twenty-one, Kavan returned, with their
young son. to live in England. During
a stay in the South of France, she met a
wealthy layabout named Stuart Ed-
monds. She also smtcd using heroin. In
another diary entry, she noted, "H makes
one's eyes beautiful ... I watched my-
self in the glass fur a long time, which
gave me real pleasure.,.
The addiction, she thought, allowed
her to cope and even thriw--a view later
supported by the German psydllatrist
Karl Bluth, her fiiend and enabler. During
her marriage to F.dmonds, she bred bull-
dogs at their house in the Chilterns, en-
jo)'W moderate success as a painter, and
published all her Helen Ferguson nov-
els---a handful of bleakly astute realist
character studies, plus an eccentric mys-
tery, "Goose Cross" (1936). Kavan de-
scnbed her own nature as "hopeless," and,
from the start,herwritingwas concerned
with the formation and hardening of a
female personality type-the: unkM:d girl
bound to become an unhappy woman.
This figure appean; in various furms, but
she is almost always pale, oold, suspicious,
"shyly arrogant." "Let me alone" is her
motto, and the mirror her best friend.
Here is Karen, who dreads personal in-
teraction and envies the sea, in Fergu-
son's trenchant-and forgotten second
novel, "The Dark Sisters" (1930):
Her face bad taken on its mildly inatten-
tive Look., which was like a curtain drawn in
front of her true self, hiding it. She looked pen-
m and remote, an abstrac:t crut\IIe of fantuy,
scattely human. There could be no warmth or
pa.ion in her blood.
In the nineteen-thirties, Kavan and
Edmonds had a daughter, who died in
infancy; the marriage then foundered,
and Kavan made a number of suicide
attempts. Eventually, her mother inter-
vened and paid fur her to go to an asy-
lum in Switzerland. This did not mark
the end of her troubles, but it symbol-
ized a moment of transition, both on
and off the page.
During the early years of the war,
Kavan travdled to Norway, New Z-ea-
land, and Bali, among other places.
While visiting a snowbound New
York-the setting for her wonderfully
edgy story "Ice Storm" -she sold three
stories from "Asylum Piece" to Harper's
Ba:taarand was photographed by Walker
Evans. When she eventually returned
to London, she worked with trauma-
tized soldicr&--an experience depicted
in several stories, including "The Black-
out," which ran in this magazine in
194,r-and then took a job as an assis-
tant at the literary journal Horizon, where
she soon became a regular contributor.
The brief outpouring of essays and
reviews from this period, which are in-
cluded in the U.K. edition of "Machines
in the Head," provides a glimpse of her
thinking at the time. In one essay, she
wrote, "I do not like at all the idea that
a new life can be built up on the old fuun-dations." It is believed that one of her
purgative acts, on becoming Anna Kavan,
was to destroy most of her letters and di-
aries. From this point, there were to be
no bulldogs or country houses or hus-
bands or children. (Her son was killed in
action during the WM.) For the next thirty
ycan, she lived alone, mostly in Notting
Hill, in West London, and supplemented
her meagre writing income with an al-
lowmc:e from her stepfu.ther and a side-
line as a property developer.
Kav:m's biographers, D. A Calla.rd
and Jeremy Reed, and the novelist Rhys
Davies, one of her executors, have fol-
lowed Kavan's lead, promoting the idea
of an abrupt and total break in her life
and work.Just as her hair was shorn and
bleached, and her contact with others
minimiud, so was her literary aesthetic
supplanted by something harder-edged.
Ai; Helen Ferguson, she wrote barely
transmuted memoir, turning her narcis-
sistic mother into a narcissistic aunt, and
her father's suicide by drowning into a
bullet to the head. In the Kavan work,
memory provided a route to elliptical
fantasy and dark parable. An unevent-
ful dinner she had with Davies at a Lon-
don restaurant became the seed for the
intensely, and typically, unconsoling story
"The Summons," in which the narra-
tor takes the advice of a trusted friend,
R, and turns herself over to a :figure lin-
gering nearby, who leads her off to be
charged with an as yet unnamed crime.
The story ends with the narrator speak-
ing from some hopeless future point
When we ~t out into the hall and I saw
the neat, inconspicuous man still impassively, ~
impersonally waiting, I began to wonder, as I ~
ha.ve wondered ever since, whether the good J:
opinion of anybody in the whole world is worth ~
all that I have bad to suffer and must still go :E
on suffering-for how long; oh, for how long~ ~Although Kavan was committed to^2 ~
her own narrative of self-transfonnation, t;;
some of the hallmarks of her later writ- ~
~
ing had been present all along. For the ~
character Anna, in the third Helen Fer- ~
gusonnovel, "LetMeAlone,"theworld ~
appears to be a "vague and unconvinc- ~
ing place, minatory and yet unreal," "an iii
uneasy dream" that threatens to become i
a "nightmare in good earnest"; boarding e
school causes her to fed "like a stranger ~
in some fantastic country whose lan- [§
guage and mode of life were alike in- ~
comprehensible, surrounded by enemies II: