Anna Kavan

This article is about the British novelist. For the American actress, see Helen Atkinson-Wood. For the jazz musician, see Helen Jones Woods.
Anna Kavan
Born Helen Emily Woods
10 April 1901
Cannes, France
Died 5 December 1968 (aged 67)
London, England
Occupation Novelist, short story writer, painter
Nationality British
Notable works Ice, Asylum Piece and other stories, Who Are You?
Spouse Donald Ferguson (m.1919-1931), Stuart Edmonds (m.1931-1938)

Anna Kavan (born Helen Emily Woods; 10 April 1901 – 5 December 1968) was a British novelist, short story writer and painter. Originally publishing under her first married name, Helen Ferguson, she adopted the name Anna Kavan in 1939, not only as a nom de plume but as her legal identity.

Biography

Early Life and Literary Career as Helen Ferguson

Anna Kavan was born Helen Emily Woods in Cannes, South of France, the only child of a wealthy British family.[1] Her parents travelled frequently and Kavan grew up in Europe and the United States. As an adult she remembered her childhood as lonely and neglected. Her father committed suicide in 1911. After his death, Kavan returned to the UK where she was a boarder at Parsons Mead School in Ashstead and Malvern College in Worcestershire.

Disregarding her daughter's desire to go to Oxford, her mother arranged an encounter with her former lover, Donald Ferguson. Helen Emily Woods married him in 1920, a few months before he took a position with the Railway Company in Burma. She moved with her husband, began to write and gave birth to her son Bryan. In 1923, Kavan left Ferguson and returned with her son to the UK. All of these biographical events make up the underlying narratives of her initial Bildungsroman Let Me Alone (1930) while Who Are You? (1963), written in a Nouveau Roman style, is an experimental variation of her tropical hell in Burma.

Living alone in London during the mid 1920's, she began studying painting at the London Central School of Arts and Crafts, and continued to paint throughout her life. Kavan regularly travelled to the French Riviera where she was introduced to heroin by her tennis coach ‘to improve her serve’[2] and by race car drivers she took up with. From then on, her syringe was to become her 'bazooka'.

In 1928 she divorced Ferguson and married an artist named Stuart Edmonds who she met near Toulon. They travelled together through France, Italy, Spain and the Pyrenees before resettling in England. A year later, she published her first novel, A Charmed Circle, under the name Helen Ferguson, followed by five more books over the next eight years.

Sanatorium Bellevue : a part of the glass menagerie, the mirror of madness

Kavan and Edmonds had a daughter, Margaret, who died soon after childbirth and they then adopted a child who they named Susanna.[3] During this period, Kavan underwent detoxification treatment in a clinic in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland. In 1938, when her second marriage ended, she attempted suicide and was again admitted to Bellevue Sanatorium, a modern clinic where important psychiatric advances were made (1857–1980). There, Kavan received treatment from Ludwig Binswanger, a psychiatrist, pioneer in the field of existential psychology and lifelong friend of Freud to whom he offered refuge in Switzerland the same year.

These were the first of what would be multiple hospitalizations and asylum incarcerations throughout Kavan's life for both depression and her lifelong heroin addiction.

Life and Writing as Kavan

Asylum Piece (1940), a collection of short stories which explored the inner mindscape of the psychological explorer, was her first book under the name Anna Kavan, heroine of her previous novels Let Me Alone (1930) and A Stranger Still (1935). All subsequent works would feature a radically altered writing style. From that moment, the brunette Ferguson disappeared and the crystal-blond Kavan set about a career as an avant-garde writer using her legal name in the United States.

An inveterate traveller, Kavan initiated a long journey at the outset of World War II. From September 1939 to February 1943, she has spent six months in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California,[4] visited the island of Bali, Indonesia, and stayed for twenty-two months in Napier, New Zealand, her final destination. Her travel itinerary was complicated by the war, which severely restricted many ordinary boat routes. As a consequence, her path took her through New York City three times and the Suez Canal twice.

