Anna Kavan

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Anna Kavan (born April 10, 1901 in Cannes , † December 5, 1968 in London , born Helen Emily Woods ) was a British writer.

Life

Early life

Anna Kavan was born as Helen Emily Woods in Cannes, southern France, the only child of a wealthy British family. Her parents traveled extensively, and Kavan grew up in Europe and the United States. As an adult, she remembered her childhood as lonely and neglected. Her father died of suicide in 1911 . After his death, Kavan returned to the UK, where she studied at Parsons Mead School in Ashstead and Malvern College in Worcestershire.

Disregarding her daughter's wish to go to Oxford, her mother arranged a meeting with her former lover, Donald Ferguson. Helen Emily Woods married him in 1920, a few months before he started working for the Burma railroad . She moved her husband, began writing, and gave birth to their son, Bryan. In 1923, Kavan left Ferguson and returned to Britain with her son. These biographical events coincide with the underlying narrative of her first educational novel Let me alone (1930) while Who are you? (1963), written in the style of the Nouveau Roman , is an experimental twist on her time in Burma.

Living alone in London in the mid-1920s, she began studying painting at the Central School of Art and Design at London's Central School of Arts and Crafts, which she continued her entire life. Kavan traveled regularly to the French Riviera, where she was introduced to heroin by racing car drivers she'd teamed up with. From then on, her syringe should become her 'bazooka'.

In 1928 she divorced Ferguson and married an artist named Stuart Edmonds, whom she met near Toulon. Together they traveled through France, Italy, Spain and the Pyrenees before settling in England. A year later, she published her first novel, A Charmed Circle, under the name Helen Ferguson, followed by five other books over the next eight years.

Bellevue Sanatorium: part of the glass menagerie, the mirror of madness

Kavan and Edmonds had a daughter, Margaret, who died shortly after giving birth, and they then adopted a child they named Susanna. In 1938, when her second marriage ended, she attempted suicide and was admitted to a clinic in Switzerland. These were the first of several hospitalizations and psychiatric placement during Kavan's entire life, due to both depression and her lifelong heroin addiction .

As Anna Kavan

Asylum Piece (1940), a collection of short stories that explored the inner world of mind travelers, was her first book under the name Anna Kavan, heroine of one of her earlier novels Let Me Alone (1930) and A Stranger Still (1935). All subsequent works showed a radically changed writing style. From that moment on, the brunette Ferguson disappeared, and the crystal blonde Kavan began a career as an avant-garde writer under her newly adopted name in the United States.

A die-hard traveler, Kavan began a long journey at the start of World War II. From September 1939 to February 1943 she spent six months alone in Carmel-by-the-Sea , California, in 1940; this inspired her to write her story My Soul in China , published posthumously in 1975. She also visited the island of Bali , Indonesia, and stayed in Napier, New Zealand , her final travel destination, for twenty-two months . Their travel route was made difficult by the war, which severely restricted many ordinary shipping routes. As a result, it made its way three times through New York City and twice through the Suez Canal.

When she returned to England in early 1943, she worked for a short time at Maudsley Hospital with soldiers suffering from war neuroses and studied for a degree in psychological medicine. She also accepted a secretarial position at Horizon , an influential literary magazine edited by Cyril Connolly and founded by one of her friends, Peter Watson . She contributed with stories, articles, and reviews from 1944 to 1946.

In 1944, Kavan's son from her first marriage was killed and she finalized a divorce from her second husband.

After her return to Great Britain, Kavan began treatment with the German psychiatrist Karl Theodor Bluth . He became Kavan's close friend and occasional creative informant until his death in 1964. They co-wrote The Horse's Tale (1949), and Kavan dedicated several short stories to her doctor, which were published in the posthumous collection Julia and the Bazooka (1970). It was Bluth who made sure that Kavan was treated in the Bellevue Sanatorium, a modern clinic in which important psychiatric advances were made (1857–1980). There Kavan was treated by Ludwig Binswanger , a psychiatrist, a pioneer in the field of existential psychotherapy and a lifelong friend of Freud .

Kavan continued to undergo sporadic inpatient treatment for heroin addiction and practically lived as a hermit in her later years in London. She celebrated a late triumph in 1967 with her novel Ice , inspired by her time in New Zealand and the country's proximity to the inhospitable ice landscape of Antarctica. The original manuscript was titled The Cold World . When her publisher Peter Owen Kavan sent his first reply, in which he neither rejected nor accepted her text, he described it as a cross between Kafka and Mit Schirm, Charme and Melone . This post-apocalyptic novel has received critical acclaim. It is her best known novel that still confuses the reader with its weirdness and is nowadays presented as a slipstream novel rather than a science fiction novel.

