The Double Play of Mirrors: Anna Kavan, Autobiography and Self-Portraiture

Abstract

Better known as the author of complex visionary novels of female experience, it is important to note that Anna Kavan was not only a writer, but also an artist, painting throughout her adult life in tandem with her writing. This article considers the nature of the relationship between her literary life and her artistic life, and what her novels tell us about her relationship to the cultivation of her self-image. Famously destroying her personal archive, shirking notable correspondents and recapitulating a mental disquiet across many of her paintings and prose works, it is of little surprise that Kavan’s enigmatic presence often figures more prominently than serious discussion of her literary and artistic achievements. How did this mercurial relationship to identity shape the ways in which Kavan explored her self-image?

Keywords:

• Anna Kavan
• self-portraits
• autobiography
• novel
• painting
• identity

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr Victoria Walker, Dr Rebecca Beasley and Amanda Vestal at the McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa, for their support.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The largest body of work is held in the Special Collections at the University of Tulsa, and a number of paintings remain in private collections.

2 Her paintings were exhibited alongside a separate dual exhibition of Henry Matthew Brock (1875–1960) and Scherpenberg.

3 For a comparison between Kavan and Rhys, see Walker (2012).

4 The first English-language version of Nadja did not appear until 1960, in Richard Howard’s translation for Grove Press.

5 For more comprehensive readings of Nadja, see Hubert (1969).

6 Robert Hauptman observed that ‘it is in Eagle’s Nest that the full influence of Kafka and modernism are palpable for the first time’ (Hauptman 1983:1513). Callard, her other biographer, suggests that she was keen on the male nouveaux romanciers but had little time for the work of the females, such as Nathalie Sarraute (Callard 1992: 124). See Brian Aldiss 1991.

7 Eagle’s Nest marked her first association with the publisher Peter Owen.

8 In an endorsement printed on the cover of Who Are You?, Ballard insisted that ‘few contemporary novelists could match the fierce intensity of her vision’, because she was ‘faithful to her obsessions’.

9 For a more comprehensive reading of Ballard and surrealism, see Baxter (2009).