Customer Reviews

Photocopies: Encounters

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"Photocopies" is a collection of twenty-eight stories, together with a photograph and a drawing. None of the stories is more than a few pages. Each of the "stories" is a vivid prose rendering of a person or place that left a seemingly indelible impression on John Berger's acutely refined sense of seeing. It is a collection marked by a minimalist sensibility, but not the cold, sterile minimalism found in the writing of Samuel Beckett or Gordon Lish. It is, instead, the warm, heartfelt minimalism of a writer striving to capture the fleeting, but enduringly memorable, moments of a human life.

"Photocopies" opens not with a photocopy, but with a photograph: the blurred, poorly-lighted photograph of a man and a woman standing under a tree. It is a sort of introduction to the first story, "A Woman and Man Standing by a Plum Tree," where Berger relates his memory of a woman he once met at a reading in Madrid who then turned up, several years later, at his country home in France. The woman is not identified by name. She is in her thirties, an artist and photographer who makes her living by restoring frescoes. The woman brings along a primitive, home-made plywood camera and, at the end of her visit, takes a picture of the two of them together under a plum tree:

"The two of us stood there facing the camera. We moved, of course, but not more than the plum trees did in the wind. Minutes passed. Whilst we stood there, we reflected the light, and what we reflected went through the black hole into the dark box. It'll be of us, she said, and we waited expectantly."

Unlike the photograph, the story that accompanies it, and the other twenty-seven stories in the collection, are clear, precise, vividly-rendered pictures from John Berger's memory. In this sense, Berger's use of a blurred photographic image to introduce the collection is a bit of irony. Ordinarily, a photograph is considered a very exact image of a moment in time. In Berger's telling, however, the more exact image is found in Berger's memory and in the reproduction (or "photocopy") of that memory that is rendered in prose.

"Photocopies" includes recollections of Henri Cartier-Bresson ("A Man Begging in the Metro") and Simone Weil ("A Girl Like Antigone"), as well as numerous unidentifiable, but memorable, friends and acquaintances of Berger. It also includes, in typical Berger fashion, insightful thoughts on drawing ("A Young Woman with Hand to Her Chin") and on the way that images of the body are influenced by local terrain and climate ("Island of Sifnos").

"Photocopies" is a stunning example of how a sensitive, perceptive observer can render a vivid image of the world in prose. In this sense, Berger's collection is a true work of art, a book that I highly recommend not only as entertaining literature, but as a text that merits close reading and careful study by writers and artists.

This is the first work that I have read by Mr. John Berger. Entitled, "Photocopies", it is a collection of 29 memories that he made more permanent by placing them in print. I don't know at what point a novella becomes a short story, or when the latter becomes something else again. Mr. Berger presents these 29 experiences in 180 pages, and while the number presented can be said to be great as measured by the little space they occupy, it would be an error to judge the quality of what they contain by their brevity.

There are not many Authors who can skillfully execute short literary works. By their definition they allow comparatively short spans of space and reading time to take the reader where the Author has mapped his or her trip. So what level of skill and experience can make a reader enjoy and think when provided with only a handful of words? Quite high for the former, and lengthy for the latter I think.

Not many writers can create a sentence that includes the work of both Donatello and Thelonius Monk to explain the achievement of a prison escape. The reader is also treated to metaphors that will become memories. Mr. Berger in describing the aged hands of a laborer could have slipped into cliché, or a variant on many others. However he compares the hands to, "certain old words that today are going out of use".

This volume is a remarkable collection of thoughts, observations and memories that never exceed a few pages, and in one example consumes only a single leaf. Yet they are all of interest, they provoke thought, and they illustrate what results when skill, gifts, and life experience are placed on paper.

"Photocopies" is profound. Like those "packed"
files on computer software disks that unpack
when you load the program, these brief pieces
unpack in my mind. I can read only about two
at a time because they are so satisfyin

It's tempting to put quotes around the word "stories" when talking about John Berger's stories in Photocopies since they aren't really stories at all: they're sketches, quick studies, notes for stories, tributes, obituaries, or fey bulletins from a playful (and sometimes even too strategically playful) man. Berger has a great weakness for exclamation marks, for example, and too great a fondness (especially when writing about lithe and humorless women) for a sort of coy whimsy.

The titles of his pieces, on the other hand, are workmanlike and plain and as static as the captions for photographs or paintings (A Bunch of Flowers in a Glass, Two Cats in a Basket, Two Dogs Under a Rock, Sheets of Paper Laid on the Grass). Or they suggest the titles of Japanese prints (A Woman and Man Standing beside a Plum Tree).

