Collected Essays. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ Trial to Max Brod and their circle of friends, he could sometimes hardly continue for laughter. Similarly, Chekhov was first played outside his own country for tragedy, not comedy. Kavan’s reputation is at present for gloom, madness and paranoia. Not undeservedly. Yet the whisper of mocking laughter is often to be heard, even in the sybilline ‘Sleep Has His House’.

      Kavan in person, too, did not always project her shadowed side. In conversation with her English publisher, Peter Owen—it’s to be doubted if there would be an Anna Kavan without a Peter Owen—I said something of this kind, having enjoyed her friendly company. Owen agreed. It took a while to see through the camouflage of normality; or perhaps, human nature being so diverse, one should rather say that the camouflage of tortured romanticism concealed much that was no more or less than normal. In either event, Anna was of smart, cheerful appearance. She enjoyed male company.

      Neither in her appearance nor her behaviour did she reveal her incurable heroin addiction. As Peter Owen admits, it was a while before the fact of that addiction dawned on him.

      When I met her, towards the end of her life, I too knew nothing of the heroin. By then, she had been on the habit for some thirty years. Heroin was her accomplice, her truce with reality. I saw only another dedication: to literature, and to that I responded.

      Raymond Marriott, another long-term friend of Anna’s, emphasizes her worldly, everyday side, reminding us that she was a good gardener, an excellent painter, and a skilled designer of small houses.

      * * *

      Anna was friendly and welcoming, in the small house of her own design in Hillgate Street, in the Kensington district of London. I had selected Ice as the best science fiction novel of 1967, less from any firm conviction that it was science fiction, or from a desire to dismay rivals, than to draw attention to a splendid piece of writing which might have been overlooked in the face of more noisy claimants for public attention. We talked in the ordinary way of two strangers wanting to get to know each other, and I gave her a novel of mine which, I felt, also operated in the same regions of otherness as Ice.

      Anna had some complaint about Cyril Connolly, the editor of Horizon, for whom she had worked in the war years. He could have been more supportive of her with regard to her own writing, she felt. It was the sort of remark anyone might make. She longed to have a reputation, and thought that perhaps my attention marked a new start; she liked the idea of being regarded as a science fiction writer. It sounded modern. One sees in her work the sort of modernism—love of cars and speed and so on, not to mention the ‘fast set’—which surfaces in Aldous Huxley’s novels.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