break in to get money for drugs.'

remarkable, attempt in their modern monochromes to reveal something about Titian at the point where words fail: 'In drawing, you try to touch, if only for an instant — like playing tag — the master's version.' His daughter's writing is full of appreciation; a pomegranate is 'split open by the centrifugal energy of its own ripeness', and the light in The Flaying of Marsyas' is 'honeyed'.

It's a hedonistic read, with illustrations on almost every page. There is also a chronology of Titian's life. Like Photocopies, it is both unconventional and beautifully presented. In his preface Berger writes, 'I began to see dimly how life can welcome art'. Berger's art should be wel- comed with open arms.