And Sheerness?
Johnson enjoyed playing games with the ever more eroded trappings of Anglo-British identity, but these had precious little obvious bearing on the struggling downriver town in which he and his wife had now chosen to settle. Writing to his benefactor, Max Frisch, on 13 August 1974, Johnson describes the “Reconnaissance trips” that lead them to choose a house here for their English residence. He reported “a certain lack of attraction to Bexleyheath”10, a town at the southeastern edge of Greater London, where they were based during the search. They’d found “hardly a hint of heath… the area is covered with terrace houses in barely four different designs, traversed by a Broadway that creates a community existing merely as a shopping centre; beyond that the foreign visitors’ prejudice and ignorance is revealed in the diagnosis ‘suburbia’”. Admitting that they may have been blinded by memories of “another Broadway”, the Johnsons decided against joining the folk who spent their weekends up ladders with “paint brush and soldering” or “faithfully advancing the cause of their landlord’s love for roses of his very own, secateurs and twine in hand”. Other English places on their list of rejected options had proved almost as off-putting. The Austrian writer Ilse Aichinger would soon declare Dover “impossible to improve”,11 but the Johnsons only had to watch a collection of English youths on the breakwater at the harbour — catching fish and then shoving them into plastic bags to suffocate, or running them over with their bicycles — to decide against stopping there. In Croydon, they watched as a distressed woman got off the train having just been molested by a man, only to confront the salacious interest not just of the conductor but also of a lady passenger who appeared to delight in “her enjoyment of it and having been spared it herself”. In Bournemouth, on the south coast, they’d seen firemen, police and spectators converging on a blaze in the vegetation behind a row of bathing huts. Their decision was assisted by a male bather who just sat there, drinking tea and stubbornly keeping his back to the action. Johnson could not decide whether this potential neighbour “had had enough of fires” or “just wanted to keep his sunburn in the shade” but Bournemouth was out too.
Properties were also considered in Herne Hill, Herne Bay, Canterbury and Brighton, but it was the town known as “Sheerness-on-Sea” that changed the tone of Johnson’s letter to Frisch:
[RECONNAISSANCES]
…I am reliably informed about a place where it seems to be no coincidence that a cul-de-sac in this country is not called that, or a dead-end street, but a blind alley. That would already be something. I am sure of it in Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey. There is more than enough you could hold against this island, and such ample objections are infallibly expressed to me. It is, they say, really not at all lovely there. I admit that with surprisingly little resistance, since it is hard to dispute that on either side of the train the fruit orchards and rye fields with their charming fringe of foliage disappear as soon as the bridge over the Swale so much as comes into view. The chalky, swampy fields on the island are really not at all Garden of England (if indeed any tourist can stand this smug catchphrase any longer than from Dover to Canterbury). No, it is not pretty. But is that why we’ve come? It is also true that even the Romans did not build villas there, expeditions to the island on their part have only been alleged, never proven. It is true that Sheerness, pop. apx. 14,000, is clearly fringed all round with bathers who can afford only such pebbly beaches or else prefer to content themselves with trade and consumption along the stone sea-wall promenade (most of them in wheelchairs, an unjust voice reiterates). Sheerness does not in fact lie -on-Sea, as it tries to officially maintain: the north bank of the Thames continues to the opposite shore, one has to turn one’s head slightly to the right if one wants to glimpse the open ocean. My opponents concede this, as well as the two hours by train to Victoria Station and the three to Heathrow. But it is not pretty, they say, and even less so during the other nine months! I could have taken them unawares by converting that timespan into an argument in favour — but I refrain. The life of the community is fundamentally, and then really and truly, influenced by a steel factory: there are labour conflicts with the workforce. A retiree, before the court over the theft of foodstuffs from a supermarket, accepts his punishment and says, in his closing statement, that the government payments leave him not too well off. On the other hand, the town park on Broadway.
A house on Marine Parade, comparable in construction to New York’s brownstones but built around 1915 and likewise standing in a tight row, but cleaned and painted white, constitutes one helpful argument in favour. It has an enlarged basement storey under the front steps, lower than street level, with at best a view of strangely cropped passersby and cars out the front. There is a garden in the back, but for someone who wants to house a complete office there, and does not want to look out the window while he’s writing, that doesn’t matter. The storey to which the front steps lead up faces north, out at the railing of the promenade, with a thin stripe of sea (river) above it, and then nothing but sky. You can eat there; the view while you’re cooking over the walled-in gardens at the distant rear facades of other buildings won’t bother you too much. So there’s that. The next floor up practically juts out over the water. So there’s that. And by the time we get to the fourth floor, with the two mansard-roofed rooms facing north and south, it has already been decided that I will be barred from making use of them, if.
And so this If has commenced. Brokers telephone, solicitors prepare contracts to exchange with one another. Our cheque, deposited with Mr Börnii, will easily cover everything, including repair costs.
The current occupant has no objection to German successors. Another applicant is rejected and remembered without regret, since he once planned to turn a building like this one into a chest of drawers with mini-apartments. The completion of sale should be possible by August 20th.
