In October 1977, so Seiler suggests, Elisabeth herself started calling, asking for the letters and explaining that they had become necessary to the continuation of her marriage. In desperate straits, she even offered to buy them from Volek, but he rejected this suggestion as an insult that destroyed whatever was left of their friendship, declaring himself “tired of having to deal with the obsessions of a forty-five-year old psychopath”. He finally dismissed Elisabeth after a further call in which she said she would arrange for someone to pick up the letters from his home. Outraged but keen to resolve the situation, he is said to have left a selection in an envelope by the door and told his mother to give them to whomsoever turned up for them. No such caller arrived but the letters allegedly vanished all the same, presumably into the hands of the Czechoslovak state security service. That, in Volek’s account, is where the exchange came to an end.
For three years, the Johnsons remained together in No. 26, but the situation worsened when news of the skein of suspicions ramifying in Johnson’s mind reached literary circles in West Germany. Someone (fingers would be pointed in the direction of Fritz J. Raddatz) revealed the tensions they’d seen in Sheerness, and Johnson, who had a strong sense of personal privacy, felt himself doubly compromised as the story went into circulation. It had been bad enough that the literary world in West Germany wouldn’t stop speculating about his apparently endless delay in completing Anniversaries but the new topic had, in his own interpretation, placed him in a situation like that faced by the Prussian Baron Geert von Innstetten, in Theodore Fontane’s late-nineteenth-century novel Effi Briest. Innstetten has discovered letters revealing that his much younger wife has had an affair when the couple were living in Pomerania years previously. Such was the “paranoid logic of honour”,8 however, that he only felt obliged to react by challenging her lover to a duel once the affair was known by others.9
If no one had known about Johnson’s suspicions, so the “Innstetten-reflex”10 is said to have unfolded in his mind, he just might have been able to let the past go and achieve a reconciliation with his wife. As it was, he and Elisabeth separated in 1978 and, the following year, he condemned his wife out loud in the last of a series of five autobiographical lectures on poetics delivered at Goethe University in Frankfurt. In doing so, he also revealed that the “betrayal” of which he accused her had by this time spread into a new area of his life. Like his publishers, Johnson had been aware of the very real possibility of Stasi surveillance over his activities while he was living in West Berlin, and he was still watchful during his years in Sheerness. He had said as much to Martin Harris and he also asked Michael Hamburger not to give out his address or phone number to anyone at all. Indeed, their friendship was suspended for a year or so after Hamburger forgot this edict, thereby obliging Johnson to open his door one day in 1976 to find the Iranian poet Cyrus Atabay smiling into his face.11 He and Atabay had met before in West Berlin, but the novelist’s fury at this accidental betrayal of confidence was exacerbated by the fact that, as Johnson knew but Hamburger did not, the intruding poet was a cousin of the hated Shah of Iran.
By 1979, Johnson’s suspicion of surveillance had entered his disintegrating marriage and started interfering with his writing too. In the book he would later make of his Frankfurt Lectures, Accompanying Circumstances (Begleitumstände), he declared that he had “let himself be helped” in his work by the graduate of a Prague seminar whom he had “mistaken for his wife” and, looked on as a “co-worker” in the final volume of Anniversaries, which he intended to close on the day before Soviet and allied tanks entered Czechoslovakia to extinguish the Prague Spring. It now appeared that “since the autumn of 1961, she had been in close contact with a confidant of the STB, the Czechoslovakian State Security Service”.12
Thanks to this additional “fact” about Volek, which Johnson would later claim to have discovered in the spring of 1978 (“not by my wife, but by accident” he would assert in his English “Statement to my Executors” of 21 February 1983), he had realised that “his dealings with the Czechoslovakian elements” of Anniversaries IV, were by no means as independent or free-spirited as he might have expected”. In Accompanying Circumstances, Johnson blamed the shocking discovery for his heart attack, and also for his lack of progress on the novel. The revelation had caused “damage to the subject” of his unfinished book and brought about the “writer’s block” that had prevented resumption of the project. A person in the “state of depression” that followed such a revelation might, so Johnson went on in his chosen subjunctive way, “sit down at the typewriter at the usual time, as soon as the doctors allowed him to do so”. He would, however, “experience a complete inability to put anything on paper with which he wishes to address future readers”. Undermined in his professional integrity as well as at the heart of his personal life, this “person” was immobilised for three years. Unable to re-establish contact with his primary character, Gesine Cresspahl, he had to teach himself “to write again at the age of forty-four, with two lines a day, five lines a week, but after three months seventeen pages”.
