London Overground (23 page)

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'.

Each breath nearer the last
. We say it aloud but we are not convinced.
The dead die hard, they are trespassers on the beyond.
We echo and quote instead of revealing what we think we mean, or what we mean to mean. The wild surmises of that walk over Hampstead's glacial debris, the skull of the hill with its plaques to Freud and Sir Edward Elgar (
HERE HE COMPOSED
/
THE MUSIC MAKERS
/
FALSTAFF
/
THE SPIRIT OF ENGLAND
), kept us going, secure within our established roles. I had much more to say, but I would save it for the book. Andrew was calculating: first, the distance to the next bite, and then how he would have to postpone his bike ride back to Hastings and borrow a Hackney bed for the night.

When the circuit of the Overground was done, and it had to be all of a piece, a single day, in order to download its secrets, I would have to come back to Maresfield Gardens. I combined an afternoon visit with a walk from Willesden Junction to Willesden Green, thereby transporting after-images of the paintings of Leon Kossoff into this scrupulously preserved house of memory. Marina Warner, introducing
20 Maresfield Gardens: A Guide to the Freud Museum London
, draws attention to the self-sacrificing piety of Anna Freud's ‘act of enshrinement'. Warner reads it as a way of seeing her father ‘as an event in history, a new geography of the mind, not only a person'.

And
I'm sure she's right: the redbrick villa with its tidy front garden keeping the road at a safe distance, and its generous allocation of windows, like an art school or dance studio, has become a portrait of the dying man. You step inside, at permitted hours, as if offering yourself up as a suitable case for treatment; a role I could never contemplate. ‘Mental pain is without end,' says Max Ferber, the Manchester painter in Sebald's 1992 book,
The Emigrants.
But the notion of spilling the mess of memory, rehashing accounts of dreams (as dreary a business as conversations misdescribing the plot of
Breaking Bad
), was far too high a price to pay for normality. For acquiring some hygienic husk of personality as your safety mask in the world.

The first task is to find somebody prepared to sell you a ticket. Rooms beyond rooms, arranged with authentic mementoes, lead to a conservatory designed by Ernst Freud and now stocked with books, cards, customized mugs and novelties such as ‘Prof. Sigmund Freud's Fruit & Nut Bar. The Non-Hysteria-Inducing Confection to be taken twice daily'.

The house in the days of Freud's youngest daughter, Anna, in her long residence, was the lair they all wanted to invade. Access was a rare privilege. The cupboard outside Anna's bedroom was crammed with unrecorded letters.

There are two monitor screens impertinently set in the high bourgeois dining room. Home movies flicker like candle flames in a dirty jar. The sunlit garden, once again, hosts a birthday celebration for the man who can barely stand to acknowledge the tributes, the floral gifts. And this happened
here.
Time knots and spirals; place is resolute.

Two gentlemen in formal attire, courtiers from another dispensation, arrive with an enormous ledger, which they invite the professor to sign. He had already signed away, to other authorities, much of his estate. Now, they say, he must pen his
full name; the preferred version –
Freud –
won't serve. There is a point at which artists become branded single-name commodities: Picasso, Matisse, Bacon.
Sigmund Freud
is scratched in the register of the Royal Society beneath
Isaac Newton
and
Charles Darwin
. They bring the book to him. He was fit enough, when drawn by powerful bonds of affection, to cross town to visit Lün in quarantine kennels at Ladbroke Grove: the Royal Society, in Burlington House on Piccadilly, was a step too far. All too soon Austrians and Germans in exile, men like Ludwig Meidner and Kurt Schwitters, would be quarantined by internment on the Isle of Man.

Much of the bleached-out garden footage, looped within the twin monitors, lobes of memory, reminds me of my own dreams of a childhood assembled from surviving 16mm home movies. My memories are of the films, not the events behind them: parties, weddings, dead faces laughing. Those who acknowledged the camera and those who learned to ignore its nuisance. My mother before I was born. And my father's father, the medical grandfather I never knew, holding up cake for his dog, the Scottie, to jump. The doctor was not well. He wears a hat. He looks like the established James Joyce, convalescent after the latest eye operation. Like Freud in Maresfield Gardens, he is a border crosser, a bringer of messages from the other side.
The conscious wears away, the
unconscious is unchanging.

