Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
First published sixty years ago, Asylum Piece today ranks as one of the most extraordinary and terrifying evocations of human madness ever written. This collection of stories, mostly interlinked and largely autobiographical, chart the descent of the narrator from the onset of neurosis to final incarceration at a Swiss clinic. The sense of paranoia, of persecution by a foe or force that is never given a name evokes The Trial by Franz Kafka, the writer with whom Kavan is most often compared, though Kavan's deeply personal, restrained and almost foreignaccented style has no true model. The same characters who recur throughout — the protagonist's unhelpful 'advisor', the friend/lover who abandons her at the clinic, and an assortment of deluded companions — are sketched without a trace of the rage, selfpity or sentiment that have marked more recent prozac memoirs.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 169
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
ASYLUM PIECE
This collection of stories, mostly interlinked and largely autobiographical, chart the descent of the narrator from the onset of neurosis to final incarceration in a Swiss clinic. The sense of paranoia, of persecution by a foe or force that is never given a name, evokesThe Trialby Kafka, a writer with whom Kavan is often compared, although her deeply personal, restrained, and almost foreign – accented style has no true model. The same characters who recur throughout – the protagonist's unhelpful ‘adviser’, the friend and lover who abandons her at the clinic, and an assortment of deluded companions – are sketched without a trace of the rage, selfpity, or sentiment that have marked more recent accounts of mental instability.
ANNA KAVAN, nee Helen Woods, was born in Cannes – probably in 1901; she was evasive about the facts of her life – and spent her childhood in Europe, the USA and Great Britain. Twice married and divorced, she began writing while living with her first husband in Burma and was published under her married name of Helen Ferguson. In the wake of the collapse of her second marriage, she suffered the first of many nervous breakdowns and was confined to a clinic in Switzerland; she emerged from her incarceration with a new name – Anna Kavan, the protagonist of her 1930 novel Let Me Alone – an outwardly different persona and a new literary style. Her first novel in this guise was Asylum Piece, and it achieved for her a certain recognition.
She was a long-term heroin addict and suffered periodic bouts of mental illness, and these facets of her life feature prominently in her novels and short stories. She died in 1968 of heart failure soon after the publication of her most celebrated work, the novelIce.
ANNA KAVAN
ASYLUM PIECEAND OTHER STORIES
PETER OWENLONDON AND CHICAGO
PREFATORY NOTE
I was introduced to Anna Kavan and to her work in 1956 by a mutual friend, Diana Johns, who ran a bookshop which Anna frequented. This was shortly after publication of her novelA Scarcity of Love.Following the book boom of the late ’forties Anna had found it increasingly difficult to find publishers for her work, and her reputation, which had seemed secure, was declining. Lacking any offers forA Scarcity of Love,she partly subsidised its publication; but the publisher, an acquaintance of hers on the periphery of book publishing, lacked distribution facilities and failed to pay his printer. His subsequent bankruptcy prevented even a moderate circulation of the book—which my firm successfully reissued in 1971.
Anna, who was then living in a beautiful house which she had converted in Peel Street, Kensington, was in the throes of litigation with the builders: Showing me their slovenly work, she explained that she was obliged to convert houses to supplement the small income bequeathed to her by her wealthy mother. She told me that she was a compulsive writer and was only happy when writing. During this first visit of mine, she handed me the manuscript of a new novel,Eagles’ Nest.We published this book in 1957 and, despite poor sales, followed it with a volume of stories,A Bright Green Field, the next year.
Anna Kavan was a lonely person, aloof with strangers, who relaxed only among a few intimate friends. Her regular visitors included the writer Rhys Davies and a doctor called Blut. Sometimes I visited her for drinks or dinner. She was an excellent hostess and a good cook. It was some time before I realised that she was an incurable heroin addict; this was not evident either in her behaviour or in her smart appearance.
In about 1960 she completed a short novel which was good, but it seemed to me to be too short to make a book and at that time my firm’s imprint was not well enough established to allow deviation from the more conventional formats. Of course I gave her my reasons for rejecting it. A year or so later I reapproached her about the novella, since I now felt confident to publish it, only to be told that she had destroyed it after my rejection. It was around this time that she sold the Peel Street house and had built to her design another one nearby, which remained her home until her death. Occasionally she augmented her income by selling personal treasures, such as her Graham Sutherland painting, which saddened her. From time to time she sent me stories—some of them were brilliant, whilst others fell below the general high standard she had set herself. Like many other writers, Anna was a bad judge of her own work. I thought it important that only her best writing should be published. Another novel appeared under the Scorpion Press imprint in the ’sixties.
In 1967 I agreed to publishIce, after some revisions were made. This and some of her later stories whichEncounterpublished were verging on science-fiction. When I remarked on this she replied: ‘That’s the way I see the world now.’ The publication ofIceand of several stories in magazines helped restore her reputation to some extent. The editors ofEncounterassumed that the stories I had sent them were by a talented new writer, and when her identity was revealed they commented: ‘Is ittheAnna Kavan? We thought she was dead!’ Anna kept her age a closely guarded secret. After the publication ofIce, having heard of her sale of the Sutherland, I suggested she might be eligible for an Arts Council grant. Her surprising reluctance to respond to my suggestion was later explained to me by Rhys Davies: she refused to divulge her date of birth on the application form.
