Anniversaries, Volume 1 by Uwe Johnson

Author:Uwe Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2021-07-27T00:00:00+00:00

December 26, 1967 Tuesday

Christmas is over, and The New York Times once again feels she needs sixty-eight pages to bring us all the city’s shopping opportunities as well as the world’s news: The air force has resumed bombing in North Vietnam. Fire on a Norwegian freighter in the harbor. The Free State of Bavaria sees itself as a bridgehead to Eastern Europe. Peking is silent on its atomic blast. Mayor Lindsay regrets errors, promises improvements, and by the way has a hidden television camera in his home office that allows him to appear live on six New York channels. Now we know that; who knows why.

One day, Marie will also say about me, among other things: My mother used to read The New York Times. Not as an indiscretion; as a description. She will compare me to Cresspahl in London, who wanted to hear the Labour Party speaking through the Daily Herald; to Lisbeth Cresspahl, who not inadvertently brought the Manchester Guardian back from the city but who in Mecklenburg was perfectly happy that there was only the Lübecker General-Anzeiger to subscribe to, not the Lübecker Volksbote, Social Democratic, banned, plundered.

Marie, that’s not how it was. In April 1961, when we arrived in New York, we had other papers to choose from: the News, the Journal-American, the World-Telegram & Sun, the Post, the Herald Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, the Long Island Press, and the Times. I bought the Times for its British ancestry, and didn’t even know that it was part of the minority that had endorsed John Kennedy for president against Richard Nixon. In the bank, they’d advised me to read the Times: for the rental listings every day, not only on weekends. We found our apartment in New York with the Times, five windows looking out on river colors, on Riverside Park, on open sky. I first realized The New York Times was a habit when they were out of it on Lexington Avenue and one day a polite child, not yet four years old, indicated with a jerk of the head on Seventh what I was looking for: a newsstand, with newspapers, though not the Times; and I didn’t feel like buying the News. You saw yet again that grown-ups are strange, and still you couldn’t let go of my hand in a place where the language, the colors of the cars, and the height of the buildings were strange, to say nothing of your mother.

Say what you want when you’re over thirty: My mother fell for the conservative appearance, while imagining she hadn’t fallen for inch-thick reporting about nothing, embarrassing photos of nobodies. You can say: My mother wanted to learn an educated, propertied American English, more than the one the workers spoke and the cops and the robbers. It may even be true. But if I did need such language to fool anyone, then I also needed it to pass muster with bosses who’d gone to universities. Make fun of it if you want,

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