Johnson answers this deformation by returning the waves to the actually-existing sea. He was particularly attentive to the way in which each incoming wave peaked in a fold of white foam atop a momentary wall of blue or green, and then rolled forward to enclose a cylinder of air briefly before collapsing back onto itself. This restoration was already underway in Speculations about Jakob, where Jonas Blach remembers walking from the inland town of Jerichow to the beach at Rande with the young Gesine Cresspahl. It’s raining, and there is a “hard wind” leaping up into their eyes from the sea, and they stand there, staring down at “the waves that broke under us over the steel jetty and froze, foamy, spraying, before they crashed and turned over and wriggled through the heavy pilings and unrolled full length, lazy and irresistible, onto the sand”.14 At that point Gesine speaks: “‘On the crest of the waves,’ said her voice, yes on the foamy crests — before they break”.
Those cresting waves — each one unique, individual and exact yet bound to be almost instantly reclaimed by the whole — reappear in the very first paragraph of Anniversaries. By this time, they are beating in on the New Jersey coast, but the sight of them quickly transports Gesine back to the Baltic:
Long waves beat diagonally against the beach, bulge hunchbacked with cords of muscle, raise quivering ridges that tip over at their very greenest. Crests stretched tight, already welted white, wrap round activity of air crushed by the clear mass like a secret made and then broken. The crashing swells knock children off their feet, spin them round, drag them flat across the pebbly ground. Past the breakers, the waves pull the swimmer across their backs by her outstretched hands. The wind is fluttery; in low-pressure wind like this, the Baltic Sea used to peter out into a burble. The word for the short waves on the Baltic was: scrabbly.15
Like days in the calendrical structure of Anniversaries, Johnson’s waves are singular and yet interconnected, discrete and yet part of a continuous series. They suggest an idea of history utterly unlike that imagined by the Stalinist dialecticians who believed in the “wheel of history” that “cannot be turned back” or in “History as a winch that winds up the past, irrevocably, for eternity. Onward!”16
*
If Johnson felt the play of distant but remembered tides as he looked out across the surface of the Thames Estuary, he also imagined his way down into the water, and here too his perspective is characteristically his own. Not for him, the surface-stripping melancholy of Jean-Paul Sartre’s stranded protagonist Antoine Roquentin, who at one point in the novel Nausea gazes out at the sea with his hands gripping the balustrade at “Mudville” (an intellectual’s vision of Le Havre), despising the promenading townspeople, and using his own corrosive bile to dissolve the view they so readily took for granted: “The real sea is cold and black, full of animals; it crawls underneath this thin green film which is designed to deceive people. The sylphs all around me have been taken in: they see nothing but the thin film, that is what proves the existence of God. I see underneath! The varnishes melt”.17 We may be confident that Johnson knew Sartre’s caustic pre-war novel from the time he spent studying modern Western literature with Hans Mayer in Leipzig. Yet it is neither a crisis of language nor the inability of words to engage the world that drove his imagination down through the sometimes filmy surface of his “Sea View” in Sheerness. Johnson’s sense of what lay beneath the surface was at once less contemptuous of common perceptions and more apocalyptic in its modernity.
We may start the descent with the pragmatic local knowledge of Johnson’s friend “Charles”, who knew the waters off Sheerness by the fish that might be caught in them. In summer, as Johnson recorded in a surviving note, it was possible to land eels, bass, flatfish, sole, mackerel, dogfish and skate.18 In cold weather, the tide also brought cod and whiting.
If Johnson saw fit to record this prosaic list of the fish that might be taken from the waters outside his window, he also pursued his interest in the transformative powers that fable and mythology had long associated with the sea’s depths. In 1976, he published his own “retelling” of “The Fisherman and his Wife”, a German folk tale which Günter Grass would also take as the basis for his novel The Flounder, published in 1977.19 The story opens on an ordinary, even pleasant day, when a poor fisherman leaves the “filthy shack” he shares with his wife, and walks down to the sea to fish from the shore. Casting his line into the deep and clear water he hooks not a cod or a whiting but a large flounder which proceeds to speak to him, claiming actually to be an “enchanted prince” who should be released rather than killed. The astonished fisherman puts the flounder back in the water and goes home to tell his wife, who is adamant that the fisherman must hasten back to the water’s edge, catch the flounder again, and demand a gift for sparing the fish-prince’s life: perhaps a “little cottage” for which they might abandon their stinking little shack.
The flounder is no sooner asked than he tells the fisherman to go home, where he will find his wish already granted. As the fable progresses through its stages, the fisherman, who is compelled by the swelling ambitions of his wife, journeys back and forth to the shore, asking for a grander transformation each time the flounder is caught and returned to the water. The harried fisherman asks for a palace, and then for the vast domain of a king, and that is by no means where the matter ends. Meanwhile, the sea changes for the worse each time the fisherman returns to trouble the magical flounder, and not for the better. At the second request the water, which had started out so clear, has become yellow and green. By the third it is “purple and dark blue and gray and dense” and by the fourth it is “boiling up” from within. Ships are firing distress signals over the ruinous waves and the sky is a lurid red and blitzed by the most terrifying lightning storm by the time the fisherman’s wife tires of life as an empress and despatches her husband to the shore demanding that she must live like the pope. Sadly, even that wish proves insufficient as soon as it is granted. Looking out over “great black waves as high as church towers and mountains, all capped with crowns of white foam”, the fisherman pulls in the flounder and informs it of his wife’s final request. Hearing that she now wants to be God, the fish closes the tale with the words: “Go home. She is sitting in her filthy shack again”.
In the “Afterword” to his “retelling”, Johnson explained that the tale had initially been collected by the artist Philipp Otto Runge, who had found it somewhere near Hamburg in the early years of the nineteenth century.20 Runge, whose search had been inspired by the poet and fellow Romantic Achim von Arnim’s insistence, stated in connection with his own collection of folk poetry, on the importance of preserving and passing on “everything that has kept its diamond-like hardness through the rolling onward of the years”.21 Recorded in its original Low German dialect as part of this “nationalist” project against France, the story was passed to the Brothers Grimm, who included it in their Children’s and Household Tales in 1812. A version in standard High German, published in Berlin in 1814, would be widely read — so Johnson observes — as a “biography” of the over-reaching Napoleon. Johnson himself, however, kept his “retelling” as close as possible to the Low German in which, as Runge himself had stated, it had originally “blossomed” . He notes that the Low German word “Butt”, the word for “flounder”, implied “blunt” as well as “flat”,22 thereby emphasising “the “ordinariness” of “the sea creature that is in a position to perform miracles”. As for the “filthy shack” that was “the initial and final dwelling place of the stricken couple” this had been a “pisspot” (“Pißputt”) in Runge’s recorded version, but, for Johnson, who “strove for literalness”, it is a “bucket” (“Eimer”).
As for the wider meaning of the fable, Johnson opens his Afterword by saying that “For as long as helpless individuals remained unaware that they could redress their grievances with earthly social conditions themselves, they desperately wished for mysterious remedies and, at least in fairy tales, welcomed them in all sorts of guises”.23 He points out that
, in many German versions of this kind of tale, the deliverance was provided by a fish — in this case “the totally nondescript flat fish which is not even a bewitched prince and yet has power over everything on earth”. The fable tells of magical powers, but in many versions it also serves a more disciplinary purpose, demonstrating that “anyone who presumes and wants to be raised above his station must be punished”. Some of the over-reachers fall from a ladder or tree, or from the gates of Heaven. Others find themselves at the bottom of a well, or their carriage suddenly turned into a pumpkin and their horses into a team of fleas. In the great majority of versions of “The Fisherman and his Wife”, all the fault lies with the unreasonable wishes of the wife. It is, as Johnson declares, “the story of an unhappy marriage, presented as smugly as the invention of a gossiping neighbour”. The fisherman warns his wife to resist the immodesty of her own demands, but he does not wish “to be against her” so keeps going back to the beach to ask favours on her behalf, fishing for the flounder as “he had earlier fished for her”. Johnson scholars have duly puzzled over the extent to which the folk tale known as “Grimm 19” may have resonated with Johnson’s own marital difficulties (unlike Günter Grass, Johnson does not set out to correct the tale’s acknowledged tendency to blame all the ills of the world on the fisherman’s wife).
