Collected Essays. Brian Aldiss
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Little financial reward had followed from the publication of her novels and stories. She was reduced to selling some paintings (of which the house seemed still full), including a Graham Sutherland she had liked; and there was the tiresome business of designing houses or their interiors for other people.
No doubt her eye for design was sharp. She showed me over her house, walking with a stick. I supposed her to be in her late sixties. Her home was cunning and discreet, garden and house interlocked. It would have been no great matter for a leopard to enter her bedroom. Exotic plants grew everywhere, indoors and out, and mirrors basked mistily among paintings. A pleasant place in which to exist, with a flavour of the admired Henri Rousseau about it.
I offered to do something about American publication for Ice, since she had no agent. I sent a copy of the novel to Lawrence P. Ashmead, then my publisher at Doubleday. Larry was—is—a fine and understanding editor, but it took him some while to work through the Doubleday machine.
Finally, he sent me a letter saying that Doubleday accepted Ice. Anna had just died. She died of heart disease on 6 December 1968; I read of her death in the obituary columns of The Times. It was not suicide. Only a week earlier, I had received a letter from her which concluded with the words, ‘Sorry this is such a disjointed note. I really don’t feel human at present’. The ice was closing in fast.
Doubleday’s hardcover edition was followed in the States by a funny little Popular Library (New York) paperback edition, which proclaimed on its cover, ‘Sci-Fi at its Best’. Of course, Ice is not sci-fi, and only marginally science fiction, existing as it does in that fertile area—increasingly fertile as the century diminishes—where unreality prevails and life strategies are not those of the false everyday world we have constructed between ourselves and what Kavan calls ‘no-times’.
‘Reality had always been something of an unknown quality to me’, she says at the start of Ice.
If one plays the game of categories, then Anna Kavan ranks as a symbolist, one of the few English symbolists. It is a rare breed, which is perhaps why she has found no protagonist to speak up for her. A slightly coterie publisher published and nourished her. She formed no alliances with other authors. Her name does not appear in The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Symbolism is not a part of the solid English mainstream of writing. We prefer our fictional protagonists to turn into successes or failures, rather than leopards.
The characters in Ice are designedly symbolic and nameless. The girl, the hero, the warden. The countries through which they travel are anonymous. Their decisions are makeshift, their actions almost random, their circumstances as arbitrary as the advance of the ice. Their world is ramshackle, and under sentence of death. In such a situation, war attains a positive value: ‘By making war we asserted the fact that we were alive and opposed the icy death creeping over the globe’.
The maddened military activity, the nameless nations, everything contributes to a sense of doom. Yet all is lively, mobile, even joyous after a fashion, since catastrophe for such affectless people is just a way of life. The response to catastrophe can only be indifference. ‘Once prominent states had simply dropped out of existence.’ States of mind also.
This vertiginous sense is counterpointed by the business of personal disintegration. ‘Something in her demanded victimization and terror, so she corrupted my dreams, led me into dark places I had no wish to explore. It was no longer clear to me which of us was the victim. Perhaps we were victims of one another.’
Ice lures us to the heart of Kavan’s writing, and to the peak of her achievement, where personal concerns become universalized.
That relationship with Kafka. What are we to make of it? ‘Helen Ferguson’s’ instinct to ally herself with the Czech writer was a true one. Kafka is clearly her literary and spiritual mentor. Both were self-torturers, both aspired to dissolve themselves into literature. ‘I have no literary interests, but am made of literature’, said Kafka. Their own personalities, deprived of self-respect through nature or more probably nurture (overweening fathers and mothers), sought an established basis in a projected writing self; the writing self became what could be cherished.
In comparison with Kafka, Kavan is a watercolourist. Yet direct comparison is unfair; Kafka remains one of the great dark beacons of twentieth-century literature. She still offers her original torments, and we do not forget that she was a painter as well as a writer, her canvasses also offering wry comment on her state of mind. Headless creatures hug one another, becoming one body. One head out-Januses Janus, its three heads perhaps girl, hero, warden, the watcher. And there was also the life of the drug addict, that decades-long communion with otherness. By the end, Kavan had created herself even more decidedly than her literary mentor. Hers is the honourable position of Kafka’s sister.
* * *
Anna Kavan is at present that uncomfortable thing awaiting final judgement, a cult figure. Her situation is as ambiguous as she could desire.
Indications are that her reputation may belatedly spread further. At the University of Tulsa, her newly discovered journals and diaries are being edited for publication. A biography has appeared.[1] Kavan’s friend, Rhys Davies, wrote a novelized version of her life, The Honeysuckle Girl, which it would be good to have reprinted.
Yet perhaps she would perversely become hostile to the world’s acclaim. It would not bring back the lost hours or the lost Sutherland. In one of her stories, ‘A Summer Evening’, she yearns towards a final grand gesture of alienation.
‘I can never go back to the living world unless I am changed completely … If this whole structure could be transmuted into something hard, cold, untouchable, unaffected by any emotion … then and then only, indifferent to isolation and independent of time, I might endure the world.
‘… Inexhaustible and impervious, I would stride all over the world, seeing everything, knowing everything, needing nothing and nobody … finally leaving earth and the last human being behind me and turning away to the most remote galaxies and the unimaginable reaches of infinite space.’
1. David Callard, The Case of Anna Kavan, London, Peter Owen, 1992.
Setting nostalgia aside, what was achieved by Astounding Science Fiction under the editorship of John Wood Campbell? Campbell edited this famous magazine from May 1938, when he took full charge, until he died in July 1971, at the age of sixty-one. It was a long tenure. Many of us still think of those years, particularly the magazine’s rich decades of the 1940s and 1950s, as ‘Campbell’s years’.
The situation must be faced, that the stories in which we gloried in our youth become tarnished on a disillusioned re-reading, many years later. The revelations in the stories are now part of our world-outlook; that they have become incorporated in, have formed, our way of life is a tribute to their earlier power.
It is hard to define exactly what gives a story or novel perennial appeal. We’re dealing here with the fragile, things not designed to last, and sometimes written in desperation for four cents a word.
One reason why science fiction is so little regarded is because it is often ahead of its time, and therefore unpalatable to the general or even the literary reader. By ‘ahead of its time’ we mean mainly forward-looking in interests.
To take a random example: James H. Schmitz’s story ‘Grandpa’ was published in Campbell’s magazine in the mid-1950s. It is a story of symbiosis on an alien planet. A human being, Cord, is using a kind of giant perambulating lily pad to navigate round a bay. They call this raft ‘Grandpa’. But Grandpa buds and starts doing sinister and unexpected things, like heading out to the open sea, to the cold Zlanti Deep. A symbiote, the Yellowhead, has joined Grandpa and taken control of it. This is the dilemma from which Cord must extricate himself and his three companions.
It was a wonderful story. I went about for months muttering to myself that thrilling name, ‘The