Image © Anna Kavan Society
Anna Kavan was born in 1901, but she did not exist until 1940. Now, I am not particularly fond of riddles; I cannot tolerate the position of not knowing for very long. Taking to heart Steinbeck's dictum in The Winter of Our Discontent that (I paraphrase) no one really knows about other human beings, so that the best thing we can do is suppose that they are like us, I will quickly reveal the clue. Anna Kavan was the name of a fictional character in two novels by Helen Emily Wood—Let Me Alone (1930) and A Stranger Still (1935). Wood began to use Anna Kavan as a nom de plume, and then, in a move that—as far as I know—is utterly unique in the history of literature, legally changed her name to that of her fictional character. From Asylum Piece (1940) onward, the world had a 'new' writer: Anna Kavan.
I do not remember exactly how I first came across her work. It might have been through the website of the publisher Peter Owen, which was Kavan's original publisher and which, ever since, has worked hard to keep Kavan's writing alive. However it happened, I stumbled on Asylum Piece, read it, and immediately knew that I had encountered someone special.
“I had a friend, a lover. Or did I dream it? 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. I lie between the bare wall and the medicine bitter with sediment in its dwarfish glass and try to recall my dream.”
Anna Kavan (I will refer to her by her chosen name) had a rough life, although on paper it may have promised to be an easy one. She was born to a wealthy British family in Cannes, South of France. Her parents spent much of their time travelling; since she had no siblings, her childhood was marked by loneliness and neglect (or so she remembers it). Her father committed suicide when she was only ten years old. She married in 1920, and moved with her husband to Burma shortly afterwards. It was in Burma that she appears to have begun writing. Who Are You?, a novel that is particularly dear to me, is laden with her experiences in Southeast Asia. I appreciate the subtle and the more obvious references to life there, having lived in that part of the world myself. I will never forget the tropical bird crying Who-are-you? Who-are-you? Who-are-you? from the tamarind trees behind the house in which the novel is set. And neither will anyone else, I am sure, who reads the novel.
“I wonder whether I’ve made it sound too easy this course I’m taking. Anybody who’s ever attempted to do it will know that it’s never easy to start life again, especially with very little money and without friends. Eternal regret is the price I must pay for the idyllic companionship I have known and lost. Now I’m more alone than I’ve ever been, not only because I no longer have any friends but because I know that, however closely another life may impinge upon mine, ultimately I exist in impenetrable isolation.”
In 1923, only three years into her marriage, Kavan left her husband and returned to England with her son. She lived alone for most of the following years, taking up painting, writing, and, most devastatingly, heroin. She remarried in 1928, and published her first novel, A Charmed Circle, in 1929. She became pregnant with her new husband, but she lost the baby shortly after she was born. Her second marriage did not work out, either. Kavan attempted suicide in 1938, and subsequently spent time in a Swiss clinic. Her experiences there form the basis of Asylum Piece, a beautiful, haunting, and intimate account of depression which is still my favorite among Kavan's works. You cannot put it down untouched. Sadly, this would not be the only time she was hospitalized or tried to take her life—depression and addiction would remain with her for the rest of her life.
“Both of them persecuted her, she did not understand why. But she accepted the fact as she accepted all things that happened to her, expecting to be ill-treated, to be made a victim, ultimately to be destroyed, either by unknown forces or by human beings. This fate seemed always to have been waiting for her, ever since time began. Only love might have saved her from it. But she had never looked for love. Her part was to suffer; that was known and accepted. Fatality brought resignation. It was no use fighting against her fate. She knew she had been beaten before the start.”
Kavan traveled extensively and, over the course of her life, lived in various European countries as well as in the United States and New Zealand. She eventually returned to England and spent her last years as a recluse—writing, battling ill health, and trying to get her works published. Her late novel Ice (1967), which is still her best-known work (Penguin recently republished it), brought her a small stretch of success before she died of heart failure in 1968. Ice can be read in many ways—the desolate world that has been turned into ice may symbolized the world of addiction, but it may also be read from the perspective of climate change and the devastation that we humans inflict on our world.
