London Overground

by Iain Sinclair

  Life to me a dream that never wakes:

  Night finds me on this lengthening road alone.

  Love is to me a thought that ever aches,

  A frost-bound thought that freezes life to stone.

  Maresfield Gardens

  There is a young woman in the front garden, her nakedness enhanced by the coarse covering of an old man’s winter coat with a fur collar. She is pleasuring a used cigar. Long hair is caught in the lower branches of Sigmund Freud’s favourite almond tree. A witness speaks of snot and smoke. Looking out from the study window, where heavy drapes are always drawn, our suppurating ghost is transformed. Unsupported, he walks through looped films that shimmer with faulty light. A ‘propatetique’ striding forward in eternity.

  ‘Pretend that the others around us are real,’ I said, unconvinced by the rasp of my own voice. By Andrew’s retreat into his furry carapace. His trundling walk, a bear caught between dances, facing uphill.

  Coming now, in the evening of the Overground circuit, to exiled parts of London that are disturbingly familiar, the people on the street begin to look more like themselves. Like characters I think I have known: bookdealers, jobbing translators, migrant Russian women hosting vodka seances to make a scene out of unpromising West Hampstead materials. We are weary enough, after the haul through Brondesbury and Kilburn, to let the fantasies through: self-directed dramas of consolation and reward. In the sodium-gaudy darkness, Andrew’s sunglasses have passed beyond eccentricity. Into mimetic blindness. The lecherous grin on the face of his stuffed monkey is justified.

  When I snap him against the orange stripe of West Hampstead Station, he holds up a ring of heavy keys. Perhaps he’s missing his motorbike? He has the meat solidity of a Sickert portrait, painted wet on dry: thornproof hiking suit, canvas-strap shoulder bag. He yawns. And scratches a few sparks from his two-day beard.

  At Finchley Road & Frognal, where the pulse of north-flowing traffic is felt, the Overground becomes an underground, tunnelling into London clay. This notion engages Kötting. Around this point, so he says, our most recent glacier put on the brakes. And the white tongue of the optimistically named ‘Last’ Ice Age ground to a halt. Viennese cafés nudge against the axial moraine, dispensing elaborate pastries and serious coffee. Motorists in their pods are preparing themselves for the bifurcation of M1 and A1. Small enterprises along this nervous stretch are being replaced by the showy windows of brand leaders.

  The unsolved glacial question is carried with us, uphill, into what begins to feel like a condition of perpetual night. Is the Pleistocene a temporal division invented by academic professionals to keep the territory in-house? Or does it, as our discussion implies, invoke something present but submerged, an older, fiercer, better part of ourselves? And if I see the Hampstead ridge as a coast, a line of difference with which to contest the memories that drag themselves ashore, Andrew is more direct. How long is the tunnel? When was it built? How much did it cost? Can we find a way to trespass and walk through to Hampstead Heath without frying ourselves?

  The tunnel, so I read, is 1,166 yards long. I’m not going to measure it. We will head directly up Arkwright Road, paying our respects to the Camden Arts Centre, and over the hump, putting our ears to the ground, from time to time, to be sure that we are still on the right track.

  Contemplation of our failure to burrow under this dune of Eocene sand brought back the morning’s challenge at Wapping, when we took the train beneath the Thames, rather than putting in the extra mile that would have allowed us to trudge, choking on fumes, through the Rotherhithe Tunnel.

  ‘My first ride on the Tube,’ Andrew said, ‘was to Stamford Bridge. Chelsea/West Ham. I was seven. I supported the Hammers because of the World Cup. Peters, Geoff Hurst, Bobby Moore. And the away kit on my Subbuteo team. I had a thing for hoops. Any team with hoops.’

  The psychoanalytical bias towards lying on a couch, with some bearded confessor, chin on fist, his chair behind your head, straining to interpret, to catch the halting phrases as they stutter and gush, might be a mistake. Walking releases the lock gates of memory with greater effect. And the process is not so costive, smoke-stained, airless. Walking therapy, side by side, turn and turn about, counters inhibition. Roles are exchanged like hats. No hierarchy. No punishing fee. No guilt. Narratives bleed into the map.