By the time he came to Sheerness, Johnson was well prepared for the possibility that there might be something else, besides Charles’s prosaic flatfish or Runge’s magical flounder, lurking in the waters outside his window. Repeatedly in Anniversaries, it is danger rather than magical power that lies beneath the surface of the water. That is how it was for Gesine’s mother Lisbeth, when she swam far out into the Baltic from the beach at Rande, a suicide attempt frustrated by a fisherman, who spotted her as night fell and hauled her into his boat. She was two and a half miles from the shore in water at least seventy feet deep, exhausted but still heading out and visible thanks to her bathing cap — “It was vanity. And I was punished for it”, as the pious and self-punishing Lisbeth says of her unwelcome rescue the next day.24
The peril of sinking beneath the surface is also the “secret” of the “huge gray cat behind a windowpane”, mentioned in Gesine Cresspahl’s account of memory and its limits. That elderly Mecklenburg cat attends one of the primal scenes of Gesine’s childhood. At the moment in question, it was actually sitting on the windowsill inside the Papenbrocks’ kitchen. In order to approach it, Gesine, who was outside at the time, clambers up onto a leaky old water butt outside the window. The new lid made by her father does not prevent her from falling in. Her mother, Lisbeth, sees her disappear into the water but does nothing, merely standing there “as if rooted to the spot”. The child is fished out by her father, who had come up behind Lisbeth, and watched her watching the disaster unfold — transfixed by the thought of having “the unjust suffering of her child to offer up to her God too” and making “the greatest sacrifice a person can make”.25
Meanwhile, something unexpected also lies in “the depths” of the inky black water of Patton Lake at the opening of the third volume of Anniversaries. After counting up all the lakes in which she has ever swam, Gesine discloses that this particular example is not in fact a natural body of water but a “dredged-out basin”, surrounded by “stunted” trees and a “chemically treated landscape set up for paying customers”,26 which had only been filled with water to create a resort after the Second World War. Go back to 1944, and the thick and inky water disappears to reveal heavy tanks, practicing “for the last assault on Germany”.27 These machines reduced “thick old trees” to stumps and left “the ground so churned up by caterpillar treads that the area had to be turned into an artificial lake, with trees having nowhere else to go and high yields from vacation rentals. From here came the Sherman tanks that measured out the market squares of Mecklenburg, too”. History, then, as intermittently remembered trauma darkening the water from below.
Johnson himself had other memories that might have prepared him for the most arresting feature of the view over the Thames Estuary from Marine Parade. I learned about one example in 2012, when I first went to Rostock to talk about Sheerness with members of the Uwe Johnson Society. When I mentioned the peculiar object that would become the focal point of Johnson’s English view, Siegfried Werner, who had known the writer during his school years in Güstrow, was reminded of a pond or small lake somewhere on the road between Recknitz and Güstrow, past which he and Johnson had cycled in the late Forties. This no longer existent body of water, which had been in the vicinity of two tiny settlements named Spoitgendorf and Glasewitz, was where unexploded ordnance found in the post-war clean-up was taken to be dumped. Werner remembered it as tempting as well as dangerous, and not just for curious children. Explosions did happen, he said. People got injured and in some cases, he thought, also killed. Here, if his memory was accurate, was another anticipation of the submerged hazard that drew Johnson’s eye down through the horizontal tiers of colour in his window and into the silted waters of the Thames Estuary.
