To Tell a Story

by John Berger, Susan Sontag, Benoît Bourreau (Editor)

Despite their status as intellectual giants of the twentieth century, John Berger and Susan Sontag’s artistic collaboration – and intense friendship – remains virtually unknown.

Published for the first time, To Tell a Story offers a glimpse into their shared history that spanned nearly a quarter-century. From sources such as their eponymous film broadcast, rare personal letters and archival recordings, the composite fragments build a portrait of a relationship that was often lively and challenging, sometimes trivial and always affectionate.

Berger and Sontag’s voices echo throughout these pages, riffing off the other as they grapple with their respective concerns. Above all, their conversations reveal a deep reciprocal admiration and an exchange of ideas about storytelling, the self and society that informed their own work.

155 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 1, 2026

About the author

John Peter Berger was an English art critic, novelist, painter and author. His novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to a BBC series, is often used as a college text.

Later he was self exiled to continental Europe, living between the french Alps in summer and the suburbs of Paris in winter. Since then, his production has increased considerably, including a variety of genres, from novel to social essay, or poetry. One of the most common themes that appears on his books is the dialectics established between modernity and memory and loss,

Another of his most remarkable works has been the trilogy titled Into Their Labours, that includes the books Pig Earth (1979), Once In Europa (1983) Lilac And Flag (1990). With those books, Berger makes a meditation about the way of the peasant, that changes one poverty for another in the city. This theme is also observed in his novel King, but there his focus is more in the rural diaspora and the bitter side of the urban way of life.

Reviews

[Katya]

#2/4 Storytelling, imagens e sociedade

John Berger and I have been talking yesterday and today, discovered a large area of common concern and common interest and we’ve decided to share our time both this morning.

É com estas palavras, gravadas em áudio, que Sontag assinala o início de uma história de três décadas. Estávamos a 18 de junho de 1974. Berger e Sontag, ambos convidados como oradores para a Conferência Internacional de Design, em Aspen, a 17 e 18 de junho, respetivamente, travam conhecimento algures no dia anterior e, entre meia dúzia de palavras, decidem partilhar o seu espaço enquanto comunicadores para poderem estender a sua conversa (sobre fotografia) em público e com o público.
Depois disso, seriam cerca de 30 anos de uma amizade sui generis, marcada pela distância física, pela colaboração intelectual, por uma correspondência incerta, pela troca de presentes e por raros momentos de encontro em que a sua intimidade, apesar de todos os esforços (este incluído) nos fica vedada: simplesmente, não conhecemos a verdadeira extensão da parceria entre Sontag e Berger.
O que esta pequena recolha propõe é ensaiar uma leitura dessa relação de várias décadas.
Organizada por Benoît Bourreau, a coletânea To tell a story é composta por três momentos: duas transcrições de conversas (uma do programa Voices — a que se pode assistir na íntegra via YouTube; uma outra da primeira metade da conferência de Aspen) e uma breve seleção de correspondência trocada pelos dois, entre as décadas de 1970 e 1990.
Serão estes fragmentos, no entanto, capazes de reconstruir a intensidade desta curiosa amizade? Certamente que não. Mas, como o próprio Berger defendia, o que fica por dizer, o silêncio, é essencial para contar uma história. E é isso que este volume tenta ser: o contar de uma história. Assim, o
desconhecimento não é uma falha documental — é parte constitutiva da própria relação que o livro tenta preservar. Como a própria Sontag afirma:

I think the story starts with the writer. I don’t think that there is a story and then the writer claims it, and transforms it, and puts his or her voice into it and adds this subjectivity. I think the writer is to begin with the originator of stories. And there are no stories outside of literature.

Em agosto de 1975, Berger sela uma missiva com as seguintes palavras: I send you my love,/ Send me something,/ John. Esta é uma das primeiras cartas trocadas entre ambos e aqui reunidas por Bourreau, cartas nas quais se lançam elogios, se discute literatura, se prometem visitas e se trocam influências. Nelas, Berger surge como uma entidade mais generosa e luminosa, enquanto Sontag nos soa mais formal, mais distante — algo que já ficara evidente para quem conhece o episódio de Voices (intitulado, precisamente, To tell a story): a energia errática e fluída do crítico de arte (que se debruça para se aproximar da sua interlocutora) a embater na força tranquila e confiante de Sontag (que escuta atenta e grave).
It seems to me, I mean yes, I think there, here we really differ, dirá Berger, conciliatório. Em contraste, as palavras de Sontag, ousadas, surgem a cortar o discurso que o crítico vem a fazer: I don’t agree with that; I don’t understand that. Ainda assim, é Sontag quem revela maior cortesia no episódio:

JOHN BERGER
Well, first of all, I’m not very verbal. Really, I have no facility with words.

SUSAN SONTAG
I don’t believe that for a minute...

Quem os vê e ouve, pergunta-se: como podem estas duas almas, aparentemente tão distantes, mostrar-se tão próximas que arriscam discordar, provocar, instigar-se uma à outra, em frente às câmaras, durante uma hora inteira, com um guião aparentemente livre?
A simbiose intelectual talvez explique parte dessa ligação, mas as palavras de Berger (We are very different but we come from the same place — and what you write now takes me back there) deixam evidente que há qualquer coisa de primordial na forma como ambos se posicionam perante a vida: solitários, embora de forma distinta.
Durante os cerca de 30 anos que a relação durou, inferimos a partilha da sua paixão pela fotografia, pela arte, pela literatura, mas há muito poucos momentos em que o possamos comprovar. A mística daquilo que viveram está também aí: a sua relação não só assenta na descontinuidade como parece viver de uma assimetria emocional — afinidade intelectual por um lado, convivência esporádica por outro:

21 March 1975
Dear John,
You won’t perhaps be surprised to learn that your letter dated Nov. 27, 1974 arrived today. At last, it arrived. Are the gods against our seeing each other again?
[...]
I miss you and send love—
Susan
P.S. I re-read G a few weeks ago and liked and admired it even more (if possible) this time.
P.P.S. Do send me a few lines to New York to let me know you got this. I’m worried that you may no longer be at this address. And the mail...

