Anna Kavan: A Writer Without an Epoch

An ornately engraved gold and jewel-encrusted monogrammed morphine set discreetly fabricated to resemble a cigarette case holds within a gold hypodermic, cork-topped vials filled with white powder, and spare needles. Society ladies gather in a private drawing room, as if for tea and biscuits, and, introductions and polite inquiries into health speedily dispensed with, the shooting party is under way. Morphine, opium, and laudanum (a tincture of opium) were legal, and injectable morphine, so clean and concentrated, was particularly attractive to respectable Victorian and Edwardian women, who would have outraged standards of etiquette had they poured a drink or lit a smoke for themselves.
In the late 1950s, when opiates—almost exclusively heroin—resurfaced in society’s consciousness, they came wearing a much-altered guise. Following passage of the Harrison Narcotics Act in the United States, Britain’s Dangerous Drugs Act, and the eclipse of the demimonde’s last gasp—the Roaring Twenties—opiates had entered a period of near-complete obscurity. With a shift in user demographics from middle-class lady to urban underclass added to the specter of criminality, the clean white powder now came tainted by a strong measure of demonization. Any genteel pretensions the opiate ingestor may have clung to fell away before a legal system that classed her or him with society’s most forlorn degenerates, down among the perverts, psychopaths, and communists.
Three months after Queen Victoria’s death, Anna Kavan was born Helen Woods to English parents residing in Cannes, then a favored haunt of moneyed expatriates seeking sun. Too late, just, to grow up and join in the heady days of state-sanctioned intoxication, Kavan shared in the lonely and emotionally blunting upbringing that was standard for Victorian girls of her class. Childhood left her lacking enthusiasm for life, remote and withdrawn, depression her constant companion. An early marriage to a man ten years her senior further benumbed her. The newlywed Fergusons traveled to a colonial outpost in far-flung Burma, and Helen Ferguson soon grew to view her husband, a minor functionary in a decaying empire, with nothing but loathing and contempt. Sexually inexperienced, she was repelled by his clumsy approaches, and only by distancing her mind from body could she survive the submission he demanded. The disastrous liaison lasted two years. She obtained a divorce and was living on an annuity in the south of France when she discovered the temporary respite a needle could give. Drugs, now illegal, remained fashionable throughout the twenties and it was a tennis instructor who first induced Helen Ferguson to sample a little cocaine in order, he said, to improve her serve. Opium followed, but heroin was the perfect fit for a young woman who had long secluded herself in a “nighttime” world, a sanctuary in which the shadows and ghosts she summoned were able to invert the real—“daytime”—world’s harsh logic and keep its ugly brutalities from encroaching. Heroin was the “stronger magic” she had been searching for, the bond that would seal her allegiance to the night world. By her twenty-fifth birthday she had acquired a habit she would remain doggedly faithful to until death, over forty years later.
The nineteenth century produced a wealth of literature influenced by or directly concerned with the easily available opiates. Before even Thomas De Quincey’s famous treatise, Mary Robinson, an actress turned poet who employed opium to overcome the pain of a crippling disease, awoke from a nightmare dreamt after quaffing a strong dose of laudanum to dictate a poem, “The Maniac,” while still in an opium reverie, much as Coleridge is later said to have produced “Kubla Khan.” John Keats, Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, George Crabbe, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mary White Lowell, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Francis Thompson, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Louisa May Alcott, and Charles Riddel were opiate ingestors all—some more, some less.
As the opium eater receded into history, opiate-related literature went likewise. At least until the nineteen fifties and early sixties when William Lee (Burroughs) and Alexander Trocchi burst upon the scene with their epistles of dopester hagiology, Junkie and Cain’s Book. Virtually overnight, they established the popular image of author as heroin-gobbling madman intent on tearing down the portals of civilized society. Outraged editorials and obscenity trials allowed assorted Mrs. Grundys to cluck their disapproval but essentially functioned as highly effective sales and image boosts, securing the authors a coterie of youthful acolytes eager to assume the trappings of their heroes’ outlaw status.
