So Johnson opens his story in an émigré Jewish world he had himself come to understand with the help of the philosopher Hannah Arendt in New York City. In an article written immediately after her death in December 1975, he would recall taking Arendt, who lived as his near neighbour at 370 Riverside Drive, for a walk through a Jewish area in New York City. Here, she demonstrated a remarkable ability to “read” the faces of passersby, identifying the social position, occupation and former place of residence each had occupied before their world had been destroyed by the Nazis.18
As the novella develops, Johnson identifies his solitary diner as a German Jewish writer named Joe Hinterhand, who’d had to flee Germany as a young man in the Thirties. We next encounter this slyly named fellow as a younger man who has recently been released after serving ten years in a New York jail. Thanks to the kindness of old friends, Dr Hinterhand now sits in an apartment on Riverside Drive, looking out over the Hudson River, reviewing his life and the betrayal for which he had eventually murdered “Mrs Hinterhand”, the otherwise nameless woman who had left Germany to join him in exile first in England and later in the United States.
Johnson has Joe Hinterhand born in the same year as Hannah Arendt, 1906, but there can be little doubt that he saw something of himself in the betrayed writer of his narrative. He emphasises the connection by announcing that Hinterhand — the name evokes hindquarters as well as the last player (who may also be the dealer) in a game of skat — had started out as a foundling called “Joachim de Catt”, the pseudonym under which Johnson had at first thought of publishing Speculations about Jakob before deciding to leave the GDR for the West. No surprise either, in this claustrophobic theatre of associations, that the woman who is granted neither a voice nor any name except Mrs Hinterhand is described as a person who saves for holidays on the Baltic Sea, goes swimming as often as she can, and believes that the Russian Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai is misrepresented by those who say she thought having sex was of no more significance than drinking a glass of water, and that “the ideal remains the monogamous union based on great love”.19
The description of Dr Hinterhand’s early married life in Kent also resonates with what we know of the Johnson’s first months in Sheerness. Joe, who has been pleasantly surprised by his wife’s willingness to leave Germany in the Thirties to marry him in exile, recognises “during an idle journey through the southern provinces of England” that she must be “compensated for the lost Baltic sea with another coast”.20 So he uses “his last” and also “borrowed” money to buy a house “in a residential village north of Folkestone”, which then becomes more hers than his. Since “people liked her”, Mrs Hinterhand proves a useful presence during the two months of renovation, talking to the builders, electricians and plumbers about their specialities and acquiring “considerable knowledge of fishing and angling” while also discussing the comparative merits of the radio symphony orchestras of London, Vienna or Berlin. She would be well-liked when she accompanied her husband to the pub, and less inhibited than him in repeating “Cheerio” on leaving. When asked what had brought them to England, it was she who answered: “My husband did”.
No surprise either, that it is because the Hinterhands like “the sight of vast expanses of water”21 that, at a later period of their life, they eventually leave New York City and move, most implausibly, to Gardiner’s Island, just offshore from the wealthy Long Island settlement of East Hampton. It is here, in a village that Johnson imposes on this famously private island that is smaller, richer and a great deal more exclusive than the Isle of Sheppey, that readers are asked to imagine Joe Hinterhand deciding he would like to write his wife’s biography as they slide into a shared old age. He mentions his plan in a radio recording, and his subsequent action soon makes suggestive evidence of his late wife’s retort: “over my dead body”.22
All has seemed to go well enough for Joe Hinterhand until, one day in 1947, he discovers that “Mrs. Hinterhand” has been betraying him all along with her Italian fascist lover: at first “carnally”, and then in correspondence that has continued until 1947. From the moment he discovers this conspiracy against himself and his work, his consciousness had been “blocked against perceptions” and “new entrances”. Like Johnson’s own, it was “arrested, sealed, merely a container in which the past was rigidly administered”.23 As Johnson explains, a deceived man looking back on his feelings as an expectant father can expect to see nothing but his own delusions, which “should be deleted”. Looking at old photographs, he sees his past life dissolving into a truth he had never suspected. The “ripple” on his wife’s forehead in the picture he took at Folkestone Central Station as they set off for America in 1939 is suddenly a sign of “her annoyance at having to say farewell to the grand hotels of the European mainland, to her weekends in hotels, dirty weekends”.24 He remembers holding forth into a microphone in Chicago during the Second World War, confidently denouncing the policy of American isolationism being advocated by the former aviator Charles Lindbergh (whom he saw as the man who had wanted the Nazis to bomb Folkestone) and blithely unaware that he was, all along, wide open to objection: “But your wife is sleeping with a fascist”.25 As for the pleasure he had once taken at the Anglo-German internationalism implied by the name she had chosen for her (their?) son Anthony, that too is suddenly cancelled by the realisation that there are Antonios in Italy too. Everything is lost in this exactly rendered nightmare of “transverse” knowledge.