The first six of her novels gave little indication of the experimental and disturbing nature of her later work, which was published after her withdrawal treatment. Asylum Piece definitely heralded the new style and content of Kavan's writing. Your development of the "nocturnal language". included the dictionary of dreams and addiction, mental instability and social alienation. She has been compared to Djuna Barnes , Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath . Brian Aldiss described her as Kafka's sister. Anaïs Nin was an admirer and tried unsuccessfully to correspond with Kavan.

Death and legacy

Kavan's house on Peel Street London

Although it is commonly believed that she died of a heroin overdose, Kavan died of heart failure in her Kensington home and was found dead on December 5, 1968. The night before, she had failed to attend a reception in honor of Anaïs Nin at the home of her London-based publisher Peter Owen.

Much of her work was published posthumously, some edited by her friend and estate administrator, the Welsh writer Rhys Davies . London-based publisher Peter Owen Publishers has been a long-time supporter of Kavan's work and continues to keep it in print. Doris Lessing , James Graham Ballard , Anaïs Nin, Jean Rhys, Brian Aldiss , Christopher Priest , Nina Allan, Virginia Ironside and Maggie Gee are among the writers who have praised their work.

In 2009, the Anna Kavan Society was founded in London with the aim of promoting a broader readership and deepening the scholarly examination of Kavan's work.

Kavan's paintings were recently exhibited at the Zarrow Art Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Unconventional Anna Kavan: Works on Paper The exhibition featured thirty-six paintings by Kavan from the special collections of the McFarlin Library Special Collections, University of Tulsa. The exhibition Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors at the Freud Museum (London) traces key moments in the history of hysteria and counterpoints them with the inventive art of women.

Aftermath

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 adapted Ice in 2008 for the theater.

DJ Britton's Silverglass is a piece about the relationship between Rhys Davies and Anna Kavan. It premiered during the 2013 Rhys Davies Short Story Conference in Swansea. Set in the late 1960s, the play portrays both Davies' late literary appreciation and Kavan's tragedy. Both writers lived "a life of self-invention in which secrets, sexuality and deep questions of personal identity constantly lurked in the shadows".

Music and sound art

Thalia Zedek is an American singer and guitarist who has been active since the early 1980s and is a member of several notable alternative rock groups, including Live Skull and Uzi. Sleep Has His House was the inspiration for the album Sleep Asylum by Uzi released in 1986.

David Tibet , the primary creative force behind the music group Current 93 (experimental music / Neofolk ), named the album by the group Sleep Has His House after the book of the same name by Anna Kavan.

The post-rock band Carta from San Francisco titled one song on their album "The Glass Bottom Boat" after Anna Kavan with "Kavan". The song was subsequently released as a remix of The Declining Winter on their album Haunt the Upper Hallways.

The French artist Floriane Pochon created a sound artwork entitled Ice Lady , which is based on the novel Ice . It was presented as part of Les Nuits de la Phaune, a live broadcast event initiated by Marseille-based Radio Grenouille in 2008.

Visual arts

In an installation called Anna , Wales-based artist duo Heather and Ivan Morison explored the construction of the self based on ambiguous narratives. They developed an allegorical piece of object theater related to the life and work of Kavan, using performance and puppet theater to tie the objects together and play "a brutal story of love and loss against the approaching threat of the ice". It was first presented in 2012 at The Hepworth Wakefield in Wakefield, England.

Modern research and interpretations

In September 2014, the Anna Kavan Society organized a one-day symposium at the Institute for English Studies in cooperation with the Research Center for Literary and Cultural History at John Moores University in Liverpool and the Peter Owen Verlag. The Anna Kavan Symposium brought together scholars and writers to historicize Kavan's work (from the postcolonial aspects of Kavan's fiction and journalism to the interwar period and World War II ), place them in the literary and intellectual context of their time, and their legacy to be recorded as a writer.

Feminist interpretations

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 sf by women written before the major works of feminist sf burst onto the scene 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. "

Genre boundaries and experimental writing

Kavan's reception as a "female writer" was hampered by her perceived lack of attention to gender politics, and her fiction was mostly interpreted as an autobiography rather than an experimental and aesthetic writing.

Kavan's work is difficult to classify into fixed literary categories; the scope of her work shows that she is experimenting with realism , surrealism and absurdism . In her work she often dispenses with linear plot and narrative structures and depicts nameless landscapes and nameless characters. Her disruptive narratives come close to the technique of stream of consciousness associated with modernist novelists. Her best-known novel Ice has been described as Slipstream , a non-realistic fiction that transcends conventional genre boundaries, citing Borges' Fictions , Calvino's Invisible Cities or Ballard's Crash as the 'canon of slipstream writing'.

