Context
Anna Kavan
Kate Zambreno
One of the worst things about hell is that
nobody is ever allowed to sleep there, although it’s always night, or
at the earliest, about six o’clock in the evening. There are beds, of
course, but they’re used for other purposes.” It
has been said that Anna Kavan wrote in a mirror. The body of work left
by the now obscure British modernist represented a constant inquiry
into her own identity, and the invention of a personal mythology—or
demonology, as it would become later in her career. The experience of
reading Kavan’s works one after another, in chronological order, is
like hearing the same story repeated again and again, recasting
familiar situations and characters in tones that grow more nightmarish
as the years pass. Her writing can be seen as an attempt to put into
language a lifetime of rejection and alienation. The characters in Anna
Kavan’s world are travelers of neverending journeys, by train and by
ship; they stop in small, indiscriminate towns where rows of faceless
houses are as closed-off as their inhabitants; finding strange faces
and obstacles everywhere, the landscape one of silent hostility. Her
alter egos veer into melancholy and disillusionment and even
derangement. They are abandoned orphans seemingly too sensitive for
reality. “So many dreams are crowding upon me now that I can
scarcely tell true from false: dreams like light imprisoned in bright
mineral caves; hot, heavy dreams; ice-age dreams; dreams like machines
in the head.” Born Helen Woods in 1901, in Cannes, Kavan was active as
a writer from the thirties through her death in 1968; she wrote about
these dreams in some seventeen novels and collections, two published
posthumously, which move from first-person essayistic fragments to
surrealist experiments,from Freudian fairytales to metaphysical science
fiction. The scope of her writing is breathtaking, although the quality
of the output is irregular. Once heralded as the heiress apparent to
female experimental writers like Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes, and
called “Kafka’s sister” (and the K in her choice of pseudonym,
“Kavan,” has been read for Kafka, her neighbor alphabetically on the
bookshop shelf), she is now only remembered—if at all—for Asylum Piece, her exploration of madness, or Ice, her sci-fi crossover success. Despite
recurring bouts of mental illness that would result in three suicide
attempts, and despite a lifelong addiction to heroin, and in the midst
of two failed marriages, Kavan wrote tirelessly, and reinvented
herself, over and again, in the process eventually taking on the name
of one of her earlier heroines. The titles of her novels provide clues
as to the transformations of this chameleon, in life as well as
writing: Let Me Alone (1930), A Stranger Still (1935), Change the Name (1941), Who Are You? (1963). Beginning
in the late ’20s, Kavan published a string of very good yet
conventional novels under the name Helen Ferguson, using the surname of
the first husband she abhorred. The Helen Ferguson novels, published by
Jonathan Cape with some success, feature young women suffering in
suburban miserabilism, trapped by their families and the constraints of
gender. There are hints of the sense of persecution and enforced
isolation that would inform the later works. A Charmed Circle,
Kavan/Ferguson’s first novel, published in 1929, features two sisters,
Olive and Beryl Deane, both unhappy and stuck living in a small
manufacturing town—an homage to the schoolteachers Ursula and Gudrun
Bragwen in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love. A Charmed Circle also calls to mind the delightful weirdness of Jane Bowles’s short
story, “Camp Cataract.” The Deane sisters with their “dark secret
faces,” live under the tyranny of their hermit father and their dainty
mother, who dotes on their cruelly arrogant older brother. “We’re all
of us miserable, and we all of us hate each other,” Beryl complains. Let Me Alone is based on the author’s first year of marriage, which she spent in
Burma. Its heroine, named Anna Kavan, is a repressed young orphan who
finds herself pushed into marriage by her cruel aunt, forced in the
process to give up a scholarship to Oxford. Ferguson portrays the
tropics where the new couple settles as an unrelenting, alienating
hell. Kavan’s husband only wants to control her: “It made him indignant
that she still remained somehow apart. It shattered his complacency to
think that he had not finally conquered her yet.” The character of the
sadistic husband was revisited many times by Kavan, and his apotheosis
is the narrator in what would be her masterpiece, Ice, a man who chases a girl all over the globe so that he can possess her, and the monsoon climax at the end of Let Me Alone presages the stylistic power of her later, experimental writing. In the sequel, A Stranger Still (1935), the character Anna Kavan is separated from her husband and
living in London, where she falls in love with a Sunday painter and
heir to a large department store fortune, modeled on Helen Ferguson’s
somewhat tumultuous love affair with the painter Stuart Edmonds, who
she married in 1931 (although no legal record of their union exists).
With Edmonds she traveled Europe for two years, then settled into a
domestic life in Chilterns, Bledlow Cross, where they bred bulldogs; a
rural setting utilized for the later Ferguson novels such as Goose Cross (1936). After
a suicide attempt in the late ’30s, following the dissolution of her
second marriage, Kavan was admitted into a sanatorium, emerging with
her new name and persona, as well as the material for two books that
would drastically depart from the tightly controlled realism of the
Helen Ferguson years. As has been noted elsewhere, it’s almost
imperative to speak of Helen Ferguson and Anna Kavan as two different
writers. Part of the fascination of the Helen Ferguson years is in the
break that occurs along with her assumption of a new identity and
style. Like Sylvia Plath’s Lady Lazarus, Kavan rose as if from the
dead, specter thin because of hospitalization and narcosis. But instead
of rising with the red hair of the poem, the former hearty bulldog
breeder and brunette girl-nextdoor bleached hers movie-star blonde to
mirror the fragile waif, the “glass girl” that would become the
nameless heroine in her later works. First came Asylum Piece,
her debut as Anna Kavan in 1940, where a desperately unhappy
first-person narrator drowning in anxiety struggles to maintain a
dialogue with an increasingly deaf outside world, becoming more and
more neurotic until she is institutionalized. “I began to feel that if
I did not succeed in breaking out of the loathsome circle I should
suddenly become mad, scream, perpetuate some shocking act of violence
in the open street,” she writes. With this collection, Kavan broke from
the structure of the conventional novel and began to develop her
obsessive dystopian vision. Some of the stories or fragments in Asylum Piece can be described as almost journalistic, or essayistic, without much
narrative momentum, containing impressions in a style that is sparing
and still. These are the dispatches from the inside of a fractured
identity. In several of the stories, the first-person narrator
undergoes relentless persecution from an anonymous “they” who
communicate with her on stiff blue official paper. There is the simple,
haunting “The Birthmark,” where a schoolgirl happens upon a castle that
turns out to be a penal colony for those who do not belong. No one is
to be trusted in the world of Kavan’s fiction—everybody’s a stranger
with a hidden motive. “For how can I tell whether the person to whom I
am talking is not an enemy, or perhaps connected with my accusers or
with those who will ultimately decide my fate?” asks the narrator in
“Airing a Grievance.” In a Kavan story, any plotline is subject to
distortion, a fog literally or symbolically seeping in. In “The Birds,”
the narrator becomes convinced that two brightly colored birds outside
her window in January, “two tiny meteors of living flame,” are in fact
hallucinations. Color is a deception—the world is actually gray and
dismal, dissolving into a dreary fog. In “Machines in the Head,” she
asks, “Is it possible that I am still living in a world where the sun
shines and flowers appear in the springtime? I thought I had been
exiled from all that long ago.” (According to her biography, her
wealthy British expatriate parents had sent her away to a chilly clime
in her childhood, and she theorized that her wet nurse must have hated
the cold, and transmitted this aversion in her breast milk.) In
1942, in the aftermath of the death of her son from her first marriage,
Kavan attempted suicide a second time. She returned from abroad (having
moved to New York in 1939—where she legally changed her name to Anna
Kavan—and then to New Zealand for two years), and settled in London, a
place she portrays as simultaneously imprisoning her and driving her
out in the story “Our City,” collected in 1945’s I Am Lazarus.
