The Sea View Has Me Again

by Patrick Wright

  Williams’s comment offended some readers, including Mrs D. Simmonds of Gillingham, whose letter appeared on 30 March under the heading “My Russian Trip Impressed Me”. She was disgusted at the Evening Post for treating two of its “Opinion Correspondents” so rudely, adding that not so long ago she’d been on a trip to Moscow and Leningrad organised by none other than the Kent Evening Post itself, which had printed pictures and news of “all the wonderful things we saw”. This precedent did not justify an enforced relocation: “I love the Canary Islands, Norway and Switzerland but that does not mean I want to go and live there”.

  Two further letters appeared on 3 April. One came from another of the Post’s more seasoned correspondents, B. Harding, who forcefully demolished the fantasy of the Soviet bloc as a “Red paradise” (“Try telling it to the prisoners behind the Berlin Wall and to the relatives of those murdered by East German [Russian puppet] border guards…”). The second, which was both shorter and more elliptical, was from Uwe Johnson.

  “I thought it best to keep my mouth shut”, Johnson had declared a couple of years earlier, when the makers of a BBC radio documentary asked about his reluctance to pontificate about the Berlin Wall in the early Sixties. We know from one of his letters to Christa Wolf, that Johnson had no intention of breaking his rule of silence in order to engage with the views of his British namesake — he called the Rainham Stalinist “Brian, unfortunately also Johnson”8 — or of the second representative of insular English culture named Box. Yet he did feel obliged to comment on editor Williams’s breach of a principle that might well have been taken for granted at the “Institute for the Preservation of British Customs”, his imaginary New York establishment in the first volume of Anniversaries.

  As Johnson explained to Wolf, it was the editor’s comments that finally got to him, since they surely placed the paper “in breach of British fairness”. The editor had mockingly asked “Brian” for a postcard, so Uwe Johnson, the “unacknowledged humorist”, finally overcame his reluctance to interfere in British political life, and pulled one from his collection. He favoured interwar views of Sheerness street scenes but he might just as well have chosen a card showing the Olau Line’s passenger ferry approaching Sheerness from the Dutch town the British insisted on calling Flushing: a service that Johnson was pleased to watch sailing back and forth to Europe, apparently undeterred by the fact that it had been condemned, shortly after it opened in 1975, by a Sittingbourne farmer named Michael Nightingale. A Conservative County Councillor who also ran rubber and tea plantations in the Far East, the latter had informed Kent’s Planning and Transport Committee that “all the hippies in Europe” now invaded Sheerness railway station every morning”, before moving on to Sittingbourne where they would “clog” the commuter train to London and “annoy ordinary travellers” with their rucksacks.9

  Printed on 3 April 1981, Johnson’s message appeared under a heading that proved that Barrie the editor, had at least got the joke if not the full point about his breach of British values:

  Just the ticket!

  Referring to the Editor’s final argument against Messrs Box & Johnson (March 25).

  Let the two of us find a country to disagree upon. On conclusion, he would owe me a one-way ticket to the capital of that country, and I might send him a card.

  —U. Johnson, Marine Parade, Sheerness.

  Having posted his card, Johnson had gone off on another trip abroad and forgotten all about it. When he returned to Sheerness he was, so he told Christa Wolf, “informed from all sides” that his message had been printed, together with his name and address. “But no one kept the paper. So now I am waiting in uncertainty for a public discussion of Tierra del Fuego or Canada, and looking forward to a ticket. I hope it’ll end up being New Zealand”.

  26. IMPLOSION: TWO STORIES FROM THE SITE

  The intended reader may have been lying on a beach, although possibly not in Sheerness, or any of the other struggling “on-Sea” resorts forming a “necklace of poverty” around London.1 The story itself, however, opens on an ordinary Monday morning in just that sort of place, where a mother is struggling to disentangle the sound of the radio from her dreams. She drifts back to sleep for a moment before hauling herself out of bed to awaken the two children, who scramble for their clothes and the bathroom before rousing their father and heading down for the breakfast their mother is preparing in the kitchen.

