Read Online While England Sleeps by David Leavitt - Free Book Online

only went so far as to let my passion fly for a few short paragraphs, during which I described the underground as “another London, subterranean and sinister and Gothic.” The novel had for a hero a neophyte writer (of course), one Nicholas Holden, who watches with fascination the expansion of the Piccadilly Line out to the distant suburb of Cockfosters, where his friend Avery James, the brilliant young painter, lives. Like Nigel, Avery is aggressively antibourgeois, and so the dreaded suburbs come to embody for him exactly the opposite of what they embody for most people; genius lingers in the semidetached houses, and the moment when the train emerges out of the tube and into the light is a moment of revelation:
     
    All at once the blackness lifted, and we were thrust into cold sun and dust. For a few seconds I had to shield my eyes against the massive brightness, the backs of houses bearing down on me through the train’s windows. Oh, how I longed to descend once again into that dark vein, where I could see as Avery saw—with the Inward Eye!
     
    Nicholas craves “the end of the line,” which is both death and a safe haven, “that elusive center, the center that will hold.” And yet he does not quite believe that the distant suburbs to which the Piccadilly Line takes him actually exist: “How could one believe in Arnos Grove, in Enfield West, in Southgate, when one was standing in a crowded cavern deep beneath the earth, and a hat was flying down the platform, blown by the hot, bitter, smoky wind? Hyde Park Corner is reality, but Cockfosters, shimmering Cockfosters, is an ideal!” In fact Cockfosters was nowhere—a station near a cemetery off a suburban road—but I didn’t care about that. I loved the name. I loved all underground stations with peculiar names—Headstone Lane, Old Street, Burnt Oak, Elephant & Castle. Also, I loved that Cockfosters was both the end of the line and somewhere no one I knew had ever had reason to visit. Not a community or town, exactly. Rather, a place invented by the underground. A terminus. The end of the map, the edge of the flat earth the map imagines. Beyond Cockfosters you could not go. You had to turn back. The tracks themselves stopped. The miles of tracks simply, mysteriously stopped.
    “Imagine Cockfosters,” Avery is always saying to Nicholas in the novel. But Nicholas’s problem is that he cannot imagine Cockfosters. That was my problem as well. Nor did I ever, in all my years in London, dare to go there. Oh, I nearly did. I got as far as Southgate once, where the escalators have gleaming gold handrails. Then I got scared. I turned back. You see, I was afraid that if I actually went to Cockfosters, I would discover it was just a place, like any other place. Shops and houses. Women carting groceries. And that reality, for some reason, my youthful imagination could not bear to contemplate.
     
    That was the novel that, in the fall of 1936, I had written half of; the novel that, to my chagrin, I did not seem to have it in myself to complete and that I knew I would never complete until I, like Nicholas, “imagined Cockfosters,” something at the moment I could not find it in myself to do.
    Since I seemed to be incapable of doing any work on my novel, therefore, and since not writing was driving me mad in much the same way that writing had driven me mad back when I wrote, I decided to return to journal writing. Simply to put things down, to get sentences onto paper, was my goal. I had no ambitions beyond the restoration of sanity. Toward that end, I bought a notebook with a mottled black-and-white cover that suggested ink spills and exuded a comforting, musty aroma, the aroma of stationers’ shops on rainy days. I also bought a natty blue Waterman’s fountain pen and several bottles of ink.
    Here is how the journal begins:
     
    Autumn 1936. I must write. Something, anything.
    I was thinking, the other day, about the names of the underground stations and what they