London Overground (24 page)

Downstairs, the study is the heart of the house. The shelved books brought from Vienna. The artefacts. The lithograph, hung above the couch on which patients lay, was
Une leçon clinque à la Salpêtrière
by André Brouillet. The French clinician Jean-Martin Charcot, as showman, presenting a swooning, hysterical woman, in an operatic state of undress, to a room of men in dark clothing.

Now the curtains are always secured against shifts of London light. Another pair of Woolfs, Leonard and Virginia, called on Freud, to discuss the publication by the Hogarth Press of his controversial text
Moses and Monotheism.
Would he consider changing the title? He would not. With a formal gesture of European courtesy, Freud presented Virginia with a flower, a narcissus. Later she recalled: ‘a screwed up shrunk very old man … inarticulate: but alert'.

Mummy masks, bodhisattvas, amulets: grave goods with which to rehearse a burial. Egyptian cullings and Greek sphinxes, the residue of dealers in Vienna, Berlin, Paris, dominated every inch of the roped-off room in which Freud engaged with his last patients, and in which he wrote. There is barely space on the desk. With so many gods and votive offerings, it must have been like taking simultaneous dictation in a dozen dead languages. The classic and the primitive. Excavated relics snatched from their ritual purpose and made into palliative toys, symbols to invoke the metaphor of analysis as an extension of archaeology.

I
think of Freud as that original Hampstead archetype, the homeworker. The writer at his desk. Bedded down ahead of all those who would follow: Elias Canetti, Jack Trevor Story, Aidan Higgins, Margaret Drabble. Laptop labourers glimpsed through unshuttered windows. The artisans of literature who require no railway. A room of one's own. A favoured pub on Devonshire Hill. On Flask Walk. A bookshop. A chess café. A heath on which to walk the dog. A shady pond around which to make new friends.

The fantasy from the start of our tramp up Arkwright Road comes right back: the girl in the garden with her hair tangled in a tree, smoking a black cigar. The Freud Museum has a tradition of encouraging art. From time to time, taboos have been broken. The poet and performance artist Brian Catling, a presence as grave as an escapee from the expressionist asylum of Fritz Lang's
The Testament of Dr Mabuse
, a crazed professor or sane lunatic, approaches Freud's desk with its ranks of twice-sanctified objects. Catling's hair is snowy white. He is stridently besuited. For some reason his jowls flap with ribbons of sticking plaster: a madman who has taken a cutthroat razor to the mirror. He snatches up one of the precious figurines. His other hand is enclosed in a brown paper bag. The audience gasp at the impertinence. Catling/Mabuse gnaws on the phallic god like a starving dog splitting a bone.

Outside, in the front garden, the poet who sings and performs as MacGillivray, and whose voice, unaccompanied, can certainly channel the dead, is woven into Freud's tree. She leaks smoke, naked in a long fur-collared coat. Something of the density of the weave of dreams in that house is undone. And something is confirmed. Her young eyes, never blinking, halt the glaciers.

Without a visible railway, and cresting the hill, we free-associate. I had the feeling that I never quite qualified for Hampstead: financially, culturally, sartorially. It's hard to get the look just right: Alan Bennett/Jonathan Miller corduroy, V-neck pullover and tie, bicycle Oxbridge,
London Review of Books
kitchen suppers on the lower slopes, the better part of Camden Town – and then Peter Cook, actors and authors, slewed bohemia with dosh, towards the leafy summit.

But that was then, the days of renting rooms in houses where single gentlemen who left the BBC under a bit of a cloud shared a bathroom with bright, shiny, geometric girls from advertising agencies and hirsute Israeli men, maturing in theoretical architecture. On Downshire Hill, becalmed in the Freemasons Arms, that dead Python, Graham Chapman, gestured at the crossword and started mid-morning on lunchtime drinks. The preserved bedroom of John Keats was across the road. When I went to the bar for another heady draught cider – the debauchery! – I tried to see which black Penguin Graham wasn't reading. Hoping it was
The Odyssey.
So that I could mutter under my breath, ‘On first looking into Chapman's Homer.'

