While Hamburger, who was writing shortly after Johnson’s death in 1984, chose not to dwell in too much detail on this aspect of the novelist’s life, the Swiss author Max Frisch had earlier recorded his own concerns in his Berlin diaries. Trying to get the measure of his brilliant but also testing younger friend, Frisch notes his pronounced formality, which extended to using “Sie” — a formality that seemed “like a reef” in a loosening world where everyone else was using “du”12 — and also the highly idiosyncratic cast of his thinking. Johnson was often “impossible to understand; his system of associations (especially after the second bottle of white wine) remains a mystery to me”.13 On top of that were his cryptic formulations: “he speaks in crossword puzzles, plunges headfirst into commentaries on subjects that he has barely introduced”. Frisch describes Johnson as a “logician” who could nevertheless be “completely irrational”: a man of “facts, facts, facts”, who “suddenly makes things up”; and a “Northman who doesn’t take anything lightly”. Noting his sudden fits of “moral rigorism”, be they about the conduct of married couples or work and income, Frisch judged his sometimes impossible young friend to be “a puritan” who was “anything but small-minded” and all the more unyielding for the fact that he passed judgement without anger. Johnson was often accused of arrogance, but Frisch reckoned that his self-esteem was actually far from secure: a fact that manifested itself “in his standards, which have not been taken from anywhere else, but are a part of him”.
Frisch was by no means hostile to Johnson and less exasperated than Gerhard Zwerenz, another migrated writer from the GDR, who described the more fêted author not just as “a statue of lost cultures” but as “the brazen edge of our crazy world”.14 Yet he knew that introducing this hardened-off human monolith to others could be dangerous. “Everything went wrong, very wrong”15 — so Frisch recorded after taking Jurek Becker, the East German author of Jacob the Liar, to see Johnson on 1 May 1973. As a child, Becker had survived both the Lódźz Ghetto and Ravensbrück concentration camp before settling in the GDR after the war. Unfortunately, he had “no idea” who Johnson was and made the mistake of trying to inform him about the location of Oranienburg, both the town and its concentration camp. Johnson rapidly became “frightening” — at first refusing to speak to Becker at all, then claiming to be Swiss and berating Becker as if he were to blame for the alleged fact that “the drugs from the Orient came over via the GDR”. This disconcerting encounter was followed, later that same night, by an accusing phone call from Johnson to Frisch, who sensibly advised “against having the conversation now, after a fair amount of alcohol”.16
It would be the same again when Frisch, who was fighting his own battle with drink, turned up at the Johnsons’s home in Friedenau, Berlin, at about 8.30pm on 26 February 1974. This time he found the writer spinning arcane allusions and setting hostile word traps for the East German author Günter Kunert — he writes of “sharply serious crossword puzzling with the character of an interrogation”.17 Unyieldingly fierce about the GDR, Johnson was red-faced and impossible — interrupting incessantly while also raising his hand as soon as someone else was speaking “as if he couldn’t get a word in”. Kunert was one target, but Johnson didn’t spare his other East German visitors, the novelist Christa Wolf and her husband Gerhard, who were attacked that same night as if they were personally responsible for the GDR, and regardless of the “fundamental” criticisms they themselves made of the “usurping power of their government”. Frisch notes Johnson’s “apodictic” manner and his wife Elisabeth’s “exacerbating smile”, attributing the whole vexatious package to “some combination of homesickness and hatred”. As Frisch saw it, Johnson’s discomfort about his own decision to quit the GDR was aggravated by Wolf’s decision to stay. “Something like a guilty conscience; he demands that the others should have a guilty conscience. That’s how it seems at times. Trauma”.
