Ernest Race resigned from Race Furniture in September 1962, shortly after the “Sheppey” range was launched. He went on to work as a consultant designer to Cintique, Isokon and other firms before falling ill and dying aged 49 in January 1964. Having previously epitomised the “contemporary” at the Festival of Britain in 1951, Race Furniture Ltd did the same for the Sixties. After 1966, the products of its Sheerness factory, whose workers had by this time mastered all the techniques and contrivances required by a wider retinue of commissioned avant-garde designers, would be exhibited at the firm’s stylish London show room at 15 Rathbone St, London W1, opened that year with a display of “Maxima” chairs by Max Glendinning — box-like things made of plywood and sprayed with bright melamine paint.
There was more work for university lecture halls and ocean liners too. Designed by Robert Heritage at the beginning of the Seventies, Race Furniture’s “Q” range was first produced as seating for the Queen Elizabeth II. A chair called the “Tipster”, which did what its name suggested and could also be ordered with a lifting armrest for right-handed note-takers, was designed for classroom use by Webb Associates in 1976. The theatres and venues equipped by the firm include the National Theatre in London, the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, and the Queen Elizabeth conference centre at Westminster. The troubles that put an end to the Sheerness factory started in the Eighties, when Race Furniture lost its long-standing contract with the Department of the Environment and entered a production agreement with Antocks Lairn, a company that ended up making Race Furniture in High Wycombe while the Sheerness factory got closed. On Sheppey, this was remembered as a very poor decision. Eric Fuller, who continued to upholster for Antocks Lairn for a while, and who, when I met up with him in 2015, was still working with the revived Race Furniture company at its present base in Gloucestershire, likened it to scrapping the Rolls-Royce and keeping the Mini.
As time passed, the workers employed by Race Furniture on New Road learned to make and upholster the strangest of chairs. It appears, however, that they had looked at their first works — the Sheppey range — with as much scepticism as “Tony” applied to Uwe Johnson’s broken Eames chair. In 1966, the Council of Industrial Design’s annual Design Journal published an article by Paul Reilly reviewing the first ten years of Design Centre awards. It also interviewed some of the winners in order to counter allegations, acknowledged by Reilly, that winning an award so closely associated with the peculiar tastes of the metropolitan elite might be more of a curse than a blessing for a product aimed at a wider market. The article in question insisted that, while contrary evidence was abundantly available, “perhaps the nicest effect of all was that on Race’s Sheppey settees and chairs in 1963. The furniture was designed to mark the move of the Race furniture factory from London to Sheppey, but when the factory opened on the island, making mostly metal furniture, the reaction of the islanders was to say, ‘And what do you call this?’ All was changed, however, when the Sheppey furniture got its award. To the islanders, it was their furniture which had received national acclaim”.37
*
And Johnson’s broken lounge chair? One Saturday morning, nine weeks after he drove off with it, Tony reappeared: “sixty four years old, plentiful gray hair, dressed in his Sunday best”.38 He opened the boot of his car, and “there lay the cumbersome piece of furniture, whole once more”. Tony muttered, “I have no idea what Charles Eames was thinking when he invented a chair with a vulcanite adhesive joint: he must have been a little drunk. Drunk in a good way, don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice chair alright”.
Coming into the house, Tony looked around, commented on the sagging condition of a table while also declaring himself almost certainly too busy to fix it. Johnson poured some whisky, and the two men got talking, starting with the various tricks with which Tony had coaxed the chair back into existence: “If that monster ever breaks again it won’t be in the place where I worked on it”. As Tony went on to talk about his life, Johnson found himself transported, as so often, back into the world of the novel he had come to Sheerness to complete.
Tony, who plainly reminded Johnson of his own socialist carpenter Heinrich Cresspahl, had started his first workshop in Islington in 1937, quickly acquiring a number of distinguished American clients, who approached him with weird modernist projects: he remembered struggling to attach legs to an oddly semi-circular table in “such a way that they would definitely collapse”. He had served in the medical corps during the war, following the allied advance from Normandy to Bergen-Belsen, where “the dead bodies didn’t bleed. Just beaten to death, starved”. Further disclosures followed, including the fact that Tony’s late wife had come from Spandau… “I realized that Tony wants more than mere money for his work: he wants this too, conversation, if that’s what you would like to call it”.
It would appear that Tony was correct in his assessment of the Eames brothers’ work. Designed to demonstrate that a modern chair could be at least as comfortable as the leathered thrones in English gentleman’s clubs, the Eames lounge chair was first produced in 1956. It was, as New York’s Museum of Modern Art had helpfully explained in 1973, composed of three plywood shells (rosewood in the original models), accommodating leather-covered cushions filled with down, latex foam and duck feathers.39 Its arm rests were secured to the middle shell with experimental “shock mounts” consisting of glued rubber washers that allowed the various parts of the chair some freedom of movement, but which also, as collectors of vintage “mid-century modern” furniture keep discovering to this day, leave the chairs ever more liable to sudden collapse. The “Sheppey” chair might have been a bit low and long in the thigh but it wouldn’t have done anything like that. A sensible option then had any refitter thought of making a forward-looking Institute for the Promotion of British Culture out of the sealed-up and mummified Institute for the Preservation of British Customs that Johnson had planted at Madison Avenue and 83rd St in New York.
