Landscapes. John Berger
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for the poet in him – this was more complicated. It had nothing to do, for instance, with his attitude to language. On the contrary, he had little feeling for words and considered them absolutely functionally, absolutely unsensuously; they were simply nails to be hit on the head in order to fix an idea or establish a fact in its proper place. It was rather that his sense of history, connecting the past with the future, was similar to the epic poet’s sense of destiny. And just as the poet seeks to connect intuitively by images, Antal sought to connect rationally by research. Above all his compulsion to work was similar to a poet’s. He worked to release a vision.
Another thing I would like to emphasise is Antal’s feeling for paintings and sculpture. He never simplified the mystery out of art – and by mystery I mean the power of a work of art to affect the heart. I have seen him profoundly moved in front of works he admired. Nor was his judgment of a work necessarily dependent upon his knowledge of all the related facts. A few weeks before he died, we went together to an exhibition of a contemporary Asian painter whom neither of us knew anything about. As we walked round he demanded now and again the date of a particular painting. Most of them were fifteen or twenty years old. After about half an hour he asked me what I thought. I was rather enthusiastic. He agreed that the paintings were good, but told me to think about what their style could lead to, what the same artist’s later pictures would be like. Then, in great detail, he described what he foresaw. When we went out we passed through another gallery. There, unbeknown to either of us, were the same artist’s later paintings. They were exactly as Antal had described them.
Finally I want to mention his optimism. He always said that it was not age or generation which counted, but one’s outlook. And it was the optimism of Antal’s outlook that kept him young. As an exile, at odds in his fundamental beliefs with nearly all his Western colleagues, and – a lack he felt very keenly – denied in this country any outlet for his great talents as a polemicist, he had little personal reason for being optimistic. Nor was his optimism of the short-term sentimental sort. Indeed he saw very clearly the full extent of the present corruption of Western culture and realised that even when true socialism had been achieved, it would take a long time for any tradition of real art to be re-established. What I call his optimism consisted of his conviction that all who fought this corruption and worked for socialism – in however small or unrecognised a way – were doing something of certain value. In an age of frantic self-justification erected over a sense of futility and despair, he remained intellectually calm: confident in the judgment of history which – as I have tried to show – meant for him the judgment of the future.
You have come here to act plays
But now you are to be asked:
For what purpose?
You have come here to reveal
Yourselves in all that you can do.
You think this worthy of being watched.
And you hope the people will applaud
As you transport them
Out of the narrowness of their world
Into the largeness of yours,
Sharing with you the dizzy peaks
And the tumults of passion.
But now you are to be asked:
For what purpose is this?
On their low benches
Your spectators begin to argue.
Some hold and maintain
You must do more than show yourselves.
You must show the world.
Where is the use, they ask,
Of being shown time and time again
How this one can be sad
How she is heartless
How that one would make a wicked king?
Where is the use in this endless
Exhibiting of grimaces,
These antics of a handful
In the hands of their fate?
You show us only people dragged along,
Victims of foreign forces and themselves.
An invisible master
Throws them down
Their joys like crumbs to dogs.
And so too the noose is fitted round their necks –
The tribulation that comes from above.
And we on our low benches
Held by your twitches and grimacing faces,
We gape with fixed eyes
And feel at one remove
Joys that are given like alms,
Fears beyond control.
No. We who are discontented
Have had enough on our low benches.
We are no longer satisfied.
Have you not heard it spread abroad
That the net is knotted
And is cast
By men?
Even now
In the cities of a hundred floors,
Over the seas on which the ships are manned,
To the furthest hamlet –
Everywhere now the report is: man’s fate is man.
You actors of our time,
The time of change
And the time of the great taking over
Of all nature to master it
Not forgetting human nature,
This is now our reason
For insisting that you alter.
Give us the world of men as it is,
Made by men and changeable.
Thus the gist of the talk on the low benches.
Not all of course agree.
Most sit, their shoulders hunched,
With brows furrowed
Like stony fields ploughed
Repeatedly in vain.
Worn away by increasing daily struggles
They avidly await the very thing their companions
Hate.
A little kneading for the slack spirit.
A little tightening for the tired nerve.
The easy adventure of magically
Being led by the hand
Out from the world given them,
Out from the one they cannot master.
Whom then, actors, should you obey?
I’d say: the discontented.
Yet how to begin? How to show
The living together of men
That it may be understood
And