Anna Kavan
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Anna Kavan (April 10, 1901—1968; born Helen Emily Woods) was a British novelist, short story writer and painter.
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Biography
The only child of cold, wealthy parents, the she grew up emotionally rootless, leading to lifelong depression and bouts of mental illness. She married and divorced twice. Her one son, Bryan, died in World War II. Her only daughter, Margaret, died soon after childbirth.
Her initial six works were published under the name of Helen Ferguson, her first married name. She eventually named herself after a character in her own novel Let Me Alone. Asylum Piece and all subsequent works were authored as Anna Kavan. Kavan was addicted to heroin for most of her adult life, a dependency which was generally undetected by her associates, and for which she made no apologies. She is popularly supposed to have died of a heroin overdose. In actuality, she died of heart failure, though she had attempted suicide several times during her life.
The first six of her novels gave little indication of the experimental and disturbing nature of her later work. I Am Lazarus, a collection of short stories which explored the inner mindscape of the psychological explorer, heralded the new style and content of Kavan's writing. They were published after she was institutionalized for a heroin-related breakdown and suicide attempt. After her release, Kavan changed her name legally and set about a new career as an avant-garde writer in the mode of Franz Kafka. Her development of "nocturnal language" involved the lexicon of dreams and addiction, mental instability and alienation. She has been compared to Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf and Anais Nin, as well as Kafka. (Nin was an admirer and unsuccessfully pursued a correspondence with Kavan.) On one occasion Kavan collaborated with her analyst and close friend, Karl Theodor Bluth, in writing "The Horse's Tale" (1949).
An inveterate traveler, Kavan spent twenty-two months of World War II in New Zealand, and it was that country's proximity to the inhospitable frozen landscape of Antarctica that inspired the writing of Ice. This post-apocalyptic novel brought critical acclaim, earning Kavan the Brian Aldiss Science Fiction Book of the Year award in 1967, the year before Kavan's death in 1968. Many of her works were published posthumously, some edited by her friend, Rhys Davies. London-based Peter Owen Publishers have been long-serving advocates of Kavan's work and continue to keep her work in print.
Many of her papers, artwork and ephemera are in the University of Tulsa's McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections and University Archives.
Influence
David Tibet, the primary creative force behind the experimental music/neofolk music group Current 93 named the Current 93 album, Sleep Has His House after the Anna Kavan book of the name.
Bibliography
As Helen Ferguson
- A Charmed Circle (1929)
- Let Me Alone (1930)
- The Dark Sisters (1930)
- A Stranger Still (1935)
- Goose Cross (1936)
- Rich Get Rich (1937)
As Anna Kavan
- Asylum Piece (1940)
- Change The Name (1941)
- I Am Lazarus (1945)
- The Horse's Tale (with K. T. Bluth) (1949)
- Sleep Has His House (a.k.a. The House of Sleep) (1948)
- A Scarcity of Love (1956)
- Eagle's Nest (1957)
- A Bright Green Field and Other Stories (1958)
- Ice (1967)
- Julia and the Bazooka (1970)
- Who Are You? (1963)
- Let Me Alone (1974)
- My Soul in China (1975)
- My Madness: Selected Writings (1990)
- The Parson (1994)
- Mercury (1995)
- Guilty (2007)