It would take Muriel Spark in her pomp to do justice to the incipient drama of all this, the social and sexual interactions of the boarding-house group and the ones who are going to snap and do something worthy of a telephone call. Calls were public and not lightly made. Most of the rooms in these quiet hives were composing bits of books; none were published. Piano practice drifted over the reserved crescents like clouds of
hay-fever pollen. I walked out to accompany Anna to the Underground station at the top of the hill, picking up newspapers along the way to be chopped into phrases that could be pasted to the page as accidental poetry. Hampstead High Street had a bookshop, a launderette on the corner of Willoughby Road, and a bank where you could walk straight up to the counter and ask them to cash your cheque for two pounds. Nobody was paying in.

I remember being summoned, late on a Sunday evening, to take a call from an elderly Northerner I'd never met, a man with some Hampstead stories of his own. The poet Basil Bunting. I'd approached him, by way of his publisher Stuart Montgomery, about taking part in a film. Very sensibly, he asked about money. There wasn't any. And nobody I hit on, at the BBC or in Germany, showed much interest in the topic.

Fitzjohn's Avenue was where we emerged and where I stopped talking about Freud. I told Andrew that Anna, when I first knew her in Dublin, thought I was making it all up, dreams and sex and
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
. I must have an ulterior motive, trying to pitch such an unlikely tale. But although she had not at that point come across any of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis, I had to confess that she was far more likely to actually read their books, when the time came, and to absorb what she needed. I dipped in and out, sampled, snacked and stole in my usual magpie fashion.

Kötting wasn't listening. We were a long way from Deptford and a fair step from a bed in Hackney. There were anecdotes on tap about his days ducking and diving in Camden Market, and watching all-night sessions at the Scala, but the silence of these hilltop streets unnerved him. We were exposed, chalk-upland pilgrims whose natural habitat has been invaded by sudden outcrops of sensible housing. Overbred cats who never step
outside watched us from behind gleaming windows. I understood the banishment of weeds and windborne infiltrators from these polite gardens. I had worked here, always for Jewish exiles, usually widows, as a jobbing pound-an-hour gardener or heavy-handed grass manicurist, keeping fecund nature in check. On good days I might be asked to get rid of a box of books – or, just once, a folder of erotic Japanese prints. The last vestiges of an unredeemed husband.

We were walking now in our own worlds. I knew there was a direct route, an uplands goat track, that would carry us straight to Hampstead Heath Station and on to the ley-line hub of Gospel Oak, but I wasn't confident, in our present condition, of finding it. Edith Sitwell writes about Rimbaud and Verlaine in their vagabond days wandering through Camden Town. ‘They walked in parallel lines, at a dignified distance from each other and unnaturally straight, like two worn-out trams.' Uncanny. And precisely how we came down Lyndhurst Road in a companionable slump.

This was a much older spine, referring back to my first days in London, my intimate association with the Northern Line. I never deviated far from what looked on the Underground map like a straight shot between Kennington (and the film school) and Warren Street, and then out along the north-west diagonal, through Mornington Crescent, with its ghosts of railway-haunting painters, Sickert, Auerbach, Kossoff, to Hampstead. A Dante progress designed by Frank Pick: Camden badlands to shining village on the hill. Submerged rivers ran in the same direction, from Hampstead ponds to the Thames. Striking east is a perversion of the natural order.

