Hearts and Minds: War Neurosis and the Politics of Madness in Anna Kavan's I Am Lazarus

Abstract

Anna Kavan's fictional portrayals of psychiatric breakdown and its treatment provide a unique perspective on the patient's experience of early to mid twentieth-century psychiatry. This article looks in detail at Kavan's time working with soldiers suffering from effort syndrome during the Second World War, observing how the solider-psychiatric patient becomes a figurehead for her radical politics in her Horizon article ‘The Case of Bill Williams’ (1944), and a prominent protagonist in her stories. Through close reading of her correspondence, her journalism and her wartime stories collected in I Am Lazarus (1945), it examines how the intersection of psychological trauma and physiological symptoms characteristic of effort syndrome surfaces in Kavan's writing of this period and in her own psychic responses to the war. It observes the importance of figurative language to her portrayal of war trauma and psychological breakdown, as her characters embody metaphor in their psychosomatic symptoms, and explores a twisted reconception of mind–body dualism prevalent throughout her writing of this period. It goes on to examine how the peculiar interaction of the physical and the psychological extends to the relationship between Kavan's characters and their external environment in her Blitz stories. Against the backdrop of the war-torn city, mind and body engage in ongoing conflict, affect and emotion bleed into her physical landscapes, and everyday objects become animated and hostile towards her protagonists.

Keywords:

• Anna Kavan
• Second World War literature
• effort syndrome
• Blitz writing
• mid-century literature
• I Am Lazarus

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Note the sonorous resonance between Mill Hill and Bill Will(iams).

2 In one example, Kavan writes: ‘One of the boys was telling me the other day about a traumatic experience he had when a very great pal of his was badly wounded … I found that very moving’ (Kavan 1943c).

3 Jennifer Sturm's research into Kavan's time in New Zealand provides detail of her relationship with the pacifist playwright Ian Hamilton, but although Kavan did not welcome her own conscription to war work in Britain, she made no resistance to it on ideological grounds.

4 Bill Williams makes a cameo appearance as a minor character in ‘Face of My People’. The story first appeared in Horizon two months after ‘The Case of Bill Williams’ (see Kavan 1944b).