Looking back on that article now, and comparing it with the condition of No. 24 as it was at the end of Martin’s life, we might be inclined to count Harris’s renovations, which had obliged Susan to raise her daughters in “a constant state of chaos”, as proof that Sheerness remained spectacularly resistant to “gentrification”. Even with this Bohemian exception, the town had nothing yet to rival the gentrified Brooklyn brownstone that Johnson had found in the “Food, Fashion, Family, and Furnishings” page of the New York Times on 27 April 1968, and included as part of Gesine Cresspahl’s daily reading in the third volume of Anniversaries. Having bought this alleged slum for $28,000, the owners had gone for renovation rather than demolition (the Scanlons and their two young daughters were especially delighted with their restored third floor bathroom with its “original bathtub on claw-and-ball feet, the marble sink, stained glass windows and a toilet complete with pull-chain”).7 Sheerness had no experience either of the systematic displacement of poorer people, or of the slithering movement of the colour line that Johnson had seen creating slums among the brownstones of New York City and would return to in the closing volume of Anniversaries (“In twenty years the blacks will have been driven out of Manhattan. We’ll be living on a lily-white island surrounded by the black boroughs”,8 predicts Ginny Carpenter, a prosperous white liberal feminist resident of Riverside Drive). Although well aware that nobody had ever made a London-style killing out of rising property prices on his street, Harris still insisted on comparing Marine Parade with Cheyne Walk in Chelsea and staring at me defiantly when I showed surprise at the suggestion that the day might one day still come.
The point, he insisted patiently, is that artists are often the first to see the potential in rundown places. They get there before the money and also, as he has particular reason to know, before the planners and conservation officers have worked out how to limit and control their improvements. In the case of Cheyne Walk, he explained, it was the Pre-Raphaelites who started to lift the street into its modern configuration as the home of billionaire oligarchs and golden-booted footballers. Look now at Marine Parade, he says, pointing out at the sea view and the gentle curve of the joined-up terraces as the street tracks the shore east towards Cheyney Rock. There were, he noted, residents who had respected and maintained their houses as they found them, even without necessarily gussying them up to make “antiques for living in”. Some members of this leavening minority had also done what they could for the community. They had their triumphs here and there but, as Harris claimed to have learned over four decades, they’d so far lacked the critical mass to lift the wider area, or, more recently, to see off the buy-to-let cannibals who have been turning so many Sheerness houses into what Johnson described as “chests of drawers of flats”. It wouldn’t happen in Martin’s life, but he still looked forward to a time when Marine Parade’s Victorian houses would no longer be among the cheapest in southern England and, for that matter, worth only half the price of a detached and free-standing former plotland residence down the road in Minster. As for Uwe Johnson, he may not at first have understood the difference between an English terrace house and a New York brownstone, but Martin counted he and Elisabeth among the incomers who looked after their properties on Marine Parade, living in the house as a historic structure that had its own right to shape the lives of its occupants. “And I”, he concluded frankly, as we sat in his much pulled-about warren, “did not”.
*
In March 2015, when the BBC Radio producer John Goudie and I went to interview Martin about his recollections of Johnson, he started by reading a prepared description of how they’d first met their new neighbour: “Uwe Johnson came to Sheerness, and introduced himself to me and seemed to warm to me immediately because I was using an E-Type Jaguar to tow a trailer containing around five tons of bricks. I expect there were three lengths of wood sticking out through the Webasto open roof. I received his congratulations for using a so-called prestige car for this purpose…” Martin knew nothing of how Johnson had treated the ill-fated “foreign” sports car in the opening chapter of his novel Two Views — a capitalist status symbol that is driven into a canal lock in Holstein, fished out, restored and bought as a “long-limbed racy creature” by an image-conscious photographer from whom it is then stolen when parked outside a hotel in West Berlin.9 He did, however, go on to boast that the humiliation he inflicted on his E-Type was completed by the “trailer” he often towed behind it. This was all that was left of the heavy Second World War army truck in which he had arrived in Sheerness from Nuneaton. By 1974, he’d had this relic cut in half by one of the island’s oxyacetylene virtuosos so that he could use its rear half for carrying timber, rubble or old bricks. Proud of the fact that his “trailer” — which may even, in another configuration, have been his “Jaguar caravan” — exceeded the recommended towing weight for E-Types by many times, he was also happy to confirm that Johnson “liked the fact that I used a prestige car as if it were a donkey”.
Harris can be counted among those who asked Johnson, “What brought you to Sheerness?” — a question the writer describes as “spoken in a tone of almost outrage, entirely in passing and definitely easy to miss”, and which he would try to answer with “baffled honesty”,10 adding an italicised quotation suggesting that many islanders understood the challenge: “We groan, we moan, we flee, we always turn back”.
