Selected Essays of John Berger (29 page)

I asked him many questions. But now I have the feeling that I never asked him enough. Or at least that I never asked him the right questions. Anyway I am not in a position to describe the major historical events which conditioned his life. Furthermore I know nobody in London who is. Perhaps in Budapest there is still a witness left: but most are dead, and of the dead most were killed. I can only speak of my incomplete impression of him. Yet though factually incomplete, this impression is a remarkably total one.

Peter Peri was an exile. Arrogantly, obstinately, sometimes cunningly, he preserved this role. Had he been offered recognition as an artist or as a man of integrity or as a militant antifascist, it is possible that he would
have changed. But he was not. Even an artist like Kokoschka, with all his continental reputation and personal following among important people, was ignored and slighted when he arrived in England as a refugee. Peri had far fewer advantages. He arrived with only the distant reputation of being a Constructivist, a militant communist and a penniless Jew. By the time I knew him, he was no longer either of the first two, but had become an eternal exile – because only in this way could he keep faith with what he had learned and with those who had taught him.

Something of the meaning of being such an exile I tried to put into my novel
A Painter of Our Time.
¹
The hero of this novel is a Hungarian of exactly the same generation as Peri. In some respects the character resembles Peri closely. We discussed the novel together at length. He was enthusiastic about the idea of my writing it. What he thought of the finished article I do not know. He probably thought it inadequate. Even if he had thought otherwise, I think it would have been impossible for him to tell me. By that time the habit of suffering inaccessibility, like the habit of eating meagre vegetable soup, had become too strong.

I should perhaps add that the character of James Lavin in this novel is in no sense a
portrait
of Peri. Certain aspects of Lavin derived from another Hungarian émigré, Frederick Antal, the art historian who, more than any other man, taught me how to write about art. Yet other aspects were purely imaginary. What Lavin and Peri share is the depth of their experience of exile.

Peri’s work is very uneven. His obstinacy constructed a barrier against criticism, even against comment, and so in certain ways he failed to develop as an artist. He was a bad judge of his own work. He was capable of producing works of the utmost crudity and banality. But he was also capable of producing works vibrant with an idea of humanity. It does not seem to me to be important to catalogue which are which. The viewer should decide this for himself. The best of his works express what he believed in. This might seem to be a small achievement but in fact it is a rare one. Most works which are produced are either cynical or hypocritical – or so diffuse as to be meaningless.

Peter Peri. His presence is very strong in my mind as I write these words. A man I never knew well enough. A man, if the truth be told, who was always a little suspicious of me. I did my best to help and encourage him, but this did not allay his suspicions. I had not passed the tests which he and his true friends had had to pass in Budapest and Berlin. I was a relatively privileged being in a relatively privileged country. I upheld some of the political opinions which he had abandoned, but I upheld them without ever having to face a fraction of the consequences which he and his friends had experienced and suffered. It was not that he distrusted me: it was simply that he reserved the right to doubt. It was an unspoken doubt that I could only read in his knowing, almost closed
eyes. Perhaps he was right. Yet if I had to face the kind of tests Peter Peri faced, his example would, I think, be a help to me. The effect of his example may have made his doubts a little less necessary.

Peri suffered considerably. Much of this suffering was the direct consequence of his own attitude and actions. What befell him was not entirely arbitrary. He was seldom a passive victim. Some would say that he suffered unnecessarily – because he could have avoided much of his suffering. But Peri lived according to the laws of his own necessity. He believed that to have sound reasons for despising himself would be the worst that could befall him. This belief, which was not an illusion, was the measure of his nobility.

1968

Last night a man who was looking for a flat and asking me about rents told me that Zadkine was dead.

One day when I was particularly depressed Zadkine took us out to dinner to cheer me up. When we were sitting at the table and after we had ordered, he took my arm and said: ‘Remember when a man falls over a cliff, he almost certainly smiles before he hits the ground, because that’s what his own demon tells him to do.’

I hope it was true for him.

I did not know him very well but I remember him vividly.

