'Being a writer is one of those no-guarantee professions: there are no guarantees that you will get published and, if you do, that you will be read and understood. No guarantees that even if you are a visionary and original writer, you will not be forgotten as soon as your last book is out of print.
'It’s not quite correct to say that Anna Kavan has been forgotten. Her books are kept in print out of sheer dedication by her publisher, Peter Owen. My colleague at the University of East Anglia, Karen Schaller, teaches her novel Ice on her course Fiction After Modernism. And a recent paean to this same novel appeared in the Guardian.
'One of only a few great British modernist writers and author of some 19 books in her lifetime, Kavan shares an era and a clipped, visionary style with TS Eliot, but never became as well known. Born Helen Woods to wealthy, indolent and emotionally cold parents, in her late thirties - after a life of improbable travels for a woman of her time - she reinvented herself several times, finally taking the name of one of her own characters. Anna Kavan (as she became) was a blonde, emotionally distant writer who became best known after her death in 1968 for being a near-lifelong heroin addict.
'‘She did everything she could to resist biography,’ her biographer Jeremy Reed writes in A Stranger on Earth, the life and work of Anna Kavan. She systematically destroyed her diaries, letters and other personal correspondence, Reed recounts. She never revealed her date of birth. She was also a talented artist, and Reed had to rely upon her paintings in part to reconstruct her life’s narrative.
'In 1967 she published the novel that was belatedly to make her name. Ice is a short novel, dense and strange. The precise nature of the apocalypse at its centre is never stated, but it seems that the Antarctic ice cap has fragmented, increasing its bulk and not melting, and so the albedo effect has cooled the planet and triggered an ice age. Biographers suppose that Kavan had the idea for Ice when she was living in New Zealand during the early years of the Second World War. The Antarctic’s proximity had a powerful subconscious effect on her.
'In our changing cultural and political thermodynamics, in which heat is likely to be our future foe, it is perhaps easy to forget that until the last forty years or so, writers and other visionaries imagined a different sort of apocalypse: the ice might return. Maggie Gee’s The Ice People described a futuristic ice age and its human inhabitants. Theirs is a frigid doom, although survivable, at least to an extent, once systems of artificial agriculture had been developed.
'Kavan’s novel is hallucinatory, a story built out of an anxiety which anticipates our current weather-climate nexus of worries: ‘Something had gone wrong with the weather. It should have been hot, dry, sunny; instead it rained all the time, there was a dank chill in the air.’ The impending ice apocalypse provokes war. The novel oscillates between this cold, dangerous world and fleeting moments of tenderness, between safety and warmth versus the cryogenic death of cold.
'The protagonist arrives in a ruined town after a long period of ‘soldiering’ abroad. He seems to resent any requirement to tell the reader of his background, his mission. ‘I had come back to investigate rumours of a mysterious impending emergency in this part of the world.’ The man (none of her characters ever earn names) is restrained, prissy, possibly – by his own admission – sadistic. Prone to glacial dream scenes, Kavan relates them in an gelid tone in which fear and beauty are intertwined: ‘Cold coruscations of rainbow fire pulsed overhead, shot through by shafts of pure incandescent thrown out by mountains of solid ice towering all round.’
'In the town he rents a room with the help of a man ‘who owns a telephone but believes in dragons’. The ice is advancing. ‘The ice will be here very soon,’ says the warden of a stern palace he investigates. ‘The harbour will freeze, we shall be cut off.’ The man’s eyes, the main character notices, emit blue flames. ‘You may be stranded here longer than you bargained for,’ he says. It sounds like a prophecy for life: we are here as if stranded; we can’t remember how we arrived, or what – if anything – happened before. We don’t know how long we’re here for.
'At the time of her death, Kavan was little-known. She suspected that Ice might make her name, as a writer, and she was correct. Posthumous notoriety came and went. The flyleaf sheet in my library copy of Ice, from the Senate House library at the University of London, attests that it has been taken out 24 times between 1973 and 2010. Scattered throughout the book are a reader’s underlinings: ‘looked thinner than ever.’ ‘completely silent’; ‘frightened, withdrawn.’; ‘silver in the flat light’.
