THENEWYORKER,MARCH30, 2020 79
in an atmosphere of suspicious and per-
petually lurking, unimaginable dangers.”
This is the surrealist alienation recog-
nizable in Anna Kavan’s writing; what
changed was not the underlying theme
or impulse but the trappings. Kavan spe-
cialized in the first-person short story, a
form and a voice she never employed as
Ferguson. And she responded to what
she called “conditions outside,” or devel-
opments in literary style and fashion—
notably the emergence, via English trans-
lations of “The Castle” and “The Trial,”
of a method and a world view later rec-
ognized as Kafkaesque.
There are occasions when Kavan,
whom Brian Aldiss dubbed “Kafka’s sis-
ter,” leans too heavily on the master’s
tropes. Places are identified as “the other
country” or “the southland”; characters
are referred to by single initials or om-
inous titles or both. In Kavan’s novel
“Eagles’ Nest” (1957), an artist working
at a department store grows tired of his
“sadistic” boss and answers a job listing
aimed at “a man of integrity,” placed by
“The Administrator” of a country es-
tate in a nameless area.
But, between the early nineteen-for-
ties and the late nineteen-sixties—in
“Asylum Piece,” “I Am Lazarus,” “The
House of Sleep” (a 1947 exercise in what
she called “night-time language”), and,
of course, “Ice”—she was spurred by Kaf-
ka’s example to create a bare yet vibrant
fictional universe and a series of stun-
ning, if slightly melodramatic, nightmare
scenarios. The unanswered question is a
worse fate than the dreaded reply. At the
start of her story “The Enemy,” the threat
is not so much a nemesis as the idea of
a nemesis. There is little reprieve from
these depths: the final stories in “Asy-
lum Piece” are called “The End in Sight”
and “There Is No End.”
W
alker’s selection, in “Machines in
the Head,” highlights Kavan’s
newfound taste for gothic flourishes and
for jagged or circular structures that en-
able a potent mixture of immersion and
analysis. “A Bright Green Field,” the title
story of the last collection published when
she was alive, concerns a sloping meadow
that follows the narrator around, and that
seems to be “arrogant” and “aggressive”
in its year-round luminosity. And, in “Ice,”
the narrator is never anything but lucid
in his efforts to evoke a sense of dislocation:
Reality had always been something of an
unknown quantity to me. At times this could
be disturbing. Now, for instance, I had vis-
ited the girl and her husband before, and kept
a vivid recollection of the peaceful, prosper-
ous-looking countryside round their home.
But this memory was rapidly fading, losing
its reality, becoming increasingly unconvinc-
ing and indistinct, as I passed no one on the
road, never came to a village, saw no lights
anywhere. The sky was black, blacker untended
hedges towering against it; and when the head-
lights occasionally showed roadside buildings,
these too were always black, ap-
parently uninhabited and more
or less in ruins. It was just as
if the entire district had been
laid waste during my absence.In an undated note,
Kavan explained that she
had wanted to “abandon re-
alistic writing insofar as it
describes exclusively events
in the physical environment,
and to make the reader
aware of the existence of the different,
though just as real, ‘reality’ which lies
just beyond the surface of ordinary daily
life and the surface aspect of things.”
But, even at its most spectral or uncanny,
her writing remained rooted in ques-
tions of human psychology. In a 1944
essay, she argued that all stories, whether
using “realistic technique” or conducted
in “a dream or fantasy medium,” de-
pended on “an understanding of the
fundamentals of personality”—what,
channelling the language of psychoanal-
ysis, she called “the interpretation of
complexes.” She never abandoned the
glazed and remote female figure that
populates the Ferguson novels. The “ice”
in Kavan’s final novel is an emotional
landscape, not a stand-in for heroin or
nuclear fallout, as is often claimed.
Her work under both names reads like
variations on a case study, almost like a
preparation for the more systematic de-
liverances of modern psychology: Win-
nicott’s writing on true and false selves,
the pitfalls of codependency. Kavan’s icy
heroines, or antiheroines, are never alone:
there’s always someone else—usually a
suitor, sometimes a sister—determined
to defrost them. In “Rich Get Rich” (1937),
a suitor is visited by a powerful impulse
to dry the tears on a woman’s “white, dis-
traught, child-like face.” (At their first
meeting, the glacial air outside fills the
room “as with a solid cube of transparent
ice.”) But what is really going on here?Who is really comforting whom? An-
other suitor, confronted by the “heartless
and cold” Karen, in “The Dark Sisters,”
finds that he is “tantalized against his
will,” and desperate, on his own behalf,
to locate her “real self.” The narrator of
“Ice” confesses that he found himself
“madly” attracted to the “victim’s look” of
a woman he calls his “glass girl,” and pur-
sues her across the frozen wastes of a
dying world, propelled by the unshak-
able sense that she possesses
something he is “missing.”
Kavan has been com-
pared to Jean Rhys—the
changes in style, the belated
success—and to Anaïs Nin,
who tried in vain to estab-
lish a friendship with her,
and who celebrated “Asy-
lum Piece” in “The Novel
of the Future” (1968). But
perhaps the most resonant
analogue is Sylvia Plath, whose personal
mythology shares a variety of symbols
with Kavan’s: drugs and dreams and dou-
bles; leopards and Lazarus; bad mothers
and dead fathers and marital miseries.
Both Kavan and Plath initially felt a de-
gree of suspicion about confessional writ-
ing, then recognized self-scrutiny as their
natural mode. On November 24, 1968,
just over a year after “Ice” appeared, to
general acclaim, Kavan wrote Peter Owen
and explained that she had been working
on an “autobiography in the form of short
stories with a connecting thread.” Barely
a week later, she died, of heart failure.
In 1970, Owen put out the collection
“Julia and the Bazooka.” The title story
is perhaps the most haunting, mordant,
and confident thing that Anna Kavan
ever wrote. A miniature picaresque, at
once unflappable and ticklingly faux-
naïf, it’s an encapsulation of Julia’s—and
her creator’s—entire life. Kavan slaloms
around in time, so we encounter Julia as
a little girl who loves picking poppies; an
adult analysand “damaged by no love in
childhood”; a heroin user liberated to
conduct “a normal existence”; a “young
bride” with a “sheaf of roses”; a rooftop
gardener surrounded by “pots of scarlet
geraniums.” The story ends with Julia no
longer “anywhere,” replaced by “nothing.”
But whether she is alive or dead matters
less than the prevailing sense, so bracingly
represented in this writer’s best work, that
she is isolated, off-kilter, and doomed.