Yossarian is more or less the hero of the book. He spends most of his time trying to avoid being killed by officers who keep increasing the number of missions he has to fly before being allowed to go home on leave. He has decided to live forever or die in the attempt. Eventually he realizes he can just leave and sets out in a rowboat to row all the way to Sweden, a neutral country. For all we know he gets there safely. And of course even if he dies en route he will live forever in the minds of the millions who read his book or saw the movie made by Mike Nichols, in which Alan Arkin plays Yossarian. Can’t you see him now in his rowboat as the scene fades to black?
Joseph Heller didn’t live forever. He died in 1999. His later books weren’t as good as Catch 22, but, as he once said: “When I read someone saying I haven’t done anything as good as Catch 22 lately, I’m tempted to reply, ‘Who has?’”
JOHN BERGER
1926–
Ways of Seeing
About Looking
John Berger was born in London in 1926, the son of an infantry officer on the Western front in 1916–18. Berger enlisted in the British army and served from 1944-46, after which he studied at the Chelsea School of Art, London.
As time went on he grew closer and closer to the Communist Party, which didn’t keep him from serving The New Statesman as its art critic. From time to time they thought of releasing him, but he was such an astute critic and good writer that they didn’t do so for ten years. By 1961 he was a freelance writer and lived the simple life he preferred. In 1972 his first book, Ways of Seeing, was published and won the Booker Prize, the highest British award for a literary work.
It is an extraordinary book, which, if you read it and think about what it says, will probably change the way you look at a work of art, at least any work of art before about 1850, say—the Old Masters, as they’re called. According to Berger, practically every painting was an advertisement for something, usually the wealth of the person—man or woman—who commissioned it. You don’t see this right away, but then you begin to notice small details: a ring on a woman’s finger, a fur collar on a man’s jacket, silver buckles on his shoes, an expensive harness on a horse, a jeweled collar on the neck of a dog—to say nothing of a mansion in the background or a fine stand of timber or a lake with a temple in the distance. Or the dress of a maidservant, the uniform of a footman—anything and everything is there for an ulterior purpose. And really always the same kind: to reveal the wealth of someone, either the subject of the painting or the buyer of it or the patron of the painter himself.
This is not always true. Take Rembrandt, for instance. Early in his career, when he was a society painter who painted portraits of rich and famous people, this was certainly true. But midway through his career Rembrandt ceased to be successful in that way, ceased to find patrons or wealthy subjects, and finally was reduced to painting portraits of his wife, who sat for nothing, and of himself, seen in a mirror. And, as Berger admits, these were his greatest paintings, the ones that lead us to name him one of the greatest artists of all time.
Berger’s analysis of paintings in Ways of Seeing is fascinating. I have only hinted at its complexities. I hope you will see for yourselves.
About Looking is another extraordinary book. It is mostly about photography. If that interests you, you should read it. The first chapter of the book moves me very deeply. It is called “Why Look at Animals?”
Berger begins by pointing out that most of us, nowadays, have almost no contact with animals, may never even see an animal unless it is someone’s dog on a leash or a cat slinking in an alley (or a rat in the same alley). Not so long ago, Berger says, this was not so. Most of us, until about 1900 or even later in many countries, lived with animals, shared our lives with theirs, depended on them for many kinds of help and services, as they depended on us. Of course, we killed and ate them, but that didn’t mean we were unaware of their existence; we knew where our food came from, how it grew under our care, what it meant to slaughter them or wring their necks or steal their eggs. And now, if we ever look at animals, it is in zoos.
And there’s the rub. Animals in zoos are not the kind of animals we used to live with. They are captives, serving life sentences for our amusement and pleasure. They are lazy, sleepy—most animals sleep if they have nothing else to do—bedraggled, unhealthy, and unhealthy looking. And when we look at them, they look at us. And what do they see? Do they recognize us as fellow inmates of an industrial culture that treats animals as things instead of living beings, and treats human beings as things as well, things that can be exploited for their labor or for warfare, or as amusing automata flickering on a screen?
If you disagree about this, don’t argue with me. Argue with John Berger, and even if you win the argument it will have done you good to engage in it.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
1931–
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,
et al.
John le Carré (the pseudonym of David J.M. Cornwell) was born in Dorset, England, in 1931. He was educated at Oxford, taught at Eton, then served for five years in the British Foreign Service. Recruited to MI6, his career was destroyed by Kim Philby, who blew the cover of dozens of British agents to the KGB. He analyzed Philby’s weakness and death in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) and A Small Town in Germany (1968), which introduced one of his major characters, George Smiley. The latter book, a tour de force, consists mostly of dialogue, which is fun for a writer to do but not always very easy to read.
My three favorite novels by le Carré are The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), The Little Drummer Girl (1983), and The Constant Gardener (2001). I remember well the excitement I felt about Spy, which was one of the first to deal with a subject that le Carré and others later made almost a cliché. I was scared for the secret agent and hopeful, when he threw himself over the Berlin Wall at the end, that he would survive to live another life. And I understood very well why he couldn’t stand to continue conducting his entire life in secrecy, because I was doing a little of that myself.
The young female protagonist of The Little Drummer Girl captured my heart. She is so brave and so frightened, and also so torn between love of her victim and hatred of the man he is becoming. Le Carré is a very good writer who can tear your feelings into shreds continuously for two hundred pages, as he does here.
I think he never has written a better book than The Constant Gardener, partly because his own feelings are so deeply involved.