Elisabeth Johnson had left the house as the idea that she was some sort of spy and literary saboteur gripped her husband’s mind, moving to a smaller residence at 47 Unity Street, a couple of streets inland from Marine Parade, where Katharina would join her. The parents lived only a few hundred yards from one another but the break was final: there was to be no contact between them. In order to prevent accidental encounters, Johnson divided the streets of the neighbourhood between the two of them, also drawing up a schedule of times when they might safely use the same shops without bumping into one another. “It was bad”, said Muriel Adams, who cleaned house for Johnson, “you didn’t mention the name of one in the presence of the other. Last year, we almost had a terrible mishap when sending our Christmas greetings … Charles would never have forgiven us for that”. Susan Harris also told Jens of how Johnson had come to their house a few weeks after the separation. He wrote an address on a piece of paper and asked if it meant anything to them. “‘Yes, Elisabeth lives there’, I answered. Charles got up and left without a word”. And that was how things remained until the end. “He wanted to forget her”, Susan Harris told me thirty years later, but “was always in her tracks”.
*
If the Harrises were representative, it may be that none of Johnson’s acquaintances in Sheerness knew about the causes of the breach or, for that matter, about the coverage given to Johnson’s accusations in the Federal Republic after the publication of Accompanying Circumstances in 1980. Some in West Germany may have leapt at the story, but others were horrified by Johnson’s accusations and their implications for his wife and daughter. Günter Grass, who had been close to the Johnsons in Berlin, described his allegations about the still unnamed Volek and Elisabeth as a “gruesome fiction”.13 The East German writer and film director Thomas Brasch also discovered how impossible it was to check Johnson’s descent into chaos. He had first met the writer at Siegfried Unseld’s home in Frankfurt on 8 January 1977, during Suhrkamp’s twenty-fifth anniversary celebrations. Brasch had made his own departure from the GDR only a few weeks before (he left following the GDR’s decision to expatriate the dissident writer and singer Wolf Biermann while he was touring West Germany), and Johnson gave him some useful advice about the challenges of the transition to the West and, in particular, the importance of holding onto your independence as a writer and not allowing yourself to be made over into the grateful victim some Western observers expected you to be.14
Brasch, who had survived a hated British public school as well as the GDR jail to which he had been sentenced for demonstrating his support for the Prague Spring, would later look back with sympathy on the difficulties Johnson had faced in the West. He understood that the GDR was in some respects an easier place for a writer to work than the West, with all its demands and distractions. He also believed that Johnson had hoped to regain his focus by moving to Sheerness, where he had tried to recreate �
��Mecklenburg in England” so that he might follow his admired William Faulkner and concentrate on building “a new country through letters”. In Johnson’s defence, he quoted the “beautiful Jewish proverb” declaring “You may be paranoid but that doesn’t mean people aren’t out to get you”.
The people out to get Johnson may not have been the Czechoslovak or East German state security agents, whose interest in his unfinished novel Johnson surely overestimated. He may, however, have been right to feel hounded by the literary gossips in West Germany who had given up waiting for the final volume of Anniversaries, and were now wondering out loud about the possibility that their brilliant, difficult writer had finally gone crazy on his English desert island. Brasch admitted that he had himself played the role of just such a “culture buffoon” when he and Johnson met up again in the slipstream of the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1982. He was aware that Johnson had by then convinced himself that his wife was a Czech agent trying to damage his work on Anniversaries IV by such unlikely ruses as getting him copies of the wrong articles from the New York Times. He knew better than to tell Johnson he thought this accusation “a joke” but he did, nevertheless, make the mistake of giving the author some uninvited advice about the unfinished novel that was obviously weighing so grievously on him. Like Michael Hamburger, who had similar thoughts about the condition of his apparently self-condemned friend in Sheerness, Brasch rashly suggested that Johnson might consider letting Volume IV remain as “a collection of material”. His idea was that Anniversaries could be allowed to rest incomplete as literary modernism’s last and perhaps most splendid installation: a “tripartite country on a high mountain” with the three already published volumes standing next to each other “and behind them a huge heap of paper” containing the drafts and research materials assembled for Volume IV. Johnson was predictably disgusted at the suggestion, accusing Brasch of thinking him unable to complete the work and insisting that, as a writer himself, Brasch would surely be just as insulted by such a suggestion. Brasch wrote a poem entitled “Half Sleep”, dedicated to Johnson and published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 26 November 1982. After Johnson’s death, a framed copy of the cutting was found hanging on the wall beside his desk.15
THOMAS BRASCH
THOMAS BRASCH
Halb Schlaf
Half Sleep
für Uwe Johnson
for Uwe Johnson
Und wie in dunkle Gänge mich in mich selbst verrannt, verhängt in eigne Stränge mit meiner eignen Hand:
And as if in dark corridors stuck inside myself, tangled in my own ropes by my own hand:
So lief ich durch das Finster in meinem Schädelhaus: Da weint er und da grinst er und kann nicht mehr heraus.
I ran through the dark in the house of my skull: There he sobs and he grins and can never escape.
Das sind die letzten Stufen, das ist der letzte Schritt, der Wächter hört mein Rufen und ruft mein Rufen mit aus meinem Augenfenster in eine stille Nacht; zwei rufende Gespenster: eins zittert und eins lacht.
These are the last stages, this is the last footstep, the watchman hears my cries and cries my cries with me out the window of my eyes into a quiet night — two crying ghosts: one trembling, one laughing.
