Anna Kavan

New in Kavan Events 2019!

Latest in Kavan press: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/private/anna-kavan-ice-machines/

This is the first indication I’ve had that it contains color reproductions of Kavan paintings I’ve never seen, as well.

Machines in the Head is now available.

(untitled 9, if you’re matching these to the old Jeremy Reed monograph of her art).

Anna Kavan and friends— taken from The London Magazine, February 1970 Thanks, London Magazine.

"She did not know, and would not accept when told, that courage was giving her a degree of triumph....She returned to these stories, a valid discipline, and their clarity of style, their spurning of sensationalism and their own code of logic, were another justification of her vision. "

“She cast doubts, she lied, she fabricated, she spoke the truth, she was most honest,” wrote the drama critic Raymond Marriott, a friend and coexecutor of her estate. “But where did it begin and where did it end?”

Two untitled paintings of swans (no.3, 1950, and no.4, 1960)

A collection of rarely seen, though tragically tiny, drawings from ANNA KAVAN: An Illustrated Catalogue, 2005.

I’m surprised to only just have heard of this one, and by the lack of good images online at least some of the enclosed paintings and drawings. Of course, many have been scanned -- I realize now that many of the images I gathered in 2013 and have been posting since originated here, and my posts have maintained this book’s numbering of untitled works.

Apt artwork for the most recent hardcover reprint of Ice -- Wish You Were Here by Naomi Frears, 2006. More about that artwork here.

More information here: https://www.peterowen.com/shop/anna-kavan-anthology

by Victoria Walker (PhD Thesis, 2012) Abstract This thesis is a study of the British writer Anna Kavan (1901-1968). It begins by tracing Kavan’s life and examining the mythologies around her radical selfreinvention (in adopting the name of her own fictional character), madness and drug addiction. It attempts to map a place for her previously neglected work in twentieth-century women’s writing and criticism. Close reading of Kavan’s fiction attends to her uses of narrative voice in representing a divided self. Given Kavan’s treatment by the Swiss existential psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, the thesis explores connections between her writing and the British anti-psychiatry movement, especially R D Laing. Focussing primarily on the Modernist and Postmodern aspects of Kavan’s work, it also notes Gothic and Romantic inflections in her writing, establishing thematic continuity with her early Helen Ferguson novels. The first chapter looks at Kavan’s first collection of stories, Asylum Piece (1940) and her experimental novel, Sleep Has His House (1947). It reads her portrait of institutionalization as a nascent critique of asylum treatment, and considers Anaïs Nin’s longstanding interest in her work. Chapter Two draws on research into Kavan’s experiences during the Second World War, particularly her time working with soldiers in a military psychiatric hospital. Reading her second collection of stories I Am Lazarus (1945) as Blitz writing, it connects her fiction with her Horizon article ‘The Case of Bill Williams’ (1944) and explores the pacifist and anarchistic views in her writing. The third chapter, a reading of the novel Who Are You? (1963), argues that Kavan engages with existential philosophy in this text and explores parallels with Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea. The final chapter looks at Kavan’s last and best known work, Ice (1967). Following Doris Lessing, this chapter reads the novel’s sadism as a political response to the Second World War. Contesting critical interpretations which have pathologized Kavan’s fiction as solipsistic representations of her own experiences, this thesis aims to resituate her as a politically-engaged writer of her time.

Self portrait by Anna Kavan Listen to episode #11 Ice by Anna Kavan Anna Kavan’s Ice was originally published in 1967 by Peter Owen books. The book is Kavan’s final and best known work, and appeared just one year before her death. In the aftermath of a nuclear war, society is rapidly crumbling as a wall of ice threatens to engulf the entire planet. Our unnamed narrator roams through this barren, frozen wasteland in pursuit of a young girl with a halo of hair as bright as spun glass; his designs on her are decidedly sinister. The novel proceeds with the torturous, cyclical quality of an inescapable nightmare in which the reader is cocooned. Over the course of the episode, we discuss the extent to which Kavan's heroin addiction influenced the novel, consider the novels place in the tradition of post-apocalyptic fiction, and explore the unique brutality of the novel's narrator.