'Although she clearly loved men in the final decade of her life, Kavan renounced sexual love, saying it had only fuelled her acute psychological distress, from which heroin had offered her a kind of refuge. Thereafter she would content herself with men who were homosexual, practising a wounded Platonism recogniseable to any woman who has been repeatedly burned in love. Kavan’s personal story and novel are haunting. Here we have a great interpreter of cold destined to die not in a heroic embrace on The Ice, as the Antarctic is known, but alone in a South Kensington flat, of complications arising from long-term heroin addiction.'-- Jean McNeil
___
Further
Anna Kavan Society
Anna Kavan Fansite
Kate Zambreno on Anna Kavan
'What's the Story? Reading Anna Kavan's Ice'
'The Blackout', by Anna Kavan
'The Mysterious Anna Kavan'
'Stranger Still: The Works of Anna Kavan'
'INTRODUCING ANNA KAVAN'
Video: 'Jennifer Sturm and Debbie Knowles discuss Anna Kavan'
'ANNA KAVAN: THE BEST KEPT SECRET OF ENGLISH MODERNISM'
'Anna Kavan and the Politics of Madness'
'Neige, d’Anna Kavan'
'Un(der)known Writers: Anna Kavan'
'Dependencies'
'Moving Toward Entropy: Anna Kavan's Science Fiction Mentality'
'A SLIPSTREAM POST-APOCALYPTIC NOVEL'
'Winter Reads'
Anna Kavan @ goodreads
'Asylum Seeker'
Buy 'Ice'
____
Extras
In R J Dent's Library - Anna Kavan
Verfilmung des Romans "Ice" von Anna Kawa
"Ice", song lyrics by Anna Kavan (feat. Hatsune Miku)
Extraits du spectacle 'Ice'à partir de la lecture d'un texte d'Anna Kavan
__
Luz
'The phrase ‘elusive protagonist’ might appear a contradiction in terms, but anyone who has read Anna Kavan’s Ice will understand. Its plot centres on the narrator’s pursuit of a desirable yet unattainable young woman through a dystopian ice-bound landscape. By its absence as well as its presence, her slender figure – depicted in turn as vulnerable, ethereal and painfully thin – dominates the narrative, for the greater part of it in absentia. As a recent reviewer has commented, it is nearly impossible to provide a plot spoiler for Ice, because “its meaning shifts with each reading”.
'Kavan’s creative powers extended to painting, and one of the Archives & Museum’s recent acquisitions is Kavan’s imagined portrait of Luz, “her extreme thinness corresponding as it does to Anna’s idea of the female stereotype…nonetheless sexualised by full breasts and defined curves”.2 This haunting image seems to capture well the impression of alternating corporeality and insubstantiality left with the reader of Ice. Kavan’s only association with Bethlem and the Maudsley was a brief spell as a research assistant at Mill Hill Emergency Hospital, to which Maudsley staff were evacuated for the duration of the Second World War. In the 1940s she also wrote for the literary review magazine Horizon. One of her pieces could be considered without anachronism to be a product of the anti-psychiatric movement, if only it had been published twenty-five years later.'-- Hive Mind
____
Quotes
“I know I've got a death wish. I've never enjoyed my life, I've never liked people. I love the mountains because they are the negation of life, indestructible, inhuman, untouchable, indifferent, as I want to be.”
"My mind is quite honest; it is my foul imagination that destroys me."
"Because of my fear that the daytime world would become real, I had to establish reality in another place."
"I relied on what I wrote to build a bridge which could not be cut down. It was my own self in which I trusted, not seeing self as that last cell from which escape can only come too late."
“I know that I'm doomed and I'm not going to struggle against my fate. I am only writing this down so that when you do not see me any more you will know that my enemy has finally triumphed.”
"Religion is a drug, and to take drugs is degrading. You must learn to look life in the face. Throw away your cowardly drugs, and see the truth, the ugly, cruel, ungodly truth, as it really is."
"I know I've got a death wish. I've never enjoyed my life, I've never liked people. I love the mountains because they are the negation of life, indestructible, inhuman, untouchable, indifferent, as I want to be."
"To wait - only to wait - without even the final merciful deprivation of hope.Sometimes I think that some secret court must have tried and condemned me, unheard, to this heavy sentence."
"I haven't felt anything for 20 years."
___
Book
Peter Owen Publishers
'There is nothing else like it . . . This Ice is not psychological ice or metaphysical ice; here the loneliness of childhood has been magicked into a physical reality as hallucinatory as the Ancient Mariner’s.'-- Doris Lessing
'In this haunting and surreal novel, the narrator and a man known as ‘the warden’ search for an elusive girl in a frozen, seemingly post-nuclear, apocalyptic landscape. The country has been invaded and is being governed by a secret organisation. There is destruction everywhere; great walls of ice overrun the world. Together with the narrator, the reader is swept into a hallucinatory quest for this strange and fragile creature with albino hair.
