{"id":131726,"date":"2018-12-10T11:16:24","date_gmt":"2018-12-10T16:16:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=131726"},"modified":"2018-12-10T12:24:56","modified_gmt":"2018-12-10T17:24:56","slug":"feminize-your-canon-anna-kavan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/12\/10\/feminize-your-canon-anna-kavan\/","title":{"rendered":"Feminize Your Canon: Anna Kavan"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Anna Kavan<\/p><\/div>\n

Our monthly column\u00a0Feminize Your Canon<\/a>\u00a0explores the lives of underrated and\u00a0underread female authors.<\/i><\/p>\n

The reputation of Anna Kavan, who wrote some of the twentieth century\u2019s most haunting and original fiction, exists in a shadowy realm not unlike those inhabited by her alienated characters. Since her death fifty years ago, Kavan has built a cult following, with all that phrase implies. Her fans, who have included Ana\u00efs Nin, Jean Rhys, Doris Lessing, J.G. Ballard, Jonathan Lethem, and Patti Smith, are scarce yet passionate. \u201cFew novelists,\u201d declared Ballard, \u201cmatch the intensity of her vision.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kavan\u2019s stranger-than-fiction life, meanwhile, has become mythologized, murky, the truth overlaid by details from short stories and novels that were taken for straight autobiography. An enduring piece of Kavan apocrypha, for example, is that she intentionally shrouded herself in mystery. \u201cWhat a thrilling enigma for posterity I should be,\u201d muses one of her fictional alter egos. Whether deliberately or otherwise, Kavan did little to assist future biographers. Elusive and capricious, with the restless, questing nature of the malcontent, she drifted from country to country and man to man, formed friendships and dropped them, concealed her real age, and destroyed diaries and letters. \u201cShe cast doubts, she lied, she fabricated, she spoke the truth, she was most honest,\u201d wrote the drama critic Raymond Marriott, a friend and coexecutor of her estate. \u201cBut where did it begin and where did it end?\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Another key element of the Kavan myth, exaggerated by repetition, is the starkness of her self-reinvention. Once a wholesome young English housewife who wrote conventional women\u2019s fiction, so the story goes, in her thirties she was confined to an insane asylum and emerged as a chic, emaciated bottle-blonde heroin addict, wielding a bleak and anarchic new literary voice. A novelist friend of Kavan\u2019s, Rhys Davies, was the first to present this colorized version of events, but many others have given their embellished spin. Vivian Gornick wrote that on Kavan\u2019s release from the asylum, she \u201cgave up forever the disguise of the woman who had married, written Home Counties novels \u2026 and she became integrated into the relentless image-maker of the drug-taking, vividly depressed, fantastical nighttime.\u201d In reality, the transformation was neither so dramatic nor so sudden. But it\u2019s little wonder that such a seductive and cinematic image has passed into lore.<\/p>\n

The basic facts of Kavan\u2019s life, at least, are fairly well established. In 1901, she was born Helen Emily Woods in Cannes to a wealthy, dissolute English couple. Uninterested in parenting, they delegated their daughter\u2019s care to nannies and then, from age six, to a series of boarding schools in the U.S. and Europe. When Kavan was eleven, and at school in England, her father committed suicide by jumping off the prow of a boat in Mexico; her mother would remarry twice. The childhood sense of loveless dispossession seemed to permanently warp Kavan\u2019s psyche, as well it might. \u201cNot one single person has even attempted to understand me, to see things from my point of view,\u201d mourns the nameless narrator of \u201cHigh in the Mountains,\u201d one of several stories Kavan withheld from publication during her life, now published in the posthumous collection Julia and the Bazooka<\/em>. \u201cThey\u2019ve all been against me, ever since I was six years old. What kind of human beings are these, who can be inhuman to a child of six?\u201d In early adulthood, Kavan discovered the palliative to inhumanity: drugs. She dabbled in amphetamines, cocaine, pot. But it was heroin that became her lifeline.<\/p>\n

