Anna Kavan’s writing “is not to everyone’s taste”, admits Victoria Walker in her introduction to Machines in the Head: Selected short writing – and nobody could argue with that. Despite being praised by the Spectator as “the most remarkable female novelist since Virginia Woolf”, Kavan has never attracted a large audience for her unmitigatedly bleak fictions, and, one assumes, never will. Many readers will choose to avoid an author who could write, in 1926, that “real life is a hateful and tiresome dream” and, forty years later, that it is “just a nightmare and the universe has no meaning”. To reverse Graham Greene’s definition of authorly dispassion, Kavan is a writer with a splinter of heart in her ice. She is Beckett without the laughs. Born Helen Woods in Cannes in 1901 to wealthy, uncaring parents, she had a wretchedly miserable childhood. Her father committed suicide when she was…