While Guilty manifests little of the heroin-influenced style or content of Kavan’s post-war writing, it does feature several of her recurrent themes. It is no surprise that Kavan chooses ‘Mr Spector’ as the name of the duplicitous and threatening character who looms over the young male protagonist, Mark. The layered meaning of ‘spectre’ as both ominous presence and reflected image would have suited her well. The mirror followed her, observing her from all angles and challenging her troubled sense of identity. She was a slave to its critical eye, alternating between self-love and self-loathing but always aware of its spectral and un forgiving presence. Mark is a marked man — his destiny is predetermined and beyond his control, his vulnerability established by the pacifist actions of his father. His inherited boyhood guilt, thrust upon him by social prejudices and compounded by an inability to find acceptance among his peers, primes him for the paranoiac events of adulthood. He becomes ‘part of an elaborate hoax, of which [he] was to be the victim’. His weakness is his love for Carla, an emotion that exposes his detachment from his own reality, the ‘disconcerting sense of estrangement from [his] own self’.
The British writer and journalist Virginia Ironside, a professed fan of Kavan’s writing, has commented on what she identifies in her work as an abiding sense of guilt and associated pending punishment. Ironside speculates on the possible source of this guilt, considering Kavan’s heroin addiction and a childish sense of responsibility for her father’s suicide. He drowned in the harbour at Tuxpan, Veracruz, Mexico, on 22 February 1911, when Kavan was nearly ten years old. This tragedy had a huge impact on the child, compounding her already developed sense of parental abandonment. Did she experience guilt? Possibly. Children personalize rejection, assuming that their behaviour has somehow causally contributed to the event. However, if Kavan’s personal guilt is identifiable, it is to be found in her chosen position of social isolation, a stance necessitated by her impatience with hypocrisy and her intolerance of those she regarded as her intellectual inferiors. Her friends were few, mostly male and often homosexual, and she was wont to estrange herself from them for periods of time, before cautiously reconciling. Mark describes this:
Anybody who’s ever attempted to do it will know that it’s never easy to start life again, especially with very little money and without friends. Eternal regret is the price I must pay for the idyllic companionship I have known and lost. Now I’m more alone than I’ve ever been, not only because I no longer have any friends but because I know that however closely another life may impinge on mine ultimately I exist in impenetrable isolation.
The reader of this, the latest in Anna Kavan’s impressive list of published works, will be intrigued by her handling of internalized and subconscious guilt. Her ability to navigate the inner landscape does not fail to impress.
Jennifer Sturm
University of Auckland, New Zealand, 2007
Guilty
My father served with distinction in two wars and emerged from the army a minor hero; whereupon he astounded everybody by a public declaration of pacifism. I was very young at the time, but I distinctly remember the day he came back to our country cottage looking most resplendent, I thought, in his fine uniform.
My mother had been to the station to meet him, but I, because I was getting over some childish complaint, had, to my disgust, been left at home with the maid, a disappointment for which I expected compensation in the form of much attention from him. But he only said, ‘Hullo, Mark’, and gave me a careless sort of hug as he passed on his way upstairs. I was still convalescent and easily upset by small things or by nothing at all and, feeling most injured, began to whimper, glancing at my mother, who, with a flushed unhappy face, was gazing after him. I’d had her to myself for most of my life, and no doubt she had spoiled me, especially during my recent illness. So when she said sharply, ‘Oh, don’t start grizzling’, and then ran upstairs without taking any more notice of me, I was so astonished that I stopped crying at once.
The bang of the back door told me the maid had gone out, hurrying after her freedom, delayed on my account, leaving only the three of us in the cottage. Though I was tempted to creep up the stairs to listen to what my parents were saying, I didn’t dare do so with my mother in her present mood, eavesdropping being a sin she condemned severely. All sorts of wild fancies went through my head, of which I favoured most the idea that my father had suddenly gone mad. Perhaps because the voices upstairs seemed to be arguing, my thoughts turned to a sensational crime (lurid details of which I had heard from the servant girl) committed recently by a soldier who, on his return from the war, had slaughtered his entire family.
Suppose my father were to kill my mother and then come down and kill me? My skin crept with delicious horror as I pictured him with the still smoking revolver in his hand, levelling it at me, saying something extraordinary before he fired. Would it hurt much? Would he shoot himself immediately afterwards, or wait to fire the remaining shots at the policemen who would come for him, reserving only the final bullet for his own death?
I still had a shamefully babyish fear of loud noises, and what I really dreaded most was the bang. Our home was far from any town, and treats such as visits to the circus or panto mime were made more attractive by their rarity, but my pleasure was always much reduced on these occasions if a gun appeared on the stage, keeping me in such agonizing suspense that when it was fired at last I could hardly stop myself screaming.
It was a different matter, however, to listen for a shot I knew would never come; an experience half agreeable, half terrifying, like the fearful thrill of the game where you hide in the dark and wait for someone to find you. But my imagin ation soon proved too strong for me. The pretence was threatening to turn into a waking nightmare, beyond my control, when, to my vast relief, my parents came downstairs again, and I ran to meet them. A sudden sense of something wrong stopped me dead, and I realized they were still too absorbed in their argument even to be aware of my presence — a state of affairs so unprecedented and altogether unnatural that I felt the obscure threat of nightmare again, all the more frightening for being imposed on the surroundings and apparently normal circumstances of everyday.
While the situation oscillated between the two poles of nightmare and norm, I observed that my father, in this short time, had already changed into civilian clothes, in which I did not think he looked half so fine. I recognized the tweed suit as the one that had been hanging up in the big wardrobe ever since he’d left, taken out at regular intervals by my mother, religiously brushed and aired. Despite these attentions, it seemed to me old and shabby compared with the magnificent uniform he had been wearing and was carrying now on his arm. I noticed that he was also carrying several small boxes that looked interesting, as if they might contain presents, and, normality getting the upper hand, I moved forward again.
But nightmare reassumed its ascendancy as he walked straight past as if I had not been there and, closely pursued by my mother, went into the kitchen, thus completing my utter confusion, for I had never seen him in there and hardly thought he knew such a place existed. Should I follow? I had not been told not to. I could tell by their voices that my parents had been caught by one of those sudden emotional storms, always liable to sweep upon grown-up people like typhoons, out of nowhere, strange, frightening, incomprehensible outbursts of love or hate, which seemed to fling them about helpless as battered pieces of wreckage, while I was left out, ignored.