PART IV.
CULTURE: THREE ISLAND ENCOUNTERS
I have hardly trodden your soil,
taciturn country, have hardly touched a stone.
I was raised so high by your heaven,
So dissolved in cloud, in mist and things even more remote
that I left you
as soon as my ship weighed anchor.
— Ingeborg Bachmann, “Leaving England”, translated by Michael Hamburger, Modern Poetry in Translation, 3, 1967, p. 12
Gentleman outside the Belle and Lion, a Wetherspoon pub on Sheerness High Street, 8 July 2018.
20. ALL PRAISE TO THE SHEERNESS TIMES GUARDIAN
What a newspaper we have in this town!
— Gesine Cresspahl in Anniversaries I, p. 425.
At the end of October 1973, a year or so before he traded West Berlin for Sheerness, Uwe Johnson visited Klagenfurt, the capital city of Carinthia in the south of Austria and the childhood home of the poet Ingeborg Bachmann, who was born there in 1926. She had promised one day to show him around the town in which she had grown up. On the 17th of that same month, however, she had died in hospital following a fire at her flat in Rome. Johnson made his “Trip to Klagenfurt” alone, arriving four days after Bachmann was repatriated and buried there. His friend was gone but some of “the things that formed her life”1 were still there to be considered.
Picking up a copy of the Carinthia Daily Times, Johnson noted that the president of the Carinthian State Tourism Association had recently returned from a “goodwill tour of major German travel agents”. Keen to promote Klagenfurt as a “bathing resort” with an “unspoiled environment”, this booster reckoned the time had come for the city to develop a “winter image” to augment its already busy summer season.2 Bachmann, who had left the city to go to university in 1945 and then spent much of her adult life in voluntary “exile” in Rome, had thought otherwise. She’d told Johnson that the province was being “completely ruined” by people determined to fill “Carinthia, Land of the Sun” with holiday facilities devoted to the
exploitation of “‘Rhein-Ruhr’ tourist types”.
Scanning the illustrated brochures, in which Klagenfurt was projected as a sleek destination packed only with “delights”, Johnson ventured that “it seems impossible that anyone might be buried here”. The tourist maps of this gleaming place had been adjusted to obscure the fact, pointed out by Bachmann herself, that “someone came up with the idea of putting the airport next to the cemetery”. That, however, is where he found his brilliant, troubled and addicted friend’s freshly dug grave: in outlying Annabichl, five or so kilometres from the city centre, and only partly covered by the ribbon-draped wreaths left by the governor of Carinthia, the mayor of Klagenfurt, and the National Minister for Arts and Education, all of whom had come to pay their respects to the poet who had so determinedly left town. Viewing the site from a nearby bench, Johnson remembers Bachmann’s letter again: “above all one cannot have grown up here and be me and then come back”. It was in order to account for the dislocation and departure of his late friend, who had written magnificently about her childhood in this “relinquished” place, that Johnson made his way to the city’s newspaper archive.
Speaking on the phone from Rome in 1972, Bachman had informed him that La Stampa — though not unlike a fuddy-duddy old aunt — was still the most “objective” of the papers she might read there. That, as Johnson already knew, had not been a virtue of the publications of her childhood in Klagenfurt, when the German “tourists” had been different too.
The “official” paper of the Nazi Party, the Carinthia Clarion, gave Johnson a glimpse of the fervid celebrations the town mounted for Hitler’s fiftieth birthday on 20 April 1939. Reading his way back into the pages of the Clarion’s extinguished predecessors, he was able to verify the reports of locals who assured him, apparently without reticence or embarrassment, that Hitler himself had visited Klagenfurt after the widely welcomed annexation of 13 March 1938. The Carinthia Daily informed Johnson that, on 5 April that year, the Nazi leader had arrived from Graz at the end of a four-and-a-half-hour train journey through the mountains of Steiermark and Carinthia, where every station along the route had been “packed tight with jubilant people”.3 After shaking hands with the SS General Lorenz and other assembled strongmen, he marches down a street dressed in red swastikas to reach a square, formerly “New Square” but already “rebaptized” after the Führer himself. The Bishop fawns and the mayor crawls as he bestows honorary citizenship on the “Uniter of all Germans”. Huge crowds, many dressed in traditional costume, sing and follow the children who lead the Sieg Heiling from their perches in trees outside the Sandwirt Hotel: “No end to the jubilation”, notes Johnson.
Scanning the Klagenfurt Times he discovers that another batch of ecstatic dances and songs (“Little Girl, Way Down in the Valley”, “No Country More Beautiful”, etc.) were offered up on 19 July, when Dr Goebbels promised, during his own brief tour of Klagenfurt, that the Nazis would “hold the land and people of Carinthia steadfast and true in our German heart”. On 24 July, Rudolf Hess came to announce that a memorial to “the fateful days of July 1934” (the month in which Hitler secured his standing as “supreme leader” with the bloody purge of the Nazi party known as the “Night of the Long Knives”) was to be built at Klagenfurt. Such had been the populace’s enthusiasm for the two earlier visitors that the District Propaganda Office this time asked the townspeople “not to throw flowers at the Deputy Führer (due to the risk of injury)”.