All of which seems vaguely unfair to poor Anna Kavan. She’d been shooting and writing for over thirty years and would continue to do so until she died in 1968, a death grip on a primed syringe tighter than Carmine Galante’s choppers would clench his trademark cigar. If any writer embodied the dictum, “Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life,” it was surely she. But Kavan was a writer without an epoch. Stranded between eras in which drug literature is common enough to be cliché, she stands alone—a forgotten missing link between nineteenth-century opium smokers and latter-day needle freaks.
Culturally, the roots of Kavan’s addiction reach back to the Victorian era. Society marginalized wealthy women to the point they became window dressing for their plutocrat husbands. They were expected to uphold impossible standards of propriety and etiquette; frailty and weakness were virtues a woman was encouraged to cultivate. An epidemic of “nervous” complaints and physical disorders of unknown origin resulted. Opium was the great panacea, “God’s own medicine,” casually prescribed to legions of women by the family physician for any ailment he had difficulty fathoming, from bouts of ague or depression to menstrual or menopausal discomforts. At a time when opiates were consumed with no more concern than an aspirin warrants today, women constituted the majority of users whose introduction to opiates had been through legitimate medicine. Kavan saw herself firmly in the medicinal addict tradition: “She is quite right to use the syringe, it is as essential to her as insulin to a diabetic,” she wrote. And, like other physically coddled, emotionally battered women before her, Kavan appreciated the oblivion opiates conferred, the easy detachment and sexlessness.
Use of opiates fundamentally alters the nature of the mediation between an individual and society. As short-circuiting agents, opiates are capable of collapsing the breach between desire and satisfaction to a monomaniacal focus. Thus they make redundant they systems of personal relationships, of sacrifice and reward, upon which organized society is structured. In this sense they will always represent a challenge to the symbolic order, regardless of criminal statutes. When opiates were legal in the nineteenth century, the potential disruption they posed was tacitly acknowledged by the view that a sharp moral distinction existed between acceptable therapeutic use and hedonistic use. In reality, such a distinction was equivocal and generally took the form of thinly veiled class prejudice, much like the moral condemnation that today accompanies addicts of street drugs but not addicts of prescription drugs. However, if opiates intrinsically redefine the user’s relationship to society, the legal status of the drugs determines on what level the interaction occurs. De Quincey was able to imagine himself, as an addict, the member of a secret society, outcast yet elect. Such a notion may have had validity in nineteenth-century England but can only appear quaintly romantic in a society that classes the opiate user first and foremost a criminal whose status is most accurately reflected by the epithet “junkie.” Kavan, privileged and protected, had more in common with the nineteenth-century opiate users than with the Beats who were only a generation younger than her. She was able to keep her addiction a private affair; her love for heroin, a displaced narcissism. In a diary entry she wrote, “The H[eroin:] makes one’s eyes beautiful. There is no doubt that I am attractive. I watched myself in the glass for a long time, which gave me pleasure.”
Overindulgence was recognized and warned against in the nineteenth century, but did not carry a strong stigma of moral opprobrium. Up until the 1920s as unlikely a writer as Somerset Maugham could write of a visit to an opium den in the East, “It was a cheerful spot, comfortable, homelike, and cozy. It reminded me somewhat of the little intimate beerhouses of Berlin where the tired working man could go in the evening and spend a peaceful hour.” Before criminalization, opiate ingestion was not politicized, neither an act of defiance nor a rejection of society. The opiate-using Romantics were not considered threatening by virtue of their drug consumption and no doubt would have considered foolish the notion that addiction rendered them politically or culturally radical.
Through much of the thirties, forties, and fifties when Kavan was carefully cultivating her habit, opiate addiction was a virtually forgotten phenomenon in Britain. In 1954, when statistics were first kept for heroin addicts, there were fifty-seven on the books. Following a suicide attempt in 1943, Kavan made the acquaintance of Dr. Karl Bluth, a German in exile who had previously counted Brecht and Heidegger among his friends. He took a sympathetic view of her addiction and suggested she register with the British Home Office as an addict, thus ensuring he could legally prescribe the heroin she required. Dr. Bluth was to become her closest friend and confidant and for the twenty years until his death he kept Kavan well stoked. So, while heroin was illegal, Kavan’s supply was permitted under the state’s maintenance program and she never internalized the criminal reprobation of drugs or embraced the outlaw status they conferred, as Burroughs and Trocchi did.
