Although the residents of Marine Parade expressed their objections strongly, the majority in the flood-prone town welcomed the Marine Parade Improvement Scheme. It promised at least some work for the unemployed, a two-penny rate increase was not an intolerable price to pay for reliable sea defences, and the trade associations saw nothing but benefit in the prospect of a seafront that would complete the transformation of Sheerness into a summer resort that might at last hold its own against Herne Bay and Margate.
After the public enquiry, the scheme was adjusted to console the unhappy residents of Marine Parade by placing flowerbeds at both ends of the development, and also on the roadside slope occupying parts of the new rampart. Ornamental glass covers were added in places, and it was emphasised that the shelters would be locked at night to discourage loitering youths. These ameliorations would, it was promised, reduce costs as suggested by the government inspector, while also ensuring that there was nothing “sordid or severe” about the scheme.51 As part of the drive for economy, it was decided to incorporate materials from the old Victorian promenade into its successor.
In May 1930 the government loan was approved, on the understanding that five hundred of Sheerness’s unemployed men would be employed over the two years of the scheme.52 A month later, a three-man deputation from the Sheerness branch of the National Unemployed Workers Movement brought their demands to a meeting of the Sheerness Urban District Council. This association was, as Uwe Johnson knew, led by Wal Hannington, among other British communists, and its members would be remembered for breaking the Two Minutes Silence on Armistice Day by singing the Internationale and for marching past the Cenotaph with pawnshop tickets pinned next to their medals. In Anniversaries, the sight of these economically straitened marchers has a disconcerting effect on Gesine’s mother, Lisbeth Cresspahl, then living on the edge of the depression with her carpenter husband in Richmond. Fearing for the future in a country where craftsmen were increasingly advertising their products as “ONLY BRITISH MATERIAL USED. ONLY BRITISH LABOUR USED”, she insisted on quitting this island of “crushed households”53 and taking her reluctant husband back to Germany in 1933, where Gesine was born just as Hitler gains power.
Communist or not, the members of the Sheerness branch of the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement appear to have been polite and, with one or two exceptions, quite restrained. Coming forward with “six points”, they asked for the council’s reassurance that the pick of the jobs on the new scheme would not go to already established council workers or to people who already had adequate pensions, and that priority would be given to those who had been out of work for longest. The jobs should be awarded in six-week periods to ensure fair treatment for all the local unemployed, and they strongly objected to the 2% pay increase awarded to the borough surveyor, Mr W.P. Puddicombe, who had agreed to take on supervision of the works, thereby saving the council from the allegedly greater cost of hiring an external civil engineer. Having made their points, the leader of the deputation, Mr Moore, thanked the council for the “courteous and kindly manner” in which they had been received.54
So the town had gone into action. Counting up reasons for the “prevailing note of optimism”55 with which its inhabitants might look forward to the new year of 1932, the Sheerness Guardian gave pride of place to the anticipated opening of the new esplanade. The optimism was not to last, except, perhaps, among members of the town’s Publicity Committee which, in March, would hold its own “boom week” to publicise Sheerness as a much-improved holiday resort. This, however, was to overlook the struggles of the borough surveyor, who had already failed to convince sceptical councillors that the works were “well within time”56 and that the Marine Parade Improvement Scheme really would be ready to greet summer visitors in August. Like the incredulous councillor who asked for confirmation that he meant “August 1932”, the Sheerness Times had by this time become scornful. The council had borrowed £25,000 from the government to fund the development, but the site was a slow-moving mess. The paper urged that the work must be completed as soon as possible. After that, further steps should be taken to “improve the inner slope by the cultivation of suitable plants and flowers to relieve the bare aspect of the concrete walls”. Once this was done “a different view may be held” by those — “not a few” — who “openly avow that, in their view, the Council has spoilt the sea-front of Sheerness”.57