This story and others in the collection document the communal insanity
caused by the Blitz. Kavan worked as a researcher in a psychiatric
military unit, and in I Am Lazarus she escapes solipsism at times to tell the stories of some of its patients. This
is Anna Kavan at her best: exacting, sympathetic, powerful. In the
fourpage opening story, “Palace of Sleep,” an older doctor gives a
young upstart a tour of the narcosis ward. (In the thirties and
forties, Kavan went in and out of various sanitariums and nursing homes
for her heroin addiction, where among other treatments she underwent
narcosis, a sort of sleeping cure for drug addiction.) In the story,
there’s the captivating image of a patient in a red dressing gown,
shuffling down the corridor with a nurse who calls her “Topsy”: In the early forties Kavan met Dr. Karl Theodor Bluth, who would
become her confidante, analyst, and heroin supplier. Kavan and Bluth
later authored a dream allegory together, published in 1949 by a
specialty press, starring a poetry-spouting circus horse named
“Kathbar,” an amalgam of their two names. Kathbar escapes the
slaughterhouse by moving to an artist’s colony and founding the
existentialist school “Hoofism.” Kavan’s third known suicide attempt
would come in 1964 when Bluth died. Many of the pieces in the
posthumously published Julia and the Bazooka mourn her longtime
analyst, as well as being the only stories to deal directly with her
drug use (“bazooka” was the nickname she gave to her syringe). Kavan
also began to experiment more with style and form, incorporating the
language and logic of dreams into her fiction and continuing her move
away from realism. In the surrealist Sleep Has His House (1948), titled The House of Sleep in the U.S., Kavan attempted to write scenarios directly from her
subconscious, interspersing these sections with fragments of
autobiography (calling to mind H. D., another disciple of
psychoanalysis). The effect of reading Sleep Has His House is
that of entering a highly coded dream world, and although some of the
poetry and imagery is rich, it was shunned both commercially and
critically, charged with being pretentious and unreadable. Still,
this collection won Anna Kavan an admirer in Anaïs Nin, who became one
of Kavan’s staunchest defenders. “Anna Kavan explored the nocturnal
worlds of our dreams, fantasies, imagination, and nonreason,” Nin
writes in her critical study The Novel of the Future, which
highlighted novelists such as John Hawkes, Djuna Barnes, and Marguerite
Young. “Such an exploration takes greater courage and skill in
expression. As the events of the world prove the constancy of the
nonrational, it becomes absurd to treat such events with rational
logic.” She also wrote that Asylum Piece was “a classic equal
to the work of Kafka.” Still, as much as Nin admired Kavan, even
writing letters to her that remained unanswered, the admiration was not
mutual, according to Kavan’s biographer David Callard. Kavan was known
for dismissing fellow women writers; for instance, she admired the nouveau roman,
but disliked the work of Nathalie Sarraute. However, there were
exceptions—she supposedly admired Jean Rhys and Virginia Woolf, as well
as Barnes’s Nightwood. In the fifties, Kavan departed
from the subjective first-person experiments of the previous decade to
externalize the nocturnal world of the unconscious, the “queerdream
plasma which flows along like a sub-life, contemporaneous with but
completely independent of the main current of one’s existence” (I Am Lazarus).