“We didn’t know who he was”, Harris explained of the human enigma who had one day moved in with his wife and daughter two doors to the east. “Was he poor or rich?” The Harrises suspected the latter at first, since Johnson evidently possessed the means to get No. 26 repaired and sorted out before he and his family took up residence. There was nothing to explain Johnson’s arrival, so “I assumed he was in hiding… on Sheppey, people do this…” Perhaps Johnson had indeed come with the aim of keeping out of view, although surely not in the manner of an MI5-monitored trade union baron like Hugh Scanlon, or of an East End villain gone to ground among the caravans and chalets of Leysdown, or even of Somerset Maugham’s sweepstake-winning London hairdresser, who had long dreamed of acquiring a bungalow on the magical island where he might escape death itself. Johnson was more “like Mick Jagger”, said Martin as he remembered his own first impressions, explaining that the Rolling Stone surely must have places he can go when he wants a brief reminder of what normal life is like. He may not have understood the situation much better when Johnson, who had indeed been concerned to stay out of sight of Stasi snoops and potential kidnappers after first moving to West Berlin, announced that he lived on the island “only because he is sure that no one is listening to his telephone”.11
In the early years especially, the two households found ways of getting along. At home, the Harris daughters got into the habit of calling Johnson “Charlie Farley” — after a comic-book character of the time. Susan remembered the Johnsons’s daughter, Katharina. She was a little older than her own Emma and Louise, but they used to play together, and Katharina would sometimes look after the Harris children and also take care of the animals when they were away. Katharina was, so Susan remembered thinking, “very shy and very lonely” and they both felt concerned for her. Susan remembers worrying about the Johnsons’s decision to trust their daughter to the island’s new comprehensive school: a place with a progressive head and too little discipline, so Susan reckoned, insisting that it surely wasn’t fair to leave young children to bear the responsibility for their own behaviour. Elisabeth, meanwhile, impressed her as a “lovely person”, who used to leave fennel tea on the doorstep when the children were sick.
The two households had their political differences to be sure. Susan insists that theirs really wasn’t a purely Tory house — indeed, she felt so inconsistent in her loyalties at election times that she was tempted to display posters for different parties simultaneously in the house’s windows. Martin, however, insisted “I’m Conservative. I was pro-Thatcher”, and “[Johnson] didn’t want to hear that”. Harris was in no dou
bt that he was also “a little bit too public school” for Johnson — not only had he been to one himself, but he and his wife insisted on sending their daughters to a private convent school, off the island, at Gillingham.
The Harrises got along with the Johnsons despite such limiting considerations. Johnson would borrow tools and then demonstrate that he didn’t have much of a clue how to use them, so Martin found himself carrying out various tasks in No. 26. In one respect, Susan saw Johnson as a threat to her husband. Martin’s customary beverage was tea and he had neither much experience of alcohol nor a practised head for it. Johnson, meanwhile, was “a terrific drinker” — as the Harrises knew from the large quantities of wine they saw going into No. 26. Susan would worry whenever Johnson invited Martin in for a glass. It was, she felt, frankly “irresponsible” to keep filling her husband’s glass until he emerged from No. 26, decidedly the worse for wear, and then climbed back up his ladder to carry on fixing a gutter or doing other work on a window or the roof.
Johnson lent them English editions of some of his earlier novels but only on condition that they made no attempt to discuss them with him. Both Harrises remember struggling but failing to figure out what on earth was going on in Speculations about Jakob. “I felt he was from another planet”, Susan told me, adding that she herself was a “very immature person” at the time. In later years she would study English literature at the Open University but in the mid-Seventies she’d hardly read anything more demanding than the children’s books she shared with her daughters. Johnson’s novels actually gave her a headache (“very hard” as she repeats of Speculations). She was, she concluded regretfully, “too ignorant” to appreciate his work: “I felt I failed him … I couldn’t give him anything back”.
If conversation about art or literature was avoided by mutual consent, Johnson could not, as time went on, ignore Harris’ activities as a small-scale property developer. Writing to Burgel Zeeh, Unseld’s secretary at Suhrkampf, on 26 August 1982, he reported on the latest development on this front:
Have I told you (many thanks again for the matjes herring) that the house to the west of this one, occupied up until now by a handicapped woman as quiet as the quietest of mice, was sold immediately after her decease to someone who wants to turn it into four apartments stacked one on top of the other? Now, during the renovation and construction, I realize with both ears and nerves that the wall separating it from me is only one brick thick. When the man next door takes a break with his hammer, I can hear his cheerful whistling. You never know when the next blow is coming, everyone is painfully surprised. Who was it who said that no situation was so bad that it couldn’t get even worse? That will come true in my case when people move in behind this wall who enjoy a little upright-piano playing, who deem loud ruckuses useful for the unfolding of darling children’s souls, who only know how to use one button on their boom boxes, the one for volume…12
Harris remembered Johnson’s discomfort at his building work differently. On one occasion he recalls being up his ladder working on the upstairs windows or guttering of No. 25, when some debris fell on the steps of Johnson’s house. Out walked the writer, peering up and remarking drily about the “mess” he had made. Harris apologised from his perch, only to have Johnson remark in his fluent but accented English, “It was a joke”.
