ASYLUM PIECE AND OTHER STORIES and SLEEP HAS HIS HOUSE. By Anna Kavan. Michael Kesend. $11.95 each.

By Norbert Blei

TRYING to explain ’writer’s writer’ is at best a small and private vision, an attempt to justify a singular taste in the hope that others will see, be convinced, and possibly save the writer from obscurity.

All of which is sometimes futile. The “writer’s writer” is often light years ahead of the general reader, as was Anna Kavan, and thus is misunderstood or ignored. Recognition, if it comes at all, arrives in the final hour or after the author’s death.

In 1968, the excellent British magazine Encounter published a short story of Anna Kavan’s (an “English“ writer herself), heralding her as a new writer. Kavan had already written 15 books by then. And in that same year she died from an overdose of heroin at the age of 67. Heroin, a habit she somehow controlled during the last 30 years of her life, rendering it into art, despite two confinements in mental institutions and attempts at suicide. And far from one’s usual concept of ”dope fiend,“ Kavan was a woman of exquisite class.

Early on she was recognized by both Lawrence Durrell, who said she belonged ”to the great subjective-feminist tradition of Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes,“ and Anais Nin, who wrote to her and praised her work highly.

Kavan is known best of ail in England, but all through Europe and Japan as well. Her work has been translated into Spanish, Italian, Danish, Dutch and French. In this country, in 1975, Knopf published an excellent collection of her stories, Julia and the Bazooka, yet she continues to remain relatively unknown here.

With the reissue of both Asylum and Sleep by a new publisher, Michael Kesend, who is determined to see Kavan receives the readership she deserves, one would .hope Kavan’s time is now.

She is a dark visionary of the nlghtscapes within us all. Her metaphors are ice and mirror and windows, ”official adviser,“ house, jungle garden, the stark calligraphy of dreams where terror, death and confinement are held in cold light for us to see what we indeed know: ”By what judgment am I judged? What is the accusation against me? Am I to be accused of my own betrayal?“

This from Sleep Has His House (1948), an extraordinary piece of work, real/surreal, in which she captures her own dark childhood, haunted by the memory of a mother who could not love her, in the image of house and dream, and the revelation of night, her lifeline: “It is night; and there is nothing false here. Night Is reliable. Night does not dazzle us with treacherous fires…”

These books are both masterworks. Separate. Unique. I could not choose one over the other. Asylum Piece (1940) reveals an institution’s control of interior lives in a prose so heightened yet matter-of-fact, that we begin to question the subtle tyranny of our own everyday lives.

I know of few stories in the English language that so effectively capture the restriction, hopelessness, loss of identity, than Kavan’s story ”Asylum III,“ in which an ordinary man, obviously confused and insecure, who seemingly possesses all kinds of freedom within and outside the institution, awaits word from his partner for release. In the inmate’s attempt to contact the partner once again, by telegram, he visits the post office, carefully writes the message to be telegraphed, hands it to the postmaster, and departs.

”Then, in a methodical way, he (the postmaster) sets about tearing the form into small pieces, until nothing is left but a handful of shreds which he negligently tosses out of the open window. With greedy eyes, the hens come rushing on their strong, scaly legs, pouncing the torn fragments. But immediately discovering that the paper scraps are inedible, they abandon them in disgust and resume their unprofitable pecking In the hard earth.“

This is Anna,Kavan, once a ”writer’s writer.“ And that is her message for us all.

Norbert Blei is author of The Hour of the Sunshine Now and The Second Novel.

[Originally published in the Chicago Sun Times, Books, May 18, 1980}