Returning to England early 1943, she worked briefly with soldiers suffering from war neurosis at the Mill Hill Emergency Hospital and studied for a diploma in Psychological Medicine. She also took a secretarial position at Horizon, an influential literary magazine edited by Cyril Connolly and founded by Peter Watson, one of her friends. She contributed with stories, articles and reviews from 1944 to 1946.

In 1944, Kavan’s son from her first marriage was killed and she finalized her divorce from her second husband.

After her return to the UK, Kavan began treatment with the German psychiatrist Karl Theodore Bluth . He became Kavan's close friend and sometime creative collaborator until his 1964 death. They co-wrote The Horse's Tale (1949) and Kavan dedicated several short stories to her doctor in the posthumous collection Julia and the Bazooka (1970).

Kavan continued to undergo sporadic inpatient treatments, and in her later years in London lived as a virtual recluse. She enjoyed a late triumph in 1967 with her novel Ice, inspired by her time in New-Zealand and the country's proximity to the inhospitable frozen landscape of Antarctica. The original manuscript was titled The Cold World. When her publisher Peter Owen sent Kavan his initial response, neither rejecting nor accepting her text, he described it as a cross between Kafka and The Avengers.[5] This post-apocalyptic novel brought critical acclaim, earning Kavan the Brian Aldiss Science Fiction Book of the Year award in 1967, the year before Kavan's death. It is her best-known novel, still puzzling the reader for its strangeness and nowadays rather introduced as a slipstream novel than a Science Fiction one.

The first six of her novels gave little indication of the experimental and disturbing nature of her later work published after her detox treatment. Asylum Piece definitely heralded the new style and content of Kavan's writing. Her development of "nocturnal language".[6] involved the lexicon of dreams and addiction, mental instability and alienation. She has been compared to Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath and Brian Aldiss described her as Kafka's sister.[7] Anaïs Nin was an admirer and unsuccessfully pursued a correspondence with Kavan.

Death and Legacy

Kavan's House in Peel Street London

Although popularly supposed to have died of heroin overdose, Kavan died of heart failure at her home in Kensington and was found dead on 5 December 1968. The night before her London-based Peter Owen Publishers invited Kavan to a reception at his place in honour of Anaïs Nin and so never she came.[8]

Many of her works were published posthumously, some edited by her friend and legatee, the Welsh Writer Rhys Davies. London-based Peter Owen Publishers have been long-serving advocates of Kavan's work and continue to keep her work in print. Doris Lessing, J.G. Ballard, Anaïs Nin, Jean Rhys, Brian Aldiss, Christopher Priest, Nina Allan, Virginia Ironside or Maggie Gee are among the writers who praised her work.

In 2009, Victoria Walker[9] founded the Anna Kavan Society in London aiming at encouraging wider readership and increase academic scholarship of Kavan’s work.

Kavan's paintings have been recently exhibited at the Zarrow Art Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Unconventional Anna Kavan: Works on Paper[10] exhibition displayed thirty-six paintings created by Kavan drawn from the McFarlin Library Special Collections, University of Tulsa. The exhibition Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors at Freud Museum London,[11] traced key moments in the history of female maladies and counterpoints them with women’s inventive art.

Modern scholarship and interpretations

In September 2014, the Anna Kavan Society organized a one-day symposium at the Institute of English Studies in association with Liverpool John Moores University Research Centre for Literature and Cultural History and Peter Owen Publishers. The Anna Kavan Symposium brought together scholars and writers to historicize Kavan’s work (from the post-colonial aspects of Kavan’s fiction and journalism to the interwar and wartime period), situate her within the literary and intellectual context of her times, and chart her legacy as a writer.

Feminist readings

On Ice and protofeminism, L.Timmel Duchamp said "First published in 1967, on the eve of the second wave of feminism, Ice has never been regarded as a significant work of proto-feminist literature, although scholars occasionally include it on lists of sf by women written before the major works of feminist sf burst onto the scene in the 1970s. The novel's surrealist form demands a different sort of reading than that of science fiction driven by narrative causality, but the text's obsessive insistence on linking the global political violence of the Cold War with the threateningly lethal sexual objectification of Woman and depicting them as two poles of the same suicidal collective will to destroy life makes Ice an interesting feminist literary experiment." [12]

Genre-bending and experimental writing

Kavan’s reception as a ’woman writer’ has been complicated and hindered by her perceived lack of attention to gender politics, and in general, her fiction has most often been interpreted as solipsistic autobiography rather than experimental and aesthetic writing.

