Patrick Wright - The Sea View Has Me Again

Published by Repeater Books

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A Repeater Books hardback original 2020

Distributed in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.

Copyright Patrick Wright 2020

Patrick Wright asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Excerpts from: Uwe Johnson, Inselgeschichten. Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1995. All rights reserved by and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin.

Halb Schlaf, aus: Thomas Brasch, Die nennen das Schrei. Gesammelte Gedichte. Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin 2013.

Translations copyright Damion Searls 2020

Cover design: Johnny Bull

ISBN: 9781912248605

Ebook ISBN: 9781912248759

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd

Patrick Wright has written an extraordinary, haunting book, a devastating allegory of our own time, yet seen from the mid-twentieth century. Wrights phenomenal achievement is to painstakingly set the scene against which the final volume of Uwe Johnsons monumental four-part novel Anniversaries can be read and to turn it back to us, with a contemporary question are we left behind or staying behind?

GILLIAN DARLEY, AUTHOR OF EXCELLENT ESSEX

A double biography of the great but always tempestuous German writer Uwe Johnson and his ultimate home, the gritty and disreputable Isle of Sheppey. Biography is in quotes because Wright is a saboteur of genres and his books encompass multiple worlds. I stand in awe of what he has accomplished here.

MIKE DAVIS, AUTHOR OF CITY OF QUARTZ

With consummate timing, when so many are locked in a blind charge towards some bigger and better crisis, Patrick Wright has picked over the landfill of a very specific Estuary culture to devastating effect. The Sea View Has Me Again is a monumental sifting and arranging of local particulars, stitched against the savage farce of a great European novelists elective exile. Remorseless retrievals from bunker and cranked microfilm, enlivened by human witness, make this final panel of a notable literary triptych, following on from A Journey through Ruins (Dalston Lane) and The Village that Died for England (Tyneham), into one of the abiding memorials to a tattered angel of history.

IAIN SINCLAIR, AUTHOR OF DOWNRIVER

In this masterful modernist history, Patrick Wright tells the story of an island which is England, yet much more than that. Wrights Isle of Sheppey is a de-industrialised place, not in the North, but in the garden of England; a refuge of liberties that has three prisons; a dockyard and garrison town with a pacifist MP; an island which could be destroyed by bombs left over from the war, but which far from being stuck in the past is a model for a new post-industrial world. It is the stage for an extraordinary cast of characters, among them Napoleon Bonaparte, DH Lawrences mother and an Anglo-Catholic fascist parish priest; the Wright brothers patent agent, the nations first indigenous aviator and the father of the British atomic bomb; the communist leader of the engineering union, an immigrant imperialist machine-tool inventor; makers of modern furniture and foreign photographers.

At its heart is the life, work, and inspiration of extraordinary East German writer Uwe Johnson who drinks himself to death in a pub run by veterans of the Battle of the River Plate. Wright scintillatingly creates, from perfectly observed fragments from the past and flashes of a better future, a British history like no other, crafted with tools forged out of hard realities of modern European history. With its steely dissing of the tidy dichotomies and exceptionalist clichs which disfigure our sense of who we are, this is Patrick Wrights most important book. It brings Europe to England by showing it has always been here, at a moment when too many want to believe something else.

DAVID EDGERTON, AUTHOR OF THE RISE AND FALL OF THE BRITISH NATION

There must be room for more things than go onto a television screen.

Uwe Johnson, Conversation on the Novel, 1973

CONTENTS

Having a wonderful holiday everythings perfect even the road is passable and as hard as a rock. From John to Mrs Miller, postcard, Valentine & Co, c. 1960

PREFACE

A sign provided by the council identifies two noteworthy graves in the Isle of Sheppeys main cemetery. The first, at plot 83 FF, marks the last resting place of Mr Frederick Peake, who somehow managed to survive the Charge of the Light Brigade while serving with the 13th Light Dragoons during the Crimean War. Unlike so many who followed their Harrovian commander, Major General James Robert Brudenell, the 7th Earl of Cardigan, into the misdirected charge of 25 October 1854, Sergeant Peake emerged from the Valley of Death with no worse than a shattered arm, a pension and a job, both light and enduring, in the stores at the Admiralty dockyard at Sheerness. He was buried to the sound of rifle volleys and the Last Post on 27 December 1906, a local hero who had lived quietly across the fields from here, at 37 Alma Road in the part of Sheerness known as Marine Town.

To find the second stone, which nobody has ever tried to elevate with flags or bugles, the visitor who has entered the cemetery by its eastern entrance on Halfway Road must walk past the tiny Jewish graveyard on the right, and press on through many regularly spaced rows of Victorian and early-twentieth-century monuments. Although some of the older graves have sunk erratically into the ground, this municipal amenity lacks the Gothick atmosphere of the churchyard at which the German Romantic poet Jean Paul launched the idea of the Death of God into European consciousness towards the end of the Age of Enlightenment. Pauls Speech of the Dead Christ (1796) is recounted by a dreamer who, having fallen asleep in the evening sunshine, is woken by a tolling bell to find himself in a darkened churchyard where

Over the course of his forty-nine years, the fiercely secular German writer whose ashes were put into the earth at plot 54 XD on 10 July 1984, found more in life to worry about than the catastrophic question that Jean Paul, a believer, derived from his dream: if each soul is its own father and creator, why cannot it be its own destroyer too? Uwe Johnsons stone lies a few yards inside the cemeterys tree-lined brick wall, beside fields that slope gently down towards Sheerness. Many of the more recent stones nearby are inscribed with loving messages and euphemisms about falling asleep. Some are also adorned with tributes from the bereaved: flowers, teddy bears and miniature footballs; favourite mugs, plastic angels and this being February a painted Santa Claus among the cement mementos, some of which appear to have been acquired (and why not?) from Andre Whelans Concrete Garden Ornaments factory at the old Bethel Chapel in Blue Town, just outside the Sheerness dockyard wall. Johnsons stone a large rectangular slab of granite laid flat in the ground sits bare and silent amongst all this. It gives away less even than the formally restrained Portland stone monuments placed nearby by the Imperial War Graves Commission to mark British servicemen killed in the Second World War.