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 as both her pen name and her legal identity. She is most well-known for her 1967 novel, Ice, published just a year before her death.
Biography
Early life and background Kavan was born Helen Emily Woods in Cannes, as the only child of an affluent British family.Brian Aldiss, "In Memoriam", p249 Her father, Claude Charles Edward Woods, was a brewer who graduated Jesus College, Cambridge in 1888. He was the son of Matthew Charles Woods of Holeyn Hall, Wylam, and the grandson of William Woods, a banker in Newcastle upon Tyne. Her mother, Helen Eliza Bright, was the daughter of George Charles Bright, physician and son of Richard Bright, and Susan Emmeline Bright (née Cooper).
Kavan's parents travelled frequently, and she spent her childhood in both Europe and the United States. When Kavan was around 10 years old, the family moved from Somerset to Rialto, California to start an orange farm. While the business was moderately successful, Kavan's father abandoned the family and was found dead around a year later in 1915, having thrown himself from the prow of a ship. After his death, she returned to the UK where she was a boarder at Parsons Mead School in Ashstead and Malvern College in Worcestershire. Kavan has reflected upon her childhood as both incredibly lonely and neglectful, and her fiction often contains portrayals of dysfunctional family relationships.
Marriages and first hospitalization Kavan's mother, disregarding her daughter's desire to go to Oxford, arranged an encounter between the then nineteen-year-old Kavan and Donald Ferguson, a man both ten years her senior and allegedly her mother's former lover. She married him in 1920, a few months before he took a position as a railway administrator in colonial Burma. After moving, Kavan began to write and then gave birth to her son Bryan Gratney Ferguson. In 1923 the marriage collapsed, and Kavan left Ferguson returning with Bryan to the UK.
Living alone in London during the mid-1920s, 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 either by racing car drivers she took up with,Ironside Virginia, "Julia and the Bazooka" Peter Owen Publishers reprint 2007, introduction. a tennis professional who claimed it would improve her game, or through a prescription for morphine to treat depression. While in France, she began an affair with Stuart Edmonds, whom she married in 1928. Together the couple travelled through France, Italy, and Spain before resettling in England. A year later in 1929, she published her first novel, A Charmed Circle, under the name Helen Ferguson. It follows the story of a pair of sisters, Olive and Beryl Deane, who live in a small town under the tyranny of their hermit father and mother who dote on their cruel older brother—themes she would return to frequently for the rest of her career. A Charmed Circle was followed by five more books over the next eight years: Let Me Alone (1930), The Dark Sisters (1930), A Stranger Still (1935), Goose Cross (1936), and Rich Get Rich (1937). Most notable of these books is Let Me Alone, which follows the protagonist, Anna Kavan, forced into marriage by a cruel aunt and forcefully moved to a tropical "hell" where she is tormented by both the environment and her domineering husband.
Together Kavan and Edmonds had a daughter, Margaret, who died soon after childbirth. They then adopted a girl they named Susanna.Jennifer Strum, Anna Kavan's New Zealand, Random House 2009 (p16) In 1938, the marriage had begun to sour and Edmonds began an affair, leading the severely depressed Kavan to attempt suicide. She was then sent to a private clinic in Switzerland to recover. This would be the first of many suicide attempts, hospitalizations, and asylum incarcerations throughout Kavan's life for both depression and her lifelong heroin addiction.
As Anna Kavan
Asylum Piece (1940), a collection of short stories which explores dreamy, strange mindscapes and touches on themes of captivity, mental illness, alienation, and the difficulty of the 'patient' role, was her first book under the name Anna Kavan. This collection marks a drastic change in Kavan's writing, and all subsequent works would continue to embrace and build upon the experimental, slipstream style exemplified by the collection, which Anaïs Nin called "nocturnal language".Anaïs Nin, The Novel of the Future published by Mcmillan, 1968. However, she did not immediately adopt a new identity as 'Anna Kavan' in her day-to-day life. She continued to sign her letters as 'Helen' up until the end of 1940, when she moved to New York.