  Kötting spoke of his excitement and fear. He was then a wide-eyed innocent going with the bovver boys in their Doc Marten boots, by rattling Underground train, into deepest enemy territory. He polished the symbols as he laid them out. How certain youths handled the black knobs of the cosh-like devices that hung down to steady standing passengers in the swaying viral torpedo. And how the speed-charged lads used the rubbery supports to kick out the window glass, roaring and jeering. Testosterone reek was heady. And carried with the warring tribe deep inside the bowels of the ground.

  Andrew Kötting – Straw Bear, biker – fashions his panting-uphill anecdote to integrate material gathered from our walk. ‘They came over the wall from Brompton Cemetery.’ He made it sound like a Stanley Spencer resurrection. Football-hooligan invaders swinging into the stadium to attack the notorious Shed. While Kötting, the rememberer, being an unimplicated child, is absolved of the violence, the tribalism that has so much appeal.

  Of late, he confesses, he has lost that punch. The desire to ram through impossible projects, bounce bureaucracy, is beginning to fade. His frontal lobes have taken one hit too many. He’s on his feet, moving as well as ever, but he doesn’t always know where he is. Or what he is doing. Pain is constant. His left hand fumbles with necessary straps. ‘Stamp on it,’ he said, ‘and I won’t feel a thing.’

  We were too late for the Camden Arts Centre, but the venue held memories for both of us. Andrew had exhibited, participated, and checked out shows. I took a refreshment break when I made my preliminary reconnaissance of the Overground route, before I inflicted it on Kötting. Energized now by a sense of familiarity, I dragged my subdued and strategically dumb companion on a minor detour to a major resource, downhill and then up again, to a well-kept house. Although it existed, and glowed a fiery red in our evening reverie, this blue-plaque address – 20 Maresfield Gardens – was as mythical in the psychogeography of London as the rooms associated with Sherlock Holmes at 22b Baker Street. And with my search for Holmesian traces when I should have been in the library of the Courtauld Institute of Art in Portman Square, trying to get my hands on that single copy of some French thesis booked out for weeks ahead.

  Sigmund Freud and Sherlock Holmes shared many characteristics. But Andrew was not for halting, and the Freud Museum, the house where the celebrated analyst spent the last years of his life, had closed its doors to paying customers hours before. I kept my dissertation to myself, as we navigated a walled byway known as Shepherd’s Path, and on over the crest of the hill. There seemed to be a valid connection between Freud’s excavations of the unconscious, impacted layers of repression and fantasy, and the physical tunnelling into the lobes of London, the glacial moraine. The railway interventions in the clay mantle were extreme, a forced lobotomy for Finchley & Frognal.

  The Hampstead Junction Railway (later the Broad Street Line, later the North London Line, later London Overground) was an associate of the LNWR. It came into being to link Camden Town (and the NLR) with Willesden (and the NSWJR). An alphabet soup of railway companies and their parasitical developments carving up territory in the teeth of geography; subverting patterns of flow, springs and streams percolating through silt and sand. Hampstead the spa, the retreat, grew up around restorative waters. Quacks in gaudy waistcoats, bottling the chalybeate springs for sale at threepence a flask, declared that Hampstead waters were ‘a stimulant diuretic, very beneficial in chronic diseases arising from languor of the circulation, general debility of the system, or laxity of the solids’.

  Underground water collected in basins of clay flooded the tunnels. The invaders burrowed, shaping ledges for men and machinery. They burrowed again. Streets we
re lost, dwellings demolished: much of the present surface, as we pass among neat villas and regimented gardens, is dirt from railway excavations, gaping tunnels covered over with replenished and compacted soil. The metaphors are clumsy, but they won’t go away.

  Freud, nursing his cancerous jaw, and keeping off flies drawn to the ripe stench of bone rot with acrid cigar smoke, listens to the stories, playing and replaying significant details, teasing out explanations that read like crafted fictions. Like detective stories in yellowback shilling shockers: the Wolf Man, the lurid confessions of Anna O. Studies in Hysteria. A Study in Scarlet.

  The tunnel between Hampstead Heath and Finchley Road was constructed in 1859, three years after the birth of Sigismund Schlomo Freud in Mähren, Moravia. Financial considerations meant that the bore of this gaping hole, crossing Finchley Road, trepanning Arkwright Road, was narrow. Soil was slippery, unreliable. Records, giving a contemporary account of why this tunnel had to be tighter than others, were not kept. Sealed carriages slid through the dark. Passengers were tense, folded back into themselves, impatient for the return of daylight.

