Anna Kavan's writing is inextricably tied up with the convolutions of her tragic life. Of course this is, to a greater or lesser extent, true of all writers…. Yet with Anna Kavan the stories and novels are so subjective in tone that it is as if she wishes, in reality, to write her own spiritual autobiography but, rather than do this, has dressed up her sufferings and longings in fictional terms. Often the short stories are little more than fragments illustrating individual paranoia or intense personal despair and, as such, are reminiscent more of pages from a psychiatrist's notebook than of works of imaginative fiction. These tales are maudlin, desperate in their evident knowledge that, for the narrator, escape from this hideous twilight world of hallucinatory imprisonment is impossible. (p. 43)
Anna Kavan possessed artistic integrity; of that there can be no doubt. Her stories are direct; there is no prostitution of contemporary trends or fads, no deviation from that extraordinary combination, peculiar to herself, of conversational ease and the loose, almost wild, imagery of some of the descriptive passages. But I am afraid, for me, there is in her work a dividing line on the one side of which she gives the best of her powers, leaving on the other a grim example of the truth of at least some of Baudelaire's warnings [of the negative implications of drug addiction]. This is unfashionable…. [I am] sure her disciples, with their customary passion for the lugubrious, the humourless, the portentous and the dull, admire her for her depressingly nihilistic snippets of self-pity, for the obtuse parabolic tilts at totalitarianism of her science fiction, rather than for her earlier, more conventional, for me more satisfying, work.
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