I had known for some time that Anna was unwell but without appreciating the seriousness of her illness. Early in December 1968 my wife and I invited her to a housewarming party, and she said she hoped to come—which rather surprised me, since as a rule she avoided social gatherings of this kind. Shortly after the party the police telephoned me, having found our invitation card in her house, which they had broken into at the request of Rhys Davies. She had died on the evening of our party.
The morning of her funeral I received the news that Doubleday, her American publishers of the ’forties, had boughtIce.
For the most part neglected in her lifetime, Anna Kavan’s posthumous reputation is growing. French and Dutch translations of her work are in progress; stories by her have appeared in leading British, American and Danish magazines; her books are becoming something of a cult. I believe this reissue of one of her early books,Asylum Piece, to be long overdue. First published in 1940, it was highly praised by critics and in a long commendatory review of it in theSunday TimesSir Desmond MacCarthy wrote: ‘There is a beauty about these stories which has nothing to do with their pathological interest, and is the result of art. Two or three, if signed by a famous name, might rank among the story-teller’s memorable achievements. There is beauty in the stillness of the author’s ultimate despair.’
It is sad that writers whose vision transcends that of their contemporaries often remain unappreciated in their own lifetime.
Peter Owen
The Birthmark
THE BIRTHMARK
WhenI was fourteen my father’s health made it necessary for him to go abroad for a year. It was decided that my mother should accompany him, our home was temporarily closed, and I was sent to a small boarding school in the country.
At this school I got to know a girl called H. I purposely use the words ‘got to know’ in preference to the words ‘made friends with’, because, although I was acutely conscious of her all the time I remained there, no actual friendship developed between us.
It was at supper time on my first day at the school that H first caught my attention. I was sitting beside another new girl at the long table, feeling strange and subdued and a little homesick in this noisy environment so different from the enclosed, intimate atmosphere in which the whole of my life had been passed up to that day. I looked at the young faces of these still unknown companions, some of whom were to become friends, some enemies. One face among them all held my eyes with compelling attraction.
H was sitting on the opposite side of the table, almost immediately facing me. In the midst of so many brown heads her fairness alone was arresting. It was an autumn evening, misty and cold, and the room was not too well lighted. I had the impression that what light there was in the dining hall clustered around her, reviving and renewing itself as it played upon her fair hair. In looking back I think that she must have been beautiful; yet the detailed picture of her obstinately eludes me, I can recall only an impression of a face unique, neither gay nor melancholy, but endued with a peculiar quality of apartness, the look of a person dedicated to some accepted destiny. Perhaps these phrases sound out of place in connection with a schoolgirl who was only a few months older than I; and naturally I did not think of her in that way at the time. It is the accumulated rather than the momentary impression which I want to convey. Just then I saw only a fair girl, slightly my senior, who, catching my eyes upon her and doubtless thinking that I might be in need of encouragement, smiled at me across the table.
I remember that I looked back at her with some envy. It seemed to me then that she must possess everything that I, as a newcomer, lacked – success, popularity, an established place in the school world. Afterwards I found out that this was not quite the case. A curious shade seemed to dim all H’s activities. I came to look upon this shadow, so hard to describe in words, as being in some way the complement of her rare outward brilliance.
How can I convey the strange sense of nullification that accompanied her? Although she was not unpopular, she had no intimate friends; and although she was in the first rank both as regards work and sport, some inevitable accidental happening always debarred her from supreme achievement. This fate she seemed to accept without question: almost, one would have thought, without being aware of it. I never heard her complain of the bad luck which so consistently robbed her of every prize.
And yet she was certainly neither indifferent nor unaware.
I recall very clearly an occasion towards the end of my time at school. In one of the corridors was a baize-covered board to which, among other notices, was fastened a large sheet of paper bearing our names and the number of marks which each of us received every week. H was standing in front of this list, quite alone, looking at it with an expression that I did not understand, an expression not of resentment, not of regret, but, so it seemed to me, of resignation combined with dread. Seeing that look on her face I was overcome by a wave of passionate and inexplicable compassion; an emotion so profound, so apparently unjustified by the circumstances, that I was astonished to feel tears in my eyes.
‘Let me help you ... Let me do something,’ I heard myself imploring, inarticulate as though my own fate were at stake.
Instead of answering me, H rolled up one of her sleeves and silently pointed to a blemish on her upper arm. It was a birthmark, faint as if traced in faded ink, which at first sight seemed to be no more than a little web of veins under the skin. But as I examined it more closely I saw that it resembled a medallion, a miniature design, a circle armed with sharp points and enclosing a tiny shape very soft and tender – perhaps a rose.
‘Have you ever seen that anywhere else?’ she asked me; and it crossed my mind that she hoped that I too bore a similar mark.
Was it disappointment, embarrassment or despair that appeared on her face as I reluctantly shook my head? I only know that she hurried out of the corridor and that for the rest of the time I was at school she seemed to avoid me and that we were never alone together again.
