Machines in the Head

December 15, 2019
Artfully strange short stories from a mostly forgotten 20th-century British writer. Anna Kavan first appeared as a character in Helen Ferguson's coming-of-age novel, Let Me Alone, in 1930. Ten years later, Kavan would reappear as Ferguson's nom de plume. In the foreword to this new collection of stories, editor Walker asserts that this pen name freed Ferguson--who was also a journalist--to try new forms and explore "darkness, fantasy, madness and dystopia." Ice (1967), Kavan's eerily prescient novel about climate catastrophe provoked by human action and the last book to be published before her death in 1968, is probably her most well-known work, but these stories--written over three decades--offer a fascinating study of a writer who was always evolving and are exceptional as literature qua literature. Many of these stories are set in hospitals--or places that might be hospitals or prisons or some combination of the two. Human existence in these spaces is depicted as a nightmare from which neither the protagonist nor the reader can awaken. First published in the New Yorker in 1945, "The Blackout" is the story of a soldier who knows that something terrible happened while he was on leave, but he can't remember what, exactly, it was. As a doctor's questions push him closer and closer to the truth, Kavan creates a sense of dread that she refuses to alleviate, leaving the reader in sickening uncertainty. Set in a psychiatric hospital, "Face of My People" is similarly horrific. "He glanced up at the waiting nurse and smiled at her. She was his best nurse; he had trained her himself in his own methods, and the result was entirely satisfactory." This line occurs just a page and a half into the story, but Kavan has already created an atmosphere so obviously insalubrious that we shudder to think of what this doctor's methods might be. Not every story succeeds. "The Gannets" is simply grotesque. "The Old Address" is both grotesque and maudlin. A writer fans of experimental fiction should know.

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January 20, 2020
Kavan’s inventive and chilling collection (after Ice), renders a sustained expression of despair from a writer who suffered from mental illness and heroin addiction, and died in 1968, at age 67. Many of the stories are set in mid-century psychiatric institutions. In “Airing a Grievance,” the unnamed narrator has been assigned to a psychiatrist-like “adviser” she hesitates to trust, and in “Face of My People,” the cruel Dr. Pope ominously compares his war-traumatized patients to oysters and decides “to try a little forcible opening” into the mind of a stubbornly taciturn patient. Bloody car accidents occur in multiple stories, offering a stage for the narrators to reflect on the world’s moments of random cruelty. In “Fog,” a driver seeks salvation in drugs, which only make her numb to an accident she causes, driving on “as if nothing had happened,” while in “The Old Address,” the narrator is struck by a car and drowns all the passersby in her blood, thinking, “at last I’m being revenged on those who have persecuted me all my life.” While the ceaseless inner torment can become a burden for the reader, flights of fantasy come as welcome relief, such as the freewheeling “Five More Days to Countdown,” in which the heroic Esmerelda and her lover escape a student revolt via helicopter. Fans of Doris Lessing will appreciate these shattered glimpses into Kavan’s creative mind.