Trauma, then, together with a remarkably sympathetic intelligence sealed off behind a face of stone, and a drinking habit that nobody could challenge without risking an explosion. The latter may have predated all Johnson’s novels (Zwerenz alleges that there was already a bottle of schnapps in his pocket when he was attending lectures by Ernst Bloch at the Philosophical Institute in Leipzig in the mid-Fifties). By the time Frisch got to know the author of the unfolding work named Anniversaries, alcohol had fully entered his being: “He needs alcohol, a person under the excessive pressure of his conscientiousness. What comes to light through alcohol (three or four bottles of white wine over the course of the evening) doesn’t expose him: he appears as someone wounded, but no smaller for it”. In some respects Johnson seemed to remain fully in possession of himself on these occasions. Frisch notes “his appearance, the robustness of his body, the discipline of this thought, his immense sensitivity”. The trouble came when
he switches based on delusions, taking his own associations for the other person’s statement. And his memory too: because he has a better recollection of secondary matters (where one was standing, when it was, etc.), this solidifies his assumptions, his interpretations; he composes and interpolates — so cleverly that I am no competition for him with my gap-filled memory. I only know that I didn’t experience it in that way. He magnifies. A trifle (trifle for me) gains weight, often glamour too; he creates meaning which he then supports with a quotation, and the quotation might be accurate enough… When he goes out for a moment, I cork up my bottle to avoid drinking any more, and put it behind the television; as soon as he comes back, he says: There’s a bottle missing. A first-class detective.18
A lot has been said about the association between intoxication, melancholy and artistic inspiration: the “beautiful alcoholic conflagration”19 that Jack London carried around with him and which fired so many twentieth-century writers, including Faulkner, Dylan Thomas and Jack Kerouac too. Johnson burned the same fuel, but there is little of the frothing fountain about his exactly plotted and closely observed novels. No florid “heaven-storming”20 of the sort that the American writer Donald Newlove remembers trying to squeeze into the tiny “nutshell” of his own sodden book reviews, and not much sign of the collapsing “apocalypse of self-pity”21 either.
So it was, though, that Johnson came to the point of leaving West Berlin. Reluctant to watch his younger friend drift further, Frisch, who had the means of a commercially successful writer, decided to help him gain some distance from his life in that politically islanded city. As he wrote in Montauk: “a younger friend, whom I much admire, does not ask me for a loan. All I know is that he does need a substantial loan and I am in a position to give it to him — and without interest, for it is wrong that my friend should have to work for me, when I am a rich man”.22 The sum in question was DM 120,000 and the idea was that it would enable Johnson to buy a house, not in Switzerland or Frankfurt, as Fritz J. Raddatz had suggested, but in England, where he might recover himself and concentrate on writing the fourth and final volume of Anniversaries.
So that is how it happened. The Belgian writer Pierre Mertens, who doesn’t flinch from diagnosing Johnson a victim of “the old Pomeranian melancholy”,23 alleges that one of Johnson’s last social acts in Berlin was to invite some friends round to celebrate his birthday in July 1974. In this retrospectively informed account, they turned up to find him already drunk: pretending not to recognise them and apparently “astonished to see them still alive”. That same month, Johnson sent the first few completed “days” of Anniversaries IV to his publisher in Frankfurt and, on 19 July, set off for London to search for a house in southern England, where he — to the satisfaction of his editor at Suhrkamp, Siegfried Unseld, who was paying Johnson a considerable monthly advance — looked forward to completing the eagerly awaited fourth volume in a matter of months. It would be a while before German critics and readers started to wonder what had possessed their brilliant author to cast himself away “like a man shipwrecked at the end of the world”.24 And longer still before Johnson finished the f
inal volume, in which a New York bartender named Wes declares, with some concern for his customers, that “All bartenders hand out medicine”.25
Uwe Johnson, 1 March 1974.
PART II.
THE ISLAND: MODERNITY’S MUDBANK
I will merely say, it was there.
— Robert Smithson, “Monuments of Passaic, 1967”, Artforum, December 1967.
“I am enjoying myself trying to put the garden to rights as well as mixing cement for Harry. It’s a lark”. Hankie to Millie, Valentine & Son’s postcard, early Sixties.
7. 1974: LOOKING OUT FROM BELLEVUE ROAD
- And what kind of job can you get with a degree in English?
- Teacher.
— Anniversaries IV, p. 1,636.
The walls around the staircase at No. 5 St Radigund Street, Canterbury, where I was living at the beginning of the year in which Uwe Johnson moved to England, were papered floor to ceiling with a poster produced by the Labour Party for the general election of 1970. Designed by Alan Aldridge, then still famous for his work with the Beatles, this huge billboard image showed painted Plasticine replicas — savagely rendered things that hindsight turns into prototypes for the puppets in ITV’s later satirical series Spitting Image — of the Conservative leader Edward Heath standing alongside Alec Douglas-Home, the recently sacked Enoch Powell and four other members of his shadow cabinet. Headed “Yesterday’s Men” and subtitled “they failed before”, it was a portrayal of such arresting harshness that it would be cited among the reasons why Harold Wilson’s Labour government had so unexpectedly lost the election to Edward Heath in June that year.