Though much of the novella’s material is autobiographically derived, it remains a creatively revealing text, and by no means just a piece of displaced special pleading. Johnson wrote it partly in response to Max Frisch’s story “Sketch of an Accident”,26 in which a Swiss surgeon, who is driving along the French Riveria squabbling with his girlfriend, eventually drives his Porsche into a truck at a crossroads outside Montpelier (the girlfriend dies but he, who appears to know his responsibility, is declared guilty of nothing since he had the right of way). It has been suggested that Johnson’s novella testifies to his long-standing admiration for Bertolt Brecht, and the devices with which he wrote of engaging apparently accepted and obvious meanings while at the same time “making them strange”.27 The novella has also been hailed as an autobiography of the “shattered self”28 and, in a different strain, as a radically unsettling text that exposes “the weakness of male identity”29 by turning the tables on the anachronistic writer who espouses enlightenment values and knows the world primarily through concepts and texts — Johnson’s text is thick with quotations, mostly about marriage, drawn from Frisch but also Ernst Bloch, Kandinsky, Alice B. Toklas, the Austrian poet Marie Luise Kaschnitz, and many others — but who has no clue as to what is actually going on in his own life.
By the end, Hinterhand stands revealed as another “lonely” male writer who has reduced his voiceless and nameless wife to an assistant, who helps him revise his books and on whom he comes to rely as his only “connection with the world”. He may even, as Johnson seems to imply, have persuaded himself that Mrs Hinterhand had “wanted the deed” to be done, since it involved the destruction of the “image” to which her controlling husband had sought to confine her.30 Whatever else may be said about Johnson’s disintegrating marriage, this novella, which Fritz J. Raddatz commended as a “gruesome day of judgement”,31 demonstrates that Johnson continued to exist as a writer. It is a complex and genuinely creative text, even though it may fall short of the high mission attributed to “the independent capability of artistic thinking” by Hannah Arendt’s husband, Heinz Blücher, who had provided Johnson with impromptu “seminars” on politics, history and philosophy when the novelist stayed with Arendt and himself on Riverside Drive. While lecturing on Homer at Bard College, some fifty miles up the Hudson river in 1954, this former communist anti-Nazi German émigré, who claimed to have experienced five revolutions in his lifetime, had told his students that “Art is so mighty because it changes our perception of the world… If we love art and participate i
n the experience given there our entire being will be changed, so mighty is this experience and yet so harmless”.32 Art, in short, as something distinct from myth of all kinds — or at least, “as a myth we can live with, but in which we cannot live”.
PART VI.
THE STORM OF MEMORY: A NEW USE FOR THE SASH WINDOWS OF NORTH KENT
It all revolved around the view. It was the view that was appropriated.
— Uwe Johnson on Riverside Drive in “A Part of New York”, Dimension: Contemporary German Arts and Letters, 1968, p. 333.
Looking north from the front bedroom of 26 Marine Parade, Sheerness, 31 August 2018.
27. UNJAMMING MARCEL DUCHAMP’S LARGE GLASS
“I am not dead. I am in Herne Bay”.1 So wrote Marcel Duchamp on a postcard to his German friend Max Bergmann in August 1913. Earlier that year, Duchamp’s painting Nude Descending a Staircase had horrified critics at the Armory Exhibition in New York, but it is most unlikely anyone was bothered about that particular scandal in this popular seaside resort on the Kentish mainland, a few miles to the east of Whitstable. The rising French avant-gardist was there to chaperone his seventeen-year-old sister Yvonne as she attended English lessons at Lynton College, a private establishment on Downs Park, a couple of streets inland from the seafront. By day, he played tennis under clear skies. In the evenings, he enjoyed the electrically illuminated Herne Bay Pavilion, a huge hall with facilities for dancing and roller-skating, which had been opened on the town’s pier only two years previously.2 He was, so he assured Bergmann, quite “enchanted” by the place.
