- Paperback: 240 pages
- Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers; illustrated edition edition (May 1 2006)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 072061273X
- ISBN-13: 978-0720612738
- Product Dimensions: 21.2 x 13.8 x 1.6 cm
- Shipping Weight: 281 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #790,858 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
Product Details |
Product Description
Books in Canada
Devotees of Anna Kavan may well be surprised-and perhaps a little put off-that Peter Owen Publishers has brought out another biography of the acclaimed and esoteric author (Asylum Piece, Sleep Has this House, Ice, and Mercury). However, Jeremy Reed’s prying book, A Stranger on Earth, has unearthed original material that uncovers a whole lot about someone who went to great lengths to turn herself into an enigma for posterity. This is a very different book from the somewhat fragmented volume, The Case of Anna Kavan, written by David Callard and also published by Peter Owen in 1992. Callard’s biography gave us a primer on Kavan’s extraordinary life while respecting her wish to exclude any meaningful information about her real self. Wanting to be judged solely on her creative output-which was considerable-she destroyed almost all of her personal correspondence, including all of her diaries, except for those spanning a short 18-month period.
Kavan changed her name, doctored her records with the intent to mislead future biographers, and anticipated becoming “the world’s best-kept secret; one that would never be told.” She almost succeeded. Jeremy Reed has, nevertheless, created the very personal biography Kavan had hoped to prevent. It must have been difficult for Reed to separate fact from fantasy.
Reed’s book also reproduces an extraordinary collection of disturbing paintings by Kavan. Although these works did not fulfill her on the same level as her writing, they were nevertheless produced in parallel to her literary creations in the 1960s.
Anna Kavan died on December 4th, 1968, putatively of heart failure, but actually as a result of a lifetime’s addiction to heroin. She had been preparing to inject herself with a shot that was still in the barrel of the syringe when she died. The plunger had not been depressed and she collapsed with the needle in her arm. She had a long history of attempted suicide and a propensity as a serious user to overdose.
Kavan was a gifted writer and a talented painter who endured an unhappy childhood, two failed marriages, and a long mutually-dependent relationship with her psychiatrist. She was born Helen Emily Woods on April 10, 1901, in Cannes, and in the first of a series of familial rejections, was sent away soon after she was born to be cared for by a nurse, before returning to live with her parents in West London. Denied any parental affection (she was allowed to see her mother for ten minutes each evening before dinner), she had a harsh introduction to an emotionally frigid world that would adversely affect her for the rest of her life.
When Kavan was six she was sent to an American boarding school where for the next seven years she suffered terribly, feeling betrayed, alienated, and lonely. She was often left in the school during holidays. When she was fourteen her father killed himself. Her mother, reacting against the social stigma of suicide, removed her daughter from her American boarding school and sent her to others, first in Switzerland, and later in England. At eighteen years of age, she was offered a place at Oxford but her socially scheming and egotistical mother dissuaded her from accepting it, and instead forced her to marry the lascivious Donald Ferguson, who was twelve years her senior. Ferguson took her to Burma, where he was an engineer on the railways. It was a disastrous decision both psychologically and sexually, which led in time to Kavan’s extreme reaction against social convention, which forms the subject of Jeremy Reed’s book.
Kavan began writing during her short-lived and explosive marriage to the alcoholic Ferguson. She published six novels under her married name, Helen Ferguson, between 1929 and 1937. During this period there was a second relationship to another bohemian alcoholic, Stuart Edmonds, a man of independent means. She started using cocaine heavily as a consequence of this second messy relationship, which ended before 1940.
Wishing in later life to eliminate entirely the facts of her past, Anna Kavan destroyed everything she had recorded about her troubled life, and in the 25 years in which she lived under the alias of Anna Kavan she expressed little or no interest in the novels she had published. From the 1940s onwards, Anna Kavan, a name she took from one of the fictional characters in her 1935 novel A Stranger Still, had no room in her life for Helen Ferguson.