Dann schließt mit dunklen Decken er meine Augen zu: jetzt schlafen und verstecken und endlich Ruh.
Then with dark sheets he closes my eyes: now to sleep and to hide, now rest at last.
*
Like the Harrises at No. 24, we may count the bottles going into a neighbour’s house but who would presume to know for sure exactly what is happening between the people inside? After reading Seiler’s account of the break-up, we must nevertheless suspect that Johnson turned his marriage into a Strindbergian inferno in which exaggerated and false significance could be attached to the tiniest event or gesture. Seiler, who writes primarily in order to challenge the accusation against Volek, accepts that Johnson may well have convinced himself of the truth of the conspiracy theory he derived from his wife’s alleged confession. He insists, however, that Volek was not an agent of the Czechoslovak STB, and that Elisabeth, whom Seiler has never met, was therefore innocent of the same charge. He notes that, while Johnson never admitted his error, he did eventually row back a little from his accusations, conceding that Elisabeth may not have known she was being manipulated. And Volek? Having himself been an object of suspicion — not just to Hermann Kesten, who had denounced him as an “agent” in 1961, but to some who had known him as a student at Leipzig and continued to wonder about his apparently effortless emigration to the West16 — Johnson might indeed have been more careful with his charges. He would appear, though, never to have paused long enough in his calculations to recognise that there was a real person behind the phantom he had made of Volek on the far side of the Iron Curtain, and one who may well have been endangered by his hostile and intemperate approaches.
We know, from August Strindberg once again, that an agonising marriage can keep people going even when an outsider only sees two people manoeuvring in a prolonged and demeaning “dance of death”. We can, however, only speculate about the extent to which Johnson’s allegations may also have endured for more or less instrumental reasons. It is conceivable that the story of sabotage and betrayal acquired some more or less conscious utility for Johnson, providing not just a weapon with which to punish his wife but an excuse for his own protracted delay in completing Anniversaries IV. Seiler notes that the accusation against Volek was allowed to stand after Johnson’s death by some concerned to defend his literary reputation. At the head of his list stands Johnson’s editor and publisher at Suhrkamp, Siegfried Unseld, who surely should at some point have corrected the record. It is conceivable that for Unseld, who continued to fund Johnson through his last solitary years in Sheerness, the alleged conspiracy worked to reduce any thought that the pressure he was placing on his writer to complete Anniversaries — as the publisher’s advance grew into a huge and unsustainable debt — might have been among the causes of the final collapse. Such were the pressures placed on Elisabeth as the situation unfolded after Johnson’s death, that she is even said at one point to have advised Volek, through a lawyer, that he should let the accusation against him stand and confine his denial, if he really felt one was necessary, to a statement he might send to the Uwe Johnson Archive where it could be withheld from public view until a later date. For Seiler, who traces this story from Volek’s perspective, a critical judgement of both Johnson’s behaviour and Unseld’s assent is inescapable: “To make such an accusation was as effective as it was free from risk in 1980 — there was practically no evidence to the contrary. Even if Volek had found out about the accusation at the time — and not, as he claimed to have done, by reading about himself in a newspaper during a trip to Berlin in the late Nineties — he would have been powerless against it … where could he have been heard and who would have believed him against the testimony of Uwe Johnson and Siegfried Unseld?” It. was only after the raising of the Iron Curtain that it became possible for Seiler to establish that there was “no basis whatsoever” for Johnson’s charges.
Desperate Dan as Easter Island Monolith, Andrew Whelan’s Gnome factory, Blue Town, 2016
*
As for writing of the searching, multi-voiced, scrupulously informed kind for which Johnson is known, this was surely irreconcilable with conspiratorial understanding in which all complexity and nuance is collapsed into an obsessive delusion. Johnson’s work on the Anniversaries project may have been “blocked” after the summer 1975, but he did keep working on other texts, including a novella entitled Sketch of an Accident Victim (Skizze eines Verunglückten). First published in 1981, but reputedly written in 1975, this is a disconcerting work in which Johnson pulls his reader into the mind of an émigré writer who has murdered his unfaithful wife. Arresting in its autobiographical resonances, the novella also retains a sense of complexity absent from the accusations the author levelled against his own wife.
The story opens
with an extract quoted from the acceptance speech Johnson gave when receiving the prestigious Büchner Prize in 1971.17 Here he describes an old man making his way through the streets of New York’s Upper West Side to his customary restaurant. The place, which had once been his, is now run by Puerto Ricans, who have become used to this survivor’s evening routine. He arrives at seven, takes up his regular position with his back to the window facing the street, and only ever orders coffee and toast, since that is all he can afford. He sits there, talking to himself or “to dead people” (although “the dead can’t be Germans”) and placing his order in a still strongly accented voice: “Ssänk ju”, he says, in an English that Irish customers sometimes helpfully adjust and repeat on his behalf. The extract closes with something that American officials had said at his naturalisation ceremony in 1941. They had warned him against giving up his German citizenship. “He might get homesick after the war. Homesick”.
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 47