Anna Kavan
Anna Kavan | |
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Born | Helen Emily Woods 10 April 1901 Cannes, France |
Died | 5 December 1968 London, England | (aged 67)
Pen name |
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Occupation |
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Notable works | Ice |
Spouse |
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Children | 2 |
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 pen name but as her legal identity.
Biography
Early life
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 died by 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
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 by racing car drivers she took up with.[2]
In 1928 she divorced Ferguson and married an artist named Stuart Edmonds whom she had 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.
Kavan and Edmonds had a daughter, Margaret, who died soon after childbirth and they then adopted a child whom they named Susanna.
As Anna 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 spent six months in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California in 1940. The stay inspired her novella, My Soul in China, published posthumously in 1975.[4] 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. 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
In February 1944, Kavan's son from her first marriage, Bryan Gratney Ferguson, died serving in No. 3 Commando during the Second World War.[5]
After her return to the UK, Kavan began treatment with the German psychiatrist
Kavan continued to undergo sporadic inpatient treatments for heroin addiction and in her later years in London lived as a virtual recluse. She enjoyed a late triumph in 1967 with her novel
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". was an admirer and unsuccessfully pursued a correspondence with Kavan.
Death and legacy
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 5 December 1968. The previous night she had failed to attend a reception in honor of Anaïs Nin at the home of her London-based publisher Peter Owen.[9]
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 and Maggie Gee are among the writers who have praised her work.
In 2009[10] 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
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
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 science fiction written by women before the explosion of the genre 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."[13]
Genre-bending and experimental writing
Kavan's reception as a 'woman writer' has been complicated by her perceived lack of attention to gender politics, and her fiction has most often been interpreted as autobiography rather than experimental and aesthetic writing.
Kavan's work is difficult to situate in fixed literary categories; the scope of her work shows her experimenting with
Politics of madness
Kavan's writing of
In the exhibition Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors at the Freud Museum in London (2013), her work was presented alongside other female explorers of the mind, among them:
Influences
Literature
Kavan was friends with the Welsh writer Rhys Davies, who based his 1975 novel Honeysuckle Girl on her early life.
Theater and performance
Choreographer and stage director, François Verret [fr] adapted Ice for the theater in 2008.
Silverglass by DJ Britton is a play about the relationship between Rhys Davies and Anna Kavan. It was presented as a premiere during the Rhys Davies Short Story Conference 2013 held in Swansea. The play is set in the late 1960s and depicts Davies' late literary recognition as well as Kavan's final tragedy. Both writers lived 'a life of self-invention, in which secrets, sexuality and deep questions of personal identity lurked constantly in the shadows'.[15]
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[16] 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 Anna Kavan's book of the same title.
San Francisco post-rock band Carta titled a song Kavan on their album "The Glass Bottom Boat" after Anna Kavan. The song was subsequently released as a remix by
Floriane Pochon, French artist, created a sound artwork untitled Ice Lady based on the novel Ice. It was presented during Les Nuits de la Phaune, a live broadcast event initiated by the Marseille-based Radio Grenouille [fr] 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".[17] 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.