[Postmark: 2-8-1976]
Please send me things. And please ask me when you need something I can offer. No matter what.
With my love,
John

Se podemos afirmar alguma coisa, é que esta relação existe nos intervalos, não na continuidade (um conceito de Walter Benjamin que ambos, certamente, apreciavam). Assim, é nessa fragmentação — feita de distância e silêncio — que reside a sua potencialidade.
Mas To tell a story, pela sua lógica de encenação da impossibilidade de completude, talvez consiga compor o silêncio de maneira a atribuir-lhe algum sentido (um sentido bergeriano). Entre Berger e Sontag há dois modos de pensar que se encontram, mas que não se fundem. Enquanto para o primeiro a verdade está no cerne das relações (sejam elas traduzidas pela literatura ou pela imagem), para a segunda há todo um sistema apostado em moldar o sujeito ditando-lhe "a sua" verdade. E esse digladiar de ideias é evidente quando percorremos as suas palavras naquela que foi a sua primeira intervenção conjunta:

BERGER
There is a great illusion that information, in itself, is the truth. Actually the truth is the relation between a person and the world of which that information may be an aspect. So truth begins in that relationship, it doesn’t begin simply in information as such – or in a photographic image as such. What the system, the media, continually do is to deny space. Space for thought, actually. Space for discovering what one’s relationship to what is happening really is.
[...]
SONTAG
We in fact are not learning to do anything with our information at all. We are simply learning to be a certain kind of person which fits in very well within an advanced capitalist society – a person who is intellectually mobile, tolerant, sophisticated, not too deeply rooted in any particular social situation that, you know, can be moved around by the corporation or the institution, can live abroad and not be completely at a loss in those situations of cultural transplant.
[...]
Someone as I say who is mobile, who is uprootable, whose roots are shallow, who is tolerant, who could roll with the punches, who can change, who can adapt, who can incorporate, who can dismantle one part of the system and replace it with another part – so the kind of modernist undertakings that have now become standard – in conferences of this kind, at better universities, in the mass media – are not, I think – though we often imagine them to be – critical of the society, of the ruling ideas of the society. They, in fact, reinforce them.

Benoît Bourreau não resolve o enigma que esta parceria (ou cada uma das partes dessa parceria) representa, mas antes o organiza. Ao fixar alguns dos seus poucos encontros públicos e privados, permite-nos observar o rodar das suas engrenagens e a sua polarização intelectual, preservando a opacidade da relação. O livro, é certo, não desvela — e é precisamente nessa recusa de completude que melhor se aproxima do pensamento destes dois autores.

[Hugo L.B · Rating 3 out of 5]

"that one thing follows another, that each thing is therefore replaced by the other - each thing is annihilated by what follows it and all things in a sense become the same. Whether it's images of agony, images of pain, images of poverty - whether it's images of beauty. Any kind of photographic display gives us (I think) the illusion of information, the illusion of compassion, the illusion of under-standing." Sontag

"Because it has no historical context, it becomes generalised. It actually - like everything that isn't placed in history - becomes part of nature. The distinction being that nature is more or less always there as a constant, it is part of the human condition." Berger

"If I think of somebody telling a story, I see a group of people, huddled together, and around them a vast space, quite frightening. Maybe they are huddled against a wall, maybe they're round a fire, and somewhere for me, in the very idea of the story, there is something to do with shelter. The shelter, perhaps of the voyager, the traveller who has come home, who has lived to tell the story, or the soldier who has come back, who has survived. So, there is this almost physical sense of shelter, where the story represents a kind of habitation, a kind of home. But then, inside the story there's another kind of shelter.
Because what the story narrates and tells is sheltered within the story, from oblivion, forgetfulness and daily indifference " Berger

Quicksilver, liquid metal, nickname for Mercury, keeper of eloquence and dexterity, protector of roads, deliverer of the messages we need.
Game and set to you, Quicksilver.

[Hannah Jung · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sontag and Berger are admired as two of the great twentieth century intellectuals, both writing prolifically on a wide range of topics - art, photography, literature and culture.

This volume brings together some of the material that links the two and sheds light on their relationship, including the transcript of a television show in which they discuss storytelling, and a selection of personal letters.

As someone who is just beginning to read their work, it was interesting to see how their ideas overlap, and to get an insight into their mutual respect.

I liked the inclusion of photos and letters, and the introduction and afterword by Benoit Bourreau gave some helpful context.

[readbytasha]

it’s like didion and babitz but for pretentious people…

no, in all honesty, i did actually enjoy this as an insight into sontag and berger’s friendship, and their individual ways of thinking about writing and storytelling. i’ve not read any of berger’s work but definitely will do soon!

something always icky about reading people’s private letters though (even if they’re used with consent from the families!)

[Elena Chiara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Came for the interview, stayed for the letters...
Sontag at her finest and sweetest.

[Luis Le drac · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un primer debate transcrito excepcional. Envidiable para nuestra televisión y para la contemporaneidad en la que nos movemos. El resto, curioso, pero decae en interés. Para coleccionistas y bibliófilos, nada más.