  In the midst of this hurried daily routine, the mother reflects that, although largely content with her life, she nevertheless still feels the desire for “a bit of excitement now and then”. Nothing excessive, of course, but “just enough to prove we are not as dull and boring as we may appear on the surface”. With this thought in mind, she glances out of the window and across to the back garden of a neighbour called “Gilbert”, where a “splash of colour” catches her eye. “It was the most perfect rose she had ever seen. The pale yellow and pink of the petals exactly echoing the tints on the wispy clouds on the summer morning dawn sky. It was neither a bud nor yet full blown. It was at that in-between stage when roses are in their prime. The impact it made on her was so vivid that it was as if the delicate, flowery perfume was all round her, fresh and fragrant”. Before she has time to think better of it, she hears herself telling her sleepy husband, “If you were full of passion instead of egg and bacon, you would get that for me”. When he eventually comes round to the fact that she has spoken, she explains her impulsive proposal: “I just thought it would be rather romantic if you leaped over the wall and got it for me”. The children are horrified, exclaiming “That would be stealing, Mummy”, as they are packed into the car by their father, who drives them off to catch their train for school.

  Once they are gone, the mother reflects on her sudden and impulsive remark, deciding that her husband, who was actually quite romantic already, had been kind not to point out how unromantic she herself looked at this time of day — hair unbrushed, no make-up, outdoor sandals on her feet. The assignment, meanwhile, would be challenging. Her husband would have to “climb over two walls and take a ladder with him” to be able to reach the rose. If he was seen as he clambered about in those overlooked back gardens, he might be charged with theft, of acting while drunk, of being a peeping Tom, or even of indulging in petty espionage in the hope of discrediting a different neighbour who was then standing in the local council elections. So the matter is forgotten until the next morning, when the mother wakes to find the plucked rose on her kitchen table: “The perfume was as lovely as she had imagined it would be. It was an exquisitely formed flower with a presence quite out of proportion to its size”. The story ends with a final guilty glance at Gilbert’s deprived garden, and a resolution: “One day they must tell Gilbert — she was sure he would understand”.

  Entitled “The Forbidden Rose”, the story was written by Susan Harris for a competition run by Woman’s Own. A winning entry, it was published in the magazine’s “Holiday Reading Special” for 1982. While the narrative sits safely within the conventions of romantic fiction, it was also true to its author’s life. The rear window, through which the rose was glimpsed across a neighbour’s garden, had been Susan Harris’ own at No. 24 Marine Parade in Sheerness. The man she named “Gilbert” was actually Uwe Johnson, two doors to the east at No. 26, and the adventure with the rose had unfolded in real life more or less as she described it. Susan’s husband Martin remembers her issuing the challenge, and also how the solitary rose was made more exceptional by the bewildered state of Johnson’s garden, which had been allowed to wander during the year when the solitary author — unwell and ever more in debt to his publisher — was still failing to complete the long-awaited fourth volume of Anniversaries.

  Woman’s Own Summer Reading Special, 1982.

  At first, when Susan put the challenge to her husband, Martin had offered to ask Johnson if he would mind giving them the rose, confident that the writer could hardly care less about the flower. For Susan, however, this was to miss the point. Her des
ire for romance would not be satisfied unless her husband did the thing properly: sneaking out in the middle of the night and struggling over walls and fences before reaching up to steal the solitary prize. By this stage in Johnson’s residency the garden was, Martin recalls, an almost solid block of “thorns and weeds and ivy”, held up by the side walls, and, towards the centre, by the now-rotting pergolas put in place by the women who had owned the house before Johnson. So there he was, as Martin remembers, late that same night, “up to my knees in the mud, fighting my way through all these thorns and ivy underneath the pergola arch, trying to think where’s that bloody rose, got some secateurs in my hand and the ladder I’m dragging through … I said is he in bloody America, bullying the students over there, or is his head going to come out of the window saying, ‘Vat are you doing in my garden at three in the morning?’ But he didn’t come through. I managed to fight my way up, and get well scratched doing it, snip this rose off, bring it back, find a nice vase, put it in the vase with a little note with a kiss in it. I got brownie points for that romantic thing”. And, as Harris closed in his own plain-speaking way, “Susan wrote a story that you could only call the worst of Mills & Boon”.

