John Berger Versus Francis Bacon -Part Two by Dave Jaffe

         Part Two of John Berger  Versus Francis Bacon  



   "Anatomy is destiny," Sigmund Freud once said. Yet destiny often hangs on a lot more than your gender. You face different futures if you're born into a middle class home rather than a poor one.Your genetic inheritance impacts heavily on your life too.  Childhood and teenage experiences can weigh heavily on your future also.
    Now Francis Bacon and John Berger lived very different early lives. Bacon was born to a sadistic horse training father and a wealthy mother. His father loathed Francis because he was gay. He got some of his grooms to whip his son. As a child Bacon lived in an Ireland that was being torn apart by a civil war. On one side were the Sinn Fein who launched a successful uprising in 1919 that eventually threw the British out of most of Ireland.
    Then there were the British troops that fought Sinn Fein. Bacon used to hear the British
troops outside his home. From an early age then, Bacon felt the tensions of life inside his house and outside it.
     Bacon was gay and due to this and other reasons, Bacon's father told him to leave his home when Bacon was 16. Bacon then travelled  to Berlin, Paris and then London where he stayed. To survive a life in the streets, Bacon sold his body to men, stole goods from people, worked as a servant, a job he never lasted at, and often skipped out of his rent.
     His early life impressed upon Bacon that as the 17th century Thomas Hobbes once said that life, it was "nasty, brutish and short." In the second world war, the London-based Bacon worked in civil defence. Yet his asthma prevented him from joining the regular army.
No wonder Bacon saw life as a brutal struggle for existence. And his name, that was the same as the famous 17th century philosopher Francis Bacon may have confused and hurt him too.
    Berger's childhood seems to have been much nicer than Bacon's. His parents weren't rich like Bacon's yet they didn't beat him. Berger went to arts schools and ended up teaching drawing and painting. He then started to write art criticism and then novels. He also served in the armed forces in world war two and at one time was  posted to Northern Ireland that was now separate from the independent country of Eire. It was still part of Great Britain.
    "When I was in my thirties," Berger once wrote about his mother, "she told me for the first time that ever since I was born she hoped I'd be a writer."
   Yet she didn't read most of his books. Still she seems to have been a good mother. Berger's father did hang out with his son sometimes. "My father used to take me to the zoo," Berger once wrote. Yet he also admitted "that going to the zoo is one of my few happy childhood memories."
    So Berger's childhood had its ups and downs. Yet it had little or none of the violence and trauma of Bacon's.
    Berger joined the British Communist Party when he was in his twenties. Then he left it. Yet he remained an idealist and a progressive. His early years surely put him on a path that differed a lot from Francis Bacon's.
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