Word: kavan
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...fiction is livelier. James Hanley's The Road, a tender tale of a sailor's discovery that his family has been blitzed, and Anna Kavan's Face of My People, a pathos-laden account of a neurotic veteran's resistance to psychoanalytical probing ("They've taken everything; let them not take my silence") are good, solid if not world-shaking stories. Also worth watching is William Sansom, who can't yet create characters but who has a captivating way with machinery...
...American Vogue when Richard Berlin, boss of Hearst magazines, lured her away in 1932. (Today Harper's, like Town & Country, gets only the gentlest Hearstian supervision.) She and her fiction editors have bought and plugged such bylines as Virginia Woolf, Jean Stafford, Eudora Welty, Christopher Isherwood, Anna Kavan and Colette...
Fixed Obsessions. Some of Author Kavan's characters live in their own homes, some in Swiss and English clinics, some in the makeshift hospitals that cared for England's military psychotics in World War II. But all share a world where normal proportions and meanings have given place to certain fixed obsessions of supreme personal importance...
...insane, Author Kavan shows, the normal man is apt to appear either as a potential "traitor" and "betrayer" or as a blind, stolid creature who has no awareness of the terrifying "powers" that control the destinies of man. Sometimes these omnipotent powers assume human shape. They become "authorities," "officials," "advisers"-suave, tough men & women with hypodermic syringes who may rudely invade your own home at any moment, pack your suitcase, and drive you away to "prison" in a closed car-while the husband who once told you he loved you looks the other way, or assists the invaders...
...Author Kavan's mad characters asks, "to whom can one appeal when one does not even know where to find the judge? How can one ever hope to prove one's innocence when there is no means of knowing of what one has been accused? No, there's no justice for people like us in the world: all that we can do is to suffer as bravely as possible and put our oppressors to shame...