ATTENTION by Joshua Cohen

Author:Joshua Cohen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2018-08-13T16:00:00+00:00

“Inadvertence”: She is referring to Turing’s fussing with cyanide. Yes? No? Or Undecidable?

HER OWN ASYLUM

ON ANNA KAVAN

ANNA KAVAN, A BRITISH FICTION writer of genius, first appeared as a character—the heroine of Let Me Alone (1930), the third novel by Helen Ferguson, later known as Helen Edmonds, earlier known as Helen Woods, born probably in Cannes, probably in 1901. By 1938, after publishing six novels, she’d internalized the discord between her Home Counties realism and her itinerant life, had a psychological break, been institutionalized, and dedicated herself to heroin addiction. She had also come to identify with her most autobiographical, but also most mystical, character, taking Kavan as a pseudonym and then as her official surname. This new life required neither quotationmarks nor husbands (both Edmonds and Ferguson had mistreated her); neither children (one died in WWII, another died in infancy, a third was adopted and given up) nor parents (her father died young, possibly a suicide; her mother was a vain socialite who may have sexually auditioned her daughter’s lovers). But it did require a new prose style: stripped, brittle-boned, shorn.

In the mid-’40s, Kavan met Dr. Karl Theodor Bluth, a physician and writer who’d escaped Nazi Germany. He became a close friend and business adviser (after the war, Kavan earned a living renovating homes in bomb-cratered Kensington) and helped administer her injections. Most of Kavan’s other friends were gay, including the Welsh author Rhys Davies, who became her amateur editor. Thanks to the Rolleston Committee, tasked by the Ministry of Health in the ’20s with relieving drug dependence throughout the U.K., Kavan’s most reliable dealer was the government itself. But when the vice laws changed in 1965, Kavan was forced into counseling. After Bluth died, she suffered the black market, and stockpiled all the opiates she could, dying in 1968, her head atop the Chinese lacquered box in which she kept her stash. The police, searching her home, claimed they’d recovered enough heroin “to kill the whole street.”

Kavan’s corpus has been made available again in new editions, appearing throughout the 2010s. The most notable rereleases are Asylum Piece (1940), a story collection retelling the author’s first experience in a mental ward; Sleep Has His House (1948), an account of insomnia; Ice (1967), a post-nuclear-war novel; and Julia and the Bazooka (1970), a compilation of narcotized fantasies. But I Am Lazarus, first published in 1945, is the best introduction to Kavan. Its fifteen fictions show the fullness of her career, from febrile impersonations of Eliot and Hardy and the even graver absurdity of mimicking Kafka to her later efforts at making them cellmates. (Kavan on their mutual konsonant: “Why does the ‘K’ sound in a name symbolize the struggle of those who try to make themselves at home on a homeless borderland?”)

Lazarus allows genuine characters—Dr. Pope, Thomas Bow—to enjoy the company of abstractions like “the adversary” and “the adviser,” and establishes London as the capital of a private Mitteleuropa. Throughout, Kavan’s motif, the imperiled woman, is as inescapable as her

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