On hospitality
‘At seven in the evening a yellow car pulled up by the house… the driver wore jeans and a dusty black shirt with white buttons. She had come from Galicia.’
In John Berger’s essay ‘A Woman and a Man Standing By a Plum Tree’, a woman called Marisa Camino turns up, unannounced, at Berger’s house. They have met briefly once before at a reading Berger gave, when Camino – an enthusiast for his writing – gave him one of her drawings. Berger, though, didn’t catch her name. Now, at his house, they talk ‘of nothing’; avoiding the rain, she stays overnight. In the morning, Camino takes a photograph of herself and Berger, and leaves again.
But Camino doesn’t vanish from Berger’s writing. As academic Richard Turney has observed, she appears often, with Berger addressing several of his essays directly to her. ‘Brancusi’opens: ‘Thank you for the painting, Marisa, I’ve put glass over it’. In ‘The Chauvet Cave’, he begins ‘You, Marisa, who have painted so many creatures and turned over many stones and crouched for hours looking, perhaps you will follow me'.
Authors are often told to write with the reader in mind, but seldom are those words meant as literally as this: picking one person and making much of your work, in essence, a long letter specifically to them. In fact, for Berger the work was more than a letter. It was an exchange. Camino was his collaborator; by naming his reader, Berger acknowledges that his writing can’t exist without her complicity. As if to underline the point, in 2005 they produced an exhibition together, Entries, of drawings they’d co-created from their respective homes in France and Spain, posting them back and forth, making small additions until they were complete.
For a while I’ve been thinking about how my background in theatre shapes what I do as a writer of nonfiction. The essence of theatre is that it is a live act: always created in the moment, for a specific audience, in a specific place. By comparison, the writer/reader relationship can seem one sided. Berger and Camino’s relationship reminds me that it’s not. A book doesn’t exist in the written word on the page, but in the moment when the reader completes the act of creation. In this way – much like theatre – the art isn’t fixed but live, created anew every time.
What are the implications of this for my writing? Perhaps I could write a book and bury the final chapter under a rock on top of a mountain and give you instructions on how to reach it, or I could write the entire thing backwards, force you to hold it up before a mirror to read it. But it is also simpler than that. The best way to acknowledge the reader’s complicity is to make space for them on the page. Given too much detail, their creativity is crowded out. The knack is to offer them just enough to hang their hat on – not an entire body but a nose or a gait, a branch that can stand for a forest.
After Berger died, Ali Smith recounted a wonderful story about hearing him talk at the British Library in 2015. Recalling his focus on migrant workers in The Seventh Man, someone asked Berger his perspective on mass migration in the world now. Berger thought for a long time, Smith explained, and then he said: ‘I have been thinking about the storyteller’s responsibility to be hospitable’.
The anecdote is revealing about Berger’s approach to writing. For what is hospitality if not making room for the unknown, accommodating them within your own space? A stranger drives in and you offer them a place to spend the night.
But in responding to this specific question in this way Berger was pointing to something more significant. A book is never as much about love affairs or train journeys or school-boy wizards as it is about what it means to tell a story, who is cast as a protagonist and what words fall off the edges of the page.
Which is to say it is a training device for reality. When the wall went up on the Mexican border, the barrier had already been built, and boats flounder long before they make their way into the English Channel. Berger reminds us: we are artless if we do not make room in our narratives for unfamiliar heroes. Or if we suppose that endings are always ours to invent.