By 6 March 1979, when he gave Helen Wolff this account of his daily routine, Johnson was no longer a newcomer revealing his foreign status by walking around looking at buildings rather than people. His interest in joining the life of the town, or at least, as he insisted, of the 980 among its inhabitants who were unemployed, had also required that he create a new identity for himself. Having quickly discovered that the English tongue was quite unable to utter the name “Uwe” (to this day people tend to prefer “Yewy” to the slightly more accurate approximation that can be achieved by taking the brand name “Hoover” and knocking the H off it), he had, as he explained in a letter to Burgel Zeeh at Suhrkamp, allowed his English neighbours to come up with an alternative: “I was baptized ‘Charlie’ in December, 1974. That is how everyone knows me here; only the postman refers to me with my last name”.15 A new name, then, but also an alias that kept everything about his actual life and work hidden from those among whom he now lived.
According to the recollections of friends and acquaintances tracked down by Tilman Jens, a West German literary commentator who came over to look about in Sheerness for the mass-market news magazine Stern immediately after the discovery of Johnson’s death in March 1984, the writer’s English “baptism” took place on the Broadway. “Here in the pub we called him ‘Charles’”,16 explained the eighty-seven-year-old former fireman Louis Miller, when the visiting reporter coaxed some comments out of him in the Napier Tavern. Everyone had their nickname, he explained, and “Charles” had gained his at the very beginning of his decade in Sheerness, on Christmas Eve in 1974. In Miller’s reported version of the story, the seasonal party was well underway when the door opened and this “heavy, powerful man” walked in. “Oh there’s Charlie”, yelled one of the regulars. Johnson had laughed, appearing to accept the name, although not, of course, without trying to establish a more formal version. “No, Charlie is wrong, he said. The name is Charles. Actually, even Charles Henry although that may be a bit complicated in this setting”. “That was the birth of Charles”, said Miller, adding a detail with which Jens would variously sadden and horrify Johnson’s admirers in the Federal Republic of West Germany: “from then on he let Ron pour a small glass of whisky over his bald head every Christmas as a symbol of his baptism”.
The controversy prompted in West Germany by Tilman Jens’ despatches from Sheerness leaves me grateful for a brief telephone conversation I had in the late Nineties with a man who had worked as a potboy at the Napier Tavern in Johnson’s time. Scraping up everything he could remember from that already distant period, this fellow pictured the German writer sitting on a stool in the saloon bar, drinking Hürlimann lager and smoking French cigarettes — Gauloises plain, perhaps, or on reflection, maybe the filter-tipped Gauloises sold as Disque Bleu (and favoured by some of the the more Bohemian students at the time). This witness may not have detected the “bell jar of strangeness”17 with which Günter Kunert reckoned Johnson surrounded himself, but he did remember that the German incomer could be an awkward customer, who had little time for small talk or trivial disturbances — especially when he was engaged in animated conversation with a visitor from abroad.
I mention this fleeting description because it corroborates much that Tilman Jens gathered from the drinkers at the Napier more than twenty years previously. He informed his West German readers that these folk did not share Johnson’s taste for Hürlimann, insisting that this suspiciously foreign, light-coloured lager — which the Faversham brewery of Shepherd Neame had started making under license from the original Swiss brewery in 1968 (and which it nowadays proudly advertises as “the first lager ever brewed in Kent”) — was the strongest of the beers on offer in the Napier. “It’s a brain-damaging beer”, they assured Tilman Jens, “it will kill you”. Johnson had been stimulated but not persuaded by their insistent warnings about his chosen brew, which Kentish pub-goers had, as I remember from Canterbury, already got into the habit of calling “Hooligans”. Characteristically determined to establish the truth of the situation, he had written to the brewery in Faversham for confirmation that he was not drinking poison. Armed with the brewery’s assurances, he would reply that the beer (which Shepherd Neame now reckon to have had a comparatively high alcohol content of 5.4% in Johnson’s time) was brewed in voluntary accordance with Germany’s ancient beer purity law forbidding anything but hops, barley, water and yeast. No question at all, as Johnson was pleased to reply to his English critics, of any “chemical additives”.