'Acclaimed by Brian Aldiss on its publication in 1967 as the best science fiction book of the year, this extraordinary and innovative novel has subsequently been recognised as a major work of literature in its own right.'-- Peter Owen Publishers
_____
Excerpts
Reality had always been something of an unknown quantity to me. At times this could be disturbing. Now, for instance. I had visited the girl and her husband before, and kept a vivid recollection of the peaceful, prosperous-looking countryside round their home. But this memory was rapidly fading, losing its reality, becoming increasingly unconvincing and indistinct, as I passed no one on the road, never came to a village, saw no lights anywhere. The sky was black, blacker untended hedges towering against it; and when the headlights occasionally showed roadside buildings, these too were always black, apparently uninhabited and more or less in ruins. It was just as if the entire district had been laid waste during my absence.
*
Despairingly she looked all around. She was completely encircled by the tremendous ice walls, which were made fluid by explosions of blinding light, so that they moved and changed with a continuous liquid motion, advancing in torrents of ice, avalanches as big as oceans, flooding everywhere over the doomed world. Wherever she looked, she saw the same fearful encirclement, soaring battlements of ice, an overhanging ring of frigid, fiery, colossal waves about to collapse upon her. Frozen by the deathly cold emanating from the ice, dazzled by the blaze of crystalline ice-light, she felt herself becoming part of the polar vision, her structure becoming one with the structure of ice and snow. As her fate, she accepted the world of ice, shining, shimmering, dead; she resigned herself to the triumph of glaciers and the death of her world.
*
An insane impatience for death was driving mankind to a second suicide, even before the full effect of the first had been felt.
*
An unearthly whiteness began to bloom on the hedges. I passed a gap and glanced through. For a moment, my lights picked out like searchlights the girl's naked body, slight as a child's, ivory white against the dead white of the snow, her hair bright as spun glass. She did not look in my direction. Motionless, she kept her eyes fixed on the walls moving slowly towards her, a glassy, glittering circle of solid ice, of which she was the centre. Dazzling flashes came from the ice-cliffs over her head; below, the outermost fringes of ice had already reached her, immobilized her, set hard as concrete over her feet and ankles.
*
Nothing in the quiet cottage suggested that anyone but myself had observed the taxi's approach. I was the only person, so far, who had seen it, which, in terms of magic, gave me absolute power over it. I could make it turn back, disappear—thus preventing my father's departure—simply by giving the sign. ... I knew I ought to give the sign that would alter my father's fate. But I didn't want him to stay at home; on the contrary, I was rejoicing because he was about to leave me alone with my mother once more.
*
My ideas were confused. In a peculiar way, the unreality of the outer world appeared to be an extension of my own disturbed state of mind.
*
Systematic bullying when she was most vulnerable had distorted the structure of her personality, made a victim of her, to be destroyed, either by things or by human beings, people or fjords and forests; it made no difference, in any case she could not escape. The irreparable damage inflicted had long ago rendered her fate inevitable.
*
Her face wore its victim’s look, which was of course psychological, the result of injuries she had received in childhood; I saw it was the faintest possible hint of bruising on the extremely delicate, fine, white skin in the region of eyes and mouth. It was madly attractive to me in a certain kind of way […] At the moment, in what I took for an optical delusion, the black interior of the house prolonged itself into a black arm and hand, which shot out and grasped her so violently that her shocked white faces cracked to pieces and she tumbled into the dark.
*
Nothing but the nightmare had seemed real while it was going on, as if the other lost world had been imagined or dreamed. Now that world, no longer lost, was here the one solid reality.
*
As I grew accustomed to the scene, the details gradually emerged, and I saw a number of officials seated at large desks, like static islands, around which flowed sluggish streams of applicants, barely seeming to move. ... What first struck me was the uncomplaining patience of all these people, for whom no convenience whatsoever had been provided, not even a wooden bench such as is to be found in the most Spartan waiting-rooms. ... After I'd been in the room a few minutes, I found the light was starting to make my eyes ache. The naked tubes, fixed to the ceiling, diffused a stark white glare which lit up some faces with a ghastly pallor, distorting others by deep black shadows. This dazzle, no doubt, was the reason why all the officials wore eye-shades, extending in front of their faces like the peak of a jockey's cap, casting a black pointed shade, which gave them all a curious similarity to one another, almost as if they were masked.
*
Day by day the ice was creeping over the curve of the earth, unimpeded by seas or mountains. Without haste or pause, it was steadily moving nearer, entering and flattening cities, filling craters from which boiling laval poured. There was no way of stopping the icy giant battalions, marching in relentless order across the world, crushing, obliterating, destroying everything in their path.