Situating Kavan in fixed literary categories has remained a challenge; the scope of her work shows her style shifting from realism to surrealism to absurdism. Her work also subverts conventions of literary form, abandoning a proper plot structure and offering nameless landscapes and nameless characters. Her disruptive narratives mix up descriptive language with "nocturnal language" or close to the technique of stream of consciousness associated with modernist novelists. Her best-known novel Ice has been sometimes discussed as slipstream work, a non-realistic fiction that crosses conventional genre boundaries, where Borges' Fictions, Calvino's Invisible Cities or Ballard's Crash are cited as 'canon of slipstream writing'.[13]

Politics of Madness

Kavan’s writing of madness, asylum incarceration and opiate addiction offer a complex association with the early twentieth-century history of psychiatry and psychotherapy. As well as being treated in private asylums and nursing homes, Kavan underwent a short analysis at the Tavistock Clinic, experienced Ludwig Binswanger’s method of existential psychotherapy at the Bellevue Sanatorium, and had a close personal relationship with her longtime psychiatrist Karl Bluth. Kavan promoted a radical politics of madness, giving voice to the disenfranchised and marginalized psychiatric patient and presaging the anti-psychiatry movement.

In the exhibition Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors at the Freud Museum in London (2013), she stood alongside other female explorers of the mind, among them: Mary Lamb, Theroigne de Méricourt, Alice James, Anna O, Ida Bauer, Augustine, Elizabeth Severn, Bryher, Annie Winifred Ellerman, Hilda Doolittle, Princess Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud, Dorothy Burlingham, Zelda Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath.

Influences

Literature

Kavan's friend, the Welsh writer Rhys Davies, based his 1975 novel, The Honeysuckle Girl, on Anna Kavan's early life.

Theater and Performance

Choreographer and stage director, François Verret adapted in 2008 Ice for the theater putting into play the three protagonists: the governor, a woman, and the narrator.

Silverglass is a play written by DJ Britton about the extraordinary relationship between Rhys Davies and Anna Kavan, presented as a premiere during the Rhys Davies Short Story Conference 2013 held in Swansea. The play is set in the late 1960s and reveals Davies’late literary recognition as well as Kavan’s final tragedy. Both of them lived 'a life of self-invention, in which secrets, sexuality and deep questions of personal identity lurked constantly in the shadows'.[14]

Music and Sound Art

Thalia Zedek is an American singer and guitarist, active since the early 1980s and member of several notable alternative rock groups, including Live Skull and Uzi. 'Sleep Has His House was the inspiration for the album Sleep Asylum [15] of Uzi' released in 1986.

David Tibet, the primary creative force behind the experimental music/neofolk music group Current 93, named the group's album Sleep Has His House after the Anna Kavan book of the same title.

San Francisco post-rock band Carta titled their song Kavan on their album "The Glass Bottom Boat" after Anna Kavan. The song was subsequently released as a remix by The Declining Winter on their album Haunt the Upper Hallways.

Floriane Pochon, French artist, created a sound artwork untitled Ice Lady based on Ice novel. It was presented during Les Nuits de la Phaune, a live broadcast event initiated by the Marseille-based Radio Grenouille in 2008.

Visual Arts

In an installation named Anna, the Wales-based artist duo Heather and Ivan Morison investigate the construction of the self based on ambiguous narratives. They developed an allegorical piece of object theatre draws on the life and works of Kavan using performance and puppetry to connect the objects and play out "a brutal tale of love and loss set against the approaching threat of the ice".[16] It has been first presented in 2012 at The Hepworth Wakefield in Wakefield, England.

