The Sea View Has Me Again: Uwe Johnson in Sheerness by Patrick Wright


 

 Patrick Wright has chosen to focus his massive account of the last ten years of Uwe Johnson's life, spent in Sheerness, on the place. The detail we absorb from Wright about this neglected and depressed locale—I seem to remember it being referred to as "the back end of the Thames"—is staggering. It seems trite to say that the places we spend our days make us who we are, but how many biographers take that seriously? Most seem content to tell us what their subjects do while more or less ignoring where they were.

Wright, adopting the opposite approach, focuses most of his 750 or so pages on the bleak, depressed place Johnson made his home. In those pages we do get the facts of Johnson's life, but much more we get the facts of Sheerness, Sheppy, and the bleak place that was England in the 1970s. 

The book's great strength is its discursiveness. From Sheppy and Johnson, Wright journeys widely., and as much as we enjoy reading about our subject, especially in the substantial quotations from his letters, it is Wright's detours into areas as far afield as modernist furniture and the early history of aviation, but also topics less far afield, at least geographically, such as the sea wall in front of Johnson's house and the wreck sunk just off the coast which can't be moved for fear of detonating the explosives it was carrying when it went down that fascinate. (The wreck is still there!)

Johnson's masterpiece, called in its English version Anniversaries, is a day-by-day account, almost ethnographic in its detail, of an East German immigrant in New York City and her daughter, but also the mother's past in wartime Germany and behind the Wall. The detail and accuracy that define this achievement seems almost a parallel to Wright's method in The Sea View Has Me, but what makes both Johnson's and Wright's books a pleasure is the astute, ironic view through which New York, Sheerness, and Germany in the bad old days are seen. 

I read the first two volumes of Anniversaries, but for reasons I can no longer recall, stopped there. Now I'm eager to go back and finish it. Surely sending one back to the work is the sign of a good literary biography.

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