Vestiges of Freud's cigars still webbed the almond trees of Belsize. At the peak of his consumption, he got through twenty a day. When his aching jaw was locked and frozen after the latest operation to scrape away the sour fruits of cancer, he
propped it open with a clothes peg: an aperture just wide enough to admit a black stogie. Beckett in
Echo's Bones
, that ill-favoured tale of the afterlife, accuses smoke, the residue of crematorium ovens and the final wheeze of stoic philosophers perched on fence posts, of being the medium of exchange between the world of the living and the limbo of the recently dead. Sam had stepped down into enough riverside drinking dens where undispersed blue clouds stood in for the missing man, saturating furniture and fittings, staining portraits of clean-living athletic heroes with nicotine jaundice. ‘The dream of the shadow of the smoke of a rotten cigar.'

The Belsize Park hinterland, that triangle between Fitzjohn's Avenue, Adelaide Road and Haverstock Hill, was saturated with anti-psychiatrists, gestalt therapists, kundalinic gymnasts teasing the sex snake from the spinal bow. The shadow of the old man in the garden fell across all of them. Freud's brief London coda, his dying reveries, the smoke, the flies, the packed library, the bonsai forest of votive figures on the desktop, ice-crawled down the contours. If a social scientist contrived a geological map for class trauma, you would colour this zone as yellow as fine-grained sand.

Visiting R. D. Laing, the mind-guru of the period, in his Belsize Park basement flat in 1967, was confirming the evolution from the grand bourgeois pretensions of Maresfield Gardens to the nakedness of elective bohemia. But still the patients, the troubled ones, made their appointments with their charismatic prophets. Freud and Laing, outsiders in London, agreed to perform, engage with, challenge and interpret, as part of the price for mastering their true calling as writers. Fictions of truth. A cinema of confession and seduction achieved without film. Laing wanted to fill mainstream television screens with a single struck match that would take half an hour to flare. And with the infinitely slow pouring of a glass of water. It was too
shocking. Freud's special patient, the poet H. D., was part of an experiment in using film to explore extreme psychic states and their relationship to surface reality. In 1930 she appeared with Paul Robeson in a piece called
Borderline
, funded by her lover, the novelist Bryher. Belsize Park floated on unmade projects, confrontations between psychiatrists, underground documentarists and culture fixers.

I arrived in Laing's flat with a film crew of my own. There were no carpets and not much furniture. A gramophone playing the Beatles'
Rubber Soul
was tended by a young lad, Laing's son. The room where we spread ourselves opened on a wilderness garden. Somebody had cut the outline of a horse from one of the Sunday newspapers and positioned it on the wooden floor.

The youth who accompanied me, recently sent down from Oxford over some standard drug infraction, and soon to become a Laing client, asked a question about tactics and confrontation. With the arrogance of the privileged half-born, he told the anti-psychiatrist that he was guilty of trying to induce a flash of consciousness, with no idea of how it was going to happen.

They were, both of them, cross-legged, red-eyed and comprehensively stoned.

‘You either shoot them or you turn them on,' Laing said. ‘And there is no violent, coercive, authoritarian mode of persuasion or seduction that will turn people on – except to be turned on oneself, as far as one can allow oneself to go. And that seems to me to be all that you are saying.'

My own – and only – engagement with place was through mapping. And walking. No sooner was I settled in my Hampstead room in 1966, and travelling to a part-time job force-feeding general studies to motor mechanics in Walthamstow, than
I plotted an excursion as a method of linking figures who struck me as binding the territory together, contributing to that underlying and still-unexposed London mythology. Tim Powers, in his 1983 novel
The Anubis Gates
, managed the trick without leaving California: there is a portal, a time gate, accessible on Hampstead Heath, leading to a subterranea of Egyptian magic (Freud's figures come to life), chthonic monsters and archaic poetry.

