CULT HERO: Anna Kavan was born Helen Emily Woods in April, 1901, in France - the daughter of well-off expatriate British parents whose peripatetic lifestyle afforded her an almost world-weary view of her surroundings.
Spells in various European countries, southern California (where her father took his own life in 1914) and, finally, England, opened up her horizons. Through her marriage at the age of 17 to Donald Ferguson, she went to live in Burma, where two life-changing events took place: she began to write, and she gave birth to a son, Brian.
Her life at this time was a mixture of pleasure and pain; she dearly loved her son, and her writing gave her immense satisfaction, but the combination of a failing marriage, the encroachment of clinical depression and a spinal disease resulted in what was to eventually prove to be her worst nightmare. For her depression and spinal disease she started on a course of self- medication, including amphetamines and heroin. Using these on a regular basis didn't alleviate her mental illness, however, and she spent two lengthy periods in sanatoriums in Switzerland and England.
In 1931 she married artist Stuart Edmonds, but this relationship also didn't work out and they separated in 1938, causing her to attempt suicide for the first time. When her son died in the second World War, she tried yet again to kill herself. By this time, she had taken the name Anna Kavan (from a character in one of her books) and had moved to New York. It was a deliberate attempt to alter her personality and image, and tied in with a change in writing style from her conventional fiction of the 1930s to somewhat darker, stranger, more idiosyncratic work. (It was also rumoured that the name change was a conscious effort at getting her books to reside on the bookshelves beside those of Franz Kafka, with whose style she had an obvious affinity.)
Despite her addiction, which she attempted to overcome several times, she developed a life outside literature, a life which encompassed semi- careers as a painter (of, by all accounts, grotesque studies of troubled women), as an interior decorator, as the owner of an architecture and design firm (Kavan Properties), and as a buyer and renovator of old houses in London.
But she is best known for her writings, notably the novel Ice (1967), a thinly veiled work about her drug addiction, which is generally recognised as her masterpiece (although Anais Nin described Kavan's 1940 short story collection, Asylum Piece, as the equal of Kafka). A difficult person to love throughout her life, at the end Kavan was reclusive and decidedly anti-social, befriended only by a small group of people. In December 1968, in London, she was found dead with a full syringe beside her.
In what was hardly a warm sense of irony, her coroner found her to have died of natural causes.
