The Sea View Has Me Again: Uwe Johnson in Sheerness

by Patrick Wright

The story of Uwe Johnson, one of Germany's greatest and most-influential post-war writers, and how he came to live and work in Sheerness, Kent in the 1970s.

Towards the end of 1974, a stranger arrived in the small town of Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. He could often be found sitting at the bar in the Napier Tavern, drinking lager and smoking Gauloises while flicking through the pages of the Kent Evening Post. "Charles" was the name he offered to his new acquaintances.

But this unexpected immigrant was actually Uwe Johnson, originally from the Baltic province of Mecklenburg in the GDR, and already famous as the leading author of a divided Germany. What caused him to abandon West Berlin and spend the last nine years of his life in Sheerness, where he eventually completed his great New York novel Anniversaries in a house overlooking the outer reaches of the Thames Estuary? And what did he mean by detecting a "moral utopia" in a town that others, including his concerned friends, saw only as a busted slum on an island abandoned to "deindustrialisation" and a stranded Liberty ship full of unexploded bombs?

Patrick Wright, who himself abandoned north Kent for Canada a few months before Johnson arrived, returns to the "island that is all the world" to uncover the story of the East German author's English decade, and to understand why his closely observed Kentish writings continue to speak with such clairvoyance in the age of Brexit. Guided in his encounters and researches by clues left by Johnson in his own "island stories", the book is set in the 1970s, when North Sea oil and joining the European Economic Community seemed the last hope for bankrupt Britain. It opens out to provide an alternative version of modern British a history for the present, told through the rich and haunted landscapes of an often spurned downriver mudbank, with a brilliant German answer to Robinson Crusoe as its primary witness.

Genres: Biography

751 pages, Hardcover

Published December 8, 2020

Reviews

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finally finished the book, an experience of steeped disappointment. I say such given the excitement I initially felt by the blurbs from Iain Sinclair and Mike Davis, two heroes of mine.
Uwe Johnson has always been a bit more distant, an instance where I appreciated the idea of an author more than the actual writing.
This hybrid text by Patrick Wright is a laudable idea but one effectively drowned in superfluous detail. I feared that the dross would triumph and I admit to skimming over the last third. We learned details of Johnson and much more about his myriad sites of exile from Ost Germany. The poignancy is lost amidst the effluvia.

Closer to two stars but for the exemplary letters of Johnson, especially those to Hannah Arendt.

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enormous and ambitious work running together Uwe Johnson's life before and during Sheerness with a portrait of the town itself. There are times when the two strands go too far apart, and one *could* argue that a more interventionist editor should have seen to that - but I rather preferred this as it is, with the density of photographs, postcards and dark alleys (and well-chosen typefaces), rather than the plausibly easier to read but less rich version of this book that a mainstream publisher would have carved out of it.

[Michael Rieman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Uwe Johnson was among the finest German writers of the late twentieth century. Readers who know his extraordinary (and lengthy!) novel, Anniversaries, can probably consider this work a milestone in European literature, though a good deal of it is set in New York City. In addition, the work's amazing translation by Damion Searls is extraordinary in itself. For these reasons, I was eager to read Patrick Wright's scholarly work on the years Johnson spent not in America or Germany, but on an island on the Thames Estuary, some 40 miles or so from London. However, despite the title, this work was largely a history of that particular island (Sheppey), rather than an exploration of Johnson's life, though there are many references to the writer's background and behavior on the island. Some of the history is appealingly described, and offers a sort of history of an island community buffeted by political, military, commercial, and even natural forces. I read on because I was hoping that the author would return to Johnson. Occasionally, he did, and showed considerable insight as a literary critic, relating some aspects of the island's geography or history to Johnson's own background. The majority of the book, though, dealt so much with the island, that I found myself wanting to skip some sections entirely. Some readers have enjoyed Mr Wright's approach, believing it to be similar to Johnson's own style in Anniversaries. I cannot agree with that: non-fiction and fiction are not the same. I found little to help me understand Johnson's thinking in greater depth.

[Dan Hicks · Rating 5 out of 5]

a wonderful work of literary nonfiction

[CE · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this vast, encyclopaedic chronicle of the Isle of Sheppey and its unlikely one-time resident emigré, Patrick Wright establishes himself as the estuarial Kentish backwater’s epic chronicler—very much in the manner of Uwe Johnson’s own panoramas of 1960s New York.

As others have noted, the sheer depth of Wright’s examination of such a small subject is both the book’s strength and its weakness. To subject a lonely, neglected locale to the kind of focus normally devoted to the fortunes of empires is precisely the book’s point. And it’s certainly full of odd little historical trinkets, from the mooted plan to exile Napoleon to the Kentish isle (rather than St Helena), to the centrality of Sheppey to so many unexpected discoveries (including palaeontology and aeronautics).

Wright manages to see in Sheppey the whole history of modernity, as well as its decline and potential destruction; an extended meditation on the looming timebomb of the SS Richard Montgomery offers a natural epilogue. Yet, in the book’s sagging middle section, the incoming tide of relentless micro-historical detail does threaten at times to drown the reader. (I laughed when getting to what appeared to be an entire chapter on a chair.)

Yet for its sheer oddness, Wright ought to be applauded. And kudos to Repeater Books for having the gall to publishing a biography this offbeat. A unique, if beguiling work of psychogeographic British social history.

[Kieran Telo · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had never heard of Uwe Johnson and I'm not sure I'll ever read any of his novels, it was the Sheerness connection that sparked my interest. I know Sheppey fairly well but I'm not a native - though I married one. Our younger son currently lives only a few doors further down Marine Parade, in Shrimp Terrace, and the view is indeed outstanding. (Better than no 26 because two stories higher...).

This is beautifully written, meticulously researched, and never patronises the island or its people. I learned a lot, and came to like Uwe a lot too, I'd never realised the history of The Ship On Shore, for example, and the details of early aviation were a revelation for the most part. The section about Duchamp at Herne Bay was amazing.

Wide Open (Nicola Barker), another great book that centres on the island, stood up to a second reading and I think parts of this will too. A fine achievement.

[David Allen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Immense but intimate study of a writer and a place. In the end, you know more about the place--Sheerness--than the writer. That's as Johnson would have it, by all accounts, including the author's. Hugely rewarding.

[Peter Mitchell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding book, compendious, huge and obliquely bonkers. Started off thinking it was too long, too detailed, too obsessively archaeological, and finished wishing it were longer, more detailed and more relentless in its determination to dig and dig and dig