When Kavan was nineteen, she married Donald Ferguson. Ferguson, a hard-drinking railway engineer based in Burma, was more than ten years her senior and could not have held much romantic allure to a sensitive and highly intelligent teenage girl. Decades later, Kavan would mercilessly fictionalize Ferguson in her 1963 novel Who Are You?<\/em> In this claustrophobic and riveting sketch of a violent marriage, set in a malarial outpost of the British Empire, he appears as the sadistic and self-obsessed Mr. Dog-Head. So named because of his \u201cdog-like aspect\u201d and copious red-brown body hair, the character is devoid of a single redeeming quality. He has, nonetheless, \u201ca curious inborn conviction of his own superiority which is quite unshakeable.\u201d His eighteen-year-old wife, known only as \u201cthe girl,\u201d exists in a state of torporific disbelief at finding herself legally bound to a vicious stranger, and in so alien an environment. Her lassitude and sense of confinement are exacerbated by the relentless tropical heat, which renders her hardly able to eat or sleep. \u201cProbably it\u2019s because she can\u2019t get used to the climate that she feels so strange all the time, and can\u2019t get used to her life in this country either. Is<\/em> it her life? It hardly seems so.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Kavan\u2019s fiction, intemperate weather operates as a powerful harbinger of doom, and of the world\u2019s harshness and indifference. The climactic vicissitudes\u2014fog, ice, heat, storms\u2014that assail Kavan\u2019s rootless characters underscore the provisional nature of reality, exceeding the pathetic fallacy. In Eagles Nest<\/em> (1957), a luckless paranoiac takes a train from a city in the \u201cgrip of an iron frost\u201d to a place under a \u201cblazing sun\u201d where everything was \u201carid, inhuman, enormous and elemental, like a scene from some earlier stage of the planet\u2019s long life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kavan\u2019s best known novel, Ice<\/em> (1967), is the apotheosis of this mode. Its vertiginous, time-looping narrative depicts an itinerant man\u2019s obsessive stalking of an evanescent young woman\u2014a platinum blonde, rail-thin \u201cglass girl\u201d\u2014across an apocalyptic, barely habitable landscape. Nebulous geopolitical calamities, including a possible nuclear detonation, are ushering in a new ice age. Yet the reader cannot distinguish between material reality and the hectic projection of the hero, who admits: \u201cI had a curious feeling I was living on several planes simultaneously; the overlapping of these planes was confusing.\u201d<\/p>\n

If Kavan\u2019s natural worlds are often inhospitable, their visual evocations are always beautiful. In Ice<\/em>, as people trying to flee the country gather at a harbor, the mist lifts to reveal a coastline:<\/p>\n

with many inlets and jagged rocks, snow-covered mountains behind. There were many small islands, some of which had floated up and become clouds, while formations of cloud or mist descended and anchored themselves in the sea. The white snowy landscape below, and above the canopy of misty white light, the effect of an oriental painting, nothing solid about it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In Who Are You?<\/em> a description of how the looming monsoon makes it \u201calmost too hot to live\u201d practically brings sweat to the brow:<\/p>\n

Each morning the sun leaps triumphantly, unchallenged, into an empty sky; but always, by midday, the clouds are back, pitch black and sulphur yellow, inexorably piling up overhead; while the red-hot earth seethes like an immense cauldron in the eerie thunderlight of an eclipse, electric tremors vibrating in the breathless air.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Kavan\u2019s disastrous first marriage, which resulted in a son, Bryan, only lasted a few years. In the summer of 1925, while traveling in France, she took up with Stuart Edmonds, a British artist. In 1928, they married and settled down in the English countryside. When their baby daughter, Margaret, died they adopted a little girl, Susanna. It is assumed that Ferguson kept custody of Bryan, who probably went to boarding school. But he visited his mother during the holidays. Kavan and Edmonds both painted\u2014she was also a talented artist and would produce canvases throughout her life\u2014and she began to write prolifically. Between 1929 and 1937, Kavan published six novels about dysfunctional English family life, using her previous married name, Helen Ferguson, as a nom de plume. Critics found Helen Ferguson\u2019s D.H. Lawrence\u2013tinged voice intelligent but depressing, and she achieved only minor commercial success. The UK Observer<\/em> suggested that the heroine of her 1929 debut, A Charmed Circle<\/em>, \u201cshould have been drowned in infancy, or her parents should have been poisoned by that rather trying Welsh nurse, since parents are plainly one of Nature\u2019s mistakes.\u201d Kavan, who had a death wish and a tortured relationship with her mother, would likely have agreed.<\/p>\n