- A Charmed Circle (London : Jonathan Cape, 1929, Open Library)
- Let Me Alone (London : Jonathan Cape, 1930, Open Library)
- The Dark Sisters (London : Jonathan Cape, 1930, Open Library)
- A Stranger Still (London : Jonathan Cape, 1935, Open Library)
- Goose Cross (London : John Lane, 1936, Open Library)
- Rich Get Rich (London : John Lane, 1937, Open Library)
As Anna Kavan
- Asylum Piece (London : Jonathan Cape, 1940, Open Library)
- Change The Name (London : Jonathan Cape, 1941, Open Library)
- I Am Lazarus (London : Jonathan Cape, 1945, Open Library)
- Sleep Has His House (a.k.a. The House of Sleep (New York : Doubleday, US ed., 1947) – Sleep Has His House (London: Cassel, UK ed., 1948) Open Library)
- The Horse's Tale (with K. T. Bluth) (London : Gaberbocchus Press, 1949, Open Library)
- A Scarcity of Love (Southport, Lancashire: Angus Downie, 1956, Open Library)
- Eagle's Nest (London : Peter Owen, 1957, Open Library)
- A Bright Green Field and Other Stories (London : Peter Owen, 1958, Open Library)
- Who Are You? (Lowestoft, Suffolk: Scorpion Press, 1963, Open Library)
- Ice (Peter Owen Publishers, London 1967, scheduled for reissue in Christmas 2017. Open Library)
Published posthumously
- Julia and the Bazooka (London : Peter Owen, 1970)
- My Soul in China (London : Peter Owen, 1975)
- My Madness: Selected Writings (London : Macmillan, 1990)
- Mercury (London : Peter Owen, 1994)
- The Parson (London : Peter Owen, 1995)
- Guilty (London : Peter Owen, 2007)
- Machines in the Head: the Selected Short Writing of Anna Kavan (London : Peter Owen, 2019)
Journalism
All work published in Horizon : A Review of Literature and Art
- 'New Zealand: Answer to an Inquiry', Horizon 45, Sept 1943
- 'The Case of Bill Williams', Horizon 50, Feb 1944
- 'Reviews', Horizon 50, Feb 1944
- 'Reviews', Horizon 52, April 1944
- 'Reviews', Horizon 59, Nov 1944
- 'Reviews', Horizon 62, Feb 1945
- 'Reviews', Horizon 67, July 1945
- 'Reviews', Horizon 73, Jan 1946
Anthologized work by Anna Kavan
- "Department of Slight Confusion." In Book: A Miscellany. No. 3, edited by Leo Bensemann & Denis Glover. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1941.
- "Ice Storm." In New Zealand New Writing, edited by Ian Gordon. Wellington: Progressive Publishing Society, 1942.
- "I Am Lazarus." Horizon VII, no. 41, 1943, 353–61.
- "New Zealand: An Answer to an Inquiry." Horizon VIII, no. 45, 1943, 153–61.
- "The Big Bang." In Modern Short Stories, edited by Denys Val Baker. London: Staples & Staples, 1943.
- "Face of My People." Horizon IX, no. 53, 1944, 323–35.
- "Face of My People." In Little Reviews Anthology 1945, edited by Denys Val Baker. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1945.
- "I Am Lazarus." In Stories of the Forties Vol. 1, edited by Reginald Moore & Woodrow Wyatt. London: Nicholson & Watson, 1945.
- "Two New Zealand Pieces." In Choice, edited by William Sansom. London: Progressive Publishing, 1946.
- "Brave New Worlds." In Horizon, edited by Cyril Connolly. London, 1946.
- "The Professor." In Horizon, edited by Cyril Connolly. London, 1946.
- "Face of My People." In Modern British Writing, edited by Denys Val Baker. New York: Vanguard Press, 1947.
- "I Am Lazarus." In The World Within: Fiction Illuminating Neuroses of Our Time, edited by Mary Louise W. Aswell. New York: McGraw-Hill Books, 1947.
- "The Red Dogs." In Penguin New Writing, Vol. 37, edited by John Lehmann. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949.
- "The Red Dogs." In Pleasures of New Writing: An Anthology of Poems, Stories, and Other Prose Pieces from the Pages of New Writing, edited by John Lehmann. London: John Lehmann, 1952.
- "Happy Name." In London Magazine, edited by Alan Ross. London, 1954.
- "Palace of Sleep." In Stories for the Dead of Night, edited by Don Congdon. New York: Dell Books, 1957
- "A Bright Green Field." In Springtime Two: An Anthology of Current Trends, edited by Peter Owen & Wendy Owen. London: Peter Owen Ltd., 1958.
- "High in the Mountains." In London Magazine, edited by Alan Ross. London, 1958.
- "Five More Days to Countdown." In Encounter XXXI, no. 1, 1968, 45–49.
- "Julia and the Bazooka." In Encounter XXXII, no. 2, 1969, 16–19.
- "World of Heroes." In Encounter XXXIII, no. 4, 1969, 9–13.
- "The Mercedes." In London Magazine 1970, 17–21.
