The Fiction of Anna Kavan (1901-1968)
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The Fiction of Anna Kavan (1901-1968) Victoria Carborne Walker Submitted for PhD Examination Queen Mary, University of London March 2012 1 Abstract This thesis is a study of the British writer Anna Kavan (1901-1968). It begins by tracing Kavan’s life and examining the mythologies around her radical self- reinvention (in adopting the name of her own fictional character), madness and drug addiction. It attempts to map a place for her previously neglected work in twentieth-century women’s writing and criticism. Close reading of Kavan’s fiction attends to her uses of narrative voice in representing a divided self. Given Kavan’s treatment by the Swiss existential psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, the thesis explores connections between her writing and the British anti-psychiatry movement, especially R D Laing. Focussing primarily on the Modernist and Postmodern aspects of Kavan’s work, it also notes Gothic and Romantic inflections in her writing, establishing thematic continuity with her early Helen Ferguson novels. The first chapter looks at Kavan’s first collection of stories, Asylum Piece (1940) and her experimental novel, Sleep Has His House (1947). It reads her portrait of institutionalization as a nascent critique of asylum treatment, and considers Anaïs Nin’s longstanding interest in her work. Chapter Two draws on research into Kavan’s experiences during the Second World War, particularly her time working with soldiers in a military psychiatric hospital. Reading her second collection of stories I Am Lazarus (1945) as Blitz writing, it connects her fiction with her Horizon article ‘The Case of Bill Williams’ (1944) and explores the pacifist and anarchistic views in her writing. The third chapter, a reading of the novel Who Are You? (1963), argues that Kavan engages with existential philosophy in this text and explores parallels with Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea. The final chapter looks at Kavan’s last and best known work, Ice (1967). Following Doris Lessing, this chapter reads the novel’s sadism as a political response to the Second World War. Contesting critical interpretations which have pathologized Kavan’s fiction as solipsistic representations of her own experiences, this thesis aims to resituate her as a politically-engaged writer of her time. 2 Contents Abstract 2 Contents 3 Acknowledgments 4 Kavan Bibliography 6 Introduction 8 Chapter 1 63 ‘A private madness’: Asylum Piece and Sleep Has His House Chapter 2 101 Hearts and Minds: ‘The Case of Bill Williams’ and I Am Lazarus Chapter 3 148 Existence and Identity: Who Are You? Chapter 4 192 Heroine Addiction: Ice Conclusion 231 Bibliography 235 3 Acknowledgments I gratefully acknowledge that this research was funded by Queen Mary, University of London. A research trip to the United States was aided by a grant from the University of London Central Research Fund and the Queen Mary Research Fund. My greatest thanks are to my supervisor Michèle Barrett for her guidance and unfailing support and to my second supervisor Suzanne Hobson for her encouragement and inspiration. Professor Meic Stephens at the Rhys Davies Trust has forwarded interesting and relevant material, granted permission for access to Kavan’s and Rhys Davies’ papers, and given enthusiastic encouragement. All at Peter Owen Publishers, especially Michael O’Connell, have been generous in allowing access to their records and Peter Owen was kind enough to share his insights and memories of Kavan. I owe special thanks to the archivists at the McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa; the Harry Ransom Centre at the University of Texas in Austin; the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, Wellington; the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth; the Random House Archive at the University of Reading Library, Special Collections; Edinburgh University Library, Special Collections; Universitätsarchiv, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen and Senate House Library, University of London, Special Collections. I was privileged to visit the Themerson Archive under the care of Jasia Reichardt and Nick Wadley. I have also been greatly assisted by librarians at the British Library, the Wellcome Library and the National Library of Scotland. The English Department at Queen Mary has been a stimulating and supportive home for my research. Beverly Stewart and Daphne Rayment have provided constant help and support. Paul Hamilton gave valuable comments on an early draft chapter, Claire Bisdorff helped with translations of letters between K T Bluth and Ludwig Binswanger and Jennifer Sturm has been generous with her support, 4 inspiration and research. Amber Abbas and Jamison Warren were wonderful hosts in Austin, providing friendship along with accommodation. Personal thanks go to my parents and sister for help with childcare and endless practical assistance without which I would have been unable to complete this thesis, to my friends for their support, and to Ben for everything. 