It was the woolgathering, of course, the preoccupation with non-human things,
the interest in the wrong place…

What I think of is fragments dispersed by the wind and left behind. A word that conjures images of movement, that suggests a restless quality to the world, a travelling that is at the back of everything. To gather these fragments of wool takes a lot of wandering. It is a wandering that is not done in straight lines, like gathering thoughts; it leads somehow to daydreams.

Woolgathering: there is something about this word that stands out to me. It is a from story in Kavan’s collection I Am Lazarus published in 1945. Reading the definition, I highlight the words purposeless, wandering, indulge, thinking, dreamy, absent-minded, unsettled, unfixed. The kind of thoughts that are idle or distracted; there is a judgement here that they are not worthwhile, not the right thoughts. To go woolgathering is to be absent-minded, to no good purpose.

Here the narrator is trying to put into words what sets her apart and makes her feel an outsider. To get tangled and caught in the tethering and untethering of thoughts feels wilful and deliberate; it is something that antagonises others and marks her out as detached, and elsewhere. The woolgathering is stronger than she is. A force, insistent and unknown, that leads her to keep moving, to leave behind safety and security, to abandon familiarity for the unknown. It is not framed as an adventurous feeling but as beyond her control; these constant departures have a sense of terror lurking behind them.

In this passage Kavan seems to give the word a more singular definition. There is an absence, an inattentiveness to the human world.  To be preoccupied with your own inner world is suspect; to choose the other, non-human world, is strange and unrelatable. It is the act of following wandering thoughts, of choosing to follow them. It is being attentive, but to different ends.

The sense of apartness, the woolgathering, is an indeterminacy that is present in much of her writing. When I first saw her books, I felt I had encountered a person of intrigue, a pioneer and a journeyer from another time. A restlessness finds echoes in the life of the author, in her shifting and experimental style and themes of homelessness and exile. I Am Lazarus was her second book of short fiction, following Asylum Piece published in 1940, and there are some continuities between these collections which distil Kavan’s experiences of mental breakdown, psychiatric treatment and wartime trauma into fiction. Within these stories it is as though she is writing to define the feeling that existence gives her, a search for the thing that causes her pain, the gap between herself and others. There is no sense of belonging or reassurance. This quest, endless and unexplainable, with its constant escapes and departures, is still present in her final novel Ice, published in 1967, but without the motivation to propel it. In some ways all her fiction seems to explore this quality of otherness and follow it through to the end. To choose the world of dreams, to be preoccupied by the non-human.

Asylum Piece was the first work that appeared under the name ‘Anna Kavan’. It signalled a transformation for its author, who had published several books as Helen Ferguson and began to call herself by the name of a character in one of her novels. The book is often framed as a story of reinvention and marked a shift in style towards something sparser and more experimental. In these haunting stories, Kavan writes about isolation and alienation in a series of interlinked and fragmented pieces which imagine the asylum as a space of confinement and surveillance. The feeling of menace is pervasive, lurking beneath the surface, behind the mask.

The numbered stories that comprise the title work ‘Asylum Piece’ are written in a third person voice, forming a series of connected fragments that read like a novella. The first-person stories that surround this sequence are told in shifting voices of uncertain identity. I like the interior, discursive nature of these stories, some of which resemble personal essays. There is a sense of longing in these fragments, a stillness and sparseness. Unsettling, there is a disquiet that feels original, unified, part of one voice. In a way that feels haunted. The title pages of each separate piece, like a pause between the words, affect the pacing of a ghost story.

When I pick up this book, I feel I am in the presence of a masterwork. I wonder how to describe the work of someone who felt all her life a stranger, an outsider, who wrote back to the world but never fully joined it, a writer who refused to follow the rules. I’ve been reading Anna Kavan, especially her short fiction, to become lost in its pages. It is the kind of writing I don’t want to leave, as I feel it might slip away from me, or reappear in my most unguarded moments.

The first story is unexpected; it creeps up with a quietness, like the calm surface of a pool that appears undisturbed. As she writes here, ‘It is the accumulated rather than the momentary impression which I want to convey.’ This accumulated tension is the atmosphere Kavan creates and that her fiction inhabits. Her settings are suffused with gothic undertones and a heavy presence, a sense of threat that is real or imagined. There are fortresses and images of imprisonment, mysterious enemies and landscapes that are dark and obscure. Characters and places are often nameless, which creates a sense of disorientation. She explores forms of estrangement and exile, inhospitable places and journeys.

There is also an uncertainty around perception; Kavan’s work questions reality, its shifting borderlands and spaces of unease, to uncover the turbulence beneath. It is possible to envision this feeling. There is something I recognise, as if I have been here before, something dreamlike, fragmented, discontinuous. There is a slippage in her style, as though the words that have been formed can unform just as rapidly. The publisher of my edition (Peter Owen, 2001) captures the way the state of exile emerges through ‘her deeply personal, restrained and almost foreign-accented style has no true model.’