A small man with white hair, bright piercing eyes, wearing baggy grey flannel trousers. The first striking thing about him is how he keeps himself clean. Maybe a strange phrase to use – as though he were a cat or a squirrel. Yet the odd thing is that after a while in his company, you begin to realize that, in one way or another, many men don’t keep themselves clean. He is a fastidious man; it is this which explains the unusual brightness of his eyes, the way that his crowded studio, full of figureheads, looks somehow like the scrubbed deck of a ship, the fact that under and around the stove there are no ashes or coal-dust, his clean cuffs above his craftsman’s hands. But it also explains some of his invisible characteristics: his certainty, the modest manner in which he is happy to live, the care with which he talks of his own ‘destiny’, the way that he talks of a tree as though it had a biography as distinct and significant as his own.

He talks almost continuously. His stories are about places, friends, adventures, the life he has lived: never, as with the pure egotist, about
his own opinion of himself.
When he talks, he watches what he is telling as
though it were all there in front of his hands, as though it were a fire he was warming himself at.

Some of the stories he has told many times. The story of the first time he was in London, when he was about seventeen. His father had sent him to Sunderland to learn English and in the hope that he would give up the idea of wanting to be an artist. From Sunderland he made his own way to London and arrived there without job or money. At last he was taken on in a woodcarving studio for church furniture.

‘Somewhere in an English church there is a lectern, with an eagle holding the bible on the back of its outspread wings. One of those wings I carved. It is a Zadkine – unsigned. The man next to me in the workshop was a real English artisan – such as I’d never met before. He always had a pint of ale on his bench when he was working. And to work he wore glasses – perched on the end of his nose. One day this man said to me: “The trouble with you is that you’re too small. No one will ever believe that you can do the job. Why don’t you carve a rose to show them?” “What shall I carve it out of?” I asked. He rummaged under his bench and produced a block of apple wood – a lovely piece of wood, old and brown. And so from this I carved a rose with all its petals and several leaves. I carved it so finely that when you shook it, the petals moved. And the old man was right. As soon as the rush job was over, I had to leave that workshop. When I went to others, they looked at me sceptically. I was too young, too small and my English was very approximate. But then I would take the rose out of my pocket, and the rose proved eloquent. I’d get the job.’

We are standing by an early wood-carving of a nude in his studio.

‘Sometimes I look at something I’ve made and I know it is good. Then I touch wood, or rather I touch my right hand.’ As he says this, Zadkine touches the back of his small right hand, as though he were touching something infinitely fragile – an autumn leaf for example.

‘I used to think that when I died and was buried all my wood carvings would be burnt with me. That was when they called me “the negro sculptor”. But now all these carvings are in museums. And when I die, I shall go with some little terracottas in my pocket and a few bronzes strung on my belt – like a pedlar.’

Drinking a white wine of which he is very proud and which he brings to Paris from the country, sitting in a small bedroom off the studio, he reminisces.

‘When I was about eight years old, I was at my uncle’s in the country. My uncle was a barge-builder. They used to saw whole trees from top to bottom to make planks – saw them by hand. One man at the top end of the saw was high up and looked like an angel. But it was the man at the bottom who interested me. He got covered from head to foot in sawdust. New, resinous sawdust so that he smelt from head to foot of wood – and the sawdust
collected even in his eyebrows. At my uncle’s I used to go for walks by myself down by the river. One day I saw a young man towing a barge. On the barge was a young woman. They were shouting at each other in anger. Suddenly I heard the man use the word CUNT. You know how for children the very sound of certain forbidden words can become frightening? I was frightened like that. I remembered hearing the word once before – though God knows where I had learnt that it was forbidden – I was going along the passage between the kitchen and the dining-room and as I passed a door I saw a young man from the village with one of our maids on his knee, his hand was unbuttoning her and he used the same word.

‘I started to run away from the river and the shouting couple by the barge towards the forest. Suddenly, as I ran, I slipped and I found myself face down on the earth.

‘And it was there, after I had fallen flat on my face as I ran away from the river, that my demon first laid his finger on my sleeve. And so, instead of running on, I found myself saying – I will go back to see why I slipped. I went back and I found that I had slipped on some clay. And again for the second time my demon laid a finger on my sleeve. I bent down and I scooped up a handful of the clay. Then I walked to a fallen tree trunk, sat down on it and began to model a figure, the first in my life. I had forgotten my fear. The little figure was of a man. Later – at my father’s house – I discovered that there was also clay in our back garden.’

It is about ten o’clock on a November morning seven years ago. The light in the studio is matter of fact. I have only called to collect or deliver something. It is a time for working rather than talking. Yet he insists that I sit down for a moment.

‘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:

1967

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.