The publican Ronald Peel — he’s the “Ron” of the annual “baptism” story — told Jens that Johnson had always turned up at the same time in the evening, stepping into the Napier Tavern’s saloon bar with a brief “Good Evening” — or “Good heavening!”18 as Johnson himself imagines them registering his pronunciation — and then taking his customary place on a high, wooden barstool with a seat upholstered in red synthetic leather of the type Tom Waits was in those days hymning as “Naugahyde”. He allegedly always wore the same distinctive garb too: a black peaked watchman’s cap, a black jacket, black trousers, black leather boots, and sometimes a thin black tie — the same gear, in other words, that had shocked Michael Hamburger, who had been astonished to find this highly regarded and sensitive writer going about in such garb.19 Even the ashtrays on the bar had to be black at his request, and “to make matters worse”, he would insist on having two: one for stubs of the French cigarettes that “stank so disgustingly” to Peel’s frankly English nose, and the other for the matches which Johnson, in a gesture that confirms other accounts of the exactness with which he measured his progress along the road to ruin, would line up in an orderly row as he made his way through the carefully counted cigarettes he allowed himself over a two-hour visit. Eleven cigarettes, eight pints of Hürlimann and also, just before returning home, “a double vodka with tomato juice, ice and lemon — but without Worcester sauce. And served in a large glass”.20 Such was the alleged tally by the end, Peel told Jens, rounding off his betrayal by adding not just that he’d been obliged to order in a special supply of Gauloises cigarettes for Johnson, but that he’d had to return the entire stock to the supplier after the writer’s death since none of his other customers would dream of smoking these pungent foreign things.
Johnson’s bar stool, long preserved as a relic at the Napier Tavern, in action with Big Fish and friends at the Little Theatre, Sheerness, 5 March 2016.
We gather from Jens that the drinkers in the pub came to terms with Johnson’s unpredictable way of alternating between rudeness and friendliness: the way he might cut someone off at one moment and then take him or her suddenly to heart in the next. They learned that he could become sentimental about accordion music, and might even shed tears at the sound of the song “Lili Marlene”. They had seen him “become the entertainer” too — dancing “like an elephant” or, going arm in arm with Muriel Adams, to sing Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s song “Mack the Knife” — he in German, she in English: “see the shark with teeth like razors”.
And yet Jens also reveals that, even after nine years, they knew almost nothing about the man who had sat in their midst. The “grand old man” of the Napier, the former fireman Louis Miller, was still astonished to have discovered that Johnson was “a famous man” from his obituary in the local paper. “We talked a lot here in the Napier”, said the newspaper publisher Bill Harvey, before admitting that, while he himself may have revealed intimate details of his own life in these conversations, “Charles” definitely did not. Another of Jens’s interviewees, Muriel Adams, had deduced that Johnson “felt a little bit guilty about being German”. After returning from a short holiday in the Birmingham area, she and her husband had mentioned their visit to Coventry Cathedral. Johnson went quiet as she described how this blitzed monument had been rebuilt under the architect and designer Sir Basil Spence. He then closed the subject with a terse observation: “This cathedral would never have had to be rebuilt had Germans not reduced it to rubble”.21 “I think�
�, so Adams told Jens, “he had a real guilt complex”. “He looked like Kojak”, someone else added to Jens’s collection of graveside scrapings, “with a two-day-growth”.
