Anna Kavan’s New Zealand Edited by Jennifer Sturm (Vintage $36.99)
Anna Kavan's New Zealand is a modest looking book which holds within it a kind of time-bomb. The explosiveness relates to Kavan's strangely powerful, even hypnotic talent. Kavan was a bottle blonde who washed up in New Zealand at that most dangerous of hours - 1942. Singapore had fallen and the world was in flames. Kavan was actually a made-up name. She was born Helen Woods in England in 1911 but two disastrous marriages later she decided to make herself over. She hoped to elude the depression which dogged her. She was also a heroin addict. Kavan knocked round the world in a sort of disillusioned, hard drinking way - toughing it out but deeply vulnerable. She always needed a man.
In 1942 she detached herself from an immensely wealthy New Yorker and came to Auckland, to find Ian Hamilton. He was a British-born pacifist who was actually a Hawke's Bay farmer. He was married with children, but Kavan and Hamilton shifted in together. She had come from the hotbed of artistic New York - Auden and Louis MacNeice were part of the crowd she ran with. In Auckland she met (and superbly caricatured) Frank Sargeson and the literary world of the North Shore. She settled at Torbay with Hamilton and found, it seemed, a kind of peace.
At least this is what is revealed in the superb pieces of writing in this book. They had lain gathering dust in the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and it is to the credit of academic Jennifer Sturm, and publisher Vintage, that they have brought this real gem back into currency. For Kavan's writing is really an equal to Katherine Mansfield at her best. It shares a crystalline quality, a hypnotic otherness which may have come from her heroin addiction but translates, on the page, into prose completely unlike anything written in New Zealand before.
And the whole point of this book is that Kavan, for a precious and small time, wrote herself into existence as a New Zealand writer. Her language has the rhythm of Sargeson. She is deeply observant - and funny - about Torbay locals. But there's that lament which one senses in Mansfield's best stories about New Zealand: here is a world I have lost. If I can only recreate it in words, it will live again. And I will be happy.
Kavan's stories - brief, as sharp as Jean Rhys - are usually told in the first person. Some show a startling prescience about race relations in New Zealand and there are brilliantly surreal evocations. This is an unmissable piece of writing. It alters the history of New Zealand writing, this haunted, vulnerable, extraordinarily talented writer somehow appearing as if for the first time. It is as if the clouds have rolled away and revealed a mountain that was there all along. Kavan wrote about always being a refugee and wanting to find a room in the mansion of life. Perhaps in this book - and in this country - she has at long last found one. c
Peter Wells is a writer and film-maker based in Hawke's Bay.