We know, too, that Duchamp continued to think about the project that, some ten years later, would yield one of the founding works of twentieth-century conceptual art: The Large Glass, also known as The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even. While in Herne Bay, he sketched various studies that would later be gathered into the work. He also clipped a photograph of the Grand Pier Pavilion illuminated at night, which would eventually appear attached to a note outlining the possible background to The Large Glass: “An electric fête recalling the decorative lighting of / Magic city or Luna Park, or the Pier Pavilion at Herne Bay”.3 In the same note Duchamp stated, apparently for the first time, “The picture will be executed on two large sheets of glass about 1.30 x 1.40 m / one above the other (demountable)”.
Grand Pier and Pavilion, Herne Bay. Postcard c. 1920.
These shreds of evidence were barely enough for those who organised the festival with which, in August 2013, Herne Bay marked the centenary of Duchamp’s visit — and especially not for the man who had inspired their festival’s most charming hypothesis. The artist and curator Jeremy Millar had surveyed every scrap of information he could find about Duchamp’s stay, and yet he’d still had to resort to fiction in the film he made about the episode in 2006. Entitled Zugzwang (Almost Complete), the film speculates in a spirit of “possible discovery” that Duchamp, who had indeed once said that he would like to refer to his work as “my windows” rather as a more traditional artist might speak of “my etchings”, got the idea of making The Large Glass on two panes of glass, one placed above the other, from “the larger sash windows of the grand Victorian houses in the town”. “Might he”, wonders Millar, “have considered The Large Glass as a sash window?”
Millar ventures the possibility that Duchamp had never seen sliding sash windows before coming to Herne Bay. Perhaps the man who would soon pioneer a new kind of “machine art” had been intrigued by their mechanism, to say nothing of the unexpected French devices that might, without too much effort, be flushed out of their English name: not just the “frame” that may found in the English “sash” (by courtesy of the French word “chassis”), but also the more menacing apparatus preserved in the French name for this characteristically English type of window, “fenêtre à guillotine”.
Certainly, The Large Glass makes effective use of its two “windows”. Duchamp referred to the upper one as the “Bride’s Domain” and the lower as the “Bachelors’ Apparatus”, and the work suggests both attraction and polarised repulsion between the two. The bride and her mechanically rendered bachelors are at once close and separate, their figures drawn towards one another and yet eternally frustrated by the frame separating them.
The connection Millar is seeking to establish between The Large Glass and the sash windows of Herne Bay might have been more resoundingly clinched — and definitely more “complete” — had Duchamp included some sort of sliding movement between his “windows” so that the frustration of both the bride and her bachelors might be registered not just by their adjacency but also by the superimposition of the two separate frames. Unfortunately (and I sympathise as one of the many former students who have struggled with jammed and rotten sash windows in rented off-season rooms in north Kent), he can’t get the things to shift at all. He does his best with the help of a photograph showing the two panes casually leant against one another while the work was still being assembled in Duchamp’s studio. That, however, is as far as Millar can persuade his hypothesis to go. He may, perhaps, be glad to hear of another major European artist who, some seven decades later, came to terms much more explicitly with the sash windows of north Kent.
Towards the end of 1974, when 26 Marine Parade was still being repaired and decorated prior to the final move from West Berlin, Johnson was pleased to inform Max Frisch that the front bedroom at the top of the house was being fitted with a double-glazed “louvre window”. The lower rooms, however, faced north across the estuary through large single-paned Victorian sashes. It was through their frame that Johnson glanced over an English sea view chosen at least partly because it reminded him of others. It was through these apparently displacing resemblances that he made his most significant engagement with English realities.