August came and went without completion, and soon after that the council and ratepayers faced a worse problem than the hooliganism of those — locals or visitors — who had already started cutting into the wood of the new shelters, clambering onto their roofs, and defacing “the side walls of the new promenade with chalk drawings and figures”.58 By 17 November it was reported that the Sheerness Urban District Council had exhausted the loan, and been obliged to place the job under its own “general foreman” who, in order to lessen the consequence for ratepayers, would complete it using as many of the council’s “permanent men” as could be spared for the task.59 By December, Puddicombe, who also seems to have had enough of unemployed workers by this time, was blaming the delay on a lack of skilled carpenters. Councillors dismissed his excuse as “very watery”.60 The Sheerness Times, meanwhile, identified exactly how many unemployed carpenters had been available for work throughout the period in question and declared on behalf of the ratepayers, “the more we hear about this scheme, the greater the feeling of disappointment it creates”.61 By this time, the matter was being “freely discussed in the town” and the council invited further condemnation by refusing to discuss the situation except “in committee”.62 “Puddicombe’s folly”, as the development had come to be known, seems not to have been mentioned when, towards the end of 1932, George Lansbury came to open a new Labour Party hall and HQ on Sheerness High Street — a meeting that started with the singing of “Jerusalem”, after which this long-standing pacifist and Christian enemy of the “merchants of death” spoke out in favour of the new forms of civil production that must surely be developed for the nation’s naval dockyards and armaments factories.63
By 1933, when Marine Parade’s controversial new rampart was finally ready to be photographed by Valentine’s postcards, young Lydia Beardsall’s “breakwater” had been entirely replaced by a vast inverted trench system which had the combined effect of tossing the beach back into the sea, lifting the promenade high into the air, and stealing the view from the private houses along Marine Parade in order to make it available as a public amenity for curious summer visitors sauntering along just outside their bedroom windows.
“Puddicombe’s Folly”, postcard.
Such was the esplanade over which Johnson imagined surveying the view with Hannah Arendt, and where he really did walk out, taking note of the beings encountered there: the dwindling number of summer tourists with their heroic optimism about the weather, the sheepish criminal doing an early version of “community service” by picking up litter from the beach, or an “overweight Labrador mutt”, trotting along “in the wake” of an old woman, and clanking weirdly thanks to the bell she had tied round its neck.64 The railings, meanwhile, would make a backwards belvedere for promenaders interested in scrutinising not the view across the estuary, but the sight of a man sitting at his electric typewriter in a basement room full of invisible landscapes and “invented persons”, failing to complete the long-awaited fourth volume of Anniversaries.
29. BEACH, SEA AND “THE VIEW OF A MEMORY”
In June 1977, Johnson wrote to his friends Antonia and Felix Landgraf in Lower Saxony. “You have not been to Sheerness in the summer”, he said, “and so I will tell you about a local custom that I have never seen anywhere else but which seems uncannily familiar to me. When it’s hot, people leave their door open and drape a cloth over the opening, its pattern generally recalling an awning or the stripes on old armchairs. I involuntarily think when I see it: Warnemünde, and then immediately afterward: But that’s impossible”.1
That fleeting and “involuntar
y” recollection of the Baltic resort down the river Warnow from the GDR’s hard currency raising port-city of Rostock was by no means unique. At the end of July 1980, Johnson wrote again to the Landgrafs, telling them about the “one day” that overcast summer on which Sheerness had managed to attract a handful of visitors from London.2 The weather was very far from brilliant but these determined excursionists had “relied on hearsay” as they set off in the morning and they now “sat uncomfortably under damp morning clouds” on the beach. The locals, meanwhile, had “mistrusted the incident straight off”, keeping their doors firmly closed and definitely not replacing them, as Johnson had seen done in brighter years, “with sun-blind curtains that are supposed to let in the wind to cool the house and leave the flies to fry in the heat”. Johnson described looking out over the grey scene: “The curtain of the water’s horizon was firmly drawn”, but “the beach, loosely furnished with swimmers, deck chairs, and sun umbrellas, far below the seafront promenade, offered for an afternoon, the view of a memory, an unreachable one of course”.
