Lee Weinstein: Fiction, Heroin, and Kavan

The prolific British writer Anna Kavan is best-known among science fiction readers for her final novel, Ice, published a year before her death in 1968 at age 67. Ice’s frozen post-apocalyptic world is the most explicitly science-fictional of her works, but its imagery was not new in her work. In her review of David Callard’s biography of Anna Kavan, The Case of Anna Kavan, Elizabeth Young says that

heroin was the center of [Kavan’s] existence; ... and almost all of her later work charts the process of addiction in an extraordinarily pure and crystalline form using again and again images—of cold, of ice, of forbidding landscapes, lowering castles, and forbidding watchers—in a manner that should be familiar to us from any study of the great addict writers of the Romantic period. (22–23)

Cover to David Callard’s The Case of Anna Kavan, 
London: Peter Owen, 1992

Callard himself vehemently objected to Young’s review and to the idea that Kavan’s writing was a product of her addiction. He said that “freezing horror” is not the “central image of heroin” and that her work was influenced more by her depression and by the works of Kafka and Freud. (Callard, Letters)

Certainly, as with other addict authors, there are explicit references to heroin addiction in some of her fiction, such as the titular story in her collection Julia and the Bazooka. Her story “Fog” in the same collection is a chilling description of drug-induced euphoria in a speeding car and “injected tranquility” resulting in a fatal accident. But how much of what she did in her novel Ice is deliberate and how much is drug-influenced? Do opiates affect creativity? If so, what exactly are the effects of opiates on the imagination and on creativity?

A small number of studies have been done on the effects of opium on writing, but these have specifically looked at writers of the Romantic era when opium was legal and commonly used, usually in the form of laudanum, a solution of opium in alcohol.

M.H. Abrams, in The Milk of Paradise: The Effect of Opium Visions on the Works of De Quincey, Crabbe, Francis Thompson, and Coleridge, argues that opium addicts wrote as if they were in a “dream world of their own, ‘as different from this as Mars may be’” (qtd in Hayter 13). Elizabeth Schneider, in Coleridge, Opium and Kubla Khan, focused specifically on Coleridge and in particular on his poem “Kubla Khan.” In an effort to show that Coleridge did not dream “Kubla Khan” as he had claimed, she researched medical sources on the psychological effects of opium and concluded that opiate addicts did not generally have the kaleidoscopic imagery, visions, or fantastic dreams traditionally associated with the drug. She further argued that people of unstable psychological makeup are more likely to become opiate addicts; that people who had visions and hallucinations were psychologically unstable to begin with (35). It should be noted that the medical studies she consulted did not involve writers.

Alethea Hayter, in Opium and the Romantic Imagination, took a stance somewhere between these two views. After reviewing the studies by Abrams and Schneider and then looking in detail at the work of eight Romantic-era writers, she concluded that opium addiction does have an effect on writing but doesn’t thrust the writers into another world as Abrams had described. Rather, it acts on the raw material in the writer’s past experiences, influencing the process by which the writer draws on them and affecting the final product. She said, “The action of opium may unbare some of the semi-conscious processes by which literature begins to be written” (334).

Hayter found certain common threads in the writings of the eight Romantic writers: De Quincey, Crabbe, Thompson, Poe, Collins, Coleridge, Keats, and Baudelaire. One is the distortion of time and space, something also noted by other researchers. The imagery of many of these writers contains references to vast limitless spaces with a paradoxical sense of claustrophobia. Hayter also noted a sense of moments stretching into eons, feelings of isolation and persecution, and a sense of distancing.

In his 1957 paper, “Opium Addiction and English Literature,” of which Hayter was evidently unaware, Douglas Hubble, MD, looks at Crabbe, Coleridge, De Quincey, and Thompson and says they did not find inspiration in opium. His paper is principally an argument against the use of opium by writers, but he admits that their writings were affected by opium, notably in the distortions of time and space, such as the idea of a single night lasting for eons and vast, limitless spaces.

In 1968, pathologist and writer William Ober, MD, published “Drowsed with the Fume of Poppies” in the Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine around the same time as Hayter’s book. His views support Hayter’s rather than Schneider’s. He outlines the effects of opium and other drugs on Crabbe and Thompson but concentrates on Keats and his “Ode to a Nightingale.”

He does admit that drug-induced hallucinations may be culturally determined and may be of relatively recent origin. He says that such hallucinations tend to have many features in common regardless of what the drug is and that “disorientation in time and space is common ... time and space themselves become distorted, usually expanded and apparently infinite” (863).