  Kötting was unimpressed by my Freudian improvisations, he wanted Gradgrind facts: references, page numbers, dates, measurements. The pedagogic German aspect of the man was becoming clearer as his physical outline vanished in the Hampstead night between puddles of electrified twilight. ‘It’s all about archive,’ he said. ‘Archive never fails. An antidote to preciousness. Pure evidence. Live footage from the past rescues me from future depression. Show me any image and I’ll subvert it.’

  Freud and railways: escape. He travels from Vienna to Paris, a deal brokered with the Nazis after shaming exactions, documents signed, fraudulent claims settled, so that the collection of books and antiquities can be shipped out of Austria to Maresfield Gardens.

  June 1938. One of those cinema escapes: last train, misty windows, closed frontiers. France. Sisters left behind. The dog, Lün, a chow, is brought out to perform, after quarantine, in home movies on the Hampstead lawn: the final birthday.

  A passenger train transports Freud into London: Victoria Station. Newsreel cameras. Magnesium flares flashing like the assassination in Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent. London welcomed the facsimile of the man, this cultural trophy, like a hieratic Egyptian figurine to be stored in the British Museum. Broadsheets congratulated themselves on their advocacy of the psychoanalytic fad; their liberality in letting such a distinguished alien step ashore, seeing him settled in a suitable quarter of the town. The obvious fragility, the fact that Freud was so close to death, added poignancy to the scene. The swagger of the earlier portraits – watchchain, gambler’s drooping bow tie, black cigar – were as much Doc Holliday as Viennese medical man. The repeated and barbaric acts of surgery conducted on Freud’s jaw, the cancerous lumps hacked out, the crudely inserted prosthetics, belonged with the kind of dentistry that Holliday might have practised. Freud dosed himself with a couple of aspirins and a fat cigar, and carried on.

  ‘Ne moriare mori,’ he said. ‘To prevent death by dying.’

  Another train. To Manchester. To visit his half-brother Emanuel in 1875. And his sister Rosa in 1884–5. This film of railway England, fields and factories, as witnessed through the smoke, made a deep and lasting impression. Emanuel died on 17 October 1914, after falling out of a train travelling between Manchester and Stockport.

  A later Manchester migrant, arriving as a Lektor in the German department of the university, and conscious of the implications of following in the tracks of the philosopher Wittgenstein, was W. G. Sebald. The bricks of Sebald’s retreat in Kingston Road, Didsbury, were not as red as Maresfield Gardens: part of a tactful development, not a custom-built Hampstead mansion, with eight bedrooms, three bathrooms, designed in 1920 by Albert Hastilow in the revivalist style, and improved by Freud’s architect son, Ernst, who installed a lift to transport the ailing analyst from one floor to the next.

  Trains were the weave of Sebald’s prose. How many cavernous stations with abandoned waiting rooms? How many station hotels with slits looking out on brick walls and strands of ominous wire? How potent the urge, at the end of all that restless journeying, to lie down on the tracks?

  In Ghost Hunter, a CBC Radio interview with Eleanor Wachel, Sebald reminds us that there are ‘trains all the time’ as punctuation between the episodes of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah documentary. ‘The whole logistics of deportation was based on the logistics of the railway system.’ That visibility is so obvious that it doesn’t register as a symbol. Holocaust echoes are seeded throughout Sebald’s texts: ‘the track, certainly, the smoke, and certainly the dust’.

  Ghost hunter or ghost detective, Freud appears in London, on the cusp of the Second World War, as a living phantom derived from the speculative fiction of that table-tapper Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock Holmes couldn’t operate without his Bradshaw’s Railway Guide. He ventured in the historic period between hansom cabs and primitive aeroplanes, with trains as his favoured theatre. Trains meant timetables, meant the end of clocks set to the whims of local stations: standardization.

  Holmes precedes Freud: A Study in Scarlet, with the first appearance of the consulting detective, was published in 1887. Freud’s Studies in Hysteria came into print in 1895. The Hound of the Baskervilles stalked the moors and crags in the Strand Magazine between August 1901 and April 1902, while Freud’s ‘Wolf Man’, the stern-bowelled Russian aristocrat Sergei Pankejeff, didn’t make his way to the Viennese couch until 1910. But the two projections, Holmes and Freud, written into existence, animated by fanatical cultists, had much in common.