Many of the stories in Asylum Piece evoke a sense of persecution and paranoia, of being a victim of unknown forces within a web of suspicion that entangles and stifles. There are impersonal systems of administration within which the rules are hidden and uncertain. Repeated themes of guilt and condemnation, invisible enemies with hidden motives. Often the narrator is petitioning an advisor or awaiting official word of a sentence that might finally decide their fate. Kavan acknowledged the influence of Kafka on her work, and she portrays an experience of being in the world that feels conspiratorial; an atmosphere of surveillance and confinement that feels deeply existential.

In the story ‘The Birds’, the narrator describes a sensation of unreality. It feels like a sentence, an ongoing watchfulness and waiting that has a hopeless and numbing quality. Outside the window is an enclosed space where she watches the birds. An endless winter, still and frozen, bitterly cold. There is a deadness to the garden, and the birds seem insignificant, with their subdued colours and movements. They provide a distraction, an impression of security and immunity from the human world and all its trials; they are oblivious to her, concerned only with their own movements. As she watches from the window, in the half-light, two bright birds appear ‘as if two tiny meteors of living flame had suddenly plunged through the dull atmosphere’. She starts to wonder if they are a hallucination, unearthly messengers from another world, only visible to her.

This stillness Kavan captures is an absence of emotion, an emptiness; an inner landscape drained of colour. Like finally seeing your existence for what it is beneath the images that form memories. This is not unlike grief; reaching a plateau of sadness and trying to take pleasure in small moments. In the hours of the night the feeling creeps back in, exposing an elongated grey weariness. There is no respite in work, in dreams, in sleep. It is a sense of despair that threatens to saturate. The dread, the claw at the heart, the unbearable weight and frozen place that you occupy, and are destined to dwell within. She writes: ‘It seems ages since I have been able to concentrate on my work: and yet I am obliged to put in the same number of hours each day at my desk.’

Kavan’s lifelong heroin addiction was one way she attempted to deal with the problem of existence, the depression that threatened to overwhelm her at times, and a deep aloneness that she sometimes represented as a fog. In her story ‘Going Up in the World’ she writes: ‘They do not know what fog is like; it is only a word to them. They do not know what it means to be sad and alone in a cold room where the sun never shines.’ I imagine her writing as a safeguard from despair, an escape or release from this place where everything looks the same and the days are alike. The words she writes, hallucinatory and dreamlike, a weaving of language, are like the vivid birds in the story. Always looking to the other place for answers, she expresses a deep sense of exile and apartness. The non-human world stands out clear and distinct as if she is shifting the borders and asking which is more real. The brightness of this vision, of crystalline worlds that are precipitous and dramatic, brings some relief from the plateau, and from the cold winter of exile.

Kavan’s work is often concerned with narratives of confinement and control. These themes run through the short stories collected in Asylum Piece and I Am Lazarus, both written during a period when authoritarian regimes and the forces of war resulted in the displacement of refugees and the detention of enemy aliens. In ‘The Birthmark’, the narrator is travelling in a foreign country and visits a fortress on the hill. It is gloomy and menacing, and as she tours the castle, she discovers a prison that is still being used ‘for offenders of a certain category’. The position of outsiders and the marginalised in her work seems to bring together both the personal and the political. Her fiction explores abandonment, betrayal and loss, the failed connections with others. In Kavan’s writing, the conditions of existence and the feelings of not belonging are situated within a politics of expulsion and totalitarianism. This concern with the dispossessed is evident in other writings as well, in the book reviews and journalism she wrote during this period. It is the position of outsiders, those detained, judged criminal, illegal, insane, that can reveal the forms of control Kavan is exploring, something that feels especially relevant as I read her today.

In her book, The Novel of the Future published in 1968, Anaïs Nin describes Kavan’s work as exploring ‘the nocturnal worlds of our dreams, fantasies, imagination, and non reason’. She wrote that: ‘Such an exploration takes greater courage and skill in expression. As the events of the world prove the constancy of the nonrational, it becomes absurd to treat such events with rational logic.’ Sometimes her work can seem oblique, circling always around a threat that is not defined or not fully comprehended. There is a sense of terror, of helplessness arising from the idea that the enemy is unknown, a face you have seen before that you come close to recognising. It is always just out of reach, a recurring dream in which you try to retrace your steps. That uncanny sense of apprehending for an instant a movement that is prior, that outsteps us, that we are always following.

In the story ‘At Night’, a condition of sleeplessness is imagined as a regime and place of imprisonment where an unseen jailer lurks. To enter the stillness of this writing is like a descent that is familiar but all at once unspoken. It feels furtive and concealed. She writes: ‘The room is as dark as a box lined with black velvet that someone has dropped into a frozen well.’ When I read this sentence, I imagine silence when she is describing darkness. That is, a dark that feels so enclosed, that it surrounds and muffles sound. Dropped, sunken, forgotten in a well that is frozen, evokes a place of limitless depths. Within this sleeplessness, the world of dreams is near. A voyage departing towards ‘the icy mountains of the moon’. She writes the sudden and unearthly sound of a cock crowing which ‘flowers sharply in three flaming points, a fiery fleur-de-lis blossoming momentously in the black field of night.’