The same ideas and images repeat—the chilly, dismal Victorian
childhood; the manipulative, glamorous mother; and the two ex-husbands
who try to usurp the Kavan-figure’s sense of self—but the
characterizations become crueler and more fantastical. Although the
controlling mother figure is a specter throughout her fiction, Kavan
recasts her as a witchy countess modeled on Hans Christian Anderson’s
Snow Queen in 1956’s Scarcity of Love, which Kavan paid some fifty pounds to publish with a vanity press. (Jonathan Cape dropped her after the failure of Sleep Has His House; unfortunately, the press that published Scarcity went bankrupt soon after the review copies were sent out, and the
remaining stock was pulped.) With its Ann Radcliffe mysticism and
gothic overtones, Scarcity of Love—a revenge fantasy written
right after Kavan’s mother died, leaving her with no inheritance—debuts
some of the imagery Kavan would use in her adventure stories, as well
as the character of the frail girl-child as perfected later in Who Are You? and Ice. Eagle’s Nest (1957) has been called Kavan’s most Kafkaesque work, further developing
her concept of a “second secret existence,” a real world with an
underworld percolating beneath. The nameless narrator in this fantasy
is potentially delusional, as in Ice, possibly having imagined
the fantasy/nightmare world of the “Eagle’s Nest,” a fortress-like
mansion with curious servants and a strange code. The title story of
the collection Bright Green Field (1958) moves towards the science fiction of Ice,
except here it’s grass that’s the natural force threatening to
obliterate humanity—in a “great green grave.” The collection also
contains the disturbing “Annunciation,” about a young girl whose rich,
controlling grandmother hides her from the world after her first
menstruation, and the beautiful, tragic “Happy Name,” in which an old
woman returns in a dream to the large Victorian home of her childhood,
which she enters through a picture in her nursinghome room. “That’s
the way I see the world now,” Kavan remarked to Peter Owen, her
publisher in later years, explaining her gradual shift to science
fiction—externalizing the purely mental apocalypses in her earlier
works. But Ice (1967)—the work that yielded her first
mainstream success—transcends genre. To Kavan, the world had ceased to
be rooted in reason, and her final and most famous novel articulates
her horror of this transformation. A psychosexual adventure story, Ice is a fantastical retelling of Kavan’s meanderings through the world
during World War II (a volume of her travel writings is forthcoming
from Peter Owen). Max Brod once described Kafka’s The Castle as the “prodigious ballad of the homeless stranger,” which could as easily describe Ice.
In the novel, an anonymous hero must save the world from global
destruction—walls of ice closing in amidst war and carnage—all the
while chasing the nameless object/victim of desire who haunts him. “She
was so thin that, when we danced, I was afraid of holding her tightly.
Her prominent bones seemed brittle, the protruding wrist-bones had a
particular fascination for me. Her hair was astonishing, silver-white,
an albino’s sparkling like moonlight, like moonlit Venetian glass. I
treated her like a glass girl; at times she hardly seemed real.” Drugs
the narrator takes for his insomnia produce horrific hallucinations in
which the girl is thrust into an obstacle course of pornographic
violence, resembling Pauline Reage’s Story of O: she lies
bleeding, broken in the white snow, is snatched out of doorways by
looming shadows, and is even thrown to a dragon by hostile townsfolk.
The novel was published one year before Kavan died of heart failure,
although it was widely reported as a suicide. In Kavan’s most
haunting inquiry into the loss of self, the 1963 novella Who Are You?,
she rewrote Helen Ferguson’s threehundred-plus page novel Let Me Alone.
The controlling yet basically harmless husband from that novel becomes
the sadistic and alcoholic “Mr. Dog Head,” whose activities include
raping his wife and bludgeoning rats with his tennis racket. The
lonesome yet fiercely independent Anna Kavan is now simply “the girl,”
yet another blonde victim living in a nightmare she can’t escape. The
title comes from the monotonous song of the birds that live in the
tamarind trees in the tropics, whose mechanical and piercing cry mounts
in the background throughout the novel. The cries of the “brain-fever
birds,” which Kavan characterizes as an assault on identity, form an
ominous chorus for the main character’s breakdown: Kavan
was known to be an enigmatic and difficult woman. The fact that she was
able to make art out of her distorted mirror and so eloquently inquire
into the evolution of madness—and let’s even call it female madness,
although she would have detested the term—is even more extraordinary
considering how painful it was to live in her version of the world.
