Everyone had an opinion on Anna Kavan, the pen name taken by Helen Ferguson.

Jean Rhys, whose complicated relationship to alchohol is no secret, described her close friend in a 1970 essay titled “The Bazooka Girl”—borrowing the title' of Anna Kavan’s story as an emblem for the author’s entire life. She was a heroin addict, Rhys assures us:

She could not escape from the evil of hopelessness. It would arrive at any ordinary moment. Sitting with her in the Café Royal, I found her taking an extraordinary dislike to a waiter, who certainly was repellent physically but otherwise, to my eye, harmless. It was with astonishment that I was to find the episode transformed in Asylum Piece. I had not understood that her brief flight from the restaurant table was done to give herself a shot of heroin, after which she gained detachment from the oppressive hovering of the waiter, who, as related in the book, had indeed followed us from the bar upstairs to serve us in the restaurant below—which, for her, had become pursuit by one of the menacing devils threatening her security. The waiter was in some way connected with a hallucinatory figure awaiting her in the foyer.

She was paranoid, intoxicated, out of her mind, riven by madness, Rhys says, drumming her nails on the table.

*

Everything depends on the patrons, Anna Kavan tells us, at the beginning of her short fiction collection, Machines in the Head and Other Stories (NYRB Classics). Everything depends on powers external to herself, and life consists in pleasing the patrons, the advisers, the men, the women, the anonymous, indecipherable masks which pass for humans.

For Kavan’s narrators—and for the writer, herself—power depends on proximity to the powerful, and in relation to men. We see this reliance on men in Helen Ferguson’s life as well as that of Anais Non (a fan of Kavan’s). This is the psychologized 20th century femme who exists by virtue of her relation to the analyst, a father-figure, a man who knows her better than she knows herself.

Of course, there is “The Enemy.” Though nameless, the enemy controls everything—it is the enemy who determines what the speaker can do, say, or think. One could read structuralism into this, but I’m not sure Kavan was going that far. Her sense of helplessness is personal, despite its emphasis on depersonalization.

*

The story “Ice Storm” describes the narrator’s experience of an ice storm in the US, as she decides whether to stay or return to England, and the entire narrative is interrupted by various media headlines and quotes about the danger of the ice storm and the victims killed by it. The banality of the reportage combines with the pragmatic discussions of privilege and good fortune which the friends use to convince the narrator to stay in New York. But the narrator’s problem is loneliness—and her friends, a married couple, refuse to hear or see her.:

‘I don’t understand you,’ Gloria said. ‘If you really feel as badly as you say, how can you be so articulate about everything and write about everything the way you do?’

“Everything in the world” is “loaded with ice” for the protagonist. The morning reveals the world immobilized by freezing. She is “the only person out in the glacial world.”

Kavan uses the word loneliness again and again, as both description and diagnosis.

*

To quote from Jean Rhys’ portrait again:

She wrote in a mirror. It imprisoned her. Watching only herself, her men are wraiths, and nearly always treacherous—as perhaps shadows must be. Retreat from an intolerable world was to become more a necessity. When, ten years before she died, she retained sufficient of her excellent constructive energy to design herself a house, battling knowledgeably with architect and builders, she was to keep its Venetian blinds down all day, and her small walled garden was secret, a density of foliage such as her favourite Henri Rousseau might have painted, a dream leopard prowling under the lunar-green fronds. In the world of reality her social conduct was apt to become erratic, passing too swiftly from the most delicate perception of a guest’s mood to hurtling a roast fowl across the table at him, then retiring to her bazooka from an objective distance, and a wry joke would be cracked about it. The discipline that sustained writing was helpful—as, probably, a respect for the principles of creative work (surely it is manifest in these stories? helped to keep under control the lying that becomes a nuisance in confirmed drug addicts. That other self carried, too, a sense of guilt. There was also an unfaltering love and knowledge of the Bible.

Des Barry wrote a great read of this book (as published by Peter Owen Publishers) in the context of Kavan’s other work, and Barry compares her mode to that of artist Henry Darger.

I’m intrigued by the emphasis on mechanization, and on the machine—the administration of the mind as experienced by certain classes of women with mental illness— and the relationship to substance abuse. There is copious tragedy in believing that a man, whether analyst or caregiver, can save a woman. There is, of course, an absence of countervailing narratives that don’t rely on an empowerment feminism which leans in to the language. Who can forget that Margaret Thatcher spent a decade in speech therapy to make her voice sound more masculine, and therefore, reliable?