[Letter to Max Frisch 4 August 197412]
Johnson’s spacious Victorian house was not built “around 1915” and one would struggle to find much chalk in Sheppey’s mixture of gravel and clay, yet Sheerness was by no means an unfounded choice of residence. Having bought 26 Marine Parade and taken the transitional measure of placing Katharina in a boarding school named Oxford House near Croydon (pending transfer to Sheppey’s new comprehensive school at Halfway), the Johnsons arrived in October 1974 to prepare the house for occupation. Writing again on 31 October, Johnson was pleased to inform Frisch that there had been “none of the cold, dark time, the time of no running water, which we expected on arrival”.13 The men from British Gas obligingly fired up the central heating boiler for them and the previous owners had left a light bulb in every socket and no junk lying about either: just a forgotten pair of knickers, a gold fountain pen, and three pennies lined up in what Johnson took to be a felicitous gesture of welcome on a window sill in one of the attic bedrooms.
The Johnsons had arrived in a year of acute political and economic crisis, and Sheerness was by no means immune from consequences that might, if some of the more polemically inclined British commentators were to be believed, have reminded them of life in the GDR. By 6 December 1974, Johnson would be writing as follows to Helen Wolff:
After the local papers have been enjoying to the fullest the prospect of catastrophe offered by an alleged impending sugar shortage, now we have one. The bread is almost gone from the shops. Lines snaking down the sidewalks, fifty feet long even here, and two people wide. Panic shopping for flour. And then they can’t bake their own bread because there’s no yeast. In any case, we have not joined the excitement, if for no other reason than that we would prefer sourdough. We also cannot agree with the amazement of the native critics who use the quality of British bread as an argument against the country’s entering the European market. We are guests here, we eat Swedish bread.14
The Johnsons had already made certain adjustments to their house. They’d had double-glazed louvre windows installed in the bedrooms on the top floor and they got their builder to prepa
re the wall so that bookshelves could be fitted to make a library of the rear ground floor living room. Johnson, who appreciated the historical fabric of the property, wrote of somehow managing to break two hammers while refitting the communicating doors dividing the front and rear living rooms (they had been removed but not thrown out, by the previous owners who must, so Johnson guessed, have found them “too venerable”). He installed an office in the front basement or “lower ground” floor — a work room, with tiled floor, shelves for books and box files, a large table made for him in Berlin in 1965, which was so long that it had to be brought into the basement through the bay window at the front, and a smaller one for an IBM electric typewriter that might, as he himself would later wonder, have to be considered a “luxury” of the kind forbidden to writers in the fourth of Walter Benjamin’s “Thirteen theses” on “the Writer’s Technique”.15
The Johnsons’s first German visitor may have been Uwe’s editor at Suhrkamp, Siegfried Unseld. He arrived from London by train on Saturday, 26 October, when the Johnsons were still readying the house before returning to West Berlin the following month to pack up their stuff. A week or so before his visit, Johnson had written to Unseld, sending greetings from Elisabeth, who was then perched up a ladder with a paintbrush in her hand. He had also warned his publisher that there was still precious little in the way of furniture, so that sitting anywhere in the house to talk would be difficult. They would have to walk instead, and Unseld should understand that “it can be quite windy here” and also that there is often “plenty of rain in the wind”.16 It would be sensible to bring a good scarf, a “true comforter” as Johnson advised. In his own note about that first visit to Sheerness, Unseld was still looking on the bright side. He recorded that No. 26 fitted nicely into its terrace facing the Thames Estuary and that the long walks through the cool sea air were pleasant if also tiring. He was pleased to discover that, while Johnson was reluctant to give him an exact date, his author anticipated that the fourth volume of Anniversaries would soon be completed, perhaps even in time for the full four-volume work to be published with all appropriate razzmatazz as the centrepiece of Suhrkamp’s twenty-fifth anniversary celebrations a couple of years hence.17
Sheerness looking West towards the Medway, photo by George Poule, c. 1975 (from Johnson’s collection).
Undeterred by Johnson’s warning that he and his wife were hardly in a position to accommodate four people overnight, the émigré German poet and translator Michael Hamburger visited the Johnsons over a day two months later, at the very end of 1974. He came with his wife, the poet Anne Beresford, and the East German writer Günter Kunert and his wife Marianne. In a letter following a phone call about the impending visit, Johnson had told Hamburger that “the house is not only inhabitable for a telephone but also, in some parts, for human use, too”.18 No surprise, then, that Hamburger’s party found 26 Marine Parade barely furnished and, with the exception of Katharina’s bedroom, which was full of “ornaments and mementoes”, entirely lacking in signs of domesticity or comfort. The office Johnson had built for himself in the basement seemed similarly “austere” to Hamburger — metal shelves as “impersonal” as those in a public library, maps and charts on the wall but no pictures, and the only personal object a “little antique writing table set aside for Elisabeth’s use”.19
The house may never have acquired much in the way of “soft” furnishings, but it wasn’t entirely bare once the Johnsons had settled in. There were lots of books, to be sure, and a very large round wall clock hung in Johnson’s office, as well as an eighteenth-century map of the famously backward province of Mecklenburg. There were two reclining chairs by the Eames brothers, a painting by the West German artist Hann Trier, and a cast of a carving of two “sleeping Vagabonds” by Ernst Barlach, the great expressionist sculptor (and, until the Nazis bullied him out of the town shortly before his death in 1939, a long-standing resident of Güstrow in Mecklenburg) about whom Johnson had written a dissertation while at university in Leipzig. The Johnsons also had a large black cat, carved from a piece of ebony in Polynesia, and presented to them by their friend, the West German journalist and author Margret Boveri (1900–1975), who is said to have found it on a market stall.
