Let Me Alone

PREFATORY NOTE

ANNA KAVAN found an apt title for this novel, first published in 1930 under the name of Helen Ferguson. Let Me Alone is an account, from childhood, of isolation in a woman and of her compulsive retreat from any association, especially marriage, that might impinge upon the strange, austere loneliness and solitude she both wanted and mortally dreaded: a schizophrenic condition. She marries — the wrong man inevitably — with predictably disastrous consequences.

This 1930 novel brings to mind today’s Women’s Liberation movement, with its demands for independence of mind and spirit for women. ‘She wanted to go through life alone, in her own independent, detached fashion,’ the heroine meditates, before marrying. ‘The idea of being bound up with another person in such a relationship as marriage was hateful to her.’ After the marriage, she is reading a Life of Luther when ‘… from the midst of the printed page, there suddenly sprang out at her these words: “Here I stand; I can no other,” a great enlightenment came to her, a sudden illumination. In a moment everything was made plain to her…. How easy and simple to face life from the single basis of her own undeniable individuality. She was what she was: herself. No need for compromise or apology or modification or defence.’

All very well if one is content with isolation and able to encrust oneself with a satisfactory crab’s shell. The heroine of Let Me Alone makes her efforts to be absorbed in other people. But the three men in her life fail her — her father, her husband and the hesitant, would-be lover, Findlay. She falters towards lesbianism; one of the best scenes in the novel describes her hopeless return to the erstwhile devoted girl, Sidney, and Sidney’s acutely perceptive rejection of her.

A Brontë influence seems to pervade the early part of this novel: the sombre father might have been imagined by Charlotte or Emily. Later, more than a hint of the D. H. Lawrence of Women in Love pervades its language, with obsessional repetitions of certain key words. In the finely written last part, the identity of the future Anna Kavan emerges clearly, especially in the hallucinatory power of the great rainstorm in Burma, coinciding with the final collapse of the ill-starred marriage.

The name Helen Ferguson, used for the earlier novels, was to be discarded, and the author began to use that of Anna Kavan (the married name of the protagonist of Let Me Alone) for the later books by which she is better known. As I have related in my Introduction to her posthumous collection of stories, Julia and the Bazooka (Peter Owen, 1970), she adopted the latter name by deed poll, following two retreats to mental hospitals, after which she changed not only her name and mode of living but also, somewhat remarkably, her personal appearance. Her vitality remained unimpaired; even her daily recourse to heroin — for some thirty years — as an escape from her conflicts, did not bring drastic physical damage until her last year or so. There had been two failed marriages. She lived until she was 67, and did not cease writing novels and short stories. She achieved the isolation and independence she wanted, but not an impervious shell.

RHYS DAVIES