He also mentions visual hallucinations, which may vary from intensification of perception to scintillating bright light to recognizable images. The person may experience synesthesia. Finally, he talks about how mild doses of opium may cause blunting of the sensory faculties and depersonalization while high dosages may cause dreams of terror with persecution and flight.

He says that single isolated therapeutic dosages can produce transient dreamlike states and mild to moderate hallucinatory effect.

He does say, as Schneider did, that addiction is rare in those with strong, well-structured personalities and common in those with poorly socialized, dependent personalities (864).

None of these researchers, by their own admission, had ever tried opium themselves.

Steven Martin, who is not a researcher, relates his firsthand experience with smoking opium and addiction to it in his memoir, Opium Fiend. He describes in detail the subjective experience of opium addiction. He talks about how he gradually became alienated from the world around him and withdrew into his own thoughts as he become more deeply addicted:

I spent every night like a pasha on a divan, holding court before the friends, relatives, and acquaintances who crowded my imagination. They pushed in for a look, asking questions that allowed me to ramble on about my favorite subject for hours. My imaginary guests were not limited to people I actually knew....

My interests had become so narrow and the depth of my knowledge so great that, like a lonely soul at the bottom of a mineshaft, only by resorting to my imagination could I enjoy some like-minded conversation. (272–73)

He describes the feelings of security engendered by the drug:

[M]y sense of well-being was more all-encompassing than before. I felt safe and warm and looked-after ... as long as I smoked opium I was continuously enveloped in this protective blanket of contentment. (274).

His observations are concordant in many ways with the observations of the researchers listed above. He talks about loss of time sense, loss of interest in the people around him, and gradual immersion in an internal world of his own making. He also says, as Schneider had previously suggested, that the drug was not hallucinatory (120). “The so-called opium dreams—at least in the primary stages of use—are not waking dreams or hallucinations,” but rather “an irrational sense of optimism” (121).

These studies of the effects on writers have focused exclusively on the Romantic era and their drug of choice, laudanum. There seem to have been none on addiction in modern-day writers such as Anna Kavan or her contemporaries such as William S. Burroughs and Alexander Trocchi, who were all notably addicted to heroin, a derivative of morphine originally synthesized as a possible treatment for opium addiction.

Opium contains a mixture of opiates including morphine. Heroin is a pure chemical derivative of the morphine molecule and is a much stronger drug.

Having looked at the general effects of opiates on creativity, we can now look at the career of Anna Kavan.

Kavan destroyed most of her letters and diaries, and relatively little is known about her life. We do know that she became addicted in 1926, likely as self-medication for the depression she is known to have suffered. She was first administered the drug by a nurse for her illness and then went to the black market to continue taking it. A Charmed Circle (1929) and her subsequent five novels, which were written under her first married name, Helen Ferguson, are usually described as “conventional, “ although they are not quite as conventional as they might first appear. Callard notes that although her first six novels were not stylistically experimental, they were “shot through with a sense of darkness and oppression which foreshadows much of Anna Kavan’s work” (54–55).

Her third novel, Let Me Alone (1930), and her fourth, A Stranger Still (1935), feature the protagonist Anna Kavan, which Helen later adopted as her own name.

In 1937, after the publication of her sixth novel, Rich Get Rich, she suffered a severe mental breakdown and was hospitalized. After her recovery in 1938, she reinvented herself as Anna Kavan, and her writing became more Kafkaesque and subjective, beginning with Asylum Piece (1940), a collection of autobiographical sketches, many relating to her stay in the asylum.

Asylum Piece got good critical reviews, but the follow-up, House of Sleep (1947, vt Sleep Has His House), was a commercial failure, and for A Scarcity of Love (1956) she had to resort to a vanity press. The press went under, and most of the copies were pulped.

After a hiatus of several years she returned to commerical publication with the strongly Kafkaesque Eagle’s Nest (1957) followed by the story collection, A Bright Green Field (1958).

Who Are You? (1963) was a reasonably successful novel based on the failure of her first marriage, but she finally hit her stride and found her audience with her final novel, Ice, which was published a couple of months after her death in 1968. It incorporates many of the themes seen in her earlier work such as depersonalization, cold, and persecution.

Although she was deliberately choosing these themes, the effects of her addiction may have swayed her toward them, as Hayter suggested for Romantic-era writers, who were also attracted to the themes of persecution and depersonalization.