Around the time of her initial habituation, Kavan began writing under the name Helen Ferguson. She was an unremarkable but well-received writer who produced six novels in eight years. Leading a deceptively bucolic life—a home in a Chiltern village, a common-law husband, and a bulldog-breeding business on the side—she wrote what the English somewhat patronizingly call Home Counties novels: tales of romance and manners among the well-to-do in the cozy homes and tidy villages within easy reach of London. Meanwhile, her heroin habit boomed and her companion’s artistic ambitions began to fade amidst escalating rounds of alcohol and philandering. In the years that followed the dissolution of the relationship, Helen Ferguson suffered a series of nervous breakdowns and, after the second of these in the summer of 1938, she emerged from a stay in a sanatorium transformed into Anna Kavan, a character she had created in two earlier novels. Kavan was a chemical rewiring of Helen Ferguson. Spectral and gaunt, she had shorn short her auburn locks and dyed what remained a metallic blond. Old friends failed to recognize her. Anna Kavan’s coming out signaled Helen Ferguson’s irrevocable rejection of the “day” world she had pretended to inhabit. Never again would she enter the realm of relationships and the messy emotions they produced. The persona she created was aloof, unattached, and inviolable, and at its core was the heroin that was both fuel and poison. Titles of two early Kavan books, I Am Lazarus and Change the Name, attest to the self-consciousness of her transformation. Her prose, too, discarded the niceties of the Home Counties’ conventions and acquired a jarring obliqueness and obsessive interior absorption. Often impossible to follow in terms of plot and character, it scouts regions of inner despair, printing a topology of the mind under the stresses of addiction and depression.
Direct references to drugs are rare in Kavan’s writing, but addiction informs every page. Her books are dispatches from the Land of Nod. Scenes meander and unfold in a series of hypnagogic associations of images and impressions, temporal distortions, and sensory fluctuations. The iconography she evokes—Daedalean cities, remote fortress homes, crumbling architecture, ornate interiors, foggy landscapes, apocalyptic visions of ice and fire, sinister watchful eyes, petrification and paralysis—places her in line with the opium-quaffing Romantics of the previous century. To this venerable miscellany she adds some updated elements: patrons, inspectors, and administrators who misuse the money, power, or answers they wield; accusations, charges, obstructions, ill-defined and inexplicable yet insurmountable—these place Kavan as a kindred spirit of Kafka. And before Burroughs had published a book, Kavan was employing a cinematic technique to describe scenes in Sleep Has His House (1947), a novel panned by no less a cultural eminence than Diana Trilling as “unreadable.” Action related as if seen through a camera eye achieves a disembodied detachment, mirroring the distance heroin creates between the viewer and the object of his or her vision. Extreme close-ups step out of real time like the junkie who’s found worlds to explore in a big toe or navel. The language is cold and precise. Sequences scroll by as images on the movie screen of the mind’s eye during a dope nod. The construction is cyclical, following the line from relief to despair that a user recapitulates time and again. Scenes open with clarity, on a positive note, and gradually, imperceptibly almost, dissolve as threatening elements intrude, the familiar turns strange, a friend becomes hostile. Misgivings and doubts creep into the narrator’s mind, his (Kavan wrote from the perspective of masculine first person more often than not) syntax grows confused, the narrative impossible to follow. The scene’s closing leaves a vague impression that everything has once again turned bleak and hopeless, but little sense of why this should be so.
Tellingly, the work containing the most direct references to drugs, a collection of stories titled Julia and the Bazooka, was written after the death of Dr. Bluth, at a time when the aged Kavan was nervous about her supply as Britain began scaling back its maintenance program and she was forced to jump through various hoops—clinics, counselors, etc.—before receiving her prescription. (So nervous she stockpiled as a guard against further changes in the law. Following her death, Scotland Yard discovered “enough heroin to kill the whole street.”) In “High in the Mountains” from the collection, she offers this defensive apologia for her habit: “I think smoking and drinking are vices, disgusting habits, so offensive to everybody. The smell of stale smoke in our house is revolting, it clings to the curtains, the bedclothes, no matter how often they’ve been washed. What I do never affects anyone else. I don’t behave in an embarrassing way. And a clean white powder is not repulsive; it looks pure, it glitters, the pure white crystals sparkle like snow.”