It is hard to think of a twentieth-century writer for whom newspapers were more vital than they were for Uwe Johnson. He read them closely, searching their pages for the truth of situations, both past and present, whilst also noting their slants and omissions, their inconsistencies and hypocrisy. They could carry him, together with his “invented persons”, far out into the world, yet they also enabled him to maintain an ironic distance from the reality he surveyed. At their best, they might challenge the powerful and embody the virtue of free debate, but they were also a useful medium for a writer whose desire was to read the world without necessarily revealing himself within it.
As every reader of Anniversaries knows, Johnson was a close scrutiniser of the New York Times, first in West Berlin and later in the two years he spent living and working in New York City from 1966 to 1968. Johnson shares the paper with his “invented person” Gesine Cresspahl, for whom it has become like “a person with a fixed place at the table”.4 As an “honest old Auntie”5 of faded British origins, her distinguishing characteristics include an inability to “do something good without also discussing it”,6 a refusal, both high-minded and prim, to countenance cartoons and horoscopes, and a tendency to swell with pride (as well as sections and page-count) as she endeavours to “mirror” not just New York but the entire world — offering her readers “All the News … That’s Fit to Print”,7 together, of course, with plenty of “shopping opportunities” and places to live too.8
The GDR may have offered only a “chained dog”9 named Neues Deutschland, barking crazily at everything beyond the chicken-wire fence, but the New York Times promised a nobler, more balanced alternative. We’ve seen that Johnson drew heavily on it in Anniversaries, holding it at a critical and sometimes mocking distance even as he threaded its efforts as a superior “supplier of reality”10 into the fabric of his novel. Reading through the eye of Gesine Cresspahl, he notes how the self-proclaimed “world’s best newspaper”11 bolsters the serialised memoirs of Stalin’s recently defected daughter Svetlana by printing photographs in which Comrade Joe was allowed to appear as a genial patriarch, gleaming back at the camera and even thumbing his nose at his bodyguard. On another morning he and Gesine, who like him has printer’s ink in her veins, ponder the paper’s silent inconsistencies. Having urged the King of Greece to “improve his country with a putsch”, Auntie then “stayed true to her principles and immediately expressed revulsion at the torture of politically suspect Greeks”.12 He had a sharp eye too for the manoeuvres imposed on the high-minded paper by the need to maintain circulation while also staying true, more or less, to the impartiality proclaimed by Adolph Ochs, who had rescued it from bankruptcy at the end of the nineteenth century.13 Hence, as Johnson notes, the recourse to “pedagogic compulsion”, which enabled the New York Times to claim the excuse of “sociology” for a coverage of murders that, in less lofty papers, would be recognised as sensationalised “reader-snatching”. “She sets our table with the latest developments”, so Gesine explains: “we pay the higher rate and admire her civilized gestures”.14
The News from “Where You Are”
On the Isle of Sheppey, a newspaper would, once again, turn out to be more than a useful source of local information. It would be a provider of strange stories to pass on to faraway friends who might enjoy an English freak show. It would also serve as a screen, or perhaps something closer to a crinkly net curtain, through which an unconvinced incomer might peer without giving anything away: a useful device, in other words, when it comes to keeping your perceptions “non-committal” and, as Johnson continued in a letter to Max Frisch, preventing them from “ascending into experience or judgement”.15
For Johnson, as for the young Ingeborg Bachmann whose poem “Leaving England” was included in her first collection Borrowed Time, the experience of being in England may never have been entirely removed from the thought of departure. Unlike his late friend, however, he settled in with the help of a new assortment of newspapers. He would tell his New York publisher Helen Wolff that his reading in Sheerness included four English papers, two German weeklies and a daily paper from Frankfurt am Main.16 The editor Eberhard Fahlke identifies the German papers as his usual ones — the Frankfurter Rundschau, Der Spiegel and Die Zeit.17 Of the British Sundays, he read the Observer, and the Sunday Times, but his daily was the Guardian — not an “aunt” like the New York Times but “a strict old uncle”, so he claimed, which rarely found news from either Germany worthy of inclusion on the page reserved for “Overseas” news.
And the fourth English paper? The Sheerness Times Guardian, which dominates the collection of Kentish papers preserved in Johnson’s archive at the University of Rostock, was an amalgamation of two rival papers, neither of which had, even in their Victorian heyday, quite managed to equip Sheerness with its own version of what Johnson, like any other reader of the German political philosopher Jürgen Habermas’s book on the subject, might recognise as a properly bourgeois “public sphere”18 — i.e. a free, rational and largely civil cultural arena that allowed citizens to push back against the powerful officers of government facing them from across the dockyard moat, or, for that matter, from the offices of the Local Board of Health that had become responsible for running the town in 1849.
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 31