She was largely insulated from the drug underground that Burroughs and Trocchi inhabited, being a British citizen and being supplied with the drug legally by means of a prescription from her psychiatrist. It was not until his death and toward the end of her own life that she was forced to attend a clinic for addicts. Unlike Burroughs and Trocchi, she didn’t dwell on the mechanics of her addiction. “She and Burroughs had only in common that they both had private incomes and vast family wealth to fall back on” (Callard,158).

To determine the effects of heroin on Kavan’s work, the logical first step would be to compare her early, pre-addiction work to her later writings composed under the influence. Unfortunately, this is not possible. When Kavan began writing, she had already been using heroin for several years. According to Callard, “by 1926 she was already habituated, if not addicted” (31). Her first novel, A Charmed Circle, was published several years later in 1929. Gornick has suggested that heroin heightened and turned her vision inward, thus enabling her to write. Her resulting images grew “more brilliant, more sustained, more metaphoric” (49).

While we can’t compare her pre- and post-addiction work, we can get an idea of the type of changes involved by comparing the pre- and post- addiction work of other writers for whom we do have the materials available. We can look at two writers who became addicted after establishing themselves as successful writers. The first is the nineteenth-century author Wilkie Collins, who became addicted to laudanum approximately midway through his writing career. The second is the twentieth-century Scottish author Alexander Trocchi, whose two major novels, Young Adam and Cain’s Book, were written before and after he became addicted to heroin, respectively.

Wilkie Collins became addicted circa 1862, and there is a generous sampling of his work both before and after. Hayter talks at length about how his early novels contain very painterly descriptions of landscapes, while his post-1862 works contain imagery which is more subjective and not “paintable,” as she puts it (266).

His pre-addiction story “Mad Monckton” (1852), for example, has some very atmospheric scenes, including one where the protagonist finds an isolated monastery.

It was a dark, low, sinister-looking place.... Moss clustered thick in every crevice of the heavy, scowling wall that surrounded the convent. Long, lank weeds grew out of the fissures of the roof and parapet, and drooping far downward, waved wearily in and out of the barred dormitory windows. (59)

This sort of atmospheric description is precisely what is lacking in The Moonstone (1868), written after several years of addiction. It is long and elaborately plotted, but although it has scenes set in India, London, and an English country house, it conveys almost no sense of place. It also contains an important plot element relating to a character’s indulgence in opium. The same lack of description applies to his later novel The Haunted Hotel (1878), which is set in England and in Venice. The only striking image in the latter book is that of a ghostly head, likely inspired by Collins’s own hallucinations.

Collins’s biographer, Kenneth Robinson, notes there was a steady decline in the quality of his later books. He says, “the mechanism [became] progressively more obtrusive, the characters more commonplace, the situations more repetitive, the coincidences more frequent and far-fetched” (329–330). He rules out overproduction and illness as factors and settles on Collins’s opium addiction as the cause.

Alexander Trocchi also offers some parallels. His first novel, Young Adam, completed in 1952 but published two years later, was written largely or completely before he began experimenting with drugs. His second notable novel (and his last), Cain’s Book (1960), was written under the influence of heroin and, like the novels of William S. Burroughs, is largely about drug addiction.

Young Adam is an existentialist novel about a man who works on a barge and is responsible for the accidental death of an ex-girlfriend, allowing an innocent man to take the blame. Meanwhile, he has an affair with the barge captain’s wife.

It is atmospheric in places. A good example is near the beginning, where he finds a dead woman floating in the canal:

She was like some beautiful white water-fungus, a strange shining thing come up from the depths, and her limbs and her flesh had the ripeness and maturity of a large mushroom. But it was her hair more than anything; it stranded away from the head like long grasses. (2)

And this from later on:

It was good to be standing there at the wheel with the flat green and brown fields stretching on either side as far as the horizon. At that point, the landscape was almost treeless and the view across the fields was uninterrupted. The sun was strong and the yellow-black canal water reacted to it, glowing behind us as it peeled off the bilges in long, black flakes. (108)

Cain’s Book does not have even a minimal plot, simply recounting incidents in the life of a barge captain who is a heroin addict. It reads like a rather disjointed memoir. Unlike his first novel, there are places where Trocchi segues into flashback sequences in a rather hallucinatory manner, similar to the way Kavan does in Ice. There are scenes set in the present in New York and in the past in Scotland with little to distinguish them except for the characters. The most vivid descriptions in it are of the process of injecting the heroin.

In both Collins’s work and Trocchi’s, the effect of opiate addiction seems to be consistent with Hayter’s interpretation that these are the products of minds which have been turned inward. There is less sense of place and less visual description of surroundings because they have lost their importance to the author, who is more concerned with the goings-on in the characters’ minds. This is also consistent with Martin’s first-hand description of becoming addicted to opium.