Jeremy Reed’s biography takes us through Kavan’s tortuous addictive life and her various relationships. She established a long inseparable bond with her psychiatrist Dr. Karl Theodor Bluth, who advocated the use of drugs as an impetus for poetic vision. Kavan’s dependency on Bluth, as both the source of her heroin and as an inseparable friend ended only upon his death in 1964. This unusually close relationship even included a suicide pact.
Kavan’s numerous breakdowns, serious suicide attempts, devoted attraction to gay men, phobias, obsessions, hospitalisations, impoverishment, loneliness, and courage never excluded her need to write, and her work is now admired for the intensity of its vision by novelists as diverse as J.G. Ballard and Doris Lessing. The publication of her masterpiece, Ice, in 1967, a year before she died, helped considerably to enhance her literary reputation. In her last years she finally connected with an audience receptive to the way she saw the world. Her niche in cult literature is secure, and this is how she would have wanted to be remembered. She had no wish to be identified by facts of her earlier life, and there is little doubt that she would have repudiated this biography, fascinating though it may be, as a gross abuse of her privacy.
Christopher Ondaatje (Books in Canada)
Kavan changed her name, doctored her records with the intent to mislead future biographers, and anticipated becoming “the world’s best-kept secret; one that would never be told.” She almost succeeded. Jeremy Reed has, nevertheless, created the very personal biography Kavan had hoped to prevent. It must have been difficult for Reed to separate fact from fantasy.
Reed’s book also reproduces an extraordinary collection of disturbing paintings by Kavan. Although these works did not fulfill her on the same level as her writing, they were nevertheless produced in parallel to her literary creations in the 1960s.
Anna Kavan died on December 4th, 1968, putatively of heart failure, but actually as a result of a lifetime’s addiction to heroin. She had been preparing to inject herself with a shot that was still in the barrel of the syringe when she died. The plunger had not been depressed and she collapsed with the needle in her arm. She had a long history of attempted suicide and a propensity as a serious user to overdose.
Kavan was a gifted writer and a talented painter who endured an unhappy childhood, two failed marriages, and a long mutually-dependent relationship with her psychiatrist. She was born Helen Emily Woods on April 10, 1901, in Cannes, and in the first of a series of familial rejections, was sent away soon after she was born to be cared for by a nurse, before returning to live with her parents in West London. Denied any parental affection (she was allowed to see her mother for ten minutes each evening before dinner), she had a harsh introduction to an emotionally frigid world that would adversely affect her for the rest of her life.
When Kavan was six she was sent to an American boarding school where for the next seven years she suffered terribly, feeling betrayed, alienated, and lonely. She was often left in the school during holidays. When she was fourteen her father killed himself. Her mother, reacting against the social stigma of suicide, removed her daughter from her American boarding school and sent her to others, first in Switzerland, and later in England. At eighteen years of age, she was offered a place at Oxford but her socially scheming and egotistical mother dissuaded her from accepting it, and instead forced her to marry the lascivious Donald Ferguson, who was twelve years her senior. Ferguson took her to Burma, where he was an engineer on the railways. It was a disastrous decision both psychologically and sexually, which led in time to Kavan’s extreme reaction against social convention, which forms the subject of Jeremy Reed’s book.
Kavan began writing during her short-lived and explosive marriage to the alcoholic Ferguson. She published six novels under her married name, Helen Ferguson, between 1929 and 1937. During this period there was a second relationship to another bohemian alcoholic, Stuart Edmonds, a man of independent means. She started using cocaine heavily as a consequence of this second messy relationship, which ended before 1940.
Wishing in later life to eliminate entirely the facts of her past, Anna Kavan destroyed everything she had recorded about her troubled life, and in the 25 years in which she lived under the alias of Anna Kavan she expressed little or no interest in the novels she had published. From the 1940s onwards, Anna Kavan, a name she took from one of the fictional characters in her 1935 novel A Stranger Still, had no room in her life for Helen Ferguson.