I still struggle to convince myself that I ever lived in “the bucolic, gorgeous English 1970s” remembered by the New York-based artist Cecily Brown.1 Despite the economic and political strife racking the country, however, the early years of that decade do now seem a fine moment to have been a student in Britain — a time, in Annie Ernaux’s phrase, of “consummate lack”.2 In 1970/1, the academic year I joined three thousand or so others at Kent, only 6.06% of English school leavers went to university. We had no tuition fees to pay and, unless from a well-off family, received a local authority maintenance grant too. The county of Kent, meanwhile, had responded positively to the creation of a new university in Canterbury, seeing improved status as well as commercial advantage in the prospect. Protesting students tried to confound this expectation, but their demonstrations, which would include a two-week occupation (encouraged by a coinciding performance of “Out Demons Out” by the Edgar Broughton Band) in February 1970, were less threatening than the actions of the “pudding bombers” who had taken over Uwe Johnson’s flat in West Berlin a few years before. Remnants of the initial welcome survived, and not just among the room-farmers of Whitstable and Herne Bay, for whom “students” meant a handy increase in demand for seaside lodgings outside the summer season. Canterbury City Council even maintained a casual employment scheme for students staying in the city over the summer — contenders were invited to turn up at a depot to be equipped with a sickle and a forked stick of hazel, and then driven to a park or an old people’s home, where we would spend a largely unsupervised day drinking freely-offered cups of tea and swiping at long grass until a van came to collect us. Students who found that prospect too taxing were free to sign on the dole during the vacations (Easter and Christmas included). On graduating, you could place your name on something called the Professional and Executive Register, thereby obliging some unfortunate civil servant to try to find you appropriate work. A new graduate only had to write something like “I want to be the editor of a literary magazine” on the form to gain another undisturbed period of subsidy from the British taxpayer. Seven years later Margaret Thatcher would reveal, while justifying one of the least opposed cuts of her first year as Prime Minister, that only one in twenty-five people registered on the PER had secured jobs.3
All this, to be sure, was grinding to a halt. During my time at the university, which ended a few days before the administration building collapsed into the disused bore of the world’s first ever railway tunnel,4 the new campus’s modestly futurist hillside became oddly reminiscent of the Victorian poet Matthew Arnold’s vision of “Dover Beach”. Even though miles inland, one could still hear the shingle rattling as the crashed wave that had once seemed full of promise and ambition was sucked back into the sea. The British class war had continued despite the settlements sought by successive political leaders. Like Harold Wilson before him, Edward Heath had struggled to out-manoeuvre the “terrible twins” of British trade unionism — Jack Jones, General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, and Hugh Scanlon, President of the Amalgamated Engineering Union. These powerful barons, the second of whom has an insecure place in our story, had set the country’s course in May 1969, when they went to Chequers to frustrate Barbara Castle’s attempt to introduce a regulated system of industrial relations under the title “In Place of Strife” (it was at this encounter that Harold Wilson is said to have asked Scanlon, reputedly practising his golf swing at the time, to “Get your tanks off my lawn, Hughie”5).
In December 1970, a “work to rule” action by electrical workers had cast large areas of Britain into darkness, and filled the Times’ letters page with the affronted call to arms noted by the historian E.P. Thompson: “May I, writing by candlelight, express my total support for the government”.6 More disputes followed, with Hugh Scanlon promoting, in June 1972, a composite bill at the TUC to bar affiliated unions from signing up to the emasculating measures of Heath’s 1971 Industrial Relations Act. The strikes rotated from one unionised occupation to the next — coal miners, gas workers, civil servants, firemen — and a general sense of deadlock filled the air. These economic challenges were accompanied by other tensions on the domestic front. The template had been set in 1968, the year not just of Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech but also of the less often remembered discriminatory law, introduced earlier by Labour Home Secretary James Callaghan, revoking the British passports held by Asians in Kenya. Enoch Powell was still finding widespread support in the early Seventies, not least during the rush of anxiety and aggression that followed Heath’s decision to admit Asians being expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin in August 1972.