*
Frozen by the deathly cold emanating from the ice, dazzled by the blaze of crystalline ice-light, she felt herself becoming apart of the polar vision, her structure becoming one with the structure of ice and snow. As her fate, she accepted the world of ice, shining, shimmering, dead: she resigned herself to the triumph of glaciers and the death of her world.
*
The weight of the gun in my pocket was reassuring.
*
p.s. Hey. So, tomorrow morning I have to wake up incredibly early and head out my door because we're doing some test filming for the TV series that Zac and I are writing for Gisele Vienne. As a consequence, I won't be able to do the p.s., and, as is usual in those situations, you'll get rerun post. I'll be back on Saturday to give you a new post, and, concurrently, to catch up with all the comments you leave in-between today and then. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi there. Apparently I did, yes. *slaps my own knuckles* ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. That's funny, -- well, not that funny, -- I intended to put the Batcave in the post, but I didn't like any of the photos or gifs or diagrams I found of it. Picky me. But yes. When I was in high school, a good friend of mine lived under Suicide Bridge in the Arroyo Seco about 100 feet away from where the entrance of the Batcave in the '60s TV series was supposed to be. Unfortunately, it was just a craggy black semi-circle painted on the canyon wall. ** Tomkendall, That rock is still there, but it split into two big pieces about twenty years ago, exposing what was left of the underground house, which then gradually filled with mud and dirt and is now just a dent in the ground, sadly. Mm, there were some interesting things written about 'TMS'. I'd have to comb through my disorganized links to find them, but I could. Oh, gosh, no I don't, about knowing the current novel the scrapbook post(s) are. I just did a search of the blog, but the 'scrapbook' search-term was too vague and brought up a million things. I'll make a note to watch for it when I'm going back looking for rerun posts. I would be curious to see it myself. That Chris Ware book sounds fun. I'll see if some friendly store here has it. They do like comix and graphic novels a lot here in Paris. Thanks, Tom! ** Sypha, Hi, J. I'm actually seeing if I can make a Santa's house/North Pole post right now, so thank you for pointing that one out! ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Oh, no, I must've misrepresented my thought. What I was trying to say/joke was that I wondered if, when you saw the title of the post yesterday -- 'Underground House Day' -- you've might have hoped for a moment that 'House' was referring to the music genre 'House'. In other words, it was an attempt at a very lame joke that didn't work at all. Oops. Sorry. ** Steevee, Hi. Ah, so the interview is finally out. Curious to read it, very naturally. Everyone, Steevee has interviewed Kent Jones about his documentary film HITCHCOCK/ TRUFFAUT, and I can guarantee you that it's a sweet and telling read. So ... read it. Thanks. I am not looking forward to being on Facebook today, that's for damn sure. ** Bernard Welt, Well, I do. No surprise, right? You have a point: pyramids. As do pyramids. Oh, I hadn't read or heard word one about Jayne Gackenbach until just now, thank you! I'll go read about her and watch her talk, and then maybe I'll find a way to read her herself. I keep meaning to just go ahead and join one or more of those academic papers-containing sites. For the blog's sake if nothing else. I'll try to do that today. I think it is in fact time for you to throw together some videos on dreaming, yes. Hm, interesting: Kerkrade is not impossibly far away from me. But I probably can't get up there for that. But it does sound interesting. And I will find out more about/from Frank Bosman. That description of him was kind of eerie, I don't know why. Not bad eerie, mind you. ** Misanthrope, Then I retroactively dedicate that post to you! Done! It sounds like you're about one chromosome away from being a survivalist. Glad you aren't. Although it would be interesting to be friends with a survivalist in theory. LPS will probably get fucked up inside by his mom's indifference to him at this point in his life over time, but that doesn't have to be an entirely bad thing. I didn't end up seeing Gisele yesterday, but I am today, and I have 'query G. about Reiniger' on my to-do list. Wow, you're, like, almost psychic, man. Kyler will probably disagree with me. And be right in doing so. So never mind. ** Okay. If you haven't read Anna Kavan, she's a fascinating writer. 'Ice' is her most well known novel, and I've spotlit it in particular mostly because it's the only book of hers that had a decent batch of excerpts/quotes online for me to use in a post. It's great, and most of her books are, or are supposed to be in the case of the ones I haven't read. Anyway, enjoy. As I said up above, a rerun and no p.s. tomorrow followed immediately thereafter by a new post and a p.s. on Saturday. See ya.