Guilty: The Lost Classic Novel

‘[
Guilty
is] thrillingly unclassifiable.’ –
Guardian

‘A week after finishing
Guilty
, I’m still haunted. Kavan’s art is breathtaking – why is there no South Bank Show on this genius drug-fiend?’ – Duncan Fallowell,
Financial Times

‘Kavan’s dreamscapes recall the hidden gardens of T.S. Eliot’s
Four Quartets
… her writing, so wild and emotionally fraught, represents a rare form of inner resilience.’ –
Times Literary Supplement

‘She is mentioned with Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys; “like Dostoyevsky”, they might have said … But she has her own original voice in one startling novel after another … She is being recognised as the most distinctive of 20th-century novelists.’ – Doris Lessing,
Independent

‘Anna Kavan lived in possession of sufficient imaginative fuel to lift a Boeing. In
Guilty
, her debt to Kafka, as the prototypical existential type, as well as her characteristic leaning towards apocalyptic vision, find a powerful fusion of opposites in a novel poised on the exhilirating forward edge of the present.’ – Jeremy Reed, author of
A Stranger on Earth:The Life and Work of Anna Kavan

Set in an unspecified but eerily familiar landscape,
Guilty
is told from the point of view of a young man named Mark. The novel begins in his childhood as his father returns from war. In spite of being garlanded as a hero, Mark’s father declares himself a pacifist and is immediately reviled in a country still suffering from wartime divisions. When he is forced into exile Mark meets Mr Spector, a mysterious figure who becomes a dominant force in his life, overseeing his schooling, his employment and even his accommodation. When he tries to break away from Mr Spector to pursue an engagement with the beautiful Carla, Mark’s life begins to unravel. Thwarted at every turn by a Kafakaesque bureaucracy, he falls prey to the machinations and insecurities of his guilt-ridden mind.

Drawing on many of Anna Kavan’s familiar themes,
Guilty
will be welcomed by those who already know and appreciate her work and a revelation to those who don’t.

ANNA KAVAN, née Helen Woods, was born in Cannes in 1901 and spent her childhood in Europe, the USA and Great Britain. Her life was haunted by her rich, glamorous mother, beside whom her father remains an indistinct figure. Twice married and divorced, she began writing while living with her first husband in Burma and was initially published under her married name of Helen Ferguson. Her early writing consisted of somewhat eccentric ‘Home Counties’ novels, but everything changed after her second marriage collapsed. In the wake of this, 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. She suffered periodic bouts of mental illness and long-term drug addiction – she had become addicted to heroin in the 1920s and continued to use it throughout her life – and these facets of her life feature prominently in her work. She destroyed almost all of her personal correspondence and most of her diaries, therefore ensuring that she achieved her ambition to become ‘one of the world’s best-kept secrets’. She died in 1968 of heart failure, soon after the publication of her most celebrated work, the novel
Ice
.

It is possible that around six decades or more have passed since Anna Kavan wrote
Guilty
. Each of those decades has produced unimagined change: social, political, literary and technological advances challenging existing thinking and creating new paradigms. It is so remarkable, then, that this previously unpublished work from Kavan’s pen maintains a freshness and immediacy that resonates in the twenty-first century. In the course of transferring ownership of her unpublished work, an anonymous reader inserted an observation between the pages of
Guilty
, indicating an estimated temporal context. The handwritten note, signed ‘M.W.’ and dated 1989, reads ‘this novel is set in the First World War and is related by a youth whose father is a pacifist’.

Kavan was no stranger to war, surviving the First World War as a teenager and losing her only son, Bryan Ferguson, in 1944 to the carnage of the Second World War. She spent twenty-two months, in 1941–2, living in New Zealand with an expatriate English pacifist and conscientious objector, Ian Hamilton. With him she shared the social disapproval and condemnation experienced by those who chose to take such a stance, enduring the receipt of poison-pen letters, always anonymously authored, the whispers of locals and the wholesale dismissal of ‘shirkers’ by conscripted men and women. It was only when Hamilton’s incarceration became an inevitability that Kavan reluctantly, and with considerable difficulty, secured a return passage to England, undertaking an astonishing journey through the
enemy-submarine-infested waters of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, the sole woman aboard a small, battered, wool-carrying cargo ship. It would not be an exaggeration to propose that few other women, of any nationality, would have made the same 12,000-mile voyage during such dangerous times. The ten-week passage provided Kavan with ample time to reflect on the nature of conscientious objection and its impact on her own life. Provocatively, Hamilton’s young son, Duncan, was sent to boarding-school during the period of his father’s resistance to compulsory conscription. An autobiographical historicity was established, providing a compelling argument that facts preceded fiction.

Before her time in New Zealand Kavan had spent three months in 1940–41 in in New York, assimilated into that city’s tight circle of exiled writers, poets, musicians and artists who had fled Hitler’s Third Reich and who were referred to as ‘Communazis’ by FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover. Counting Lion Feuchtwanger among her friends, Kavan was a ready sympathizer with the dispossessed and the ‘outlandish’, sharing their justified sense of persecution and apprehension. It is therefore tempting to correct M.W.’s estimation and date the setting, if not writing, of
Guilty
to somewhere in the mid-1940s, a possibility that would acknowledge her experiences as a personal and powerful means of informing the narrative. Indeed, the opening sentence of the book tells us that the protagonist’s father ‘served with distinction in two wars and emerged from the army a minor hero’, information that implies participation in the two world wars.