Freud disliked cameras, a mechanical system of evaluating the past to rival his own. And he never tolerated rivals. Whenever, as in the secure reservation, the Arcadia of Maresfield Gardens, confrontation became inevitable, a consequence of his fame or notoriety, he submitted, putting on a face as stern as a Greek tragic mask. He refused the Czech-born director Georg Wilhelm Pabst, who requested permission to contrive a film around the person of the Viennese analyst. Freud could
have entered our European art-cinema pantheon, alongside Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks. Pabst, by 1930, had evolved a style acclaimed for its psychological prescience. He had what they called an ‘X-ray eye' camera style, seeing through flesh and fabric. His London, designed, in
Pandora's Box
, for Louise Brooks as a victim of Jack the Ripper, was a studio set in Berlin. ‘Analysis,' Freud told Pabst, ‘does not lend itself to any kind of camera.'

The most potent retrieval, the one that transfixed me in front of the monitors in that Maresfield Gardens dining room with the souvenir painting of the Alpine region where Freud loved to walk, showed a young relative, a youth in flannels, blazer, open-necked white shirt, paying his respects to his grandfather. The youth was Lucian Freud. Innocent of the will to challenge the camera as an instrument of record, Lucian walks beside the fading old man, across the lawn to a fishpond. Lucian and Sigmund, side by side for an instant, affect the matter of London. The official story in the guidebook does not record this visit. But letters from young Lucian are on display in a glass case: ‘Lieben Pap – we have put up the model railway. Have you already built the skyscraper?'

Painters were the true analysts: Freud, Auerbach, Kossoff. Day after day in their studio-traps worrying at portraiture, persons and places of the city. Scraping off, starting again, setting aside. Like Sigmund Freud, they finesse a narrative, the facsimile of a higher reality. They stay close to railways, using tracks as ladders into past and future, ladders of transience and extinction. Ladders like strips of film. They sketch compulsively, their notebooks are records kept against future portraits.

A different kind of painting, in high-walled mansions of the suburbs, is therapy. It does not belong to those who produce it. It is called ‘outsider art'. It requires tactful curation. A vault at
the Wellcome Trust. In the now-decommissioned asylum at Netherne-on-the-Hill, the doctors decided to remove all unnecessary internal organs, in case they should be the source of social infection: madness, delirium, vision. They plucked teeth, hacked out tonsils, sliced at the appendix, the worms and tubes of the interior. At mealtimes, nurses came to the table with a great confectioner's jar containing all the sets of teeth, which were handed out and then returned, when the chewing and mangling and dribbling was done.

Climbing the stairs, and not using Freud's lift, if it still exists, brings the paying visitor to the room with the death couch. We have already negotiated the portrait by Salvador Dalí, penned on blotting paper from surreptitious sketches: the Mekon bulb of the consulting analyst's bald cranium and the frown, blind eyes behind the round white disks of the spectacles. The vortex of that great snail's shell grafted on a rictus of cancerous pain spins me back down the route of our Overground walk: Dalí invokes Ballard. As the painting of the wolves in the tree by Sergei Pankejeff conjures thoughts of the remedial art of motorway asylums. And, more significantly, Angela Carter and her stories: ‘The Company of Wolves', ‘The Werewolf'. ‘The wolfsong,' Carter wrote, ‘is the sound of the rending you will suffer, itself a murdering.' The beasts painted by Freud's own Wolf Man are soft as white-furred pears. Their song is cloying.

There is a photograph of an Alsatian, together with a poem presented to Freud on his seventieth birthday, hung in Anna Freud's room. The dog belonged to Anna and its name was Wolf. When Hitler took Blondi, his own German shepherd, with him into the Führerbunker of the Reich Chancellery, a puppy was born. He named it Wulf in the mistaken belief that his first name, Adolf, meant ‘noble wolf'. There are home movies in existence of the off-duty dictator and his dogs. Subdued familiars. Messengers from Carter's dark forest.

Nobody
sits on, or even touches, Freud's leathery death couch. Nearby, old films loop: summer gardens, heavy dresses, bouquets, cake, wine, beribboned dogs. The chow rescued from quarantine would not approach the bed in which the sick man lay. The smell of the gangrenous jaw was too rank. They had to cover what was left of Freud with mosquito netting to keep off the flies.