All memories are like that — of course — and not just those that are “unreachable” because they are also mistaken. Yet Johnson has very much more to say about memory than the fleeting comparisons in his letters may suggest. Indeed, Anniversaries would establish him as one of the great twentieth-century writers of memory and one who knew that, under modern conditions, this particular muse could be a dreadful curse as well as an inspiration. “A man”, so Johnson writes, sees memory as “an ornamental trinket”,3 but that is not at all how it was for Gesine Cresspahl. As she goes about her days in New York 1967–68, her mind keeps throwing up “static, disconnected fragments” of the remembered past, which may evoke a longing, if only for the sake of a better understanding, while at the same time frustrating her desire that memory might be “not the storage but the retrieval, the return to the past, the repetition of what was: being inside it once more, setting foot there again. There is no such thing”.
The same dissatisfaction is felt on 27 December 1967, when Gesine is looking out of window in Manhattan’s Riverside Drive. The New Jersey shore is “white, bundled up high behind the bright icy blue river”.4 It reminds her of “a winter morning on Lake Constance, the memory of snow-covered gardens, children on the railway embankment with their hoods up, the church-tower tuber on the water, foreland and mountain range rising up through the headlights there, and the Säntis massif imaginable as hidden behind the new snow in the air”. And yet despite that sudden impression, “the moment of recall, the fact of bringing it into present, corrodes both at once: past memory and present view”.
At a wishful moment near the beginning of the novel, Gesine agonises over this frustrating fact at greater length, attributing it less to the traumatising impact of the history through which she has lived than to the psychology of memory itself:
If only the mind could contain the past in the same receptacles we use for categorizing present reality! But in recalling the past the brain does not use the same many-layered grid of terrestrial time and causality and chronology and logic that it uses for thinking. (The concepts of thinking do not even apply there. That’s what we’re supposed to live our life with!) The repository of the mind is not organized in such a way as to provide copies, or retrieve things that have happened. When triggered, even by mere partial congruence, or at random, out of the blue, it spontaneously volunteers facts and figures, foreign words, isolated gestures. Give it an odour that combines tar, rot, and a sea breeze, the sidelong smell from Gustafsson’s famous fish salad, and ask it to fill the emptiness with content that was once reality, action, the feeling of being alive — it will refuse to comply. The blockade lets scraps, splinters, shards, and shavings get through, only so that they may be scattered senselessly across the emptied out, spaceless image, obliterating all traces of the scene we were in search of, leaving us blind with our eyes open. The piece of the past that is ours, because we were there, remains concealed in a mystery, sealed shut against Ali Baba’s magic words, hostile, inapproachable, mute and alluring like a huge gray cat behind a windowpane seen from far below as with a child’s eyes.5
“Blind with our eyes open”. This sense of being suddenly captured by a remembered world that nevertheless remains inaccessible can be far from comforting for Gesine. “No, not homesick”, so Johnson decrees about this largely involuntary experience: “But there is a waking up in the night, with a shock in the nerves, not wanting to recognize the thick gray light outside the windowpanes and looking for another window; even the April colours don’t look right … There are mornings when the glittering sun on the East River disappears in the shadow of the blinds, and Long Island becomes a different island. The smog turns the crush of houses in Queens into a soft rolling landscape, forest meadows, vistas of a church tower like a bishop’s miter, the way I saw it once from the sea as the boat jibbed, obscured by furrows in the ground, eventually reachable not far past the shoreline cliff”.6