Kavan returned to England on 28 January 1943 after three and a half years away. The culture shock of immediate and unavoidable immersion into London’s wartime difficulties
profoundly affected her, prompting depression and an urgent wish to return to the relative tranquillity and comfort of New Zealand. Within days of her arrival, she initiated the paperwork required to secure an exit permit and a passage on any vessel bound for the South Pacific. For the duration of the war she continued a regular and, at times, desperately worded correspondence with Ian Hamilton, reinforcing in every letter her regret at having left New Zealand. Her letters illustrate the effect of the impersonal ‘machinery’ of bureaucracy on the mentality of the individual, whose sole intent might be to house or feed oneself. The following excerpts exemplify the personal experiences which may well have informed the writing of this book.

February 14 1943, c/- Barclay’s Bank, Piccadilly Circus, W1 [written while Kavan stayed in a hotel in London]

To find a flat seems quite impossible & I’m still in this place that’s full of worldly gilt & decayed past magnificence & American officers with blondes … Dolphin Square and all the other big blocks of flats have mile-long waiting lists. The only alternative is some dingy, grim, grey, Bayswater bedsittingroom. I suppose I’ll come to it in time.

February 25 1943, c/- Barclay’s Bank, Piccadilly Circus, W1
I can’t get a flat anywhere, & it’s utterly hopeless to find any place at less than 6 guineas, and that’s hard enough. Next week I’m taking a large room in Hampstead which is the best I can do. It’s probably a mistake, like all my moves, but I have to go somewhere cheaper & that’s all I can find.

March 7 1943, 15 Cannon Place NW3

I wish I cd describe these vast government institutions to you: the passes, forms, official documents of all kinds;
the miles of corridors; the innumerable officials to be interviewed [by] in their different bureaux; the extra-ordinarily complicated & apparently irrelevant procedures. It’s pure Kafka, of course. At times when I am in one or another of these enormous buildings waiting for an interview with some new authority, I feel as if I were the victim of a private madness induced by too much reading of the ‘The Trial’ and ‘The Castle’.

October 12 1943, Crossways Cottage, Well Rd NW3

I sent a cable to you to tell you that the Authorities had actually granted my permit to leave the country. But of course that doesn’t mean that I’ll get away soon. All shipping arrangements here are made through a central board & one is simply notified that there’s a passage about 24 hours before the ship’s due to sail. NZ House informs me that there won’t be any accommodation for some months; almost certainly not this year … the Authorities may decide to cancel the permit in their capricious & unpredictable way.

Guilty
is an anomaly. Deceptively, it resembles in tone and style Kavan’s early work, written under her married name, Helen Ferguson, and famously described by her friend Rhys Davies as ‘Home Counties novels’. Her occasional use of clichés and the chronological linearity of this story, completely absent in her later work, contradict the Kafkaesque sinister content, leaving the reader unprepared for the disconcerting developments that unfold. It is
Eagle’s Nest
(published by Peter Owen in 1957) which the Kavan enthusiast associates most with the work of Franz Kafka. In 1983 Robert Hauptman observed that ‘it is in
Eagle’s Nest
that the full influence of Kafka and modernism are palpable for the first time’ in Kavan’s writing (
A Critical
Survey of Long Fiction
, edited by Frank Northen Magill, Salem Press, Pasadena, 1983). Impressed by the ‘insistence upon dream, fantasy, and escape into unreality, the quest, the narrative structure, and the ambiguity’, he concludes that
Eagle’s Nest
‘is one of Kavan’s outstanding books, particularly as it is flawless’. I suggest that
Guilty
is more unnerving, more disorienting, and therefore more Kafkaesque, because it adheres more closely to perceived reality, to the ordinariness of a single unspectacular life. No castles, no ruins, no mountainous terrain. The topiary chessmen at Mark’s school, ominous in the dark, are, after all, simply trees.

The horror evolves in the simple task of finding somewhere to live in an increasingly unfamiliar world. If the reader of Kavan’s impressive list of publications should be called upon to identify an especially ‘Kavanesque’ feature of her post-1940 writing, he or she would undoubtedly point to the disturbing motif of unreality and to her portrayal of the precariousness of the liminal mindscape between sanity and insanity. The human condition is universal, but few dare to write of it with such acuity. Kavan was a heroin addict and, like her antecedents Thomas de Quincey and Jean Cocteau, she allowed her drug use to take her imagination into scenes denied the non-drug user. Her most successful novel,
Ice
(1967), was chosen by Brian Aldiss as his Science Fiction Book of the Year, an indication of the outer limits Kavan visited in her imagined and imaginary discourse.

While
Guilty
manifests little of the heroin-influenced style or content of Kavan’s post-war writing, it does feature several of her recurrent themes. It is no surprise that Kavan chooses ‘Mr Spector’ as the name of the duplicitous and threatening character who looms over the young male protagonist, Mark. The layered meaning of ‘spectre’ as
both ominous presence and reflected image would have suited her well. The mirror followed her, observing her from all angles and challenging her troubled sense of identity. She was a slave to its critical eye, alternating between self-love and self-loathing but always aware of its spectral and un forgiving presence. Mark is a marked man – his destiny is predetermined and beyond his control, his vulnerability established by the pacifist actions of his father. His inherited boyhood guilt, thrust upon him by social prejudices and compounded by an inability to find acceptance among his peers, primes him for the paranoiac events of adulthood. He becomes ‘part of an elaborate hoax, of which [he] was to be the victim’. His weakness is his love for Carla, an emotion that exposes his detachment from his own reality, the ‘disconcerting sense of estrangement from [his] own self’.