There are words of accusation, ‘when I first came under suspicion’. A pattern of behaviour that places her outside the circle, into other orbits. A victim of sleeplessness – the word victim framed in italics. What is the meaning of this place, is it somewhere she goes willingly or somewhere she is trapped? Does sleeplessness mean something else, madness, watchfulness, awareness, a way of being in the world? Her writing that rejects the notion of unity, or meaning, or finding answers. It exists within slippages, of the mind, of the eye. The jarring feeling of a headache ‘an iron band around my head’. Even the mind is enclosed, and the iron band tightens.

This still and unspoken time is one I recognise, the shifting boundaries between realms of sleep and waking, the edges of oblivion. She writes: ‘My thoughts have become strands of weed, of no special colour, slowly undulating in colourless water.’ In these uncanny dream images, there is a sense of dread that is very familiar. Sometimes when I read these words, I feel someone or something there with her – a creeping suspense, like a presence, the certainty that another is watching. At other times, I sense an intense isolation. Is it because I find myself trapped in silences these days? That is, I listen to the sounds around me and hear silence, although the sounds are always there. Trees in the wind or a passing car, but I hear the deep quiet that lies behind the sound.

Kavan feels like a writer for those times of absence, when everything falls away. I am insubstantial. I am haunted by everything, slowly unravelling, and writing becomes this propulsion to turn my own hauntings into something, to put them on the page. There is only this stillness that is the silence behind things; once you have named it, then it slips away and changes. When words go missing and there is nothing to hold onto. In the hollow places, the weighted fear, there is strange clarity. I experience an immersive quality in her writing and I write under its spell. I keep returning to Anna Kavan because for me her style is liberating; words arrive more freely. I find there are other ways of feeling words, that sometimes you need to hover, to float somewhere, not to name it directly.

Even as I let your words sink into me, there is a lightness to them, a motion in their stillness that resists the need for answers.

A definition of the uncanny is the bringing to light of something that should remain concealed. Can some things be kept as secrets?

In Kavan’s stories the sense of unreality that characterises the human world is slipstream; once you’ve seen it, it’s hard to unsee. In the story ‘I Am Lazarus’ from her next collection, she will write of the ‘queer dream plasma which flows along like a sub-life, contemporaneous with but completely independent of the main current of one’s existence.’ It is an atmosphere that she writes into her work, that exists just under the surface of things, and that certain states of mind expose and are open to, at moments of crisis. Kavan’s vision is full of these shifting presences between the real and unreal, and what lies at the limits of the human world. It is like glimpsing the pipes and cables running underground, the feeling of dissonance, of dissolution this brings, as if you had pulled aside the façades of buildings to find them made of paper.

In the final story, ‘There is No End’, the presence of an unseen enemy creates a nightmarish mood. There are snatches of recognition. A face peering in at the window, half familiar, someone passing out of sight down the corridor. Kavan writes hauntingly of an enemy that appears almost kindred, ‘an identification of myself with the cruelty and destructiveness of the world’. This figure of dread that she imagines becomes a manifestation, ‘a sort of eidolon moving about the world.’ Kavan envisions the world as a place of conflict; she is a writer who feels close to those strange and empty times. Her vision moves towards a world in which there is no escape from authoritarian control and the machinery of war, just a temporary hiding place.

In this ongoing silence, from which there is no respite, the feeling of existential aloneness is complete. This is the real place I reside in, and the rest is pretend, the worlds I evoke to shut down the silence for a time. I have found her to be the writer I need for these unfathomable moments of alienation, that awareness that seeps through and infiltrates the waking hours. I feel comforted by her figure of the visitor, the traveller, the exile. A stranger, moving away from that word, or towards it. Between the pages of this book, let me dwell for a while.

In this same story, there is a realisation that there are no visible barriers enforcing confinement, no bars on the windows, no locks on the doors; the prison seems to lie within. There are only ‘unseen and impassable walls’ that surround, and that ‘tower into the highest domes of the zenith and sink many miles below the surface of the earth.’ Reading these words, I accept this vision and feel it to be true. ‘Is it life, then, or death, stretching like an uncoloured stream behind and in front of me? Nor any place where feeling accumulates.’

A nameless place – a place of nothing. There is a garden outside, but it is a garden without seasons, where nobody walks, where no one listens to the sound of birds. An infinite enclosure in which she finds herself, a stillness that is unending. The comfort of the non-human is absent and there ‘is no arbour where friends could linger’. As these words accumulate, I am left desolate and marooned in this solitary exile. I recognise this place of no feeling. Once you have reached it, you understand the meaning of the asylum.

But there is one line of colour that strikes me, stays with me, sensory and lyrical. It is a moment, a memory. I am falling into those words, reading them over, inhabiting the sentence: ‘In this nameless place nothing appears animate, nothing is close, nothing is real; I am pursued by the remembered scent of dust sprinkled with summer rain.’

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Anna Evans is a writer based in Cambridge in the UK. Her recent essays and non-fiction writing have appeared in Echtrai, Elsewhere and Hinterland among others. She writes about place, literature, migration and memory. Anna is co-editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. She can be found on Instagram at @annaevanswrites