Martin describes Johnson as “not an easy man to get close to … He was a mate and a neighbour, but I never got close”. He also remembered the writer as “a verbal bully”. Offer some passing pleasantry such as “Hello Charles, nice day” and you could expect an answer such as “In what respect ‘nice’?” It seems likely that Johnson, who dedicated an entire article to Sheerness’ frequent and varied use of the words “thank you”, was actually researching the finer points of English usage at some of these moments, but for Martin the interrogation felt mocking and aggressive: “Everything you say to him is a challenge to be picked to pieces”. He remembered Johnson once explaining his approach to the students he met when he went off to teach in America: “The first thing I have to do is to clear all their ideas out of their heads”. He did, though, recall more convivial occasions, as when Johnson consulted him over what might be the appropriate English wording for a funeral oration. Harris remembered trying to explain that, to him, the phrase “sincere condolences” sounded far too formal and official and hackneyed: his own preference would be for something more direct and closer to what one might actually feel. He suggested something more along the lines of, “I’m very upset that we’ve lost you”.
As he tries to describe the gulf across which he and Johnson gestured, not always successfully over the best part of a decade, Martin cited his favourite writer, P.G. Wodehouse, and an episode from the story “Jeeves and the Chump Cyril”, written while Wodehouse was living at 375 Central Park West in New York City and first published in the Saturday Evening Post on 3 April 1918. The story is set in a large Manhattan apartment building and Bertie Wooster has been in trouble with his highly exacting English valet Jeeves, who simply cannot abide the lurid purple socks his master has taken to wearing. Eventually, Wooster discovers that Jeeves has given these offensively showy items to the African-American lift attendant in their apartment building. Surprised when the grateful recipient thanks him for the gift that had turned him into “a blaze of mauve from the ankle-bone southward”, Wooster concludes with the words “Well, I mean to say, what? Absolutely!”
What, Harris asks pointedly, might Johnson, the probing linguistic investigator from Germany, ever have made of that phrase? He himself judged it to be perfect in every way, and communicative too, but only to someone instinctively at ease with the fact that, on forensic analysis of the type the German writer favoured, it may turn out to bear no meaning at all. Wodehouse’s English would surely so Harris suggests, have seemed utterly inscrutable to Johnson — as obscure, perhaps, as the public-school slang used over the radio by British tank officers in the north African desert during the Second World War, which is sometimes said to have convinced German interceptors that they were hearing a new and as yet unbroken code. Being unfamiliar with Anniversaries, he was not in a position to realise that Johnson would have had little difficulty grasping the situation of Wooster’s elevator man. Describing the apartment buildings of Riverside Drive as he had found them in the Sixties, he notes in Anniversaries that “Negroes are permitted to superintend them, keep them clean, operate the elevators, polish the brass” but not to live in these monuments of faded prosperity, where “old age… lurks like a neglected disease”.13 Indeed, the befriended lift attendant in Gesine’s building, “Mr Robinson”, is a Cuban refugee who definitely does not wear flashy mauve socks. As for using the word “Negro” to describe people “of African descent”, this was only allowed entry into the first English translation of Anniversaries because it had, by then been reclaimed by those it had previously been used to reduce and insult (in January 1971, Johnson had told his first American translator to use “any equivalents that do not offend Negroes, and [which] betray a kind of solidarity with them”14). We can be confident, though, that the author of Anniversaries was no more likely than his primary characters, Gesine or Marie, to be entertained by racist stereotypes, be they explicitly converted into insults or treated as implicit sources of humour as they are in Wodehouse. The German writer who “looked like Goldfinger” remained a curiosity to Harris, keeping himself at a formal distance and preferring — this was admitted with a slight sense of injury — to get most of his English conversation from the “very working-class” people with whom he fraternised in the pub further west along Broadway.
22. A JOB FOR THE TOWN PHOTOGRAPHER
One day in 1979, Johnson received a request from a friend in West Germany. The artist Hann Trier was preparing the catalogue for a retrospective exhibition in Cologne and he asked Johnson to provide “a high-quality black and white photograph”1 of a painting Johnson had in his basement office in Sheerness. Johnson’s interest in the artist’s work had developed in Be
rlin nearly twenty years earlier. Trier had been in the habit of lending Johnson paintings, which he would hang on the otherwise bare wall facing the desk at which he wrote in his flat in the Friedenau district. Potential buyers would come to examine and sometimes actually buy these loaned works, which would then be removed just as Johnson felt that he had broken them in, rather in the way a smoker might “‘break in’ a pipe”.2 The loss of these paintings, and the sudden interruption of their ongoing conversation with his own developing texts, had eventually become “too much” for the writer, so, some ten years previously, he had bought a painting that he could be sure of keeping.
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 36