30. WHAT IS THAT THING? THE SS RICHARD MONTGOMERY
Johnson’s most sustained Sheerness essay, “An Unfathomable Ship”, opens with a description of one of the first things he noticed about the view from his upstairs window: “In the Thames, about two miles off the north coast of the Isle of Sheppey, a cluster of parallel diagonal poles catches one’s eye”.1 These closely observed objects were “visible especially at low tide, but also when the tide is eighteen feet higher, because behind them tosses and pitches almost ten miles of the water’s surface as well as, since the Essex coast in the distance quite noticeably veers off to the north, the horizon line under the quickly shifting illuminations of the sky”.
Johnson goes on to suggest that, while anyone moving to Sheerness will be “struck by the reflections of the light on the multiply moving mouth of the Thames and North Sea”, it was those tilted “poles” cutting upwards through the surface of the sea that had really caught this resident alien’s attention, prompting him to ask: “what is that thing?” To begin with, and presumably guided by a Baltic memory of some kind, “he thinks those poles are fish traps, blown into a diagonal position by a ferocious west wind, since the eye is easily fooled about distances when looking out across a boundless body of water”. On this assumption, it seems possible that “the black triangle that becomes visible between the poles at ebb tide” could be a fishing boat exercising certain rights over the sea bed in that particular area.
The upthrusting “poles” that break through the horizontal lines of Johnson’s view may well be arresting in their slanted verticality — like the masts, crosses, wintry trees and net-draped poles that form such striking presences in the flat and sometimes moonlit landscapes painted in the early nineteenth century by the Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich in Fischland, or further to the east on the Pomeranian island of Rügen. And yet fishing was the wrong Baltic comparison. After noticing that the “triangle” has not moved for two weeks, Johnson’s newcomer realises that the “poles” are of unequal length and have a “strangely regular relationship with one another”. Watching huge freighters pass by on either side of them, he concludes that they are too close to both the Medway and Thames shipping lanes to be fishing apparatus of any description at all.
The “native inhabitants” proved happy to confirm Johnson’s rising doubts about “that thing”. Putting down his hammer and gazing out to sea, one fellow declares it a pity to be wasting time on work when the weather is so good for fishing: “no matter how dark the cloud”, he says, “it always has a silver lining”. This Sheerness homily, which Johnson will dignify with a quotation from John Milton’s “Comus”, shows how the presence of “that thing” confronts the inhabitants of his adopted town with a choice between two catastrophic futures. The “cloud”, as Johnson goes on to explain, is the memory of the flood that overwhelmed Sheppey’s sea defences and swamped much of the island at the end of January in 1953. The fear of another such inunda
tion had led to “the most thorough discussion, involving the best plans and resolutions” concerned with warning systems and improved sea defences. Yet not enough had been done to prevent Sheerness being flooded again in January 1978 — another round of dead sheep and wrecked furniture followed by the retreat (or costly advance) of insurance companies as they reviewed their coverage of properties in Sheerness.
If the continuing threat of inundation was the “cloud”, the silver lining would be found in the thrice-pronged “thing”, which promised to add a fiery End of Days to the flood that would one day wash over the “tufted grove” (Milton’s phrase) of Sheerness. The protruding “poles” turned out to be the masts of the SS Richard Montgomery, an American Liberty ship that grounded on submerged sands a little under two miles offshore from Sheerness in August 1944, breaking up and sinking in two pieces shortly afterwards. Having since become wrapped in a thickly sedimented layer of local lore, the sunken freighter was known variously as “the wreck” or “the grand old lady of the Thames” or “our one sight worth seeing”. It had the unusual distinction of being packed with unexploded bombs: huge quantities of them, stacked in the holds seven metres high and capable of blowing up at any moment.
The Sea View Has Me Again Page 52