Abstract
German writer Uwe Johnson died aged 49 in February 1984 in his home in Sheerness-on-Sea, where he had been living since late 1974. Shortly after Johnson’s death, journalist Tilman Jens went to the Isle of Sheppey and asked locals about Johnson’s life there, and subsequently produced a slim and rather indiscreet volume entitled Unterwegs an den Ort, wo die Toten sind (On the Way to the Place Where the Dead Are, 1985). It had little to say about the significance of Johnson’s work and focused instead on the unfathomable mystery behind his decision to leave Berlin and move to Sheerness-on-Sea, and on the isolated and unhappy final decade of his life there.
Patrick Wright has now written another book based on Johnson’s life in Sheerness, and it weighs in heavily. Wright intends, as he says, not only to write about Johnson’s life and work, but also the town of Sheerness and the Isle of Sheppey. He also wishes to focus on the ‘crisis-ridden decade’ of the 1970s (p. 8), which he sees as a formative and neglected period on the way to how things are today, in post-industrial and post-Brexit Britain. While the focus concerning Johnson is on his Sheerness years, Wright also reviews Johnson’s life and work before Sheerness, but thereafter for much of this book Johnson features only cursorily, while several years of the history of Sheerness are related in depth, with one obscure story and character after another. This is a detailed history of a neglected backwater, which Wright deems worth telling as an archaeology of the present, though I fail to identify much specific reflection on how the 1970s inform the present in the wealth of the material here.
When it comes to Johnson, there is nothing new here that informed Johnson readers do not already know, and curious readers who want to find out more about Johnson may well find themselves skipping page after page on Sheerness. Even then, there is not much beyond Wright’s balanced introductory overview of Johnson’s life and work before he moved to Sheerness that might give any sense of the enduring significance of Johnson’s writing and why it might be worth reading today.
Instead, The Sea View Has Me Again reads for long stretches like two books placed between one cover. Johnson is frequently dwarfed by all the material on Sheerness, but when I decide to see this as a book about this part of Kent, here too, I fail to find the relevance. Zooming in to one place in depth can lead to an understanding of our times, but here it seems to run the danger of not seeing the wood for the trees. For potential readers with an intrinsic interest in Sheerness, this book must surely be welcome. Readers who might be expecting that Sheerness can be a mirror reflecting a bigger picture may perhaps prepare to be disappointed.
After his friend the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann died in 1973, Uwe Johnson visited the town of her birth, Klagenfurt, where she is also buried. In 1974 he published his own account of this visit and of the town of Bachmann’s childhood, Eine Reise nach Klagenfurt (translated by Damien Searls as A Trip to Klagenfurt in 2004). Johnson’s laconic prose is a masterful mix of historical research and reflection on Bachmann, as well as an act of friendship. The disjunction between Bachmann and the town where she grew up is gaping, and yet in Johnson’s account this alienation becomes meaningful as a commentary on Austrian and German history, and paradoxically this brings Bachmann and Klagenfurt together, as we come to sense why she elected to live in Rome. Johnson’s work on this book took place at the same time he was preparing to leave Germany – electing to live in England.
Johnson’s life in Sheerness – where he went by the name of Charlie – seems to be a story of a man out of place, as it was in Jens’s volume and is again, very differently, in Wright’s version, but asking why Johnson left Germany, a question that Johnson so deftly asked of Bachmann and Austria, and then looking for speculative and complex answers, would go some way to understanding his life in Sheerness. In terms of his writing, in Sheerness Johnson finally finished the fourth and final volume of his major novel Jahrestage. Aus dem Leben von Gesine Cresspahl in 1983 (newly translated by Damien Searls as Anniversaries. From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl, 2018). Three volumes had already been published and the fourth was well in progress when Johnson left Berlin, but Wright does not reflect on Johnson’s nearly 10-year struggle to complete it, nor particularly on its significance as a major work of twentieth-century European literature. Otherwise, Johnson’s two most important works during his Sheerness years were his 1979 Frankfurt poetics lectures, published as Begleitumstände (Attendant Circumstances) in 1980, and the novella Skizze eines Verunglückten (Sketch of An Accident Victim) of 1981. Wright does not discuss the former in any depth, even though it is as close as Johnson got to an autobiography and offers plenty of material that might help understand his move to England. Wright uses the latter only as a comment on the break-up of Johnson’s marriage that took place during his Sheerness years, which it certainly can be seen to be, but to which it should not be reduced. It may be the case that there simply is not enough to say about Johnson himself in Sheerness that makes the tale worth telling as a story in its own right, whereas there would be value in a study of his years in Sheerness that addresses and assesses his literary production there and that also weaves in the author’s own origins and life before Sheerness, while taking a far more selective approach to Sheerness local history.
A volume of Inselgeschichten (Island Stories, 1985) was published from Johnson’s literary estate, containing largely unfinished texts, mostly from Johnson’s letters, and only three short texts that Johnson published in his own lifetime. His essay ‘Ein unergründliches Schiff’ (published in English as ‘An Unfathomable Ship’ in 1983, translated by Lawrence Wilson) on the Richard Montgomery, a US ammunitions ship that was wrecked in 1944 and lies in view of Sheerness, stands out as the only text of substance based on the town of Sheerness that he wrote. Johnson’s research on the wreck evokes a sense of place in the present while salvaging the history that lies submerged, spinning a tale from contemporary Sheerness to the Second World War and its consequences. It condenses the ‘sea view’ that he himself ‘had’ in Sheerness down to a bigger story worth telling. Here we see Johnson not as ‘Charlie’ in Sheerness, but as the major European intellectual that he undoubtedly was.