There's a portrait of a house in Italy too (A House in the Sabine Mountains) which is both a portrait of a village and a brief history of time (Italian time). And there's also an elegy to an Alpine meadow that Berger visits after a friend's death. "The laws of probability change up there," he tells us in a brilliant and dislocating description of how and why this is so. "Sometimes the pine trees seem as if they've just stopped walking. There are nights when the Milky Way looks as close as a mosquito net."

In A House Designed by Le Corbusier, the house, built in Paris in 1923, resembles an abandoned garage, with a studio wall of "murky glass", but it's the site of the most emotionally affecting tribute in the book--the house that André, a fourteen-year-old schoolboy, leaves behind him early in the winter of 1927 when he bids his mother (Berthe) and his stepfather (the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz) goodbye and travels by train to Moscow to meet--for the first time in his life--his father, a general in the Russian Army.

He travels with the People's Minister of Education and with the Minister's mistress, who decides, as the train is pulling out of Berlin, that she hasn't bought all the underthings she intended to buy. She pulls down the chain for an emergency stop. The train comes to a halt. She disembarks. The other passengers play cards until she returns with her lingerie.

On his arrival in Moscow on the morning of the tenth anniversary of the Russian revolution, André hurries straight to Red Square. His father is up on the podium in his general's uniform, taking the salute. André stares up at him but the temperature is -28 and he can think of nothing except how cold he is, dressed in a light summer suit and "a fashionable white raincoat with dark amber buttons". The officers behind the podium take pity on him and one of them approaches the General to ask what should be done. The father's response--and this must be one of the most bizarre introductions of father to son in all of history and literature--is decisive: Wrap him up in a tarpaulin and deliver him to my house!

But then the introduction to the stepmother is not exactly run of the mill, either, as André now tells us:

And this is what happened....My stepmother thought I was a new carpet! Eventually she thought she heard the carpet murmuring! Soon afterwards I moved out of their house. For two years I was a vagabond and by the winter of '30 I was already an enemy of the people. My father the General was executed in '37.

But tragedy occurs not only for the General, it also for André, who is sent to the Gulag. In the meantime, Berthe and Lipchitz have sailed to America, but after the war, Berthe leaves New York to return to Paris, convinced that somewhere her son is alive and that when he's released he'll go to their house to find her and that if she's not there when he arrives, "we'll never meet again on this earth."

She has to wait for him for fourteen years. By the time he appears on the doorstep of the house designed by Le Corbusier, he's forty-five years old and has spent twenty-seven years in the Gulag.

And in Men and Women Sitting at a Table and Eating, the first scene is set in a legendary Paris restaurant (Maxim's) where Berger and some of his Russian friends eat in elegant near darkness at a long refectory table. Berger orders sole fourée with prawns and mushrooms. The sauce over the fish is "the colour of a milky opal"; the marigold carrots are "sliced thin as wafers."

Berger is served a much sunnier lunch in a town on the northwest coast of Spain; it's mid-August, and an old woman in black settles a cooked octopus on a wooden worktable. "It glistens there, no longer reddish but phosphorescent--with the colours of gas jets, green, white, violet. She cuts it with a pair of secateurs into round slices. The slices are about the size of signet rings. Sprinkled with salt, vinegar, oil, cayenne, and served on round wooden plates, these rings are the feast."

Which is such a terrific evocation of a cooked octopus.

But Berger can also occasionally be disingenuous, as he seems to be in A Painting of an Electric Light Bulb when he rationalizes his not being able to give any help to a friend whose paintings he considers extraordinary: "Sometimes I read in a newspaper that I am (or was) one of the most influential writers about art in the English language. Yet I know nobody in the art trade in Paris or anywhere else. Nobody."

But then there are so many John Bergers: the sightseer, the raconteur, the romantic, the reporter. There's also the art critic who wrote Ways of Seeing and the novelist who wrote G. and To the Wedding. There's the author of a polemic on writing too (Lost off Cape Wrath) and there's also the writer who recently read from his work on the CBC's Writers and Company. A brief memoir in which he described a childhood ritual, the one in which the child sings out to the parents, "See you in the morning!" and the parents come to the child's doorway to sing back to the child, "See you in the morning!"--this chant being a guarantee, at least in the child's mind, that the only three people in the world who really matter will all survive the night.