Another writer who might shed some light on the subject is William S. Burroughs. Burroughs became addicted to heroin in 1944. Like Kavan and unlike Collins, he had done little writing to speak of before becoming an addict. It is impossible to know what his writing would have been like had he never become addicted. But his work can be compared to Kavan’s for salient similarities.

Burroughs’s first serious work was Junkie (1953), a semi-autobiographical account of his addiction, for which he began writing notes in 1950. At that point, he had been addicted for about five years.

It can be described as a fictionalized memoir like Cain’s Book although it is not similarly disjointed. The protagonist, Bill Lee, roams through the seamy underbellies of New York; Lexington, Kentucky; New Orleans; and Mexico.

In Junkie as in Collins’s later works and in Cain’s Book, there is little sense of place. The various characters and their lifestyles are vividly described, but as the protagonist travels from place to place, there is no sense of different settings. The entire novel could just as well have been set in New York City. One reviewer noted that although it is told in the first person, we never get to know the protagonist. His motivations remain blank. This can be seen in some of Kavan’s work as well.

The later works of Burroughs and Kavan tend to be more disjointed in a way that Collins’s work never did. Also, Burroughs was on and off heroin after Junkie and experimented with other drugs as well. He wrote Naked Lunch (1959) largely under the influence of Eukodol (oxycodone), an opioid related to codeine. But Collins took laudanum, a tincture of opium, and as Martin says, “Alcohol is a poor delivery system for the narcotic—the enervating effects of liquor dull the energizing qualities of opium” (89). Another difference, again, is that heroin is far stronger than opium.

The writings of Kavan and Burroughs appear at first glance to have little in common. He wrote of the seamy underworld of drug culture in Junkie and Queer while she, as Helen Ferguson, wrote of dysfunctional families and failed marriages.

Yet, in their later writings they both began to write increasingly subjective fiction veering into fantasy, Kavan with such internal psychological stories as Asylum Piece (1940) and Burroughs with Naked Lunch and Nova Express (1964).

It can also be said that their writings are dreamlike and approach surrealism. The surrealists tried to tap into the unconscious directly by use of such tools as dreams and automatic writing. Burroughs has said that Naked Lunch wrote itself. L. Timmel Duchamp said of Kavan that “Her novel, Sleep Has His House (1947), for instance, is a gorgeous piece of surrealist writing.”

It is interesting to compare their writings against the conclusions of Hayter and Ober. Like Junkie, Let Me Alone is a fictionalized, autobiographical work, in the latter case about Kavan’s disastrous first marriage.

It can be described as hallucinatory. The protagonist, Anna Kavan, whose name the author eventually took, is perpetually plagued by a sense of unreality. There is a sense of isolation even as the heroine travels from place to place.

As in Junkie, the protagonist travels to a number of different locations. She starts in her parents’ home in the Eastern Pyrenees; is sent to a girls’ boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland, for an extended period; is taken in by her aunt in Wycombe, and finally travels to Burma. Again, there is little sense of movement or place, but there is a cast of vivid characters. There is also a sense of claustrophobia and entrapment throughout. Despite the changes in location, she is restricted in her movements by the school, her aunt, and finally her husband. One reviewer noted that we never get to know what the protagonist is feeling or what she’s really about. She describes herself as being in a fog or dreamlike state much of the time.

In a typical passage, Kavan writes:

Anna was too indifferent to care. A vast indifference had settled on her like a doom. She went about calm and vague and indifferent. Vaguely, she was sorry that Findlay had gone. Vaguely, she was aware of a sense of humiliation, of bitter loneliness: the absolute loneliness of her existence. (234)

This sense of removal from her surroundings is nowhere as evident as in her story “Fog,” a nightmarish, first-person tale in which a woman in an opiate-induced mental fog runs down a pedestrian on a lonely road, possibly an autobiographical account. She describes the people crossing the road as reminiscent of “... Japanese dragon-masks and also of the subhuman nightmare mask-faces in some of Ensor’s paintings.” She is about to remove her foot from the accelerator and then thinks, “Why? They weren’t real. None of this was real. I wasn’t really here so they couldn’t be either” (29).

Similarly, the description of the state of mind engendered by opium smoking as given by Martin, a recovered opium addict, is: “... a sense of detached observation that feels to the smoker like the wisdom of a sage who sits on a mountain on high.” He quotes Jean Cocteau as saying that if “... life is an express train speeding toward a dark tunnel that is death, to smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving” (174).