5 Kavan Bibliography As Helen Ferguson 1929 A Charmed Circle 1930 The Dark Sisters 1930 Let Me Alone 1935 A Stranger Still 1936 Goose Cross 1937 Rich Get Rich As Anna Kavan 1940 Asylum Piece (Stories) 1941 Change the Name 1945 I Am Lazarus (Stories) 1948 Sleep Has His House 1949 The Horse’s Tale (with K T Bluth) 1956 A Scarcity of Love 1957 Eagles’ Nest 1958 A Bright Green Field (Stories) 1963 Who Are You? 1967 Ice Posthumous 1970 Julia and the Bazooka (Stories) 1975 My Soul in China (Novella & Stories) 1994 Mercury 1995 The Parson 2007 Guilty 2009 Anna Kavan’s New Zealand, ed. by Jennifer Sturm (Stories) 6 Kavan’s Modernist style Example of distinctive cross-hatching in oil Untitled, private ownership Untitled, Tulsa Archive Series IV/ Box 1/ Folder 3 Examples of later ‘disturbing’ paintings Untitled, Tulsa Archive Untitled, Tulsa Archive Series IV/ Box 1/ Folder 3 Series IV/ Box 2 7 Introduction The Myth of Anna Kavan Helen Edmonds, Home Counties housewife and writer of conventional novels, was admitted to a Swiss psychiatric clinic after a suicide attempt in 1938; when she emerged she was barely recognizable, transformed from plump brunette into emaciated platinum blonde; she had taken the name of her own fictional character and become Anna Kavan. With her new name came a radically different writing style which was dark and lucid, influenced by heroin addiction, insanity and despair; she would spend the rest of her life surrounding herself in mystery and enigma. So goes the story of Helen Edmonds’ metamorphosis into Anna Kavan; known to many more intimately than her fiction, it is a narrative hard to resist. But the tale of Kavan’s life is a jumble of fact, fiction, exaggeration and omission, developed and perpetuated as it has passed from magazine article to fly-leaf, popular biography, book review and back again.1 Kavan’s adoption of the name of one of her fictional creations has been taken as licence by critics as well as biographers to read her life and fiction interchangeably and the character ‘Anna Kavan’ along with her many later, nameless heroines, has given scope for casual confusion between author and fictional creation. Integral to the Kavan mythology is a paradoxical belief that she fabricated the facts of her life and put her real self into her fiction, reading her name change as a deliberate attempt to mystify and her writing as a complex puzzle. But a persistent desire to seek the ‘truth’ of Kavan’s life, and tendency to view her fiction as an elaborate game of hide and seek with the reader, has inhibited serious consideration of her work and she remains a marginal figure in literary criticism. Beneath the accumulated layers of speculation, falsehood and elaboration lie the contours of Kavan’s life story. She was born Helen Woods in 1901 to British parents in Cannes and her father died when she was 11 years old. In 1920 she married and became Helen Ferguson, moving with her husband to Burma where their son Bryan was born. Less than three years later she returned to England and 1 See, especially David Callard, 'Bitter Pilgrimage: The Life of Anna Kavan' London Magazine 1989; The Case of Anna Kavan: A Biography (London: Peter Owen, 1992); Clive Jordan, 'Icy Heroin', review of Julia and the Bazooka, The New Statesman, 6 March 1970.; Vivian Gornick, 'The Great Depression of Anna Kavan', The Village Voice, December 2-8 1981; Jeremy Reed, A Stranger on Earth: The Life and Work of Anna Kavan (London: Peter Owen, 2006). 8 in 1928 was remarried to Stuart Edmonds, publishing six novels from 1929 to 1937 under her previous name Helen Ferguson. In 1935 she gave birth to a daughter Margaret who died soon afterwards and the couple immediately adopted another child whose fate after their divorce is unknown. In 1938 Helen Edmonds suffered a breakdown, attempting suicide, and was sent to a Swiss psychiatric clinic; she would experience bouts of severe depression throughout her life. After splitting from Edmonds, she published a collection of stories under the name of one of her earlier fictional characters, Anna Kavan, which she would eventually take as her own. Her new writing style brought her some literary success in the 1940s. During the Second World War Kavan travelled extensively, living for a time in America and New Zealand; back in London she worked for a short spell at a military psychiatric unit and then at the literary journal Horizon. She is known to have used heroin from the mid 1920s and was an addict for most of her life. She continued to write, with mixed success, but depression and ill-health led to a reclusive lifestyle and she was largely forgotten until the success of her final novel in 1967. When Kavan was found dead in her home in 1968 reports in The Times and The Daily Telegraph on 6 December and in The New York Times on 7 December gave assessments of her achievements as a writer rather than accounts of her sensational life.2 During her lifetime, her work received a variable critical reception and her life little scrutiny.