In Kavan\u2019s late thirties, as her relationship with Edmonds foundered, she had a nervous breakdown and tried to kill herself. She spent time in a Swiss psychiatric hospital, and soon after her release she made the decision\u2014later so sensationalized\u2014to begin publishing as Anna Kavan, the heroine of two of her previous novels: Let Me Alone<\/em> (1930) and A Stranger Still <\/em>(1935). In this new authorial persona, Kavan committed fully to the literary style only nascent in her previous work: hallucinatory, experimental, steeped in doom, and with a disorientating quality made all the more forceful by diamond-etched prose and supreme narrative control and concision.<\/p>\n

Asylum Piece<\/em>, her first book as Anna Kavan, was published by Jonathan Cape in 1940. In these brief, lucid, thematically linked stories of madness, Kavan\u2019s nightmare logic reigns. Systems of administration, impersonal and opaque, withhold help from desperate supplicants. Invisible but all-powerful enemies plot inevitable retribution. Blame, humiliation, and punishment are dispensed for unknown charges. And justice is impossible:<\/p>\n

to whom can one appeal when one does not even know where to find the judge? How can one ever hope to prove one\u2019s innocence when there is no means of knowing of what one has been accused? No, there\u2019s no justice for people like us in the world: all that we can do is suffer as bravely as possible and put our oppressors to shame.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Reactions to Asylum Piece<\/em> were admiring, if rather startled. \u201cPersons with strong nerves and no doubts of their own mental stability will find Miss Kavan\u2019s extremely painful book absorbing,\u201d advised the novelist L.P. Hartley. \u201cGleams of beauty and pathos filter through it.\u201d It was poor timing: despite the positive critical reception, Kavan\u2019s relaunch as an author was stymied by the war. Still, she decided to kill off Helen for good and legally change her name. \u201cAs Anna Kavan,\u201d she wrote to her lover, the New Zealand playwright Ian Hamilton, \u201cI want to get right away from Helen Edmonds and all her associations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kavan had no wish to discard, however, Helen\u2019s most beloved habit: heroin. Having occasionally abstained, from this point forward Kavan more or less accepted the drug as an integral part of her existence. The narrator of \u201cHigh in the Mountains\u201d argues that, unlike \u201cdisgusting habits\u201d like smoking or drinking, what she does \u201cnever affects anyone else. I don\u2019t behave in an embarrassing way. And a clean white powder is not repulsive; it looks pure, it glitters, the pure white crystals sparkle like snow.\u201d During this era in the UK, obtaining pure heroin on the black market was relatively straightforward. And if you registered as an addict, as Kavan eventually did, it was legal for a doctor to prescribe maintenance doses. An outwardly normal life was thus sustained. Though one of Kavan\u2019s friends remarked on seeing her lifting her skirt and injecting herself in the thigh, there was otherwise nothing junkie-like in her conduct. By all accounts, her appearance was immaculate. \u201cShe was an excellent hostess and a good cook,\u201d remembered Peter Owen, the publisher of her later books. \u201cIt was some time before I realized that she was an incurable heroin addict.\u201d<\/p>\n

Heroin was not always an adequate anesthetic, and Kavan was still overcome with periodic suicidal impulses. She apparently made a serious attempt on her life after her close friend and heroin-prescriber, the German psychiatrist Dr. Karl Theodor Bluth, died in 1964. Kavan was not grateful to the friends who saved her: \u201cI can\u2019t say how profoundly I resent their interference.\u201d Another low point was when Kavan\u2019s son, Bryan, was killed in action as a paratrooper in 1944. He was just twenty-one. To make matters worse, Edmonds, citing his ex-wife\u2019s mental instability, denied her access to their daughter, an estrangement that seemed to become permanent. Kavan\u2019s own history of childhood separation from her parents, which caused her such anguish, had sadly repeated itself.<\/p>\n