Many things can prompt those “scraps, shards, and splinters” of past life to explode into the present. It might be the weather, a physical resemblance, or the way light moves in the glassy foyer of a Manhattan office block. Often, though, it will be a coastal scene or view across a river that comes to be ghosted by “partial congruence” with the memory of another one. The “river colours”7 of the Hudson, glimpsed under an open sky from Riverside Drive, will do it for Gesine Cresspahl, and the water itself repeatedly proves to be an uncannily familiar medium too. At the opening of the third volume of Anniversaries, Marie is swimming alongside her mother at a summer resort named Patton Lake, a few hours north of New York City. At her request, Gesine counts up the various lakes in which she remembers swimming since childhood. Having learned to swim on Fischland or in Lübeck Bay, in a Baltic Sea that sailors from the Kaiser’s defeated navy would call “the flooded field of the seven seas”,8 she moves on to various lakes and swimming pools in Mecklenburg before arriving at Wannsee outside West Berlin. Her survey then runs across West Germany, to Switzerland and France as well as America, where the lakes tend to have native American names — “And you came swimming all the way from Mecklenburg”, remarks Marie, having allowed eighteen lakes before this one.9
So persistent is Johnson’s attention to water and to views across it that Anniversaries itself comes to resemble the geography of Mecklenburg — sea-edged and filled with marshes, inland canals and lakes as well as rivers and the occasional swimming pool. Each of the first three volumes of Anniversaries opens with a watery scene. The first with a view of Atlantic waves crashing onto a beach “on a narrow spit of the New Jersey shore”; the second in a blue-tiled swimming pool — the “Mediterranean Swimming Club” — beneath the Hotel Marseilles in New York City’s Upper West Side,10 and the third with that scene at Patton Lake.
Gesine is very much Johnson’s creature in this. We have already seen how, in the course of speaking “About Myself” at Darmstadt during his induction to the German Academy of Language and Literature, he told his life story by remembering the rivers beside which he had lived. He added to this inventory of remembered waters in the CV he typed up on 22 February 1984, which happens to have been the very last day on which he was seen alive in Sheerness. He had been asked for such a document by the German writer and educationalist Friedrich Denk, who was due to introduce him at a planned reading at the German International School in Petersham Road, Richmond. In this fuller version, a copy of which survives among Michael Hamburger’s papers in the British Library, Johnson wrote out in capitals the names of the rivers in each of the places he had lived. Starting where he had grown up, in present-day Poland, he named the DIEVENOW (now the Dzwina) at Kammin (Kamien Pomorski), near the home of his maternal grandparents, and the OBRA outside his SS-run school in Kosten/Kościan. He added the RECKNITZ and the NEBEL at Güstrow, the TIBER in Rome, the HARLEM as well as the HUDSON and WEST RIVER in New York City, the HAVEL, SPREE and LANDWEHRKANAL in walled-off Berlin. Johnson’s last expanded map
of his life as a series of free-running rivers also includes the Isle of Sheppey, acknowledging the MEDWAY and SWALE beside the THAMES — rightly said by now to “beset” rather than smoothly glide past the low-lying town of Sheerness.11
Rivers and lakes figured largely in Johnson’s unsettling storm of memories and so too did the sea, which we are invited to consider not only for the glinting or wave-shaped surface that might be seen from a beach or sea-facing window but also for the powers that lie hidden in its depths. Johnson engages the sea not as an engineer, marine biologist or nature writer might know it, but as a non-human force that is nevertheless the witness and even bearer of the murderous history that keeps troubling the surface of Gesine Cresspahl’s consciousness. Early in Anniversaries, he permits her to tell her daughter about the day (“On a day like this, thirty-six-years ago. On a white day like this…”) when her father proposed to her mother while strolling along the promenade overlooking the sea at Rande, a fictional Baltic resort derived partly from Boltenhagen. Yet he also interrupts her recitation of that seaside scene with the New York Times’ present-day report of the death in prison of Ilse Koch, the notoriously depraved and sadistic “Beast of Buchenwald”.12 The incoming waves too are entangled: caught up both in Nazi imagery of national destiny and in the later Stalinist imagination in which Hitler appears as a “recurring type” in the “ebb and flow of history” — as demonstrated in the slogan painted on bedsheets and hung on town halls as a guarantee of the new socialist state’s eternal identification with the people (“Hitlers/come and go/but/the German people, the German State/remains”13).
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 51