The thwarted fiction of Anna Kavan

Anna Kavan
ICE
158pp. Peter Owen. Paperback, £9.95.
0 7206 1268 3

Jeremy Reed
A STRANGER ON EARTH
The life and work of Anna Kavan
212pp. Peter Owen. Paperback, £13.99.
0 7206 1273 X

Anna Kavan’s novels usually head off in the sure direction of a good plot, then gradually, and without our noticing how or when it happens, they become entangled in dreams. At the start of Ice, the last novel she wrote, which was first published in 1967, a motorist runs out of petrol, makes for the nearest garage, and is suddenly caught in the middle of a rapidly encroaching ice age from which there is no escape. Everything is freezing up and turning white, yet he still holds on to the hope of making contact with a former lover. In Eagles’ Nest (1957), an advertising illustrator is made redundant, and finds himself travelling towards a mysterious castle in the belief that the ideal job is waiting for him. Once there, he roams the corridors searching for a previous employer of his, a man known only as the Administrator, “someone who knew all about my doings and difficulties, and followed them sympathetically from afar”:

“I tried to think of other things; but, going along the corridors to my room, I was uncomfortably aware of all the doors I was passing, and of all the deserted splendid rooms beyond, their untouched perfection repolished endlessly by a labouring brown-skinned army, kept uselessly immaculate, filled daily with fresh flowers nobody ever saw – Why? I asked aloud in the silence; which closed down so heavily and with such finality upon this small interruption, that the expression “dead silence” came into my head, seeming appropriate as never before.”

To read Kavan’s novels is to experience a deepening sense of foreboding on every page. The relationship between her writing and her subconscious remains an unsettling one. It is as though Kavan’s own memories were being disturbed while her protagonist wanders these corridors – hence that profound silence which falls “so heavily” on a simple question. In some ways, Kavan’s dreamscapes, her frozen seas, and unseen fresh flowers, recall the hidden gardens and rose leaves of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. It is not always clear where we are, or even what is happening, but we read on in pursuit of some imminent personal revelation.

Kavan tended to be defensive about her poetic prose, a style which many people – including her own publisher – found obscure and confusing. “At night”, she explains in her preface to her novel Sleep Has His House (1948), “most human beings die and are born . . . . No interpretation is needed of this language we have all spoken in childhood and in our dreams.” In his new biography of Anna Kavan, A Stranger On Earth, Jeremy Reed tries to explain something of the circumstances of his subject’s life and how they haunted these fictional dreams. His task was made more difficult by the fact that Kavan destroyed most of her personal diaries and letters and was prone to give misleading accounts of her past, often falsifying the basic facts about her birth and upbringing. Even her pseudonym, Anna Kavan, was a name she had previously used for the heroine of an early novel, Let Me Alone (1930). Reed frequently uses the fictional work to fill out the few known facts about her life. While this technique does provide some insight into Kavan’s inner life, the biographical portrait remains decidedly sketchy.

Anna Kavan was born Helen Emily Woods on April 10, 1901, in Cannes. Her father, Claude Woods, “a gentleman of independent means”, owned an estate in Wylam, Northumberland. According to Reed, her childhood was bitterly unhappy: her parents were an emotionally detached couple who cruelly neglected their only daughter. When Helen was four years old, they left her in the care of relatives while they moved to America. She followed them a year later, only to be sent straight to boarding school. “The child was denied parental affection or even contact”, writes Reed, “ . . . and [was] thus introduced into the emotionally cold world that would adversely affect her personality for the rest of her life.” What made her parents behave in this way is not addressed; the Woods’ emotional sterility is simply taken as an obvious symptom of their class and wealth. Reed rushes through Helen’s icy childhood in just three pages. We learn that her father killed himself by jumping from a ship on a voyage to South America when Helen was fourteen. In 1920, when she was nineteen, she married Donald Ferguson, a colonial official “rumoured” to be one of her mother’s old flames.

This first marriage caused a crisis in Helen’s life which Reed describes using fictional sources. In Who Are You? (1963), one of Kavan’s finest books, a woman is trapped in a loveless marriage with a thuggish colonial official she refers to as Mr Dog Head. Set in Burma, where the Fergusons lived for two years, this novel is taken to be a close portrait of her first marriage. The raw narrative describes a marriage in a state of violent disintegration. Mr Dog Head remains as oblivious to his wife’s inner life as he is to the world around him. Becoming suspicious that she is having a secret affair, he bullies and, eventually, rapes her. As well as being a novel of great tension, Who Are You? gives voice to the girl’s subsequent loss of identity. Her husband’s violent treatment has robbed her of her very self, and she struggles to recall who it was she once hoped to be, and what her real name is:

“All day long, in the tamarinds behind the house, a tropical bird keeps repeating its mono-tonous cry, which consists of the same three inquiring notes. Who-are you? Who-are-you? Who-are-you? Loud, flat, harsh and piercing, the repetitive cry bores its way through the ear-drums with the exasperating persistence of a machine that can’t be switched off.”