Such forthrightness is rare in Kavan’s work, though. Heroin provided her writing with its symbolic and visionary elements, but it is neither a metaphor, as in Burroughs’s work, nor a statement, as it is for Trocchi. Beyond the peculiarities of each writer’s interests, these differing approaches derived from the climates in which they consumed drugs. Consider the difference between the maintenance program in Britain that shielded Kavan from criminal status and permitted her to retain the mien of the privileged class to which she was born and the zero tolerance found in America, which ensures that all addicts know themselves to be legally and socially reprobated and compels drastic upheavals in a user’s lifestyle. Burroughs’s picture of junk as the ultimate commodity, of the relationship between the junkie and the pusher as the supreme distillation of a consumer in a consumer society, holds true only when heroin is illegal. Where it is legal, the relationship breaks down—if supply equals demand and the profit motive is removed from dealing, the pusher disappears. Trocchi attempted to incorporate his drug consumption into a philosophical stance he intended to realize in life. He wrote, “There is no more systematic nihilism than that of the junkie in America,” as he embraced his own status as a junkie. With Trocchi, heroin use took on the aspect of a willful negation of society. Drugs were part of a program he devised in which nonvirtue was employed as a means to self-betterment, but it was a program that could be meaningful only where heroin was illegal.
Isolation was Kavan’s ultimate objective. Her impulse in taking heroin was not so much the obliteration of self (the motive generally ascribed to an addict), but to block out the exterior world from herself; to achieve what Marek Kohn calls the “beautiful completeness of the self-conscious junkie.” The blinds over her windows were permanently drawn, the garden purposefully overgrown to resemble an insulating jungle. “Once and for all I’ve declared myself against life and people, on the side of otherness and indifference, isolation, the mineral beauty of the nonhuman world,” she wrote in Julia and the Bazooka. Drugs did not bring her into contact with any “in” or underground groups as was the case with the Romantics and the Beats. None of her few friends were addicts and, unlike a typical user who is only too eager to regale a listener with tales of junkiedom, Kavan was characteristically reserved.
Burroughs explained the courage necessary to be a writer as the “courage of inner exploration, the cosmonaut of inner space. The writer cannot pull back from what he finds because it shocks or repels him, or because he fears the disapproval of the reader.” Judged on this criterion, Kavan is highly successful. Her inner searching is brutal and relentless, sometimes pointless, like a dog chasing its tail, but always unflinching. As a young woman she wrote in her diary, “Real life is a hateful and tiresome dream.” Forty years later, toward the close of her life, she wrote in a letter, “I’m sorry you were so depressed last night. But I’m afraid there’s no consolation. Life is just a nightmare and the universe has no meaning. Depression is as good an introduction to oblivion as any other.” Between these remarks lie all her writing and a lifetime of heroin addiction. While her sentiments are far from remarkable (nihilism is rarely in short supply), to hold them true while maintaining a drug habit and producing a body of work without either losing her life or compromising the work is a rare balancing act. The lapses in her writing—a clumsy or hackneyed sentence that jolts the reader from the carefully constructed dreamscape, accusations or complaints repeated until they become trite—are overcome by the purity and consistency of her vision. Each book is a testimony to her will to suffer and struggle. Her acceptance of the constancy of despair, depression, and terror in her life gave Kavan an enduring wellspring she obsessively examined and tirelessly drew upon for transformation into writing. The hard work paid off. Incredibly, for an addicted author, Kavan’s books improved as she grew older—Ice, completed the year before her death, is regarded as her strongest narrative and gave her a greater measure of critical and commercial success than any of her previous books. The courage to live and write may have been chemically regulated, but her work achieved a power both genuine and compelling.






Books by 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)*
Asylum Piece and Other Stories (1940)
Change the Name (1941)
I Am Lazarus: Short Stories (1945)
Sleep Has His House (1948, U.S. title The House of Sleep)
The Horse’s Tale (1949, with K. T. Bluth)
A Scarcity of Love (1956)
Eagles’ Nest (1957)
A Bright Green Field (1958)
Who Are You? (1963)
Ice (1967)
Julia and the Bazooka and Other Stories (1970)
My Soul in China: A Novella and Stories (1975)
My Madness: The Selected Writings of Anna Kavan (1990)
Mercury (1994)
The Parson (1995)