- "Edge of Panic." In Vogue, 1 October 1971, 75–83.
- "Sleep Has His House" excerpts. In The Tiger Garden: A Book of Writers' Dreams. Foreword by Anthony Stevens. London: Serpent's Tail, 1996
- "The Zebra Struck" In The Vintage Book of Amnesia, edited by Jonathan Lethem. New York: Vintage Books, 2000
Further sources
Biographies
- The Case of Anna Kavan : A Biography, by David Callard. London: Peter Owen, 1994
- A Stranger on Earth: The Life and Work of Anna Kavan, by Jeremy Reed. London: Peter Owen, 2006
- Anna Kavan's New-Zealand, by Jennifer Sturm. Auckland: Random House Books, 2009
- Stranger Still: The Works of Anna Kavan, by Francis Booth. London:Lulu.com, 2013
Major archives
The largest collection of archival material from Kavan[
Letters from Kavan and papers relating to posthumous publication are included in the Rhys Davis Archive in the National Library of Wales. Letters from Kavan to Walter Ian Hamilton Papers between 1940 and 1955 are in the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand. Other correspondence can be found at the Jonathan Cape files in the Random House Archives at the University of Reading and the Koestler Archive in Edinburgh University Library, Special Collections.[18]
See also
Notes
- ^ Brian Aldiss, "In Memoriam", p249
- ^ Ironside Virginia, "Julia and the Bazooka" Peter Owen Publishers reprint 2007, introduction.
- ^ Jennifer Strum, Anna Kavan's New Zealand, Random House 2009 (p16)
- ^ Jennifer Sturm, Anna Kavan's New Zealand, Random House 2009, (p19)
- ^ "Pte Bryan Gratney Ferguson". gallery.commandoveterans.org. Retrieved 2 May 2021.
- ^ David Callard, The Case of Anna Kavan, biography published by Peter Owen, 1992.
- ^ Anaïs Nin, The Novel of the Future published by Mcmillan, 1968.
- ^ Brian Aldiss, The Detached Retina : aspects of SF and Fantasy published Syracuse University Press, 1995.
- ^ 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. ".
- ^ The society was founded by Victoria Walker who achieved her PhD 'The Fiction of Anna Kavan' at Queen Mary, University of London in 2012.
- ^ 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." .
- ^ 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.
- ^ L Timmel Duchamp, What's the Story? Reading Anna Kavan's Ice, LCRW14:http://www.lcrw.net/fictionplus/duchampkavan.htm Archived 12 November 2014 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ A Working Canon of Slipstream Writing compiled in Readercon 18, 2007.
- ^ "Taliesin Live".
- ^ From the desk of Thalia Zedek : Anna Kavan, interview in Magnet Magazine 28 April 2013 : http://www.magnetmagazine.com/2013/04/28/from-the-desk-of-thalia-zedek-anna-kavan/.
- ^ Heather & Ivan Morison website: http://www.morison.info/anna.html Archived 5 May 2012 at the Wayback Machine.
- ^ a b "Resources". Anna Kavan Society. Retrieved 15 October 2015.
External links
- Anna Kavan Society
- Peter Owen Publishers
- Anna Kavan aka Helen Ferguson (redmood.com/kavan) – created by Jan Hanford, archived 2004-12-04
- Anna Kavan on Open Library
- Anna Kavan by Jennifer Sturm at CulturalIcons.co.uk – discussion by Dr Jennifer Sturm and Debbie Knowles for the Cultural Icons project (audio and video)
- Anna Kavan at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
- Anna Kavan at Library of Congress, with 42 library catalogue records
- Anna Kavan papers, 1867-1991, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, McFarlin Library, The University of Tulsa
- Meic Stephens collection of Anna Kavan ephemera, 1943-1971, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, McFarlin Library, The University of Tulsa
- Richard R. Centing collection of Anna Kavan, 1943-1991, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, McFarlin Library, The University of Tulsa
- David A. Callard collection of Anna Kavan, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, McFarlin Library, The University of Tulsa
- Anais Nin papers, 1969-1992, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, McFarlin Library, The University of Tulsa