In the mid 1970s John Berger began a new life—and a new family—in a small mountain village outside Geneva in the Haute-Savoie. He was close to fifty. At first he and Beverly Bancroft did not live in the village of Quincy itself, but up the road in an old farmhouse. The ground floor was an unused cow barn; in the kitchen an iron furnace burned coal and wood. Even so, the house was frigid in the winter. There was running water, but no way to heat it except on the stove. The toilet was in an outhouse across the driveway. There was no telephone. Upstairs Berger kept a study with a desk, typewriter and books; from the window the massif of Mont Blanc was visible in the distance. It was a short walk to the village, but there was no commerce there. The nearest grocer and post office were several miles down the main road along the river.
For some, the move was a retreat. It was seen by many as quixotic, Tolstoyan. Here was one of England's most renowned leftists living in the French countryside when Thatcher was ascending to power, the welfare state crumbling, and coal miners out on strike. Whenever he visited London, which he did about once a year, there was always the inevitable question. "What are you doing over there," in one friend's paraphrase, "with romantic ideas about peasants, when you should be over here at the sharp end of the class struggle?"
To others it was an aesthetic capitulation, a nostalgic turn away from the rigorous modernism of his novels. In a remarkable conversation—remarkable for its intimacy and frankness—commissioned in 1983 by Channel 4, a regal and silver-streaked Susan Sontag, sitting across a small table from Berger, continually pressed her friend on this point. "But haven't you changed, John," she said again and again. Berger seemed taken aback. "Well, I have had to relearn how to write," he admitted, half reluctantly and half with a recalcitrant pride.
However native he may have gone in the foothills of the Alps, he of course always had the privilege of leaving, of travelling, of his education, of his friendship with important artists and publishers. Berger's French, for that matter, remained faltering and heavily accented to the end. He was never more than an hour's drive away from Geneva, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in Europe, where his ex-wife and two grown children lived. And by the mid 1980s he was dividing his time between the Haute-Savoie and a suburb of Paris, where he had a new companion, the Ukrainian-born writer Nella Bielski, a woman Beverly shared him with.
Despite all this, the move to the country was anything but a caprice. Even those friends who could be skeptical—who may first have looked askance at what they saw as rural gentrification or fashionable country squatting—had to admit, once they visited, that he had indeed found a new and fitting home. Berger shared in the life of the village. He helped with the haymaking during harvest, visited the higher pastures when it was time for the cows to graze, accompanied woodcutters as they felled trees, picked the apples to be pressed into cider, and drank the gnôle that was passed around at local celebrations. He participated in and was part of the gossip that made up the social fabric of the valley. He did not own land at first, choosing instead to rent his house from a neighboring farmer, who became a friend. "I feel at home here in a way I have felt nowhere else," he told an American journalist who made the pilgrimage in 1981. "Certainly not in England. I don't feel French particularly, but I do feel at home in this village, accepted for who I am."
A retreat implies an escape—either to surrender or to rest. Berger did neither. If anything, the specter of the charge made him work harder: not only with his writing, but with all he did that was not at his desk. "I didn't have a wish to get away," he said. "I had a wish to meet something. Yes, I had a wish to meet and know more about rural life. Not in contrast to urban life, or as a relief from urban life." And the very idea that the rural was, perforce, a getaway spoke to what he saw as the historical solipsism of the urban professional class.
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