company of heroes legacy edition bazookas

Retreat from an intolerable world was to become more a necessity. Watching only herself, her men are wraiths, and nearly always treacherous-as perhaps shadows must be. Work did not stop to the end, and only writing really mattered. She also painted bizarre studies of tormented women and, occasionally, men.

Later, she profitably renovated old London houses, launching a limited company for this. Had the bazooka kept tuberculosis at bay? She married twice, bore a son, and was divorced twice she travelled and lived in many parts of the world, bred bulldogs whilst gracing the Chilterns with a painter husband, and for a time worked as editorial assistant on a literary magazine. Was her bazooka a salvation for her? She lived until she was sixty-seven.

Under the daily stimulus and pacifications of heroin and the amphetamines Anna Kavan wrote with ceaseless productivity. This apart, it strikes me that her work can be seen either as an over-idiosyncratic personal document, or as a moving chronicle of terrifying isolation and defeat. Perhaps some inkling of the reason why a person begins to take drugs can be traced in these stories. Her drug addiction is helpful to an understanding of her stories and much of Anna Kavan’s other work, especially her superbly composed book, Asylum Piece. Her palliative had not obliterated the last moment. ‘”This is her syringe, her bazooka she always called it,” the doctor says with a small sad smile…’ A syringe lay in Anna Kavan’s hand when she was found dead in her London home, a shot of the heroin to which she had been accustomed for some thirty years still inside the plastic barrel. Written a year or so before her death in 1968, in a sense she even foresaw her end in this story, although a wartime bomb destroys Julia.

If it is possible to concentrate the nature of a person’s life into a brief sketch, then that of Anna Kavan is conveyed perfectly in her story Julia and the Bazooka, which seems to me a most symmetrical example of the art by which this obdurately subjective writer chose elements of her life and transformed them into something rich and strange and basically true. For more from our archive and for original issues from our back catalogue, discover our Legacy Issuesfrom 1954 onwards. It was written by Rhys Davies, a close friend of Anna Kavan’s, and was published alongside the short story ‘The Mercedes’. The following piece is taken from The London Magazine, February 1970.

Company of heroes legacy edition bazookas