We will never know how or to what extent the Isle of Sheppey might have emerged as a twentieth-century microcosm — “an island that is all the world” in the phrase of the Anglo-Scottish poet Douglas Oliver — had Johnson completed the book of Kentish stories he hinted at in Frankfurt. He did, though, write enough before his early death to demonstrate his appreciation of the island as a vantage point with highly revealing views of England as it was in the Seventies and early Eighties: a crisis-ridden time in which the post-war settlement with its promises of a new British society was collapsing into economic and political turmoil combined with a “deindustrialisation” that turned Sheppey into an early incubator of the landfill world in which we find ourselves today.
Trying to understand a literary work by reading it back into its physical, political or historical “context” can easily lead to pointless reduction. But what if, like Johnson’s imagined book of island stories, the work remains hypothetical? Obviously, it can’t be jumped into existence with the help of existing drafts or fragments, even those as suggestive as Eberhard Fahlke assembled from Johnson’s letters and articles in the Nineties. Yet something else becomes possible if, rather than trying to guess the missing stories into existence, we pick up some of the cues in Johnson’s existing work — be they specific observations in letters and articles or more general characteristics such as his interest in place and memory or the close attention he paid to newspapers — and follow them out into the world he thought of engaging more fully. As someone who lived and worked in north Kent in the early Seventies, I have followed Johnson back to the area in the belief that the often derided Isle of Sheppey — here approached as a fragment of just-about-floating England less than forty miles downriver from the gleaming and internationalised citadel that is the City of London — remains among the revealing places where, as Johnson himself came to understand, horizons are wide and all sorts of historical questions bearing on our own time remain open, even though there are no National Trust properties anywhere near the place to do the same. The Isle of Sheppey was a backwater, to be sure. For Johnson, however, its landscape was also a theatre of resemblances, alive with the memory of other claimed backwaters he had known and written about: Staten Island in New York, for example, or the large-skied Baltic scenes of his own childhood and youth in Germany.
So this book explores three coinciding interests. The first is Johnson himself, the brilliant, afflicted East German writer whose truth-seeking novels reveal their commitment to Enlightenment values in their broad social sympathy as well as in their irony, judgement and investigatory procedures. The second is the Kentish Isle of Sheppey with its no-longer naval or steel-making capital town of Sheerness, a part of England where the actuality both of Johnson’s world and our own has not been entirely smoothed over by consumerist prosperity, glozing politicians or, for that matter, by the corrosive mockery of mainlanders who continue to treat the place and its people as a great joke. The third is the Seventies, a crisis-ridden decade whose ongoing consequences may now remind us of Hesiod’s legend of Pandora’s Box. Having watched the powers released at that time transforming reality so vigorously through subsequent decades, I have taken the story of “Uwe Johnson in Sheerness” as the occasion for an investigation that comes at the East German writer from the English side and explores the island (itself offshore from a country that German newspapers have, since the Brexit referendum of 2016, enjoyed calling “the island”) on which he chose to spend his last decade in the knowledge of things that have happened since. Johnson once insisted that the novel should be seen as a form of “reconnaissance”11 and I hope this book, which has been researched, remembered and written during years in which the English air has resounded with appeals to “the world we have lost”, reads in a similar spirit. Thanks to Johnson and the sometimes truly sunny Isle of Sheppey, which was, like much of Kent, strongly in favour of leaving the European Union, it’s been a time of encounter, reassessment and reflection, and not just of trying to hold out for one dead certainty or the other as the ruins of post-war British modernity are washed away around us.