Anna Kavan’s Ice (Penguin Classics 50th anniversary edition, 2017)

We can now look again at the comment about Ice by Callard in the light of what these other writers and researchers have said.

Callard had named Kafka as a major influence on Kavan’s writings. The influence of Kafka can certainly be seen in the namelessness of the characters and places in Ice and the political situation depicted. However, Kafka’s fiction is not disjointed. While the mood is often dreamlike, it is consistent, and the narrative is straightforward. In Ice, on the other hand, the narrative shifts from reality to hallucination and back again, and in places it is not clear at first what is actually occurring and what the narrator is imagining.

In this sequence near the beginning, the narrator is recalling an episode with the girl he is pursuing:

Ice had already engulfed the forest, the last ranks of the trees were splintering. Her silver hair touched my mouth, she was leaning against me. Then I lost her; my hands could not find her again. A snapped-off tree trunk was dancing high in the sky, hurled up hundreds of feet by the impact of the ice. There was a flash, everything was shaken. My suitcase was lying open, half-packed, on the bed. (25)

He is suddenly, in mid-paragraph, back in his hotel room. This sort of disjointed shifting can also be seen in Cain’s Book. For example, at one point the narrator sees a man urinating in a New York alley, hallucinates a flash of silver, and then flashes back to a man he saw leaving an alley in Scotland years earlier. There is a flash of silver in the man’s hand. A page later, with a small break, he is back in New York with his girlfriend in her apartment (44–45).

The influences of Freud on Ice, suggested by Callard in Freud’s elevation of the dream-life as “the royal road to the Unconscious,” are subtle and difficult to separate from Kafka’s influence, Kafka himself having been influenced by Freud. Kafka often made use of dreams and dream-imagery in his stories. Kavan did this extensively and explicitly in her House of Sleep but not as explicitly in her later works. Ice does have the hallucinatory feel of a dream, but as we have seen, so do the works of other opiate-addicted writers.

Kavan was also a depressive, as Callard notes. The effects of depression on writing haven’t been thoroughly studied, but one effect that has been found is an increased amount of cognitive distortion; that is, dichotomous thinking—black or white, good or bad, with the emphasis on the bad.

There are references to ice and cold throughout Kavan’s work, but this is probably more a reflection of her deliberate use of this sort of imagery because of its commonly used connotation in connection with heroin. Neither Trocchi nor Burroughs used such imagery, nor did Collins.

J.G. Ballard’s novel The Crystal World provides an interesting perspective on Ice. The books are about similar catastrophes enveloping the world. In Ice, the world is faced with encroaching glaciers and in The Crystal World with a strange process of crystallization affecting living organisms. Both have protagonists who have less concern for the approaching catastrophe than for their interpersonal concerns, in both cases trying to find and rescue loved ones. But Ballard, who was not an addict and did not use opiates, created a book that is a tour de force of beautiful imagery—the crystallized plants and flowers are an artistic vision.

The long arc of trees hanging over the water seemed to drop and glitter with myriads of prisms, the trunks and branches sheathed by bars of yellow and carmine light that bled away across the surface of the water, as if the whole scene were being reproduced by some over-active Technicolor process. (61)

This can be visualized easily because the descriptions are objective and precise.

Here is a description from an eerily similar passage in Ice:

Instead of the darkness, she faced a tremendous sky-conflagration, an incredible glacial dream-scene. Cold corruscations of rainbow fire pulsed overhead, shot through by shafts of pure incandescence thrown out by mountains of solid ice towering all around. Closer, the trees round the house, sheathed in ice, dipped and sparkled with weird prismatic jewels, reflecting the vivid changing cascades above. (36)

Although similar, this is more subjective a description, less precise and visual as in the later works of Collins, capturing a feeling more than a specific image.

Ballard was an admirer of Kavan’s work (Reed, 183), but The Crystal World was published a year before Ice.

Another difference is that Sanders, the protagonist in Ballard’s book, has clearer goals. He initially wants to meet up with and help his friends. Later, he wants to escape from the crystallization phenomenon. Finally, he decides to return and give himself up to it.

In Ice, the unnamed protagonist simply pursues and loses the woman he is seeking a number of times before escaping with her into the dying, freezing world.

Hayter sums up by saying she found no consistent, recognizable pattern caused by opiates in the writers she studied, noting that the drug could only act on what was in the writer’s mind, and the Romantic-era writers she was studying all had very different lives and experiences.

