Context N°18
by 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.”
—My Soul in China
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”:
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 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.”
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:
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.
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.
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Selected Works by Anna Kavan:
Asylum Piece. Peter Owen, $19.95.
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.