Politics of madness

Kavan's writings on mental illness , mental illness , and opiate addiction offer a complex and thought-provoking perspective on early twentieth century psychiatry and psychotherapy. In addition to treatment in private clinics and nursing homes, Kavan underwent a brief analysis in the Tavistock Clinic, experienced Ludwig Binswanger's method of existential psychotherapy in the Bellevue sanatorium and had a close personal relationship with her long-time psychiatrist Karl Bluth. In her fiction and journalism, Kavan promoted radical politics of insanity by giving voice to the disenfranchised and marginalized psychiatric patient and advancing the anti-psychiatry movement.

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 humanities scholars.

Works

as Helen Ferguson

New editions were published after 1939 under Anna Kavan

  • A Charmed Circle (1929)
  • The Dark Sisters (1930)
  • Let Me Alone (1930)
  • A Stranger Still (1935)
  • Goose Cross (1936)
  • Rich Get Rich (1937)
as Anna Kavan
  • Asylum Piece and Other Stories (1940)
  • Change the Name (1941)
  • I Am Lazarus: Short Stories (1945)
  • Sleep Has His House (1947, also as The House of Sleep )
  • The Horse's Tale (with Karl Theodor Bluth ; * 1949)
  • A Scarcity of Love (1956)
  • Eagles' Nest (1957)
  • A Bright Green Field (1958)
  • Who are you? (1963)
    • German: Who are you? Translated by Helma Schleif. March, Herbstein 1984, ISBN 3-88880-030-7 .
  • Ice (1967)
  • Julia and the Bazooka an Other Stories (1970)
  • My Soul in China (1975)
  • Mercury (1994)
  • The Parson (1995)
  • Guilty (2007)
Anthologies
  • Machines in the Head: Selected Short Writing. Selection and preface by Victoria Walker. Peter Owen Publishers, London & Chicago 2019, ISBN 978-0-7206-2054-2 .
German translations
  • Julia and the Bazooka. Novellas and short stories. Translated by Helma Schleif. Edited by Rhys Davies . März, Berlin & Schlechtenwegen 1983, ISBN 3-88880-029-3 (contains texts from Julia and the Bazooka an Other Stories and from My Soul in China ).

literature

Biographies
  • David A. Callard: The Case of Anna Kavan. Peter Owen, London 1992, ISBN 0-7206-0867-8 .
  • Jeremy Reed: A Stranger on Earth. The Life and Work of Anna Kavan. Peter Owen, London 2006, ISBN 0-7206-1273-X .
Lexicons

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Brian Aldiss, "In Memoriam," p. 249
  2. ^ Ironside Virginia, "Julia and the Bazooka" Peter Owen Publishers Reprint 2007, Introduction.
  3. ↑ Jennifer Strum, Anna Kavan's New Zealand, Random House 2009 (p. 16)
  4. ↑ Jennifer Sturm, Anna Kavan's New Zealand, Random House 2009, (p. 19)
  5. ↑ David Callard, The Case of Anna Kavan, Biography, published by Peter Owen, 1992.
  6. ^ Anaïs Nin, The Novel of the Future, published by Mcmillan, 1968.
  7. ^ Brian Aldiss, The Detached Retina: Aspects of SF and Fantasy published in 1995 in Syracuse University Press.
  8. ↑ 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 realize at the time that I was dealing with a really major writer who would become a cult figure, "Owen admits."
  9. ↑ Kristina Rosenthal, announcement: Anna Kavan at the Zarrow Art Center October 23, 2014: "ased 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 10, 2013 - February 2, 2014: Inspired by Lisa Appignanesi's celebrated book "Mad, Bad and Sad": Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present, the exhibition illuminates the Cultivated and listened to the experiences of women and their relationships with those who held them. It also shows how women today conduct their own explorations of the mind and imagination in challenging works of art.
  11. ↑ http://www.taliesinartscentre.co.uk/performances.php?id=710
  12. ↑ From the desk of Thalia Zedek: Anna Kavan, Interview in Magnet Magazine April 28, 2013: http://www.magnetmagazine.com/2013/04/28/from-the-desk-of-thalia-zedek-anna- kavan / .
  13. ↑ Heather & Ivan Morison website ( Memento from May 5, 2012).
  14. ^ L Timmel Duchamp, What's the Story? Reading Anna Kavan's Ice, LCRW14 What's the Story? Reading Anna Kavan's Ice ( Memento dated)
  15. ^ A Working Canon of Slipstream Writing, compiled in Readercon 18, 2007.
personal data
SURNAME Kavan, Anna
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Woods, Helen Emily (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British writer
DATE OF BIRTH April 10, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Cannes
DATE OF DEATH 5th December 1968
Place of death London