*
Johnson was talking about the pub when, in October 1975, he informed Erika Klemm that “The Sea View has me again”.4 However, the view from his house across the Thames Estuary also acquired a sense of uncanny familiarity that would extend far beyond the quickly noted fact that the southern stretch of the North Sea, which filled the right hand side of Johnson’s windows, was still occasionally described as the “German Ocean”.
Views over water mattered greatly to Johnson, and so too did the windows through which he, together with his principal character Gesine Cresspahl, often observed them. It has recently been pointed out that the “framed gaze” serves as a constellating principle of Anniversaries — and one that prevents Johnson’s evocation of New York City from becoming conventionally realist or “mimetic”. As Thomas Herold describes it, the “framing” is connected to “the German past” that lurks at the edge of Gesine Cresspahl’s field of vision, triggering “memories, hallucinatory daydreams, descriptive evocations, or symbolic references”5 that press into and shape her experience of the American metropolis. The containing frame converts the view into an “image”, which then goes on to evoke “corresponding images” from the unreachable past. This rising storm of memory serves to obscure the city, but it also enfolds the American present in recollections — often sudden, disconcerting and involuntary — of the unattainable Mecklenburg “home” for which Gesine sometimes yearns (although without forgetting the genocidal murder and ideological violence that have permanently dislodged her).
Johnson shows how this might work in the first volume of Anniversaries. It is 15 October 1967, and the ten-year-old Marie Cresspahl is sitting by the window in her mother Gesine’s three-roomed flat at 243 Riverside Drive, gazing out towards New Jersey on the far side of the wide Hudson River as she ponders her homework. Sister Magdalena, the teacher at her private school, has demanded an essay entitled “I look out of the window”. Marie’s options, which Johnson elaborates with characteristic precision, include describing “how the colours are tiered under the clear sky, with the blue terrace of the steep New Jersey shore between the softer colour of the vegetation and the sharper gray of the river, all sprinkled with sand-coloured boughs and
sparse patches of foliage on the upper promenade, plus, along the lower edge of the view, the poisonous car paint next to the solemn gloom of a park fence deep in shadow”.6
That “tiered” world (which young Marie spurns, preferring to describe the more dramatic events of the day she watched a building burn down through the window of “Charlie’s Good Eats” on 96th Street) is derived from the “unassailable”7 view Johnson had himself known while living in the apartment he later allowed Gesine and Marie to have for slightly less rent (as Herold also notes) than he himself had paid: a place “with five windows that all looked out onto Riverside Park, and in the fall you looked out at the Hudson”.8 The passage also anticipates the way Johnson would come to see the view over the Thames Estuary from his house on Marine Parade — a building, as he had explained to Max Frisch just after making his offer of purchase, with an upstairs that “practically juts out over the water”. Given a “clear” day, which can by no means be taken for granted in north Kent, this view too is gathered in by the window and framed as a series of horizontally aligned bands of colour. The uppermost tier, which may be blue, white or grey depending on the weather, stands above a tiny strip of greenish brown produced by the distant Essex shore. Beneath that, a wide band of sea gives way first to a tawny layer of shingle, mud and sand, and then, although one may have to lean over to see it from the uppermost floor, to the heavier grey concrete of the sea wall on the other side of Marine Parade.
“There is no perception that is not full of memories”,9 declared Henri Bergson, and so it was for Johnson as he looked out from his house in Sheerness. The sashes that framed this incomer’s Kentish sea view as tiered bands also abstracted it to a degree: dislocating it sufficiently to open it, however unexpectedly and, indeed, fleetingly, to the coinciding memory of the earlier views across water with which Johnson would repeatedly map the course of his life. “Ultimately”, as he explained while talking “About Myself” on the occasion of his election to the German Academy for Language and Literature in 1977, “it would be fair to say that I have a thing for rivers. It’s true, I grew up on the Peene in Anklam, the Nebel flows through Güstrow, I have traveled to and in Rostock on the Warnow, Leipzig presented me with the Pleisse and the Elster, Manhattan is surrounded by the Hudson and East and North Rivers, I also recall a Hackensack River, and for the past three years I have had on offer outside my window the River Thames, where it turns into the North Sea”.10
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 48