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A Stranger on Earth: The Life and Work of Anna Kavan

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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.

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