Like Kafka, Kavan destroyed many of her diaries and letter, wishing to conceal herself from others. This is not the only parallel between the two writers. There are two general categories (alongside many others) into which I place writers. There are those who seem to write for the public, and there are those who apparently write for themselves. With Kavan, as with Kafka, you get the sense—stronger, perhaps, than with anyone else I know—that she writes because she needs to, that she writes for herself, to make sense of her life and experiences, to get the thoughts and ideas out of her head. When you read Kavan's fiction, it is as if you are with her inside her mind. This may sound scary, and even like a bad thing. In fact, for bad writers, it is a bad thing. The stories that writers tell are supposed to be transparent—to exist, while one reads them, somewhere out in the world. Very far away, maybe, but somewhere real; detached, in any case, from the storyteller. When the writer intrudes in the story, this is problematic unless it is done with great skill and art. With Kavan, it is not that she intrudes in her stories—there is rarely an authorial voice that takes over. It is that her thought processes, her settings and the way she describes them, the way that her characters respond to others and to particular circumstances, and so on and so on, appear so strange sometimes that one gets the sense that they must originated in the mind of a strange person. I mean strange only in the sense of unfamiliar—not in a pejorative way. The second evaluation, after strangeness, has to be of beauty and wonder. Just as there are plenty of markers of external reality in Kavan's stories—in the form of birds, for instance, in Asylum Piece and Who Are You?—there are similar markers in the writing itself. The stories find deep resonance in the mind we take to be conceiving them—and they are real. Neither can be doubted.
“A human being can only endure depression up to a certain point; when this point of saturation is reached it becomes necessary for him to discover some element of pleasure, no matter how humble or on how low a level, in his environment if he is to go on living at all. In my case these insignificant birds with their subdued colourings have provided just sufficient distraction to keep me from total despair. Each day I find myself spending longer and longer at the window watching their flights, their quarrels, their mouse-quick flutterings, their miniature feuds and alliances. Curiously enough, it is only when I am standing in front of the window that I feel any sense of security. While I am watching the birds I believe that I am comparatively immune from the assaults of life. The very indifference to humanity of these wild creatures affords me a certain safeguard. Where all else is dangerous, hostile and liable to inflict pain, they alone can do me no injury because, probably, they are not even aware of my existence. The birds are at once my refuge and my relaxation.”
The strangeness of Kavan thus revolves around her descriptions of thoughts and people and, especially, landscapes that do not initially seem to be of this world. It is not a strangeness like the one you find in William Faulkner, for instance in The Sound and the Fury. That is an aesthetic, carefully considered form through which the voices of characters are passed, and perspective are created (and build against, intertwined with others). The strangeness in Kavan is not so much about where you are as reader in relation to characters and voices, as about where you are in the world. The strangeness cannot be complete; as I argue in an earlier post, literature cannot be removed from life. So the invitation—the challenge—with Kavan is to find where you are. And where you are turns out to be inextricable from who you are. We have to confront the bird in the tamarind tree, when it ask us Who-are-you?
I write of the strangeness of Anna Kavan, then, in the most positive sense of the word. In today's climate of writing, where stories too often are demanded to be catered to particular audiences, Kavan speaks for herself, from herself, and to herself. Perhaps paradoxically, that is why I listen. I could have referred to her strangeness as her originality; it would have been as true, only I think that the strangeness of her writing is what immediately draws you in. It is only after the near-visceral experience of strangeness, when you sit back and reflect on what it means, on what you have just read, that you realize the sheer extent of her originality.
p.s. While researching this post, I discovered that Peter Owen will be publishing a new collection of works by Kavan, entitled Machines in the Head: The Selected Short Writing of Anna Kavan. It will be an anthology, apparently, of Kavan's short fiction as well as selected journalistic pieces. It will include Starting a Career, a previously unpublished story. I pre-ordered it, of course. It is set to be released on 30 May, 2019. The cover is alluring in its simplicity.
It looks like I am not the only one to have aligned Kavan and Kafka. I did not see the cover before writing; for whatever else it is worth, if the connection with Kafka draws some of his devotees to Kavan, then I am glad.
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If you want to begin reading Kavan, I would recommend starting with Ice (order a beautiful edition here) or Asylum Piece (order here).
You can pre-order the new Kavan collection Machines in the Head here.
(Note: if you buy any book(s) using the above link, or any book from The Book Depository via this link, I will receive a small commission. It won’t cost you anything extra, and you’ll help me maintain this blog.)