Rick Simonson

Hold Everything Dear
September 13, 2007

Two summers ago, I was going through the small rite of meeting the bookstore's then-newest staff member, there on her first day, something made 'easy' by my office area being proximate to receiving, which is where a good part of a new person's first days are spent. My two surprises on meeting her were that she was a bit older than most new people (I shortly learned she was within hollering distance of my age), and that I even recognized her. There was conversation about that - her being from Seattle, moving away but nearby and making stops in on visits through town, and what had brought her back, and to working here. Life circumstances, some interests and pursuits, these were also briefly parried. She said she liked art, and books about art.

A little later that day, I checked and clutched the stack of a new fiction title I had been watching for. From Pantheon, it was John Berger's Here is Where We Meet, a striking collection of stories fictional and likely not, some from the borderland of having live characters who were now actually no longer alive ... plays of memory and what is present.

In best handselling enthusiast mode, as I walked past this new person, I waved a copy at her, 'So you like art ... have you read any John Berger? This is fiction, but he always writes great essays about art.'

As I babbled this, I realized there was this look on her face. Oh, no, I thought, she thinks this is some bookseller come-on line, some 'hey baby' thing, no no, this is what I do, books like this, writers like this (especially), these are why I'm here, this is the daily bread work, the real work. Before I said anything else, she smiled, gave me ths look, and said, 'You know, you were selling me John Berger back in 1980.'

I was?

If so, I stand and accept being guilty as charged, though if she was right in the year, it would then have been in the very first bloom of my coming to admire, respect, and feel impassioned about a body of work, and a way of working that seems rare and unique (to me), and at the same time, from the most extra-ordinary, vital, and everyday. I still remember unpacking the Random House shipment (and where I unpacked it in a 1980, pre-computer, little-typed-index card inventory system Elliott Bay). This hardcover book titled Pig Earth with cover artwork by 'Bascove,' whose covers were adorning other writers work that caught my eye then (Alice Walker's Meridian and others of hers). On the book's backcover, an arresting photograph of a man with deep eyes wearing one of those Mao-style caps (it appeared), gazing seriously off into some distance. There was also a Susan Sontag quote.

27 years later, and by my count, at least fifteen books later (not counting artist monographs), that same Susan Sontag quote adorns the just-landed (September 11) new book, Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance. Note to friends at Pantheon: there is nothing wrong with the quote, with nothing by Susan Sontag from any time or place, but there are surely some more recent words of praise that could be placed there. Michael Ondaatje, Arundhati Roy, Anne Michaels, and Geoff Dyer (who has written a book about Berger's work and edited a volume of Berger's Selected Essays) are among the numerous writers, artists, and activists who have publicly acknowledged, and found insight, candor, engagement, proportion, context, and vision in Berger's varied writings, always with, in a world increasingly clamorous and commodified, a place for the human heart, human dignity, human voice, and human- and humane-relationship with the rest of the world, including that which is more-than-human.

Hold Everything Dear carries the intimate, familiar voice that is felt throughout Berger's nearly thirty books. One senses his hand - which still paints and draws, but started that way, after World War II, with painting and drawing as his greater avocation - puts words to the page the way a drawing is carefully made. There are the lines, the shapes, and also these empty or quiet places, part of which serve to let you think or hear what you have read, and to absborb it. He is not a writer to race through, even as he writes the most direct, seemingly simple sentences.

John Berger is a writer whose work has always sold well for us. He is one who surprises even those readers who are fond of his work. Some readers of the fiction (Pig Earth is part of a cycle of novels tracing the end of peasant/village life in western Europe and there are the Booker Prize-winning G. and To the Wedding) aren't aware of his essays. And some readers of his essays (The Shape of a Pocket, About Looking, and a favorite of favorites, Keeping a Rendezvous) aren't so aware of the fiction. Fun it always is to acquaint those readers with what they're about to enjoy.

The 'dispatches on survival and resistance' of the newest book are that: most of the pieces are drawn from places where everyday struggles for dignity and sovereignty (in the smaller and larger sense) are going on. At  81 (he turns that age this autumn), he is still traveling (albeit not to the U.S.), still seeing, still witnessing, still reporting, revealing, reminding. In this, there is a harkening back to his earliest writings, some very politically written (one of his first books was titled Permanent Red, and that does not refer to the present blue state/red state demarcating definitions of U.S. political inclinations ... this is 'red' as in when it was 'Red China'). However political or not (and there are writings here on art and artists, on desire, as well as endurance, persistence, and despair), you see, hear, feel yourself differently, more presently and attentively in the world after reading him. John Berger, holding everything dear.

Posted by Rick Simonson on September 13, 2007 | Comments (0)