Call it England or call it Sheppey, the island looks tiny on conventional maps: little more than a mudbank about eight miles across at its broadest point, and eleven in length. Those, however, are not the only dimensions that matter. In the course of writing this book I have learned to sympathise with the man from Gillingham, eight or so miles further up the River Medway, who decided — a full six years before the referendum — to buy himself a small motorboat via the internet and put to sea with the aim of navigating his way around Great Britain. The man in question was no match for Jonathan Raban, who achieved that feat as the sailing author of Coasting in 1982. After studying a road atlas, he concluded that he only had to keep the land on his right-hand side in order to end the first stretch of his journey at Southampton. Having proceeded on this assumption for a day and a half, he ran out of fuel and found himself stuck in the mud near some tidal marshes. The lifeboat that came to rescue this slow voyager from his predicament guided him to the quayside at Queenborough where an officer of the coastguard service briskly informed him that he had all the time been circling the Isle of Sheppey: “He had no idea of the magnitude of the journey he was undertaking”.12 Since this unidentified Englishman — he was, as I recall, rudely dismissed as a “dopey sailor” by the island’s newspaper — insisted on resuming his journey once refuelled, we may assume that he too had by then seen enough to know not just that small can be large, but also that life isn’t necessarily at its richest when it is predictable or easy.
August 2020
www.patrickwright.net
PART I.
THE WRITER WHO BECAME A REEF
- Gesine, do you think I should go to college?
- If you want to learn how to see all the sides and corners of things, and how they fit together with other things, or even just how to look at a thought and arrange all its interconnections simultaneously in your head. If you want to train your mind until it takes over everything you think and remember and want to forget. If you want to become more sensitive to pain. If you plan to work with your head.
- And if all you’d ever learned in life was how to milk cows or boil potatoes for pigs?
- Then lying would be just as bad, and guilt, and responsibility to other people. But your memory would be less sharp — life would be easier, I think.
— Gesine Cresspahl talking with her daughter Marie in Anniversaries IV, p. 1,609.
1. READING UWE JOHNSON IN KENT, 1970–3
I first encountered the writings of Uwe Johnson on a hillside where Britain’s post-war social democracy was still laying claim to the future. It happened at the University of Kent at Canterbury, then still emerging from its building site as one of the seven new universities urged on Harold MacMillan’s Conservative government by the Robbins Committee in 1963. Arriving as a new student in the autumn of 1970, I found a collection of not exactly “plate glass” buildings planted among new bus stops and saplings to the north of the city. They had been designed and put up in a tearing hurry under the direction of two battling men. The first was the Vice Chancellor, Geoffrey Templeman, who had been appointed to bring in an “instant university”1 on time and, as he quickly became convinced, without mortgaging the project to any dreamer’s utopian master plan. The second was the well-known architect and planner Sir William Holford. Having initially imagined the new university as a Siena-like “city on a hill”, Holford had withdrawn in bruised frustration a few weeks after the first students arrived in October 1965.
Built on a windswept slope overlooking one of England’s great historical views, the first two colleges, Eliot and Rutherford, were identical labyrinths that nevertheless preserved a striking remnant of Holford’s cancelled vision. The plan for each may have been derived from a castle-like dormitory designed by the American architect Louis Kahn for Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. Both, however, were placed so that the huge windows of their dining halls framed
the sight of Canterbury Cathedral dominating the city below. The view was then coaxed back through the building, ensuring that glimpses of the fragmented cathedral beckoned even from the entrance causeway on the far side of the college. There was nothing at the University of Kent to match the work of Giancarlo De Carlo, the Milanese architect who had inspired architects all over the world with his Collegio del Colle (1962–6), a brilliantly integrated brutalist cluster of student residences on a hillside just outside the Italian city of Urbino. Even so, however, those view-catching windows have justifiably been described as “one of the outstanding architectural experiences offered by any modern university”.2 They also hinted at the university’s divided attitude towards history and tradition — a salute, as the college chaplain never doubted, but also, as I was more inclined to hope, a valedictory wave from an institution with a very different future to find. Planted as they were in the so-called “Garden of England”, those windows surely gave every student who looked through them in the dying light of the late Sixties a chance to be tempted by the thought of the modernist, tower-building and brutally anti-conservationist Labour Minister of Housing in Edward Hyams’s Kentish novel The Last Poor Man: “The thing so many people in this country are still clinging to is dead. Oh it makes a handsome corpse, gentlemen … in parts”.3
Eliot College, University of Kent at Canterbury, 1966.
