In the early 1960s, Berger and his wife, the translator Anya Bostock, left London for a suburb of Geneva, where he wrote in relative obscurity for several years, publishing two further novels that attracted little attention. “It is a struggle,” he explained in a letter to an older novelist, “because I made so many enemies as an art-critic; I have now offended the sense of order by abandoning art criticism; and I have exiled myself here seeing nobody except a few cherished but powerless friends. But meanwhile one must write and hope.”
The silence of exile was in fact a preparation for the great flowering of Berger’s middle period. As the generation of ‘68 spread its wings and the New Left seemed to promise revolution, Berger’s work broke free of all previous models. Between 1965 and 1975 he produced an awe-inspiring array of forms: photo-texts, broadcasts, novels, documentaries, feature films, essays. Many of these were done in collaboration. With the Swiss photographer, Jean Mohr, he made A Fortunate Man, a documentary portrait in words and images of a country doctor in the Forest of Dean, and A Seventh Man, a kind of modernist visual essay about the courage and perseverance of migrant laborers in Europe. (This latter project was the book Berger always said he was proudest of, and in a 2010 reprinting he mused that sometimes a book, unlike its authors, can grow more of-the-moment with time, a statement that itself has only grown truer in recent years as the migrant crisis reaches new levels.) Berger also worked with Alain Tanner on several films, including Jonah who will be 25 in the year 2000, an ensemble comedy that became a touchstone of post-‘68 optimism.
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