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 in writing: Let Me Alone (1930), A Stranger Still (1935), Change the Name (1941), Who Are You? (1963).
Beginning in the late 1920s, 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 Brangwen 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, whom she married in 1928. With Edmonds she traveled through 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 1930s, following the dissolution of her second marriage, Kavan was admitted into a sanatorium, emerging with her new name and persona, as well as with 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-next-door bleached hers movie-star blond 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 struggles to maintain a dialogue with an increasingly deaf outside world, becoming more and more alienated 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 diaristic, 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.)
At the beginning of World War II, Kavan traveled around the world, an itinerary complicated by wartime border restrictions, this atmosphere of paranoia and an unfeeling bureaucracy further saturating the fiction that came afterward. She passed through New York City several times, spent six months in California, a setting that would inspire her posthumously published novella My Soul in China, traveled in Bali, and then spent almost two years in New Zealand. She returned to London in early 1943, 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 psychosis caused by the Blitz. Kavan worked as a researcher in a psychiatric military unit, and in I Am Lazarus she escapes a crushing solipsism at times to tell the stories of some of its patients.
This is Anna Kavan at her best: exacting, empathetic, powerful. In the four-page story “Palace of Sleep,” an older doctor gives a young upstart a tour of the narcosis ward. (In the 1930s and 1940s, 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:
The 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 wide open 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 claustrophobic, although there are relapses into Asylum Piece’s poetic screeds about invisible enemies, as well as a 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.”
In the early 1940s 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 artists’ 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).
In the surrealist Sleep Has His House (1948), titled The House of Sleep in the United States, Kavan attempted to write scenarios directly from her subconscious, incorporating the language and logic of dreams, (calling to mind the prose of Hilda “H. D.” Doolittle, another disciple of psychoanalysis, such as Nights). 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, accused of 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 Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood.
In the 1950s, Kavan departed from the subjective first-person experiments of the previous decade to externalize the nocturnal world of the unconscious, the “queer dream 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 Andersen’s Snow Queen in 1956’s A 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, A 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 A Bright Green Field (1958) moves toward 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 nursing home 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. Max Brod once described Kafka’s The Castle as the “prodigious ballad of the homeless stranger,” which could as easily describe Ice, inspired by Kavan’s travels during the war, and the proximity of New Zealand to Antarctica. 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 Réage’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 her death 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 three-hundred-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 blond 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:
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 freeze 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.
The fact that Kavan was able to make art out of a sometimes distorted mirror and so eloquently inquire into the evolution of madness—and let’s even call it a feminine madness, although she would have detested the term—is even more extraordinary considering how painful it was at times 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 dyeing her hair. Kavan received true recognition for her genius only 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 she was compared to, has—regretfully—vanished.
KATE ZAMBRENO