The curriculum had been shaped in a similar spirit. People studying English Literature at Oxford or Cambridge may still have been squeezing the long march from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf into their short eight-week terms, but we flimsy futurists were invited onto a more ambitious path. Created in the knowledge that the realities of our time did not come packaged in nineteenth-century boxes, the Humanities faculty at Kent was dedicated to a wider frame: “Britain in the Contemporary World”, as the core foundation course was named (and it was definitely a “course” rather than a “module” of the sort preferred in present-day university jargon). Before arriving, students were asked to read Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, set at another not always improving institution on a hillside: not a building site aspiring to the condition of a new kind of university this time, but a TB sanatorium on a mountain at Davos in the opening years of the twentieth century, where afflicted young people conversed about the challenges and possibilities of an age that we, looking back through two world wars and one welfare state, were invited to survey and understand as the precursor of our own.
In an early lecture, the epigraph “only connect” was lifted from the title page of E.M. Forster’s novel Howard’s End and commended as an injunction that might guide us through fields unintended by Forster himself.4 Film, history and modern languages were to the fore. We read African and Caribbean as well as English and American literature, and also the “new novel” pioneered by the French authors Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet. Those of us who smoked could learn to do so with greater philosophical pretence under the guidance of Italo Svevo’s Triestean masterpiece Confessions of Zeno. Lancashire’s Louisiana blues man, Champion Jack Dupree (“I’m English now… I love this place”), did what he could to lower the tone with filthy “single Entendre” stories during his performance as a “barrel-house professor” in the Junior Common Room, but our introduction to post-war German literature was provided, if I remember correctly, by a young lecturer named Martin Kane. He brought us up against three novels published in 1959, causing that year to be hailed as the “annus mirabilis” in which German literature began to regain its place on the world stage. All three probed the experience of a nation that had swept the world into war, perpetrated mass murder and then emerged from the fire and fury of righteous defeat as two roughly divided states. All three also raised a more general question about the novel and the possibility, or otherwise, of coming to terms with the vast scale of Nazi devastation through a story of individual characters. Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum and Heinrich Böll’s Billiards at Half Past Nine were both written by writers with some adult experience of the Nazi years and the Second World War. The novel that caught my attention, however, was called Speculations about Jakob.5 It was the work of a younger and, at the time of publication, quite unknown author, the twenty-five-year-old Uwe Johnson, who had only moved to West Berlin from the German Democratic Republic a few weeks before Speculations was published.
It was a tantalising book to read in Britain at that time, when politically diverse voices could already be heard denouncing British entry to the European Common Market as a humiliating surrender to the old and, as we were expected to understand, incurably power-mad German enemy. Issued during the year in which Bertolt Brecht wrote his poem “The Solution”, with its mocking suggestion that the time had surely come for the government of the GDR “to dissolve the people / And elect another”, Speculations was both brilliant and perplexing, as earlier British readers had already discovered. What were they to make of a novel from behind the “Iron Curtain” written in several voices by a man whose debts to the southern American author William Faulkner were both obvious and unexpected? Reviewing Johnson’s novel for the New Statesman, D.J. Enright (a poet and “mendicant professor”, who had studied under F.R. Leavis at Downing College, Cambridge) muttered grumpily that “obscurity” appeared to have become “the hallmark of quality” among those adjudicating literary prizes. He faulted the novel for being “not political, except in being anti-political” and suggested, with an unmistakeable sneer, that “a profitable working motto for new novelists would be: ‘Make it Hard’”.6 He also expressed sarcastic relief at the publisher’s blurb — always a desperate resort for a reviewer — with its “assurance that the fog in which he wanders is ‘the very climate of life under communism’ and not the product of his own stupidity”. The alternative hypothesis, which I am confident was commended to us at the University of Kent, was that the “difficulty” of the novel did indeed stem not from literary narcissism or incompetence, but from the fractured and guilt-ridden post-war reality that Johnson set out to engage as it conditioned lives in both Germanies. Far from being “anti-political”, Johnson was using the novel to pioneer a new form of political writing. Far from setting out to strike positions or sell the party line — or to pretend, like so many works of officially sanctioned “socialist realism”, that the promised future was already arriving — he was using fiction to explore, in a manner that could be coldly analytical as well as sympathetic, the ways in which people lived under the constrained circumstances of their time. Far from seeking to impress his readers with formalistic displays of virtuosity, he was inviting them, as citizens of a self-created republic of letters, to participate in an experimental attempt to understand and, as far as may be possible, search out the truth of their post-war situation.