  That verdict sounds harsh, yet Susan willingly confirmed that her effort placed her as far as it was possible to be from Johnson in the literary hierarchy. The German author, whose novel she had struggled and failed to understand, probably wouldn’t have minded at all about Martin’s theft of his flower, but she shudders to think how he might have greeted her “silly soppy story”. There was never any question of her showing him the page on which she had made a “forbidden” flower of his rose. “That seems a pity”, so Johnson’s biographer Katja Leuchtenberger told me in Rostock, confident that Johnson — who was certainly capable of acts of kindness — would indeed have “understood” the situation.

  *

  As might be deduced from the wilderness into which Martin Harris was obliged to trespass in order to pick that bewildered flower for his wife, things had changed in 26 Marine Parade since the Johnsons had moved in and started drawing up optimistic plans for their garden. (In some “agricultural news” relayed to Max Frisch in March 1976, Johnson noted that the “ministry responsible” — i.e. Elisabeth and himself — had been trying to decide whether an “irreplaceable” rosebush should be cut back further, or otherwise rescued from the rampant honeysuckle already threatening to extinguish it.2) Although the Johnsons kept their private life very much to themselves, the Harrises knew about the serious heart attack the writer had suffered in June 1975, just as they recognised in later years that he drank far too much and remained unwell — “I could have pushed him over with a finger”, said Martin of the large and sometimes challenging man whom Günter Kunert had also registered as a teetering “colossus” on the doorstep. They also noticed the tensions leading up to the couple’s separation in 1978. When I talked with the Harrises over thirty years later, both were still pained by the memory of looking on as involuntary bystanders at somebody else’s calamity: “They were as bad as each other”, said Martin, as he recalled a situation he and his wife had been left to understand through its external indications. It was part of their unEnglishness, so Harris seemed to suggest, that neither of the Johnsons knew “the first thing about the art of compromise”.

  The situation leading up to the separation has more recently been described by the German academic Bernt W. Seiler.3 In his account, which was published in 2006 and remains (as he observes) uncontested if not universally approved in Johnson circles, the crisis had indeed begun in the summer of 1975, when Elisabeth revealed — “unwillingly”, as Johnson would later allege in a “Statement to my Executors” written on 21 February 1983, and “by a slip of the tongue” — that she had been conducting what Johnson called “a steady affair” with a man living in Prague.4 Seiler, who claims to be the first to have publicly revealed the name of the man in question, dates the encounter back to October 1961, when Elisabeth Schmidt was twenty-six years old and studying Indology in Leipzig. She and another GDR student, Erika Jäckel, had travelled to Prague with their lecturer Eberhardt Klemm, a former student of Ernst Bloch’s, who was then teaching musicology. While there, she decided to stay in Prague to study for a semester. Klemm’s Czechoslovak contact, a historian of music and Mozart scholar named Tomislav Volek, agreed to take her to concerts and show her around the city. Volek, who was a few years older than Elisabeth and had learned German in school under Nazi occupation, is said to have been pleased to meet a German who had herself suffered some of the consequences of the Third Reich (Elisabeth’s father and mother had died in 1944 and 1945 respectively) and a romance had developed between them.

  Seiler notes that, while Elisabeth had been friends with Uwe Johnson since 1956, this brief liaison took place at a time when the future was unpredictable. For the previous three months, the Berlin Wall had stood between the pair, and there could be no certainty how or when they would meet again. The matter was resolved in February 1962, shortly after her semester in Prague, when Johnson arranged for student “escape helpers” to smuggle Elisabeth through the closed frontier to West Berlin (they were married that same month). She and Volek continued to correspond. On a few later occasions, they also met up when Volek got permission to attend conferences in the West. Seiler mentions a day or two in Salzburg in September 1964: Volek was in the city with a delegation from the Czechoslovak Composers’ Association at a time when Johnson, who by then had “many obligations as a well-established author”, is said to have been travelling about in Holstein looking for a place in which to set part of his novel Two Views. Another brief meeting is said to have taken place in November 1965, when Johnson was on a reading tour promoting Two Views. That time, Elisabeth is said to have paid for a flight from Hanover so that she and Volek could share a visit to the opera in Berlin, thus putting a secret break in Volek’s closely monitored itinerary. From then on, they maintained an intermittent and, as Volek recalled, largely “poetic-melancholic” correspondence. When the Johnsons were living in New York City, Elisabeth wrote about possibly continuing her studies at Columbia University, and also offered coded observations about conditions in Czechoslovakia after the suppression of the Prague Spring, or noted the contrast between the upbeat cheerfulness of New Yorkers and the fact that people were turning up at the city’s hospitals more or less daily having tried to commit suicide.