This concurs with the statement famously made by Thomas De Quincey in the “Introductory Notice” to his Suspiria de Profundis, the sequel to his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. If a man “whose talk is of oxen” should become an opium eater, the probability is that (if he is not too dull to dream at all) he will dream about oxen.

Nonetheless, Hayter concludes that laudanum had the effect on writers of illuminating hidden corners, “secret hiding places” that resided in their own memories (334).

Thus Callard is correct in saying that the “freezing horror” imagery throughout Kavan’s work is not pathognomonic of heroin addiction in general. However, it evidently had a personal meaning to Kavan.

Hayter also notes that opium induces a state of detachment, an absence of sympathy that is ultimately detrimental to the writer. (This can be seen in the memoir by Martin as well.) In the writers she studied such as Poe, Coleridge, and Collins, she believes they fought this sense of apathy by going to the other extreme by indulging in “extremes of violence, gruesomeness, insanity [and] extremes of fear.” It also, because of the sense of detachment, makes the writer feel himself to be a pariah. Normal features of landscapes are blotted out while solitary figures, cliffs, castles, and stagnant pools are highlighted.

These features she describes can be seen clearly in the works of our later heroin-addicted writers. The protagonist of Naked Lunch as he wanders through the Interzone, the protagonist of Cain’s Book, and the protagonist of Ice all have this in common: they are all pariahs.

There is also less emphasis on the external and more on the internal as these authors withdrew from reality into a world of their own thoughts. It is not a hallucinatory world but one removed from the objective one.

A tendency toward disjointedness can be seen in the works of writers addicted to heroin, which is not seen in the Romantic era laudanum addicts, possibly because of heroin’s greater potency and possibly because modern literary standards were more accepting of such stylistic experiments, or a combination of both. Cohesiveness of plot has become less important to these writers, perhaps due to their drug-induced state of detachment.

Accordingly, Ice is constructed as a series of repetitious set-pieces in which time and place cease to have much meaning. At the conclusion, Kavan writes, as the protagonist and the girl escape into the encroaching ice that dooms the world, “Although I knew there was no escape from the ice, from the ever-diminishing remnant of time that encapsuled us, I made the most of the minutes. The miles and minutes flew past” (207).

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Lee Weinstein lives in Philadelphia.

Works Cited

Abrams, M.H. The Milk of Paradise: The Effect of Opium Visions on the Works of De Quincey, Crabbe, Francis Thompson, and Coleridge. (c. 1934) New York: Octagon Books, 1971.

Ballard, J.G. The Crystal World. New York: Berkley Medallion 1967.

Burroughs, William S. Junkie. New York: Penguin 1953.

——. Naked Lunch. New York: Grove Press, 1966.

Callard, David. The Case of Anna Kavan: A Biography. London: Peter Owen, Publishers, 1992.

——. “Letters.” London Review of Books 15.6 (1993).

Collins, Wilkie. The Complete Shorter Fiction. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1995.

De Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings. New York: New American Library, 1966.

Duchamp, L. Timmel. “What’s the Story: Reading Anna Kavan’s Ice.” Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet 14 (June 6, 2001).

Gornick, Vivian. “The Great Depression of Anna Kavan.” Village Voice 26.49 (December 2–8, 1981).

Hayter, Alethea. Opium and the Romantic Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968.

Hubble, Douglas, MD. “Opium Addiction and English Literature.” Medical History 1957 October; 1.4 (1957).

Kavan, Anna. Ice. New York: Popular Library, 1967.

——. Julia and the Bazooka. New York: Norton and Co, 1970.

——. Let Me Alone (1930). New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1995.

——. Sleep Has His House (aka The House of Sleep). Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1947.

Martin, Steven. Opium Fiend: A 21st Century Slave to a 19th Century Addiction. New York: Villard Books, 2012.

Ober, William, MD. “Drowsed with the Fume of Poppies: Opium and John Keats.” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine. 44.78 (July 1968).

Reed, Jeremy. A Stranger on Earth: The Life and Work of Anna Kavan. London: Peter Owen Publishers, 2006.

Robinson, Kenneth. Wilkie Collins: A Biography. New York: Macmillan, 1952.

Schneider, Elizabeth W. Coleridge, Opium, and Kubla Khan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953.

Trocchi, Alexander. Cain’s Book (1960). New York: Grove Press, 1993.

——. Young Adam (1954). Edinburgh: Rebel Inc., 1996.

Young, Elizabeth. “Dependencies.” London Review of Books 15.4 (25 February 1993).