Johnson would give his own account — a credo of sorts — of the challenge facing the German writers of his generation in his preface to Das Neue Fenster (The New Window), a book of “selections from Contemporary German Literature” he prepared for his American publisher, Helen Wolff of Harcourt, Brace & World, while living in New York City in 1967. The book was intended to introduce American high-school students to a selection of works by a generation of German writers, from East as well as West, who had begun to publish after 1945. Starting with “bare inventories of bare remains”7 — his examples include Günter Eich’s “Inventory”, a poem written in the voice of a prisoner-of-war going through his very few belongings — these younger authors had been obliged, as Johnson explained, “to lay the groundwork for a new tradition. While they stood apart from those writers whose publications had lent a façade of culture to the Nazi regime, they were also separated from the pre-Nazi tradition, which writers in exile had been able to continue. For a decade they had been isolated from international developments in literature, and they were left with a language damaged by twelve years of misuse and dissimulation. They had in common the task of expressing the experiences of dictatorship, genocide, war, and reconstruction in a language that had to be check
ed and cleaned, so to speak, before it could be employed in the formation of a new realism”.8 This responsibility, as Johnson knew well, had earlier been recognised by Paul Celan, the German-speaking Jewish Romanian poet who in 1958 had famously insisted that, if it were to “come to light again”, the German language must “pass through its own answerless, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech”.9
The reviewer D.J. Enright may not have recognised it in Johnson’s novel, but this was a necessary challenge for readers as well as writers, and it was further complicated by the fact that the Germany in which Nazism had so recently triumphed had since been divided into two states faced off against one another in accordance with polarised ideologies. Johnson may have seemed to enjoy “difficulty”, but he was lucidity itself when compared with other writers he would come across in the West, who embraced “opacity” in the same cause. Celan, for whom a poem was “a making toward something”,10 was among those Johnson encountered at meetings of the writers’ association known as Group 47. So too were the expatriated Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann, and also Ilse Aichinger, the Austrian author of Bad Words, who was married to Günther Eich and would, as it happens, arrive at her own version of Kent when passing through Dover, where “the correlation between walking bent over, walking upright, and walking away is always perfectly clear”.11
Situated primarily in the GDR, the events in Speculations about Jakob are extended over a few months in the autumn of 1956. It was a year of dramatic and fateful occurrences in which the temperature of the Cold War oscillated fiercely. In February, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev delivered his “secret speech” condemning the cult of Stalin at the end of the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. In November, the reformist hopes that Khrushchev had fired in the Eastern bloc were themselves killed off by the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian revolution: an event that coincided with the Suez crisis in the west. The novel, which mostly takes place in the grey northern light of the Baltic province of Mecklenburg, is shaped in relation to these events. It opens with the death of a train despatcher named Jakob Abs. Having recently come back from visiting his mother in a refugee camp in West Germany, which he has not liked at all, Abs has been hit by a shunting train while walking, one foggy November morning, across a very familiar railway line that had just been used to transport Soviet troops into Hungary. The novel then unfolds as a series of interleaved “speculations” about Abs and the events leading up to his unexplained death.
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 2