Pig Earth, Once in Europa, by John Berger

A visit from Christina, who spent the summer milking goats and making cheese in the Swiss alps, made me think of John Berger who wrote about peasant life in the French alps in the 1970s and 80s. Peasant has its meaning still in French. Paysan, paysanne, creature of this land, knowing its habits and its ferocity, the shrill call of the goat:

The lament of breath issuing from a skin bag. The Greeks called the cry of the he-goat tragos, from which they derived tragedy.

In English a peasant is an idiot with a misfortunate past and a regrettable future. At best a lifestyle, a brand, a silhouette. A French boyfriend I had in my early twenties saw me bent double from the waist, picking a lettuce in my parents' garden. Tu es paysanne, he said, and I was pleased. 

For many years I have not looked at John Berger's books because I could hear his voice as I read. All the goat and shit and the wholesome authority were too clearly defined, whatever narrative or essayist voice he takes on. But it is many years since I read him, he has since died and the world has become noisier, and his voice, his insistence have grown quieter.

The stories in Pig Earth get longer as the book progresses and the writer's confidence in his own storytelling grows. In the last and longest story, John Berger becomes Jean, the narrator of  'The three lives of Lucie Cabrol'. 

Lucie Cabrol, known as the Cocadrille, a creature sprung from a cock's egg, a dwarfish wrong'un whose universe rose and fell and rose again, expanded to the zone she foraged. Jean the narrator finds the biggest cep he's ever seen and she seizes it. Everything on her alp she owns, she says, except the title. She dies of the fortune she reputedly gathered from foraging, axed through her skull. The money and the murderer were never found.

John Berger writes himself into a village in the alps. He shovels shit and herds goats, drinks gnôle, but the real participation is on the page, in the stories he wrote about the people he knew who'd lived there for generations. 

Pig Earth is first of the 'Into our labours' trilogy, published in 1979. In Once in Europa, the second volume published ten years later, the alp connects to the rest of the world in several painful ways. There is migration to factories, tanneries, chimneys to be swept in Paris. Men return triumphant and then fall. Women are temptresses and milkers, sustainers, or dead, or unknown. The title story 'Once in Europa' is about a factory that produces ferromanganese in blast furnaces. Workers are burned, maimed and killed, the surrounding landscape is poisoned. 

At the end of Pig Earth, John Berger wrote a historical afterword about the threat of extinction of peasants. Ten years later, when he published Once in Europa, one or two peasants had tractors and looked after land and animals on their own. By the end of the 20th century, in Western Europe, the extinction of peasants had effectively been achieved. There are some who, nostalgic for an imagined past, want to become peasants, to survive from the land with only a minimum of saleable product. But the pressures are immense.

As I learned a few weeks ago, the Ford factory in Cork was the first manufacturer in Europe of tractors. Mechanized agriculture and all that goes with it, started here, in 1919.

Pierre Ryckmans and Simon Leys

I have one book by Pierre Ryckmans and one by Simon Leys, who are the same person. Why he does it I don't know, but the use of of two names gives full play to the doubt that permeates the average thinking life. In content, these two books are approximately polemic and reflection. Pierre Ryckmans The View from the Bridge is a series of lectures published in 1996 in Australia, where he lived and taught for many years. The Simon Leys was published in 2008 by Sylph Editions in London as one of their Cahier series. Notes from the Hall of Uselessness is a selection of pieces from the eponymous Hall, his writing room, where, as I can fully imagine, he contemplates the usefulness of the useless. Both books are permeated with Chinese thought and culture, and thus, for the European reader, they hang suspended in air of their own.

In presentation they are both slim volumes, but there the resemblance ends. The Cahier series published by Sylph are a model of thoughtful typesetting and design. The Australian book, published by the Australian Broadcasting Company, has an overlarge font and charmless layout. Does it matter?  Yes, for the way the reader is or isn't encouraged to read, and reflect. John Berger describes how, on first sight of a new book, he so disliked the production that he burnt it straightaway, which is a tad highhanded if a successful writer's privilege.

Pierre Ryckmans argues and implants ideas, he is not above being a perplexed old man. His chapter headings, in ABC's aggressively electronic font, are Learning, Reading, Writing, Going Abroad and Staying Home. Simon Leys, from the heart of the Hall of Uselessness, moves among words, music and silence, examines perfection and imperfection, listens with Glenn Gould to a sonata for piano and vacuum cleaner. The thinking and the layout of the page invite the reader to stop reading and look around, look back and forth.

I look forward to reading Notes from the Hall of Uselessness up at the reservoir. And then, settled in our spot, I note the local flora, go for a swim and fall asleep. 'Truth is grasped by an imaginative jump', is one of Simon Leys' headings. Truth is also grasped by falling asleep in the sun.

I like both writers, Pierre and Simon, Ryckmans and Leys. Though it's Simon Leys I would take to a desert island for his freedom, his interiority. If that isn't the Cahier style bringing me on.

Pierre Ryckmans chose Chinese and a pen-name, Simon Leys, and Australia. I chose French, and to keep my name, and Ireland, and Europe. Ryckmans is known for having debunked Chairman Mao before most had figured it. There is only one thing worse than being wrong and that is being right before anyone else.

Polemics leave me confused as to who scored which goal in what argument why. I like consensus conversations. I like to build à deux or alone, or with Mozart, or Chopin, and a writer who reflects. I find it hard to maintain an argument, I forget what it's for, or can't believe that any view of mine will hold, let along swing anything, which for a strong woman is a strange confession.

It is good to know that the hall of uselessness where Pierre/Simon/Judy write is useful for running all this before the mast.

Last night I dreamt of a drone attack, and later Mickos said I looked sad. That's how I feel about polemics as I build with Mozart over a shorn hayfield in Ireland's heatwave which is on the way to becoming a sea.

John Berger, Into Their Labours

I don't know why, yesterday, the phrase 'into their labours' came into my head, and John Berger with it. Maybe it was planting out the leeks, or re-heaping the compost. John Berger's spoken voice and tv/photo presence make me uneasy. I find it hard to start reading him again. I sympathise with his take on life, but his ego grates. He does his proselytising so quietly it hurts.

I can read anything in the bath. I can read the first story in Once in Europa, the middle volume of the trilogy, Into Their Labours. Peasants are on their way down the mountain, some of them dying as they go, not leaving heirs or moving heirs to the town. The expository style does not fool.

The voice disappears behind the pages, without style or emphasis, without humour, into our lap. As a transplant myself, I'm uneasy about why he wants to tell these tales of peasant life in the french alps. I'm uncomfortable with his Marxist regret. He tries to keep the emotion out of his voice. Sometimes the less you show the more you show.

He has good titles. Once in Europa. Europa is full of myth and idea, a name worth reviving in these fractured European days. John Berger likes to return to the idea of things, the idea of peasant life, as well as the labour of it, the idea of Europe, which the change of an e to an a, Europa, reinforces.