Biography: This enthralling new biography of Anna Kavan (1901-1968) poses interesting questions about the benefits of drug addiction as a liberator of creative artists.
Narcotics suppress the cerebral cortex, the censor of the ego, and allow uninhibited expression of the subconscious. That is what generates the gaudiest surrealistic images and ideas.
Adding further sympathetic partisan ardour to David Callard's 1992 biography, The Case of Anna Kavan, a title that indicated the author's proper psychiatric view of his subject, Jeremy Reed portrays Kavan as the foremost druggie laureate of 20th-century English literature. Though addicted to heroin for more than 40 years, with incidental bouts of heavy drinking, she was always a prolific writer and sometime painter. The painful truths of Reed's text are effectively visualised by colour reproductions of some of Kavan's technically crude, emotionally revealing self-portraits.
Her novels and short stories, many of them now republished by Peter Owen, were admired by JG Ballard, Cyril Connolly, Brian Aldiss and critics on both sides of the Atlantic. Aldiss called Kavan "De Quincey's heir and Kafka's sister", and nominated her final novel, Ice, about apocalyptic worldwide glaciation, as Best Science Fiction Novel of 1967, although her hallucinogenic fantasy of terminal cold could hardly be considered scientific. Regular users of heroin are said to be extraordinarily sensitive to low temperatures. Her predominant stylistic characteristic was so cool that it made the music of Miles Davis sound like Jingle Bells.
Sometimes close to the brink of suicidal madness, she was tortured by feelings of displacement and paranoiac dread of unidentified authority, as in Kafka's masterpiece, The Trial. When lonely outsiders read Kavan's later work they feel like tragic heroes. Asylum Piece - which she based on her experience of a heroin-induced nervous breakdown - and Ice are two of those rare fictions of enduring minority appeal that deserve to be called cult classics.
Her troubles began early and their effects persisted the rest of her life. Born Helen Emily Woods of affluent English parents in the south of France, she was moved to the US at the age of six, and spent the next seven years in a boarding school, Reed relates, where she "suffered an excruciating sense of betrayal, alienation and acute loneliness". She experienced more of the same in boarding schools in Switzerland and England. When she was 14, her father committed suicide. She was then at the mercy of the "manipulative hostility of a socially scheming and over-bearingly egotistical mother". Reed does not mince words.
Helen's mother forced her, at the age of 18, to marry Donald Ferguson, a "lasciviously scheming" 30-year-old engineer, a sort of marital rapist, who took her to live in Burma. Their relationship lasted only long enough for her to give birth to a son. Back in England with her mother, Helen had as little as possible to do with the boy, because he reminded her of his father. Early in the second World War, her son joined the RAF and was killed over Germany, while she was cruising from country to country in the Pacific with a wealthy platonic lover.
Visiting the south of France in the 1920s, she discovered marijuana, cocaine and heroin. At the age of 25 she discovered Stuart Edmonds, who did a little painting and a lot of drinking. Their addictions were incompatible: alcohol made him gregarious to a fault; heroin caused her to withdraw. Even so, after an abortion and his divorce, they got married - another disaster.
After publishing six autobiographical novels as Helen Ferguson and her failure as Mrs Edmonds, she underwent a radical change of identity. She emerged from a mental hospital with her dark hair bleached light blond and, according to Rhys Davies, unrecognisably "attenuated of body and face". Her closest friends were homosexual men and the fatherly doctor who reliably prescribed her heroin. She settled alone in a house in Kensington with a garden like a Rousseau jungle, and did her best work, until her death, which may have been caused by a deliberate heroin overdose.
Patrick Skene Catling's memoir, Better Than Working, was recently published in paperback by Liberties Press
A Stranger on Earth: The Life and Work of Anna Kavan By Jeremy Reed Peter Owen, 195pp. £13.99