John Berger Week, part four. To be honest, I’m getting a bit bored with John Berger Week. I think I might call it to an early close, maybe with a page from Another Way of Telling, which is, I think, my favourite. In the meantime, though, here’s a lovely 1967 Penguin, Berger’s first collaboration with photographer Jean Mohr. The life of a rural doctor. But not a mushy humanist celebration, more of a rigorous Marxian analysis. Consequently very much of its time and a bit grey. The book is subtitled ‘the story of a country doctor’ but Berger refuses us the colour and the human insights that might suggest.
I think this footnote sums it up: “I do not attempt in this essay to discuss the role of Sassall’s wife or his children. My concern is his professional life.” It’s all a bit Brechtian: labour, the material conditions of the rural poor, class relations… that kind of thing. I’m really selling it, aren’t I? As in their other collaborations, though, Mohr’s photographs cut right across the chilly analysis: they’re warm and humane. Anyway, it’s out of print but there are plenty of second-hand editions on Amazon.
John Berger Week, part three. Berger won the 1972 Booker Prize for G and then scandalised the literary world by making a militant acceptance speech in which he pointed out that the firm for whom the prize was named made all its money in exploitive practices in the Caribbean. He gave his prize money to the Black Panthers. Cue gasps, tuts, leader page condemnations etc.
The book is formally adventurous and the narrative jumps back and forth all over the place but, if I’m honest, it’s, well, humourless and quite doctrinaire: a bit like getting locked out and having to spend the evening with your neighbour who sells Socialist Worker outside the tube. I wish it weren’t so but it hasn’t aged well. You might like that sort of thing, though, so you’ll want to buy it from Amazon.
John Berger Week, part two. One of Berger’s several collaborations with photographer Jean Mohr, it’s about migrants in Europe – tunnel diggers, maids, agricultural labourers and factory workers. What we now call ‘economic migrants’. It was published in 1975. It’s humane, poetic, heartbreakingly sad and entirely relevant. Buy the paperback edition on Amazon.
John Berger Week, part one. John Berger’s got a new book out, so I’m going to read from a few of his older ones. I’m starting with a page from his luminous short story ‘Boris’ which appeared in issue nine of Granta in 1983 – his first new fiction since the seventies. Around this time (I was twenty) I was having a bit of a Berger crush and was soaking up his earlier stuff. My dad, knowing this, and knowing that Berger lived in a village that my parents visited in the Haute-Savoie in France, took one of his books up the mountain to Berger’s little house to ask him to sign it. Berger’s partner took the book but told dad not to expect it back – “he doesn’t do that sort of thing.” Three or four months later the book showed up in the post, duly inscribed…
Downstairs Loo Week, part six. Edna O’Brien has written a couple of dozen popular novels and collections of short stories about Irish life and love but a lot of Irish readers resent her patronising, slightly anthropological version of the country – after all, she left the country just as soon as she could, never to return. And her version was profoundly pre-Tiger, pre-boom, pre-flowering of self confidence and boisterous independence (pre-bail-out too, of course). She reinforces the old image of Ireland as backward, superstitious and repressed.
This book – a collection of non-fiction sketches of the country, illustrated with photographs by Fergus Bourke, was published in 1978, only five years after Ireland had entered Europe and some years before the torrent of money from Brussels transformed the place. So it’s heavy on saints and scholars – and priests and drunks and lonely farmers. It is beautiful, though, and reminds me of why I fell in love with Ireland as a young man (and you can buy a second-hand copy on Amazon for a penny!)
Downstairs Loo Week, part five. Gummo himself, on being written out of the Marx Brothers myth. Not bitter. Resigned, philosophical and funny. From Simon Louvish’s excellent biography, Monkey Business: the lives and legends of the Marx Brothers. Buy the paperback on Amazon.
Downstairs Loo Week, part four. This is quite an important book. It was published at the height of an intellectual punchup that saw its author denied tenure at Cambridge because of his defence of a particularly hardline version of then-fashionable structuralism (this, I read, was called ‘l’affaire MacCabe’ because of its French component). He was a follower – stop me if I’m getting this wrong – of the fantastically exotic French brand of psychoanalytic theory invented by Jacques Lacan.
This book is a defense of another formidably oblique Frenchman, Jean-Luc Godard, at the end of his most formidably oblique phase, during which he made a string of inaccessible, hectoring TV documentaries and hideously didactic dramas, often in collaboration with groups of ‘workers’ (now I sound like Simon Heffer).
So it’s a fascinating snapshot of the language and attitudes of a lost era, an era of great intellectual certainty and of a kind of deliberate obscurity that I now remember – as a student of this stuff at the time – as frankly uncomfortable, negative, hostile.
Downstairs Loo Week, part three. My dad had a huge open-reel tape recorder, the size of a suitcase and giving off so much heat and light through the many slits and vents in its metal case that I used to huddle up close to it on my bedroom floor on cold nights. Dad had recorded all sorts of radio programmes, mainly from the Home Service, during the fifties. I remember the Richard Burton Under Milk Wood, Stan Freberg, many Hancocks and Goon Shows and a few episodes of Monday Night at Home, featuring the warm and strange voice of Ivor Cutler. Later, of course, he became a fixture on the John Peel show.
It’s a tiny book, about the size of a matchbook. Buy it on Amazon.
Downstairs Loo Week, part two. Surveys show that eight-in-ten downstairs loos have a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I’ve had this one for over thirty years and I certainly haven’t looked at it more than twice in that period. It’s an iconic work, a pivotal text, a key work… Or whatever. I’m sure it’s a great book. I’m not prepared to find out, though, so I picked a page from the middle: a page which has an amusing echo of the Third Policeman (inanimate objects and all that).
Buy the Twenty-fifth anniversary edition (which has acquired a much more self-consciously psychedelic cover in the years since the spanner/flower) on Amazon.
It’s Downstairs Loo Week at Slash Reading. Each day this week I’ll read from one of the books in our downstairs loo. I won’t go so far as to pick one at random but I can guarantee that this week’s selections will all be a bit different. I’m starting with a practical book. It has in it all the information you need to build your own sundial (also, for that matter, your own armillary sphere, portable dial or memorial dial). It’s published by Dover Press, the people who print all those marvellous books of copyright-free woodcuts and illustrations, and it’s quite old, but I guess this sort of stuff never goes out of date.
So what I do here is dip into the glories of the humanist tradition - curiosity, imagination, humour, scepticism - by reading out bits of my favourite non-fiction books. And you can get all this lovely, weird or forgotten non-fiction on your iPod by subscribing to the podcast.
.
on Amazon.
, so I’m going to read from a few of his older ones. I’m starting with a page from his luminous short story ‘Boris’ which appeared in issue nine of Granta in 1983 – his first new fiction since the seventies. Around this time (I was twenty) I was having a bit of a Berger crush and was soaking up his earlier stuff. My dad, knowing this, and knowing that Berger lived in a village that my parents visited 
at Amazon.
for a penny!)
.
, which is out of print and pretty expensive second-hand (I told you it was important). MacCabe has written other books about Godard, though, like 
and 
, which comes out later this year.
.
(which has acquired a much more self-consciously psychedelic cover in the years since the spanner/flower) on Amazon.