In 1922, Helen Ferguson left her husband in Burma and travelled to settle in England with her baby son, Bryan. Despite this new start, she was unable to build a loving relationship with the child, tragically repeating the pattern of her own upbringing. (Bryan was declared missing in action in 1942 – an event which Reed says left his mother in a “state of deep trauma”.) In 1926, she stumbled into an unhappy affair with Stuart Edmonds, a failed alcoholic painter, and from that year, her diaries begin to describe her growing dependency on heroin. Reed, who dedicates a chapter to the drug and its dangerous effects, suggests that heroin became a source of creativity for Helen. As her addiction deepened, she became increasingly drawn to describing her hallucinations in her private writings. It would be years before her published work reflected her unstable, hidden life.

The early novels were all published under the name of Helen Ferguson. The first, A Charmed Circle, was published by Jonathan Cape in 1929 and was praised in the TLS as a “powerful exposition of contained lives”. It is set in an emotionally frosty household in a respectable village (one might almost call it an enclosure) called Hannington. Dulled by the routine of her daily life, Beryl Deane, a doctor’s daughter, believes her chief enemy is boredom, and she struggles to find a wider purpose to her narrow existence. Like one of the women in D. H. Lawrence’s novels, she is searching for a deeper love, a stronger spiritual meaning to her life. Yet, while clearly expressing a longing for a break with form, the novel never manages to achieve any kind of imaginative release, any escape from the simmering world of Hannington. Kavan’s early books, published in the 1930s and including The Dark Sisters, A Stranger Still and Goose Cross, are “submerged in restraint”; they give only the faintest hint of what was to come.

The decisive break came in 1940, when Helen Ferguson reinvented herself as Anna Kavan. The first Kavan book, Asylum Piece and Other Stories (1940), represented her first attempt to describe her isolation and her fears of encroaching madness. It was written in the aftermath of a serious mental breakdown, which culminated in a failed suicide attempt and confinement in a Zurich asylum. Yet those bleak stories, each of them set in a white clinical institution, encouraged Kavan to reach for a new, pared-down style in which she could recreate the nature of her alienation. Peter Owen – who publishes this new biography as well as an earlier study by David Callard – took on Anna Kavan in 1957. Ten years later, after some initial misgivings, he brought out her most successful novel, Ice. In this bizarre work, Kavan creates an entire landscape as a means of conveying her own frozen feelings. It is a book of whirling blizzards, endless chases across frozen wastelands, and there are many scenes which would not be out of place in a disaster movie. Yet, above all, Ice is driven by a deeper search for love. While the world is drawing to a close, the novel’s unnamed protagonist searches for the woman to whom he was once deeply attached. Once he finds her, he discovers they can barely communicate; it is as if something had seized up between them.

Although her books contain many violent, argumentative scenes and quarrels between lovers, what Kavan’s people really long for is tender dialogue, an emotional thaw. Her writing seems to relax only when her characters are finally allowed to speak to one other. Ice turns into a meditation on frustrated emotion, a prose-poem in which feelings of loss, regret and reconciliation are set against a background of sheer nothingness.

In 1968, Brian Aldiss, who once called Kavan “Kafka’s sister” managed to persuade Doubleday to publish Ice in America. Kavan died of an overdose a week before this news would have reached her. She was found dead in her Kensington flat on December 4, 1968. (The police reported that they had found enough heroin in her house “to kill the whole street”.) In A Trillion Year Spree, Aldiss wrote that Kavan’s fiction, in its “acceptance of the insoluble”, possessed “a blind force much like hope”.

Peter Owen has ensured that nearly all of her novels remain stubbornly in print, yet her work has still to find the wider readership it deserves. The success of Ice has meant that Kavan is seen as a mere symbolist, the author of one strangely surreal science-fiction novel, but other less well-known novels, such as Eagles’ Nest, suggest that her true subject is the buried life within. Kavan was strangely indifferent to literary fame, insisting that she wrote for herself first. It is striking that, despite its concern with secrecy, her fiction constantly re-creates the dialogue form. Her novels can seem as bleak as it is possible for any art to be; but, on every page, her characters protest, argue and struggle against the mysterious forces that threaten to defeat them. Kavan’s writing, so wild and emotionally fraught, represents a rare form of inner resilience. As she once explained in an unpublished autobiography:

“Lots of the things that happen to me I really can’t bear at all. Then I write about them. Only just, mind you. But it makes that little difference.”

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Mark Crees's essays and stories have appeared in periodicals including The Threepenny Review, Books and Company and The Reader.