Bibliography

As Helen Ferguson

Re-issues after 1939 are under the name Anna Kavan.

As Anna Kavan

Published posthumously

Journalism

All work published in Horizon : A review of Literature and Art.

Anthologized work by Anna Kavan

Further reading

Biographies

Major Archives

The largest collection of Kavan’s personal papers, photographs, manuscripts, correspondence and paintings are held by the University of Tulsa's McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections and University Archives.

The Peter Owen Archives at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas contain correspondence between Kavan and her publisher Peter Owen and related material. Other archives in the collection contain letters from Kavan to writers and publishers including the William A Bradley Literary Agency, Francis Henry King, Scorpion Press, John Lehmann, Kay Dick and Gerald Hamilton.

The Rhys Davis Archive in the National Library of Wales contains the papers of Kavan’s close friend and literary executor Rhys Davies including a small collection of letters from Kavan and papers relating to posthumous publication.

The Walter Ian Hamilton Papers in the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, Wellington contain letters from Kavan to Hamilton between 1940 and 1955.

Other archives containing examples of Kavan’s correspondence include the Jonathan Cape files in the Random House Archives at the University of Reading and the Koestler Archive in Edinburgh University Library, Special Collections. A small collection of Karl Theodor Bluth’s papers are housed in the Deutsches Literatur Archiv in Marbach, Germany.

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Brian Aldiss, "In Memoriam", p249
  2. ↑ Ironside Virginia, "Julia and the Bazooka" Peter Owen Publishers reprint 2007, introduction.
  3. ↑ Jennifer Strum, Anna Kavan's New Zealand, Random House 2009 (p16)
  4. ↑ Jennifer Sturm, Anna Kavan's New Zealand, Random House 2009, (p19)
  5. ↑ David Callard, The Case of Anna Kavan, biography published by Peter Owen, 1992.
  6. ↑ Anaïs Nin, The Novel of the Future published by Mcmillan, 1968.
  7. ↑ Brian Aldiss, The Detached Retina : aspects of SF and Fantasy published Syracuse University Press, 1995.
  8. ↑ Emily Hill, A Novel Approach, interview with Peter Owen for Dazed & Confused, 2010 :"The author of Ice, who died in 1968 with enough heroin stockpiled in her house to kill the whole street, did so on the night she was expected at one of Peter Owen’s parties. When the police broke in the door, they found the gold invitation, so Owen was the first person they called. “I didn’t realise at the time that I was dealing with a really major writer who would become a cult figure,” Owen admits. ".
  9. ↑ Victoria Walker achieved in 2012 her PhD The Fiction of Kavan at Queen Mary, University of London.
  10. ↑ Kristina Rosenthal, Announcement: Anna Kavan at the Zarrow Art Center 23 October 2014 :"Based upon her formal training at the Central London School of Arts and Crafts in “design theory,” Kavan’s technique places each current painting in the context of earlier pieces. It mirrored her creative approach to first experience a relationship, emotion, or life situation then make a work of art that marked that experience. She considered these memorials a justification for having lived." .
  11. ↑ 10 October 2013 - 2 February 2014 : Inspired by Lisa Appignanesi’s acclaimed book, Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present, the exhibition highlights the experience of women and their relationship to those who confined, cared for and listened to them. It also shows how women today conduct their own explorations of mind and imagination in challenging works of art.
  12. ↑ L Timmel Duchamp, What's the Story? Reading Anna Kavan's Ice, LCRW14:http://www.lcrw.net/fictionplus/duchampkavan.htm
  13. ↑ A Working Canon of Slipstream Writing compiled in Readercon 18, 2007.
  14. ↑ http://www.taliesinartscentre.co.uk/performances.php?id=710
  15. ↑ From the desk of Thalia Zedek : Anna Kavan, interview in Magnet Magazine 28/04/2013 : http://www.magnetmagazine.com/2013/04/28/from-the-desk-of-thalia-zedek-anna-kavan/.
  16. ↑ Heather & Ivan Morison website: http://www.morison.info/anna.html.

External links