  Although it is not for us to join the journalists and lawyers who have, for better or worse, passed judgement on this situation in Germany, we may still suspect with Seiler that the liaison between Volek and Elisabeth was something that many partners would have been able to leave in the past. Seiler, who wrote after meeting Volek in Prague, also suggests that their ongoing correspondence was really just an exchange between friends — sufficiently innocent for Volek to think nothing of sending his occasional letters directly to the Johnsons’s home address and, as Seiler also suggests, for Elisabeth to have thought little of letting her husband know about the situation in 1975. Even Johnson, who over the course of his life had come to place great emphasis on personal trust and loyalty, would later claim, in that same Statement of 21 February 1983, to have understood the matter as “a private and personal affair to the point of my forgiving her and attempting a reconciliation by going on to live with her”. Be that as it may, he also registered the disclosed events as a grievous betrayal that continued to rankle in his mind. By the time he wrote to Hannah Arendt at the beginning of August 1975, Elisabeth had become “my dear wife Mrs Letsnotdiscussit”.5 Over the years to come, this private crisis may also have informed his expressions of sympathy for some of the men in the pub who had argued with or been kicked out by their wives. He might have offered help or even a bed for the night to some of these unhoused fellows, but there were limits to his sympathy. He had, for example, nothing to offer the misogynist who sat down next to “Charles” in the Sea View one night in 1977 and asked him what he thought about women. Having failed that test (“Oh,
I replied, in the island manner: I am very much in favour of personal relationships”), Johnson politely declined the subsequent invitation to write the stranger’s story.6 He informed Helen Wolff that he was pleased to get home that evening without suffering an attempt on his life from this aggressive fellow: a “real blighter”, so Johnson was informed by friendlier drinkers, who might have found an adequate summary of his outlook by taking a stroll down Black Griffin Lane in Canterbury where, as I recall from my brief spell as a milkman, a resident maniac had seen fit to daub the words “Woman is the curse of the world” around the arch above his front door.

  Seiler, who met Volek several times in Prague,7 confirms that Elisabeth did what she could to settle the suspicions metastasising in her husband’s mind. She is said to have written a confessional “diary” of her encounters with Volek in a notebook, and, at some point in the summer of 1975, to have written to Volek in Prague, asking for the return of her letters so that she could demonstrate their harmlessness. This wasn’t easily done across the Iron Curtain, and Volek’s reluctance may only have intensified Johnson’s desire to see them. He tried unsuccessfully to involve Günter Grass’s wife Anna in the attempted recovery, asking her to use their acquaintance with the widow of the translator Vladimir Kafka to help extract the letters. When that failed, he tried Erika Klemm (formerly Jäckel), the other Leipzig student who had gone to Prague alongside Elisabeth and her own husband-to-be in October 1961. She passed on Elisabeth’s letters to herself and, in 1977, returned to Prague to do what she could with Volek.

  According to Seiler, their meeting was unproductive, perhaps not surprisingly since Volek had difficulties of his own. He had been in trouble with the authorities in Prague ever since 1972, when he had refused to retract an article he had written likening Soviet condemnation of “formalistic music” to the Nazi pillorying of “degenerate art”. Indeed, he had been sacked from his job at the Prague Academy of Sciences. Not an easy time, then, in which to deal with Johnson’s next move in his bid for the “return” of Elisabeth’s letters. At 1am, the phone rang in the small flat Volek then shared with his mother. He picked it up to hear the word “Johnson” uttered in a “funereal” voice. There were more calls like that, in which Johnson said little more that “Send me my wife’s letters”, with neither explanation nor argument by way of justification. Volek is said to have become both furious and uncooperative. The danger to which he was being exposed, at that time when calls from the West were closely monitored by the Czechoslovak security services, became all too obvious when he answered the phone to hear a man announce himself as “Jonsen” and then start talking in Czech about “letters of my wife”. The caller, who was plainly not Johnson, ignored Volek’s request that he speak in German but cursed and hung up when Volek reverted to Czech, dismissing him as a liar and an agent of state security.