It’s not too late to learn from John Berger
We look for models. Mentors. Whether in business, art, politics, or crime, it’s important to find a role model whose achievements or methods chime with the hopes and aspirations we ourselves carry.
I have been looking for a mentor and father figure since I realised that my father could be neither. This search has led me down some dodgy byways, I can tell you. Sometimes I think we need a mentor to help us find a mentor. Such is the rite of passage of many misguided youth.
Now I’m older and, if not wiser, more sceptical. Disturbingly, the figures I now look to for guidance are often younger than me. This is especially true if I make the mistake of believing I want to be a success in some sort of business sense.
Then I see sense and shake off the drive to conform and look for something more in tune with my real values.
This inevitably leads me back to writing and, especially writing that is informed by a political sensibility.
Most recently this has led me to John Berger. And, as usual in these situations, a certain degree of serendipity has played a role.
Here’s what happened:
1. Verso books offered me a huge discount on a selection of books. Among the ones I chose was Berger’s Hold Everything Dear. I took this to Corfu on a holiday earlier this year and was astonished not just by the quality of the writing but also by the thinking.
2. My daughter gave me back a copy of Berger’s Ways Of Seeing that I had leant her.
3. I was rooting through boxes of books I had brought down from the attic and came across two uncorrected proofs — from Chatto & Windus (now an imprint of Penguin Random House) — of Berger books from 1985: a reissue of his Booker winner, G, and a collection of essays, The White Bird.
4. Berger’s 90th birthday is now being celebrated by Verso — and by the London Review Of Books — and Verso are offering discounts on many Berger books, as well as publishing his latest work. I was tempted but instead looked to the London Library and borrowed his Selected Essays — edited by Geoff Dyer — from 2000.
5. The BBC broadcast a stunning little film on Berger by Cordelia Dvorák, which managed, in less than an hour, to convey something of the man’s greatness.
I am smitten. And I am reading through the work in great gobbets.
More than anything, Berger makes me feel young and full of ambition again instead of old and jaded. That is some achievement.
