TRUTH AND FACTS
An essay on ANNIVERSARIES by Uwe Johnson
1
Uwe J.[Johnson] last and solitary 10 years in England always
fascinate me. Shortly after his death I met a bookseller in Richmond that knew
him. And when Sebald invited me to a symposium in Norwich I met there the late
Michael Hamburger that was his friend. Speculations
[About Jakob]... a very innovative
work. I keep a very good Spanish translation, Conjeturas..., from 1973,
annotated, with a critical introduction and bibliography. No publisher will do
this kind of work in Spain anymore. And his Spanish translations are out of
print. But I believe Zamyatin was right: the future of Russian literature, and
of literature, for short, is in its past. The rich past will erase the pastime.
And the eyes of a new and real reader will follow the lines and the lives of St. Patrick's Day...
(from a letter from Julian Rios (author of LARVA) to the writer of this essay)
2
The tendency of every age is to bury as many classics as it
revives. If unable to discover our own
urgent meanings in a creation of the past, we hope to find ample redress in its
competitive neighbors. A masterpiece
cannot be produced once and for all; it must be constantly reproduced. Its first author is a man. Its later one---
time, social time, history
----Philip
Rahv
ONE
ANNIVERSARIES
by Uwe Johnson is a great American novel though written in German but now
available in a complete, precise and very readable translation by Damion
Searls.
ONE
I began writing this essay about Uwe
Johnson’s ANNIVERSARIES on September 1, 2018, the 79th
anniversary of the beginning of World War Two and I am writing the essay in a
small town in New Jersey, home to a former Michelin tire factory that closed in
1930 though the main street is still crossed by Pershing, Haig, Foch and Joffre
streets with a little side avenue named for Petain and an American Legion hall
named for Joyce Kilmer as is the elementary school. Everything remains and is forgotten.
ONE
I had thought more provocatively to
have started my essay with: ANNIVERSARIES by Uwe Johnson is one of the greatest New
York City novels and of course it begins
at a New Jersey beach town and will end at a Danish beach town.
ONE
Or, Uwe Johnson’s ANNIVERARIES From a Year in the Life of
Gesine Cresspahl (giving its complete title) is the freshly translated, definitive and complete 1668 page
novel constantly centered on the year of 1967-68 in the life of a German woman
living at West 96th Street in Manhattan remembering or being placed
in times that include both the Nazi past and the then present divided Germanys,
while constantly mirroring those lives in a daily reading and quoting from The
New York Times.
And one will be happy to know that
this woman has nothing to do with the so-called Upper West Side intellectuals
who were memorably described as inhabiting a world of “Keeping up with
Niebuhrs” by the writer James McCourt. A
world of Lionel Trilling, Meyer Shapiro, Norman Podhoretz, Irving Krystol,
Susan Sontag and Reinhold Niebuhr. And
there will be nothing about the Democratic Convention in Chicago!
The novel opens:
“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 a cavity 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
out-stretched 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: choppity. The town is on a narrow spit of the Jersey
shore, two hours south of New York by train.” (3)
An opening wordier than: “Stately
plump Buck Mulligan…” or “For a long time I used to go to bed early,” but
closer “From a little after four o'clock until almost sundown of the
long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield
still called the office because her father had called it that – a dim hot
airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers
because when she was a girl someone had believed that sight and moving air
carried heat and that dark was always cooler…”
SO TO
“There was a depression over the Atlantic. It was travelling eastwards, toward an area
of high pressure on Russia.” The last
quotation is the opening of Robert
Musil’s The Man Without Qualities.
Of course the same ocean now joins
these two novels forever, underlining what one can only hope to urge: Johnson
has written the necessary masterpiece linking the United States and Europe---
and why not allow for Germany standing in for all of Europe in the way the
United States can represent the New World
imaginatively since no other book I know of does this while of course one is aware that the central character of Celine’s Journey to the End of Night spends a
long time in the United States and Michel Butor in his book Mobile creates a wonderful European
recreation of the whole of the United States—while recalling the more fantastic
version of the United Stakes created by Kafka, a writer who had the benefit of
never coming to the US---but the essential point is that the experiences of
both places are given equal weight in Anniversaries thus avoiding the common
and usual dichotomy of the visitor and the visited… whether long or short term
it matters not at all.
TWO
ANNIVERSARIES closes 1668 pages later:
“As
we walked by the sea we ended up in the water. Clattering gravel around our
ankles. We held one another’s hand: a child, a man on his way to the place
where the dead and she, the child that I was.” (1668)
New Jersey and the Baltic!
