A Book Written in Disguise
KAVAN, Anna. Asylum Piece. London: Jonathan Cape.1940.
8vo. Original publisher's grey cloth with black lettering to spine and upper cover and with the original unclipped dust jacket; pp. [viii], 212, [8 (ads)]; spine and edges slightly browned; some spotting to fore-edge and to preliminaries; minor spotting on the dust jacket front and mildly stained on the back; otherwise a very good incredibly rare work.
Very scarce first edition, first impression.
Writer Helen Ferguson had published six books before Asylum Piece. She had also attempted suicide numerous times and had been interred in a clinic. Upon her release, she legally changed her name to her pseudonym Anna Kavan, the protagonist of her previous novels Let Me Alone (1930) and A Stranger Still (1995). She also bleached her hair, disappeared further into her dystopias and began composing striking works of experimental fiction. Asylum Piece is in fact the first book written under her authorial guise and is a collection of 21 interlinked short stories.
Each of the stories, although themselves complete, are united - tracing in abstract the progressive growth of a case of schizophrenia, The narrative accompanies the protagonist from an onset of neurosis culminating in incarceration in a Swiss clinic. A writer confirmed as 'Kafka-esque', Kavan's often terrifying writing is frequently autobiographical; “She wrote in a mirror,” stated Kavan’s friend Rhys Davies in a 1970 essay of remembrance,
As the 1940's blurb affirms, "Nothing quite like this has ever been written before… Each sentence tells of the progress in introversion, the horror of people, the imagined hostility of inanimate things, and finally the complete turning inward of eyes that cannot bear any longer the sight of the pain and hostility in the outside world".
Far ahead of its time, Aslyum Piece is one of the most impressive and disconcerting excavations of madness. Anais Nin, a steadfast admirer of Kavans's work, expressed of her spectacular ability to render psychological trauma in often abrupt, sparse prose; the irrational world becoming disturbingly matter of fact, a daring display of "classical lucidity while entering irrational worlds”.
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