Jeremy Reed’s biography takes us through Kavan’s tortuous addictive life and her various relationships. She established a long inseparable bond with her psychiatrist Dr. Karl Theodor Bluth, who advocated the use of drugs as an impetus for poetic vision. Kavan’s dependency on Bluth, as both the source of her heroin and as an inseparable friend ended only upon his death in 1964. This unusually close relationship even included a suicide pact.
Kavan’s numerous breakdowns, serious suicide attempts, devoted attraction to gay men, phobias, obsessions, hospitalisations, impoverishment, loneliness, and courage never excluded her need to write, and her work is now admired for the intensity of its vision by novelists as diverse as J.G. Ballard and Doris Lessing. The publication of her masterpiece, Ice, in 1967, a year before she died, helped considerably to enhance her literary reputation. In her last years she finally connected with an audience receptive to the way she saw the world. Her niche in cult literature is secure, and this is how she would have wanted to be remembered. She had no wish to be identified by facts of her earlier life, and there is little doubt that she would have repudiated this biography, fascinating though it may be, as a gross abuse of her privacy.
Christopher Ondaatje (Books in Canada)
Product Description
Reed’s new biography draws on new material to map out the enigmatic life and times of one of Britain’s most extraordinary novelists.
This biography of novelist Anna Kavan, draws on newly discovered material about a visionary writer who renamed herself after a character in one of her own novels and did everything she could to resist biography. It documents Kavan's addiction to heroin, her failed marriages, her bond with her psychiatrist, her suicide attempts, her strange, unforgettable paintings, her devotion to gay men, her obsessions, phobias, reclusiveness, and indomitable artistic courage. Of Reed's biographical fiction of the Marquis de Sade, When the Whip Comes Down.
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Customer Reviews
|
There are no customer reviews yet on Amazon Canada
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4.0 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A Woman "Beyond All Towns And All Systems", Oct 18 2006
By J. E. Barnes - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: A Stranger on Earth: The Life and Work of Anna Kavan (Paperback)
Jeremy Reed's A Stranger on Earth: The Life and Work of Anne Kavan (2006) is an interesting if liberal-minded exploration of the novelist and short story writer about whom relatively little has previously been known. This is partially because Kavan was a marginal literary figure during her own lifetime, but also because the secretive, obsessive Kavan, who destroyed most of her diaries, correspondence, and other private papers, wished to remain as much a mystery in death as she had been in life. As Reed acknowledges, his loosely-structured biography has been composed from the various scattered and frequently incomplete resources presently available.
A fundamental problem with A Stranger on Earth is that Reed spends most of the book defensively attempting to justify why Kavan's life, behavior, and creative work cannot be accurately assessed by traditional and generally accepted Western standards of psychology, literature, ethics, and morality. The volume's subtext suggests that Kavan was a largely blameless and self-martyring victim, who, due to her very special, very sensitive nature, inherently transcended the broad Western laws, rules, and guidelines that are commonly brought to bear on the rest of the wide spectrum of humanity. Reed seems to be arguing that Kavan was almost supernaturally beyond fact, truth, and the vast accumulated knowledge of the Western world.
As Reed underscores, Kavan was a self-acknowledged nihilist, and full-throttled nihilism, as fellow nihilist and heroin addict Nico also discovered, is accompanied by very little in the way of worldly rewards of any kind, and is, by its essential nature, devoid of elements of equanimity, solace, and sustaining human love and concern. If Kavan was indeed one of Britain's "first existentialists," as Reed states she was, he has no business selecting her for special status as a lifelong victim. Kavan was fallible, vulnerable, and somewhat fragile, as are all human beings. Often disappointed by well-wishers during her life, Kavan doesn't need to be falsely canonized in death.
Reed's interpretation of Kavan is especially important since he also believes that Kavan suffered from no more than general (as opposed to what Reed himself refers to as "clinical") depression and anxiety, and therefore that her behavior and suffering were not the result of schizophrenia, psychopathology, borderline personality disorder, or any other severe mental condition.