The front garden was really just a few feet of tiled yard that kept the house a merciful distance from the road. The larger area at the back was the usual walled rectangle with a gate leading into a narrow alley behind. This garden had been carefully tended by the two women — were they retired teachers, perhaps also a couple, as one former neighbour thought he remembered? — who owned the house before Johnson. They’d introduced trellises, roses and other plants too. The Johnsons may have shuddered at the thought of joining the rose-pruning suburban tenants of Bexleyheath, yet they quickly came to appreciate their own piece of ground after the walled-in feeling of West Berlin. By February 1975, Johnson would be informing Fritz J. Raddatz, the well-known columnist and literary editor of Die Zeit (who had hoped Johnson might join him in Hamburg rather than burying himself in England), that Elisabeth — “the person with the secateurs” — would be happy to extend a hand of greeting in his direction were it not so covered with earth.20
Aware that this new interest might cause some arching of eyebrows in West German intellectual circles, he assured Raddatz that theirs would remain a “spartan idea of a garden”. In a further attempt to dispel suspicions of an unlikely collapse into English domesticity, he added that, when they walked past the “overgrown, weedy, entirely untended yard” between the sea and the buildings of Neptune Terrace, diagonally across from their house, Elisabeth would declare this wilderness, still capable of sprouting like a post-war bombsite, to be her favourite “garden” in all of Sheerness.
The Case for Backwaters (Sheppey, Staten Island, Mecklenburg)
The Johnsons’s early visitors were inclined to recoil from Sheerness and its island surroundings, if not also from the house they had chosen there. After Johnson’s death, Michael Hamburger, who was almost certainly among those who had counselled the Johnsons against moving to Sheppey, declared that the writer’s choice of Sheerness demonstrated that he had no desire to have anything to do with another “literary scene”.21 It was, he concluded, to be “the most thorough-going of self-imposed exiles”. It would also be some years before Unseld admitted to his true thoughts about his author’s English retreat: “Every time I arrived and left, my feeling was the same: how can one live here, how can one write here, in this run-down town, with little or no possibility of preserving what makes the outer life worth living?”22
The East German novelist Günter Kunert, a former protégé of Bertolt Brecht’s who had come to England for a year as writer in residence at the (new) University of Warwick, shared the Hamburgers’ assessment of the desolate place in which they had found the Johnsons. Having taken the train from Victoria Station, the party had changed at Sittingbourne, as travellers still do to this day, and boarded the short three-carriage train that would carry them across the Swale. As Kunert recorded in his An English Daybook, the seats inside British Rail’s shabby conveyance were a poor advertisement for the attractions of “Sheerness-on-Sea”. Their headrests were “enormously patinated” — so much so that one was stuck with tufts of white hair as if an old man had struggled to “tear himself from his seat on arrival”.23
The world these visitors glimpsed as their train crawled along the western coast of Sheppey proved an “adequate” match for this dismal interior. Michael Hamburger diagnosed “rural slums”. “Decay all around”, agreed Kunert as he surveyed the wintry scene: “hills of wrecked cars in front of smelters, every now and then a few cows, a few horses on the flat surface”. (They missed the dismal “parade of skeletons”24 that Dutch Elm Disease had made of some of the island’s already few trees, the remnants of the industrially obliterated settlement of West Minster, and the “Juggernaut” lorries that were driving locals crazy as they ground their way along inadequate roads leading to the industrial harbour estate at
Sheerness.) Reaching the end of the line at the station that still announces itself as Sheerness-on-Sea, the four visitors detached themselves from their seats and picked their way through “a deserted coastal town” that seemed distinguished by absolutely nothing except for the recent arrival of “a German writer” who had chosen, for reasons best known to himself, to move his family into one of the “glued together” houses making up the forlorn “endlessness” that was Marine Parade. As he’d earlier done with Unseld, Johnson took Kunert and the rest of the party out for a walk on the promenade before waving them off from his doorstep in time for the evening train back to London. Kunert glanced back from the pavement to see the distinguished “German writer” standing motionless next to his waving wife and daughter, a teetering “Colossus” who looked as if he might at any moment fall on his wife and break into large pieces of stone.
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 19