Reading through the stories collected in Machines in the Head, one will notice that Anna Kavan had a talent for violence.
A narrator envisions being hit by a car “with the full force of its horrid horsepower” and “transformed into an inexhaustible fountain, spouting blood like a whale.” A doctor visiting a psychiatric hospital is disturbed when a narcosis patient awakens suddenly “from their clouded greyness” with “a look of terror, of wild supplication, of frantic, abysmal appeal.” Machine guns “grind elephantinely over” the narrator during a London air raid. “I can feel the broad beams sawing and the narrow beams scissoring through my nerves.” A flock of gannets swarm over a brood of seemingly abandoned children, undertaking a ritual in which a child’s face is left with “shocking blankness … darkened by two great holes, bloodied pits from which the eyes had already been torn.”
Such passages would make Kavan out to be something of a shock artist, and, perhaps, in a way, she was. She wrote some of the most elegant, lyrical English this side of modernism, but when applied to the precariousness of the human psyche and the world around it, her writing took on a destructive power. In Kavan’s world, even dew-covered crocuses can’t simply gleam in the sun. They must have a “neat, low fire of symmetrical flames.”
Kavan’s prose is often described as “hallucinatory” or “surreal.” It does not heed the conventions of characterization or narrative, nor does it fit easily into a single genre. Her writing earned her a host of prominent admirers: Anais Nin, Doris Lessing, Brian Aldiss, and J.G. Ballard, among others. But it did not attract a wider readership. Indeed, though her work has always remained in print, it has usually been through foreign publishers, sometimes making it difficult to acquire in the United States. This changed in 2017, when Penguin Classics released an edition of Ice, Kavan’s final novel and masterpiece. Now, NYRB Classics is helping to flesh out her bibliography with Machines in the Head, a selection of her many short stories, including her earliest. Earliest of a kind, anyway.
Kavan was born Helen Woods in 1901 to British parents living in Cannes, France. She died in 1968 in London. Her background was privileged but not happy: Her father committed suicide in Mexico when she was young, her relationship with her mother was cold at best, and she spent much of her childhood in the care of servants or in boarding schools. Her first six novels were published under her married name, Helen Ferguson. It was as a central character in Ferguson’s 1930 novel, Let Me Alone, based on her disastrous first marriage, that “Anna Kavan” first appeared. Ten years later, Ferguson published a short story collection, Asylum Piece, as Kavan, which she also made her legal name. “One reacts to the environment and atmosphere one lives in,” she wrote to her friend and publisher Peter Owen. “One absorbs outside influences, and my writing changes with the conditions outside.”
One such influence was chronic depression, which Kavan went to great lengths to treat, including through multiple institutionalizations and with the opiates to which she became addicted for the rest of her life. Machines in the Head includes nine stories from Asylum Piece, in which the narrators convey their lack of control over their own minds and in society at large. They depict a world of cold “patrons,” “jailers,” and “advisers,” of rooms “where the light burns all night long,” and of friends or lovers who are either mistrustful or who may never have existed to begin with. The comparisons to Franz Kafka that have followed Kavan are most apt in these stories, yet, where Kafka is detached, Kavan is intensely subjective: “Who shall describe the slow and lamentable cooling of the heart? On what day does one first observe the infinitesimal crack, which finally becomes a chasm deeper than hell?”
Another influence was World War II. Kavan spent much of the war in the U.S. and New Zealand, where she lived with a conscientious objector. On her return to England, however, she was conscripted and worked in a London hospital for soldiers with war neuroses. These experiences informed the themes of her subsequent collection, I Am Lazarus. “The Blackout,” published in the New Yorker in 1945, tells of a soldier trying to piece together traumatic memories in which home and war cannot be separated. “He … hated leaving [his aunt] badly off, now, financially insecure, bombs falling; and she alone with her crippling pains and no one reliable to take care of her.” Kavan’s third-person narration is no less vivid than her first-person, but it is more clinical, even colloquial, anticipating Ballard’s cool savagery:
By the 1950s, Kavan’s more obvious influences had dissolved into the singular style of her best-known work. The antagonism of grotesque bureaucrats and faceless persecutors gave way to the antagonism of the natural world itself. In the title story of 1958’s A Bright Green Field, the narrator is fixated on a patch of grass that requires a convoluted, even lethal landscaping process in order to control its growth:
But Kavan, the doom prophet, is less central to this collection than Kavan, the literary artist. Machines in the Head presents an experimental author actually experimenting in style, tone, and sometimes genre. In addition to the New Yorker, Kavan published conventional fiction and nonfiction in Horizon, edited by Cyril Connolly, for whom she also briefly worked. “World of Heroes,” published posthumously in Encounter, is another pre-Ballardian narrative about a sheltered, neglected young woman, presumed to be a stand-in for Kavan, who comes of age among a team of race car drivers. It contains all of her self-destructive fatalism with little of the despair. “They were attractive to me, heroes, the bravest of men in the world. Vaguely, I realized that they were also psychopaths, misfits, who played with death because they’d been unable to come to terms with life in the world.” “Starting a Career” concludes the collection with a similar play on adventure tropes, this time a spy thriller shot through with fairy tale and low-level comedy. “Already I saw myself becoming a legend, an insoluble mystery,” the narrator gushes. “I would simultaneously present my consistently mediocre facade without a scrap of evidence that I’d ever possessed another.”
Kavan’s work, like that of most authors of posthumous renown, is not unlike a man-made disaster. It was surprising and unwelcome in its time, usually met with ignorance and revulsion, but it came to alter the cultural landscape permanently. The various myths that accumulated around Kavan (the doom prophet, the drug addict, the tortured artist, the suspected autofictionist) give way to more fitting roles. One such role is as a witness to 20th-century chaos, equal in vividness and intensity to her similarly pseudonymous contemporary George Orwell. The other is as the author who helped push the formal dexterity and thematic adventurism of modernism into the transgressive extremes of postmodernism. Kavan helpfully demonstrates the careful process by which “make it new” became “rip it up and start again.”
Chris R. Morgan is a writer from New Jersey. Follow him on Twitter: @CR_Morgan.