The international situation was also testing. Sterling came under immediate pressure after August 1971, when President Nixon, faced with the enormous costs of the Vietnam War, unilaterally freed the dollar from the gold standard. Meanwhile, the ongoing tensions of the Cold War were augmented by new forms of terrorism. In Italy, the Red Brigades emerged in a climate where “autonomist” and neo-fascist groups had been fighting it out on the streets. In West Germany, the “pudding bombers” had given way to Baader-Meinhof and the Red Army Faction, and a grouping of the Palestine Liberation Organisation had staged the Black September massacre at the Munich Olympics in 1972. Closer to home, we watched the unfolding “troubles” in Northern Ireland, where the sectarian division galvanised tit-for-tat pub bombings — with the IRA murdering three in Belfast’s Red Lion Pub on 2 November 1971, and the Ulster Volunteer Force killing fifteen in McGurk’s bar a month later. Tensions were increased at the end of July 1972 when, as part of “Operation Motorman”, the British government used Centurion tanks to break into republican “no-go areas”, thus producing self-defeating images of tracked vehicles being deployed against citizens in a manner that evoked Soviet behaviour in East Berlin or Hungary. We also followed the more distant antics of the Shah of Iran, a Western puppet who crowned himself King of Kings at a grotesquely extravagant party at Persepolis in 1971 and presided over the torturers of the “Savak” secret police force: one that, as we saw quite plainly at the University of Kent, felt no need to hide the watch it kept over left-leaning Iranian students at British universities.
By the close of 1973, Edward Heath was following Harold Wilson in running out of time — although not before his government had successfully implemented the measures thanks to which, as a Daily
Mail historian recently announced, “Britain lost its soul”.7 In February 1971, it had presided over decimalisation of the national currency (it was hard at the time to see the end of the world in the passing of those heavy, pocket-shredding coins, some of which were, thanks to what was then called “galloping” inflation, worth more than their face value as scrap metal). It had begged and squeezed the stricken country into the European Common Market at the beginning of 1973. It had survived, more or less, the ongoing violence in Northern Ireland: with its paratroopers getting away with murder at the Ballymurphy Massacre of August 1971 and then again on “Bloody Sunday” in 1972. It had also endured through IRA bombings in England as well as in the six counties — Aldershot barracks in 1972, Euston Station in 1973 and, in 1974, worse outrages in which bombs were met with grievous miscarriages of justice: the M62 coach bombing, followed by the Guildford and Birmingham pub bombings.
On the economic front, meanwhile, every day confirmed that we were well past the end of the “long boom” of growth and prosperity (meagre as it had been in comparison with other countries) secured, since 1950 or so, by centralised planning, industrial policy and the tripartite “corporate” state. Few may have anticipated the enormous future consequences of the 1971 deregulation of the banking sector, but that wasn’t the only financial story of the times. In June 1972, Heath’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Anthony Barber, had floated the pound only to watch it sink like a stone. He had printed money, thereby feeding inflation and the waves of industrial unrest that overwhelmed the government’s attempt to maintain a firm incomes policy. Some may have sensed the coming of a new kind of “whizz kid” politician in Barber’s failed manipulations.8 Not for long, however. The oil crisis that began as an outcome of the Arab-Israeli war of October 1973 had strengthened the case for future offshore production in the North Sea, but a quadrupling of prices also proved overwhelming for the government. 1974, which has fairly been described as “the apocalyptic year of the British Seventies”,9 opened with a miner’s strike, the imposition of a three-day week designed to conserve energy, and a general election that Edward Heath lost. In the following year, he would reluctantly yield leadership of the Conservative Party to his Secretary of Education and Science, Margaret Thatcher, a figure who had been widely reviled as “the milk-snatcher” after she withdrew free school milk from many British children. Nobody I knew at the time had recognised the “potential greatness” that the poet Douglas Oliver diagnosed from her televised contributions to the election campaign that brought Heath into 10 Downing Street in 1970.10 However, the Belfast Telegraph was by no means alone in fearing for the future: “Food parcels, ration books and soup kitchens. Are these the basics we will all be getting back to as the swinging Sixties give way to the slump-bound Seventies in a bankrupt Britain?”11
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 8