The years passed, and though I heard nothing about H, I never really forgot her. Every now and then, once or twice a year, when I was in a train, or waiting for an appointment, or getting dressed in the morning, the thought of her would come to me, together with a peculiar discomfort, a kind of spiritual unease which I would banish as soon as possible.
One summer I was travelling in a foreign country, and, owing to an alteration in the railway timetable, I found myself obliged to change trains at a small lake-side town. As I had three hours to wait, I left the station and went out into the streets. It was an August afternoon, very hot and sultry, ominous thunder clouds were boiling up over the high mountains. At first I thought I would go down to the lake in search of coolness, but something ill-omened in the aspect of that stagnant sheet of lava-coloured water repelled me, and I decided instead to visit the castle which was the principal feature of the place.
This ancient fortress was built at the highest point of the town and was clearly visible from the square in front of the station. It seemed to me that I had only to walk up any one of the steep streets leading in that direction to reach it in a few moments. But my eyes must have deceived me as to the distance, for it turned out to be quite a long walk. Arriving hot, tired and unaccountably depressed at the great studded gates, I almost decided not to enter, but a group of tourists was just going inside and I allowed the guide to persuade me to join them.
I had been told at the station that the building now served as a museum, so it surprised me to see armed soldiers standing on guard in the courtyard. Replying to my question, the guide told me that part of the castle was still in use as a prison for offenders of a certain type. I tried to find out more as I had not heard before of these special prisons; the guide listened to me politely but refrained from answering. The other tourists, too, seemed to disapprove of my inquisitiveness. I gave in and became silent. We all trooped into a great hall and gazed at the dark stone walls carved in threatening relief.
As we went from one gloomy chamber to the next I wished more and more that I had not come on this expedition. The stone flags tired my feet, the menacing walls, the heavily barred doors, depressed my spirits; but I had the idea that it was impossible to go back, that no one would be permitted to leave these precincts until our guide led us outside again.
We were examining a display of medieval weapons when I noticed a small door half-hidden behind a suit of armour. I cannot tell now whether it was bravado, or a sudden longing for fresh air, or just idle curiosity that made me step behind the knight’s ponderous armour and try the handle. To my astonishment the door was unlocked. It opened quite easily and I passed through it. The others, engrossed in the guide’s lecture, paid no attention.
I was now in an enclosed flagged space, too small to be called a court, open to the sky, but so barricaded by cliff-like walls that no sunlight reached it and the livid air felt stale and oppressive. Not liking this any better than the interior of the castle, I was about to return to the tedious tour I had just forsaken, when something made me look down at the ground. I was standing in front of what I took for a low grating, a ventilator probably, which did not reach higher than the calf of my leg. Looking more attentively, I saw that this was in reality a low, barred window giving on to some subterranean cell. It was a movement behind the bars that had caught my eye. I knelt down, peering through the weeds which had grown up in the cracks between the great flag-stones.
At first I could see nothing, it might have been a black cellar into which I was gazing. But soon my eyes penetrated the darkness and I could make out some sort of a pallet under the grating with a shrouded form lying upon it. I could not be sure whether it was a man or a woman who lay there, shrouded as if on a bier, but I thought I discerned a tarnished gleam of fair hair, and presently an arm, no thicker than bone, was raised, feebly, as if groping towards the light. Was it imagination, or did I really see on that almost transparent flesh a faint stain, circular, toothed, and enclosing a shape like a rose?
I cannot hope that the horror of that moment will ever leave me. I opened my mouth, but for several seconds I was not able to utter a sound. Just as I felt myself about to call out to the prisoner, soldiers appeared and hustled me away. They spoke roughly and threateningly, jostling me and twisting my arms as they dragged me into the presence of their superior officer. I was commanded to produce my passport. Falteringly, in the foreign language, I started to frame an inquiry about what I had seen. But then I looked at the revolvers, the rubber truncheons, the callous, stupid faces of the young soldiers, the inaccessible officer in his belted tunic; I thought of the massive walls, the bars, and my courage failed me. After all, what could I hope to do, an insignificant foreigner, and a woman at that, against such terrifying and strongly established force? And how would I help the prisoner by myself becoming imprisoned?
At last, after much questioning, I was allowed to go. Two guards escorted me to the station and stood on the platform until the train carried me away. What else could I have done? It was so dark in the underground cell: I can only pray that my eyes were deceiving me.
Going Up in the World
GOING UP IN THE WORLD
Inthe low-lying streets near the river where I live there is fog all through the winter. When I go to bed at night it is so cold that the pillow freezes my cheek. For a long time I have been lonely, cold and miserable. It is months since I have seen the sun. Suddenly, one morning, all this becomes intolerable to me. It seems that I can no longer bear the cold, the loneliness, the eternal fog – no, not even for another hour – and I decide to visit my Patrons and ask them to help me. It is a desperate resolve, but once I have made it I am filled with optimism. Perhaps I deliberately trick myself with false hopes as I put on my best dress and carefully make up my face.