None of these pub-goers had known enough about Johnson to recognise the man who was destroying himself before their eyes, nor, for that matter, to grasp that his fits of costiveness and aggression were like flames flickering behind the windows of a vast and irreplaceable library. None of them were in a position either to confirm or counter Michael Hamburger’s observation that Johnson was “not merely reticent, but almost morbidly averse even to such intimacies as are considered usual and decent among friends”, or to assess the truth of Hamburger’s further conjecture that Johnson may actually have drunk in such “terrifying” quantities in order to “break through”, or at least to “loosen up”, the “puritanical rigor” and strict “socialist morality” that seemed to weigh on him like a helmet of lead.22 They did, however, know that the man who also deputised as their walking encyclopaedia could be a cussed sod. “I was not always happy with him”, confessed the publican Ronald Peel, explaining that Charles could be “obnoxious” — as when he turned up with lots of “junk” from home, occupying about five places as he spread it out over the bar or table, and then objected to some speck of dust that nobody else would ever have noticed. There had been occasions, Peel admitted, when Johnson’s “tyranny” made him and his fellow publican Col Mason incandescent with rage, “and then I had to call him to order”. Sometimes these confrontations drove the writer to stand up and insist, quite emphatically, that he would never enter the pub again. The next day, however, he would be “back in his usual place” and “ready for reconciliation”. According to Jens, Peel felt that, by the last few years, he and Mason had got Johnson adequately trained in their Kentish way of doing things. No question either, about his fits of generosity. Though not rich himself, “Charles” paid for a dignified funeral for an impoverished lady he had got to know. He gave some German mattresses to Frank Mathew Baker, the taxi driver who used to ferry him back and forth between Heathrow and Sheerness. When John Forster, a docker at the port, had a falling out with his wife, “Charles” had offered him a bed in his house.
This retrospective testimony encourages Jens to suggest that the drinkers in the Napier had handled Johnson none too badly. They were quite capable of growling back at the morose outsider they knew as “the owl” as well as “Charlie”. They handled his sometimes pedantic-sounding questions about local culture or, particularly, their use of the English language, and they left him in no doubt when he breached the limits of acceptable behaviour. Without straying far from their customary repertoire of shrugs, jokes and grunts, they had looked after Johnson in their own way. It was in their company that the writer found not just a driver but someone to help tend his garden or to put up his daughter when he and Elisabeth were away, or to joke about his plan to counter the effects of Dutch Elm Disease on the town’s trees by planting a potentially vast, Mecklenburgian “white poplar” in the small garden at the back of his house. When they hadn’t seen their resident alien for a while, the people of the pub, who never really knew when he was off on one of his trips abroad, would despatch a party along Marine Parade to knock on his door, as happened after his heart attack in 1975, and they did these things while also leaving him alone. “I don’t want to get personal” is among the English phrases Johnson noted with approval, along with other collected gems — “We want you to stay as you are: handsome and poor”, “All gone to buggery” and no doubt others of a more local nature, such as the present-day example, “There’s money on Sheppey but nobody knows where it is”.
It is likely Jens was right to suggest that the “common people” in the pub coped with Johnson better than the intellectuals who’d recoiled from his impossible outbursts in the literary world of West Berlin. They also handled Jens in their own obliging way, offering their testimony in the deadpan catastrophic tone characteristic of the more abandoned towns around the Thames Estuary. We can’t crawl back into the bar to count up the rounds Jens may have bought to lubricate his enquiries, but he managed to get the cardiganed publican Ron Peel to oblige his attendant photographer, Nomi Baumgartl, to act out Johnson’s movements during his very last appearance at the bar. He’d come in unexpectedly in the afternoon on 22 February 1984, sweating and looking completely overwhelmed. Having knocked back a pint, he’d left the bar and then returned later, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes, as Peel himself went on to do with an appropriately ghoulish expression, and then, after swallowing another three pints, finally stepped out into oblivion with a silent nod.23
Fortunately, Johnson can still speak for himself. A few years before that dismal night, he had provided another East German writer, Walter Kempowski, with his own account of his encounters with the people of Sheerness, on the promenade but also, to be sure, in the pub:
[A GERMAN AMONG THE ENGLISH]
It is also high time to answer your question about how the German is doing here among the English.