  Cocaine. And other substance-abuse experiments. Obsessively cluttered London rooms with the blinds drawn. The ability to listen, observe, interpret: to tease out a narrative and to pick it to pieces, practising a form of portraiture by cubism before cubism has been invented.

  The supplicant lies prone, or slumps in a chair. The interrogator betrays no special interest, until there is a revealing slip of the tongue, a show that has the entranced listener leaning forward, chin on steepled hands. Psychoanalysis is routine detective work with a higher fee. Clients are always inferiors, whatever their pretensions to wealth and caste. Irene Adler, the woman, the only woman for the misogynist Holmes, the American-born beauty with ‘the mind of the most resolute of men’, is mirrored by Hilda Doolittle, the bisexual poet, H. D., who undergoes analysis with Freud.

  ‘He never spoke of the softer passions …’ Conan Doyle writes of Holmes in ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’. ‘They were admirable things for the observer – excellent for drawing the veil from men’s motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results.’

  The Adler case turns on a compromising photograph. When, at the finish, the former opera singer and Bohemian adventuress, marries a man called Norton, and outwits Holmes, after disguising herself as a boy, the consulting detective refuses payment from his royal client and asks instead for a photograph of this woman. Freud decorated his Hampstead study, the retreat of those last fourteen months, with portraits of his own Irene Adlers: the Parisian singer and café-concert performer Yvette Guilbert, and the mysterious woman in furs, Lou Andreas-Salomé, who had lived with Friedrich Nietzsche and whose lovers included the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. The photograph of Guilbert is inscribed and dedicated, and dates from her visit to Maresfield Gardens, when she was in London for a series of recitals at Wigmore Hall. The portrait of Irene Adler that Holmes claims as a fetish, a sentimental trophy, shows her, full figure, in evening dress. It is not inscribed, but comes with a letter. ‘Male costume is nothing new to me. I often take advantage of the freedom it gives … I leave a photograph which he might care to possess …’

  Irene’s surname, Adler, exposed in the first Holmes story published in the Strand Magazine in 1891, anticipates Freud’s invitation to Alfred Adler, his colleague
and later rival, to join the informal discussion group that germinated the psychoanalytic movement. After a bitter parting of the ways, Adler carried with him, wherever he travelled, the postcard from 1902 with Freud’s offer: he wanted proof that he had never been a mere disciple. The hothouse atmosphere in which the Viennese discussion group took place offered as many schisms, rivalries, grudges, psychic assaults as could be found in the biosphere of sensational literature cranked out as railway reading in England.

  Freud, crossing from Calais to Dover, dreams of wading ashore at Pevensey Bay, making a landfall as significant as that of Duke William of Normandy. With his entourage of personal physicians, lapdogs, wealthy princesses, his strong cigars (the ash of which would tell Holmes so much), the Viennese professor is a Moriarty figure: an intellect as cold and perverse and egotistical as that of his rival, the legendary detective.

  A late challenger to Freudian orthodoxy, an infiltrator of the inner circle, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, accessed and edited – a detective story in itself – the correspondence between Freud and a colleague from whom he parted on bitter terms, Wilhelm Fliess. An eccentric researcher, Peter Swales, dogged but untenured, picked over the Freud/Fliess letters, and discovered an episode which he proposed as a plot by Freud to murder Fliess by pushing him over a ravine when they were walking together in the mountains. There was a meeting in August 1900 at Achensee, in the Tyrol. A technical argument over who had first articulated the concept of universal sexuality soured the atmosphere.

  Fliess, recalling the drama, in a book published in 1906, claimed that it was Freud’s intention to lure him into the mountains, in order to nudge him over a precipice and down into the turbulent water below. This strange narrative echoes the famous conclusion of the rivalry between Holmes and Professor Moriarty, author of a treatise on the binomial theorem. Holmes and Watson enjoy a walking tour among ‘homely Alpine villages’ – until the day arrives for the apparently fatal plunge, when Holmes precipitates Moriarty into the Reichenbach Falls, ‘that dreadful cauldron of swirling water and seething foam’.