Another interpretation, one fairly opposed to Reed's, is certainly possible. Reed, who appears to strongly identity with Kavan, seems blinded to the possibility that many of Kavan's problems were the result of her own actions, and were certainly her own responsibility regardless. Compared to many, if not most, Kavan, who existed on a fairly substantial allowance from her step-father, lived a life of material luxury and relative privilege, much of which she seems to have squandered with little apparent appreciation or a sense of its value.
Reed blithely reports how Kavan, while a patient at a prestigious health sanatarium where she was attempting to both cure her drug addiction and receive treatment for the "hideous abscesses" on her legs resulting from unclean needles, makes a "demand" to the staff for, and subsequently receives, "smoked trout from Harrods." For Kavan, such regal expectations of exclusive treatment were routine. Kavan's various London residences, as the included photographs reveal, were also quite sumptuous.
Raised by a wealthy if selfish, domineering, and unloving mother after her prosperous father drowned himself, by the time she was thirty, Anna had been denied the opportunity to attend university, escaped from an unhappy, apparently violent first marriage, bore a child she rarely spent time with, become a heroin addict and an alcoholic, attempted to commit suicide multiple times, entered into a second abusive relationship with an older, alcoholic man, suffered a miscarriage and an abortion, changed her name repeatedly, and possibly experimented with lesbianism. During this period and shortly after, Kavan also wrote and published 6 novels under the name Helen Ferguson.
Later, Kavan would, despite all the attendant difficulties any reasonable and intelligent person could foresee, chose to travel the globe via a series of boats at the height of World War II, eventually listing her principal ports of call as "Oslo, Acapulco, La Jolla, San Francisco, Manila, Macassar, Surabaya, Batavia, Singapore, Kuta, Brastagi, New York, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Pago Pago, Takapuna, and Waitahanui." As one would anticipate, these masochistic journeys were often extremely unpleasant and involved repeated challenges to Kavan's citizenship status, passport, and visas.
At forty-two, Kavan met the man who came to mean the most to her over the course of her life, the equally troubled psychiatrist Dr. Karl Theodor Bluth, who not only provided Anna with regular medical prescriptions for heroin for the next twenty years, but literally believed that sensitive, troubled "outsiders" like Anna and himself were the result of "cosmic rays coming from outer space." Perceiving both themselves and others like them as "mutants," "aliens," and "extraterrestrials," Bluth was known for administering "cocktails" composed of amphetamine, bull's blood, and B vitamins (or, alternately, ox's blood and methadone) to individuals who came to him seeking assistance.
In light of such eccentric, ineffective, and potentially deadly treatment, it's hardly surprising that Kavan remained socially marginalized and psychically tormented year after year, while the empty days, frustrations, abscesses, and suicide attempts mounted.
Reed makes other factual errors, some of which a minimally-functioning editor should have corrected: Jean Harlow, who Reed refers to as a "1940s heroine" with a "slow affected drawl" died in 1937, and had a high, not a husky, voice. Reed states that Anais Nin's "lies and manipulations were solely directed towards protecting the work," when the truth is that Nin, who was a bicoastal bigamist, lied about everything and anything, and who frequently used deceit merely to find bed partners.
Though the author's evaluation of Kavan's paintings, many of which are reproduced in color, is quite good, he refers to the impaled figure in one gouache as an "androgyne," "the red-haired man" and "she" even though a limp phallus is clearly visible, making Reed's case for the meaning of the painting questionable.
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A 'must' for understanding her writings., Oct 14 2006
By Midwest Book Review - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: A Stranger on Earth: The Life and Work of Anna Kavan (Paperback)
Readers of Anna Kavan's novels will want to include A STRANGER ON EARTH: THE LIFE AND WORK OF ANNA KAVAN on their reading lists: newly discovered material contributes to an analysis of an author who did everything possible to avoid biographical surveys of her life and works. From her lifelong addiction to heroin and failed marriages to her reclusiveness, discussions include a centerfold of the author's artwork, and are a 'must' for understanding her writings.
Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
