Jennifer Sturm (ed.): Anna Kavan's New Zealand: A Pacific Interlude in a Turbulent Life (2009)

Anna Kavan (1901–1968) spent just twenty-two months in New Zealand, and from what she wrote for Cyril Connolly's Horizon in September 1943, in the first of a series of articles whimsically called 'Where Shall John Go?', readers might get the impression that Kavan viewed the country in a rather negative light. However, Jennifer Sturm's Anna Kavan's New Zealand, the fruit of eight years' work, is very much a revision of that idea.

Kavan lived in New Zealand with the pacifist Ian Hamilton, initially in Takapuna and then in Torbay. She arrived in February 1941 and left in November 1942, when it became clear to her that Hamilton would receive a prison sentence for conscientious objection.

Almost half of Sturm's book contains Kavan's stories, titled 'Five Months further or what I remember ab[out] NZ', in which she begins by saying that she would like to develop the quality of 'non-attachment' that exists in dreams. These stories are obviously richly autobiographical, containing details of characters she would either have known or heard of in Torbay, or 'Waitahanui'. Names and identities are often disguised.

The stories continue into the period when she took a sea journey back to England with an all-male crew via the Panama Canal and New York. Throughout, war is in the background, and it seems clear that Kavan's restless travelling is in part an attempt to escape from the madness of war, and also in part an attempt to escape from the madness inside her. Sturm believes that Kavan experienced a great calm in New Zealand, that she was clear of her heroin habit, and also that after her return to England she came to idealise the country that she unsuccessfully sought to return to.

Sturm makes a convincing case: much of Kavan's work, not only that written in New Zealand, but also much not in theory set in New Zealand, contain the memory of that country, even Ice. Also, as Katherine Mansfield went out of her way to avoid New Zealand-specific expressions, Kavan embraced them: for instance, she uses the word 'bach' instead of 'hut', and 'morepork' instead of 'owl', as if in defiance of the Anglocentric norm. She concludes, in full cogniscance that it might sound 'incongruous' or 'contentious', that there is more New Zealand in Kavan than in Mansfield.

There are some fascinating things in this book, not the least of which is that scholars have blithely ignored the significance of the NZ link. And it is interesting how biographies – Jeremy Reed's A Stranger from Earth (2006) and David Callard's The Case of Anna Kavan (1992) being full-length works – have simply run with generally accepted assumptions, for example that Kavan returned to England because of her son, which in fact is nonsense. Reed even attempts to construct an essentially lesbian Kavan. But it is shameful how insulting and how masculinist some writers could be, such as Denis Glover, who remarked that Kavan was one of those blondes who go round the world with their knees behind their ears. And this was a comment with which Frank Sargeson – that well-known fighter against the status quo – by no means entirely disagreed.

In the 54-minute video below from the Depot's Cultural Icons project, Dr Jennifer Sturm talks to Debbie Knowles about Anna Kavan. Also linked is my comment on Asylum Piece:

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Anna Kavan by Jennifer Sturm
Anna Kavan: Asylum Piece (1940)

Anna Kavan: Asylum Piece (1940)

Anna Kavan (1901–68) was born Helen Woods, although she initially wrote as Helen Ferguson, her married name. Following the failure of her second marriage and one of many nervous breakdowns she changed her name to Anna Kavan, the main character of her novel Let Me Alone (1930). Asylum Piece is a collection of short stories which her publisher Peter Owen describes as 'mostly interlinked and largely autobiographical'. The cover shows Karl Theodor Bluth, the doctor who prescribed Kavan's heroin and co-wrote The Horse's Tail (1949) with her.

The first story is 'The Birthmark', in which the unnamed first person narrator begins by describing going to boarding school at the age of fourteen. She has a sudden and inexplicable feeling of compassion for one of the other girls, H, who shows her a birthmark on her arm which has a pointed, circular shape with a tiny object inside that might be a rose. H isn't happy when she discovers that the narrator doesn't have a similar mark, and this effectively ends any further communication between them.

But over the years to come the narrator is occasionally haunted by H, giving her a feeling of unease. Once, during a long wait for a train in another (unnamed) country, the narrator visits a former castle – now a museum-cum-prison; she strays from the main party and believes she sees a prisoner in an underground cell lift his or her arm, which bears a mark similar to H's birthmark. She is seized by guards, interrogated, and later allowed to leave.

'Going Up in the World' also has an unnamed narrator, one who lives in the cold and fog at ground level and takes a lift to visit her mysterious Patrons who live way up in the sunshine and in luxury. She implores them to free her from the cold and loneliness, but they refuse, saying they must learn to forgive her and that she must turn over a new leaf. At no time does the reader learn what the narrator is supposed to have done that is wrong.

In 'The Enemy', the unnamed narrator is obsessed with an enemy about whom the narrator knows nothing, but who knows everything about the narrator, whom the enemy despises and intends to destroy. The narrator expects to be taken away one night, and will put up no resistance.

'A Changed Situation' is another short piece of paranoia, in which the narrator imagines the house he or she is in is a prison, but one that has the power to eject the narrator.

This amazing series of stories continues, full of feelings of estrangement, obsession, paranoia, anonymity, imprisonment, clearly depicting a mind almost at the end of its tether, colluding in its own alienation.

About one third of the book is the title story 'Asylum Piece', which is set in and around a clinic and divided into eight sections, and is rather different from the other stories in that apart from one brief section narrated in the first person the other seven are in the third person, and people's names are frequently mentioned. Furthermore, there is not the same excessive introspection because the emphasis is on external appearances, some of which may betray troubled minds.

'The End Is in Sight' sees a return to the first person narrative after the clinic sections, and at first it seems to represent a move in the direction of health for the narrator. However, we learn that the narrator has been involved in a 'case' and is 'condemned'.

The final brief story is 'There Is No End', and the paranoia continues, apparently for ever.

 

The links below are to a post I made on Jennifer Sturm's book, and to a 54-minute video from the Depot's Cultural Icons project, this being a conversation between Dr Jennifer Sturm and Debbie Knowles:

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Jennifer Sturm (ed.): Anna Kavan's New Zealand: (2009)
Anna Kavan by Jennifer Sturm