I roped in a couple of companions, floaters from Dublin, and led them to Golders Green Crematorium, where we paid our respects to Freud's ashes. All that heat and smoke reduced to an ornamental urn. Between mourners, we processed the paved walkways, the Italianate colonnades, failing to acknowledge the traces of other London figures cremated here. All those already recorded, installed on commemorative tablets. Or those still to come, slots reserved for a future date. Anna Freud and Doris Lessing from Finchley and West Hampstead. The architect Erno Goldfinger with his brutalist towers, twin spectres of Westway and Blackwall Tunnel approach. Concrete obelisks for a city that never happened. And Joe Orton: butchered in Islington. Bram Stoker banishing Count Dracula to Purfleet. But our biggest miss of all was Percy Wyndham Lewis whose trilogy –
The Childermass
,
Monstre Gai
,
Malign Fiesta
– was the most accurate topographic chart I knew of the soul's attempt to penetrate the labyrinth of the radiant city. ‘Some homing solitary shadow is continually arriving in the restless dust of the turnpike,' Lewis wrote. Prefiguring past and future pilgrims, from John Bunyan to John Clare. The almost-living in pursuit of the not-quite-dead.

From Freud to Karl Marx, by way of the Llandin, as Parliament Hill was known to antiquarians. We touched the stone of assembly, a recent intervention proving the site of the Gorsedd of the Druids, a sacred elevation. And moved on to the massive
head of Marx in Highgate Cemetery. Here was the materialist antidote to arcane speculations constructing an essentially conservative version of the city involving hierarchies of power, privileged access to the gods, and lines of terrestrial force that squabbled for precedence like our current energy suppliers, the frackers and reckless spendthrifts of fossil resources.

Karl's glowering, leonine head was an iron chess piece honoured, on the day of that first London
dérive
, by small parties of excited Chinese men in long coats and Mao caps. There was no strict pattern to this walk: Freud, Marx, and a vague attempt to identify the room where Rimbaud stayed with Verlaine in Royal College Street. The notion of these provocative exiles taking up residence in London gave that other metropolis, the city within the city, the city of our imagination, a certain lustre.

Drifting through the graves and memorials of St Pancras Old Church, we found ourselves on the disputed towpath of the Regent's Canal. The narrative of our pinball zigzag between persons of interest evaporated. We were liberated by the absence of memory. We infiltrated a terrain suspended between eras of economic adventurism; the working barges had gone and the barriers and mesh fences of the energy companies had not yet arrived.

Railway cathedrals on the horizon. Gas holders. Allotments. Warehouses. We carried on, making a detour around the tunnel under Islington, and pushing east until we arrived at Victoria Park – which reminded one of our party, a Francophile, of Louis Aragon's surrealist excursion with André Breton to the Buttes-Chaumont. The Parisian park was a ‘shared mirage'. It destroyed boredom. The meandering paths and shaded avenues suggested ‘a great revelation that might transform life and destiny'. We emerged into the streets of somewhere shabby, self-contained, and utterly mysterious: a place called Hackney.

The
cinema has disappeared from Pond Street. The Royal Free Hospital, an intimidating, multi-balconied hulk, links us to Denmark Hill, to the Maudsley and King's College Hospital. A TV woman, her prompt notes kept out of shot, is delivering a snappy piece about healthy meal initiatives for patients, alongside a KFC monster burger bus stop dressed with the slogan:
FILL YOUR TANK
. Listening to Andrew's creaking joints and squelching boots, I can't decide if we should check him in to outpatients or find a pub.

With the reappearance of the Overground at Hampstead Heath, our steps quickened. We were returned to the actual, the facts of the street. An architect called Robert Dearman had gussied up his narrow grey strips of window with a set of five bright-coloured Olympic rings. They struck a redundant note on a street with more impatient cars than people, so far from the Stratford development zone. The misted glass panels, I realized, were a design conceit, intended to reference a top-down view of swimming lanes or a section of the running track.

I let Gospel Oak pass without comment. We were too tight against the railway that loomed above us to go back to my old source book,
Prehistoric London: Its Mounds and Circles
by E. O. Gordon. ‘At the foot of Parliament Hill is Gospel Oak Station,' Gordon wrote. ‘A name which connects the Druidic with the Christian religion, and links British and Saxon customs.' I swallowed the story and recorded Andrew smiling behind his dark glasses, belly rumbling.