Kavan portrayed female characters with a desire to fall, to luxuriate
at the bottom: shattered women who harbor the hope that someone will
come and save them, but who always, in the end, return to the struggles
of solitude. These portrayals of women dangling on the brink—or,
rather, woman, since it’s usually the same character—call to mind Jean
Rhys, especially her boozy nihilist Sophia Jansen in Good Morning, Midnight,
who sets out to drink herself to death and busies herself with the idea
of dying her hair. Kavan only received true recognition for her genius
a year before her death, with the success of Ice; interestingly, Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea was published the year before, to much acclaim. Of its success, Rhys
famously intoned, “It has come too late.” Both Kavan and Rhys were
writers many had believed to be dead, Lady Lazaruses who found
recognition too late in life to appreciate it. But Rhys is still widely
read, and accepted as a great modern talent, while Kavan, every bit the
equal of every writer that she was compared to,
has—regretfully—vanished. ___________________________ Selected Works by Anna Kavan: Asylum Piece. Peter Owen, $19.95.
—My Soul in ChinaThe patient swayed and staggered in spite of the firm
grasp that guided her hand to the rail. Her head swung loosely from
side to side, her wideopen eyes, at once distracted and dull like the
eyes of a drunken person, stared out of her pale face, curiously puffy
and smooth under dark hair projecting in harsh, disorderly elf-locks.
Her feet, clumsy and uncontrolled in their woolen slippers, tripped
over the hem of her long nightdress and threw her entire weight on the
nurse’s supporting arm.
“Welcome to the palace of sleep,” the older doctor quips at the story’s end. Overall, the pieces in Lazarus are less fragmented and subjective, although there are relapses into Asylum Piece’s
poetic screeds about invisible enemies, as well as further exploration
of the theme of exile, this time in an Antipodean setting. In “The
Picture,” the narrator is once again living in a foreign country, going
to pick up a picture that she had dropped off to be framed the day
before. She’s excited and optimistic, since the man at the picture shop
seemed like a “benevolent gnome.” But when she goes back to the shop,
she finds herself under surveillance by another man, and treated rudely
by the dark-haired girl behind the counter, who gives her someone
else’s picture instead. She asks for the old man, hoping for
yesterday’s touch of humanity, but he pretends not to recognize her.
“Then it began to dawn on me that the thing which has so often happened
to me in this country had happened again, that I had made a mistake,
that I had fallen into the trap of accepting as real an appearance that
was merely a sham, a booby trap, a malicious trick.”
Who-are-you? Who-are-you? Who-are-you? . . . The
frantic cries sound to her not only demented but threatening, so that
she feels uneasy. Some of them seem to sound distinctly ominous. Yet
she must imagine this, for, in reality, all the cries are exactly
alike. All have the infuriating, monotonous, unstoppable persistence;
all sound equally mechanical, motiveless, not expressing anger, or
fear, or love, or any sort of avian feeling—their sole function seems
to drive people mad.
This is Kavan’s “hot” novel, as opposed to the cold of Ice, with evocative descriptions of heat building once more to a monsoon climax. Who Are You? resembles the novels of Robbe-Grillet (the nouveau roman was the only school of writing Kavan ever identified with, although
much of her work predates it). The novella conjures up an atmosphere of
claustrophobia, and a stylized and fragmented descent into hysteria, as
the young girl begins to lose her identity in the stifling heat.
Following an ambiguous first ending, Kavan stages a second, with a
different outcome. The result is to destabilize any reality in the
preceding narrative, imbuing Who Are You? with all the clarity of a fever dream.
Bright Green Field. Out of Print.
A Charmed Circle. Peter Owen, $24.95.
Eagle’s Nest. Out of Print.
I Am Lazarus. Out of Print.
Ice. Peter Owen, $22.95.
Julia and the Bazooka. Out of Print.
Let Me Alone. Out of Print.
My Soul in China. Out of Print.
The Parson. Peter Owen, $16.95.
A Stranger Still. Peter Owen, $31.95.
Scarcity of Love. Out of Print.
Sleep Has His House. Peter Owen, $19.95.
Who Are You? Peter Owen, $18.95.