Kavan spent the war years ricocheting all over the place\u2014Norway, New York, California, New Zealand, Indonesia, and finally London\u2014and published two more books: Change the Name<\/em> (1941) and I am Lazarus<\/em> (1945). In 1945 her short story, \u201cThe Blackout,\u201d appeared in the New Yorker<\/em>. Alas, the initial acclaim and excitement sparked by Kavan\u2019s literary second act proved temporary. The surrealistic Sleep Has His House<\/em> (1949), written in what she called \u201cnighttime language,\u201d was deemed too radical an experiment, despite drawing some praise. \u201cThis is a strange, softly terrifying book,\u201d said the U.S.\u00a0Saturday Review<\/em>. \u201cIt is difficult not to yield helplessly to its beauty.\u201d Other reviewers were far less generous, and publishers were scared off. Kavan fell into obscurity. She lived quietly in West London and supported herself by renovating and selling houses and renting rooms to friends. Some people assumed she was dead.<\/p>\n

In 1956, a bookshop owner introduced Kavan to Peter Owen, whose eponymous young press championed unpopular and so-called difficult writers. He took her on as an author, but her next few books made little impact. Then, at age sixty-six, Kavan published Ice<\/em>. It was the biggest critical success of her career. The writer Brian Aldiss awarded it the 1967 Best Science Fiction Novel prize, calling Kavan \u201cDe Quincey\u2019s heir and Kafka\u2019s sister.\u201d The recognition had come just in time. The following year, Kavan suffered a heart attack and died alone at home in Kensington. According to the police, there was \u201cenough heroin to kill the whole street\u201d in the house. Kavan, horrified by the government\u2019s new policies of sending addicts to drying-out clinics and prescribing methadone, had been hoarding supplies. On the day of Kavan\u2019s funeral, Owen learned that Doubleday, her American publisher from twenty years earlier, had acquired Ice.<\/em><\/p>\n

The firm of Peter Owen continues to publish Kavan. In May 2019, they will release a limited edition anthology of her writing illustrated by her paintings. The editor, Victoria Walker, is the foremost Kavan scholar and chair of the Anna Kavan Society. Titled Machines in the Head<\/em>, the book brings together journalism and stories selected from Kavan\u2019s criminally neglected oeuvre. It is mainly Kavan\u2019s \u201cresistance to categorization,\u201d Walker has proposed, that has kept her from wider acclaim. Her work spans multiple genres, an approach always less permissible in women writers, and is astonishingly avant-garde even to the contemporary reader. Kavan knew that what she called \u201cmy sort of experimental writing\u201d had narrow appeal, but she wasn\u2019t interested in conforming to popular taste. Despite criticism and rejection, she remained uncompromising in her creative vision.<\/p>\n

Yet there are signs that Anna Kavan\u2019s moment may be yet to come. Last year, to mark its fiftieth anniversary, Ice<\/em> was reissued as a Peter Owen Cased Classic and a Penguin Modern Classic. The novel was hailed by the New Yorker<\/em> as \u201ca haunting story of sexual assault and climate catastrophe decades ahead of its time\u201d and the UK Times<\/em> as \u201csuperbly unsettling \u2026 perfect winter reading.\u201d To those cultish fans who see Kavan\u2019s marginality as central to her glamour, such mainstream acceptance may be unwelcome. But for this most imaginative and otherworldly of writers, whose plots seamlessly merge fantasy and reality, past and future, life and death, nothing could be more apt than a cross-century literary resurrection.<\/p>\n

Emma Garman has written about books and culture for\u00a0<\/em>Lapham\u2019s Quarterly Roundtable,\u00a0<\/em>Longreads,\u00a0<\/em>Newsweek,\u00a0<\/em>The Daily Beast,\u00a0<\/em>Salon,\u00a0<\/em>The Awl,\u00a0<\/em>Words Without Borders, and other publications.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Read Garman’s previous\u00a0Feminize Your Canon<\/a>\u00a0columns, about\u00a0Violette Leduc<\/a>,\u00a0Dorothy West<\/a>,\u00a0Rosario Castellanos<\/a>,\u00a0Violet Trefusis<\/a>,\u00a0Kamala Markandaya<\/a><\/em>,\u00a0and\u00a0Olivia Manning<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Whether deliberately or otherwise, Kavan did little to assist future biographers. Elusive and capricious, with the restless, questing nature of the malcontent, she drifted from country to country and man to man, formed friendships and dropped them, concealed her real age, and destroyed diaries and letters. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1048,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34367],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-131726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feminize-your-canon"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nFeminize Your Canon: Anna Kavan by Emma Garman<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Whether deliberately or otherwise, Kavan did little to assist future biographers. 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