An inveterate traveller, Kavan initiated a long journey at the outset of World War II. From September 1939 to February 1943, she spent six months in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. The stay inspired her novella, My Soul in China, published posthumously in 1975.Jennifer Sturm, Anna Kavan's New Zealand, Random House 2009, (p19) She also 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.
Returning to England early 1943, she worked briefly as a psychiatric nurse with soldiers suffering from war neurosis at the Mill Hill Emergency Hospital and studied for a diploma in Psychological Medicine, which she never finished. 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. There, she contributed stories, articles, and reviews from 1944 to 1946, Most notable of her work for Horizon is The Case of Bill Williams, based on her time as a nurse. During her tenure at Horizon, letters indicate that Kavan had begun using cocaine as well as heroin, and may have been supplying it to others in the office, which Connolly disapproved of.Walker, Victoria Carborne. The Fiction of Anna Kavan (1901-1968). Diss. Queen Mary University of London, 2012.
In February 1944, Kavan's son from her first marriage, Bryan, died serving in No. 3 Commando during the Second World War.
After her return to the UK, Kavan began treatment with the German psychiatrist . They shared an unconventional relationship, with Bluth becoming Kavan's close friend, creative collaborator, and doctor until his death in 1964. He also managed her heroin addiction, and supplied her with the drug. Bluth regularly dedicated poetry, writings, and drawings to Kavan. The drawings were often sexual in nature, and though there were tensions between Bluth's wife and Kavan as a result of her disapproval of their closeness, there is no evidence that their relationship ever became physical. Together, Bluth and Kavan co-wrote the allegorical satire, The Horse's Tale, published in 1949 by Gaberbocchus Press.
It was Bluth who arranged for Kavan to be treated by pioneering psychiatrist and existential psychologist Ludwig Binswanger at his Swiss clinic, the (1857–1980). While at the clinic, Kavan's treatment focused on alleviating her psychological problems and finding a cure for her heroin addiction. This was unsuccessful.
Kavan continued to undergo sporadic in-patient treatments for heroin addiction and in her later years in London she 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.David Callard, The Case of Anna Kavan, biography published by Peter Owen, 1992. Ice brought Kavan critical acclaim and it is her best-known novel, known for its strangeness, disturbing imagery, portrayals of violence and war, and slipstream writing style.
Although popularly supposed to have died of a heroin overdose, Kavan died of heart failure at her home in Kensington and was found dead on December 5, 1968. The previous night she had failed to attend a reception in honor of author Anaïs Nin at the home of her London-based publisher Peter Owen.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 down 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. ".
Legacy
Many of Kavan's works were published posthumously, some edited by her friend and legatee, the Welsh writer Rhys Davies. Her writing has been compared to that of Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Jean Rhys, Alan Burns, and Ann Quin. Brian Aldiss described her as Kafka's sister.Brian Aldiss, The Detached Retina: aspects of SF and Fantasy published Syracuse University Press, 1995. Doris Lessing, J. G. Ballard, Anaïs Nin, Jean Rhys, Brian Aldiss, Christopher Priest, Nina Allan, Virginia Ironside and Maggie Gee are among the writers who have praised her work. Nin was perhaps the most dedicated of Kavan's early supporters, as she tried unsuccessfully for years to begin a correspondence with her.
London-based Peter Owen Publishers were long-serving advocates of Kavan's work and kept her work in print for many years. Ice was published as a Penguin Classic fiftieth-anniversary edition in 2017. Her work is now available through Pushkin Press. In 2009,The society was founded by Victoria Walker who achieved her PhD 'The Fiction of Anna Kavan' at Queen Mary, University of London in 2012. the Anna Kavan Society was founded in London with the aim of encouraging wider readership and increasing 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 PaperKristina 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." . 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 London10 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. traced key moments in the history of hysteria and counterpointed these with women's inventive art.
Modern scholarship and interpretations