As my first witness, I call a retiree whom the gentlemen his age respectfully call “Major”, who noticed my accent straight off and wanted to know more precisely where I came from. — From Berlin, I offered, keeping in mind the people in Berlin whom he had every reason to want to impugn. — Berlin, what a splendid city! he cried. He’d spent his honeymoon there, in 1921. And he wanted to buy me a round — be a dashing young fellow tonight! he encouraged. What I learned from others was that he had marched into Berlin with the first troops, in 1945, and that ever since then he had expressed an unshakeable opinion about the Germans as a race, but making an exception for me, the individual, the guest.
As my next witnesses, I present people on the promenade, passersby, neighbours. We open the conversation, as one does, with the weather. Gray weather we’re having, dampish, makes for long nights; it surely is annoying how there’s nothing on the telly. — Nah there’s something tonight, someone says, and I know the program he means, since he says the time it’s on: 9:25. A documentary about Auschwitz. But he looks right past me and says peevishly: Oh, just an ol’ story from the war.
Another one takes the spot next to me and tells me outright that I have a German background, immediately transitioning to the comment that I was lucky, geographically speaking, since if I was from the Ruhr he would have helped bomb me to ducking bits, possessor as he is of the Distinguished Flying Cross. But that’s all over now, he says, and he says he forgives me, as far as he’s concerned. Says it and that’s that. I never saw him again, because he was banned from the bar for breaking the rule in force there: talking about politics is indelicate, and private attacks are not allowed.
In sum, they are unanimous in never forgetting the German’s nationality and history while the majority have decided not to talk about it, in order to leave him in peace, since he clearly prefers coming to terms with it in silence.
This can be taken to the point of protecting him from other people with that same background, Germans on holiday comparing their respective native cities a little too loudly with this one, which seems to them ugly, cramped, poor, and dirty. They try to convey in English that they desperately need to find a roof over their heads, a bed under their backs, and breakfast included. The locals know that there is a German sitting right there with them, who could ease these visitors’ accommodation and orientation problems straightaway in their own language. But since they can see from his whole demeanour how little connection he feels or wants with such countrymen, they conceal him in a conversation in English and watch the tourists leave as if they had something urgent to say on the tip of their tongues that they would nonetheless refrain from saying, at least to me. And I think I might have some idea what it is.
[Letter to Walter Kempowski, 3 August 198124]
*
Many of the stories Tilman Jens gathered in the Napier Tavern recounted events that had actually taken place in a different Shepherd Neame establishment on the other side of the
Broadway. The now demolished Sea View Hotel was a considerable Victorian building that stood next to the Catholic Church and only a hundred or so yards to the west of the Napier, and it was here, in the bar on the southern side of the hotel, that Johnson had first become familiar with the joint publicans Ron Peel and Col Mason. It was also here rather than in the Napier, which Peel and Mason only took over in 1981, that his first Christmas Eve “baptism” as “Charles” had taken place: thanks, according to Johnson’s version of the story, to the initiative of “a man known as Joe”.25
For Jim Enright, who remembers the Sea View as it was in the Sixties, the room that mattered most in those days was on the first floor and called the “Rose Room”. It was here that Enright, or “Stitch” as he was known at the time, started running a dance music club. As described in The Rise and Fall of the Beat Groups in Sittingbourne,26 Enright was drummer with the Rock Spots and then with the Rebounds, which he had founded as the first beat group in the area in 1959. He’d launched the Rebounds Dance Club after the people running the previous trad jazz nights in the Rose Room had thrown in the towel. He remembers pushing the fights out onto the sea wall directly to the north of the hotel, and being commended by a Sheerness policeman who declared himself pleased to know where all the island’s villains could be found on a Saturday night. As for hiring bands, Enright had a system of asking aspirants to perform for free on an audition night, and inviting them back for a paid engagement if they made the grade. The bands that passed through on these terms included the Lower Third from Maidstone and Margate, whose recently employed singer, David Jones, would shortly change his name to Bowie.
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 39