大象传媒

As a teenager growing up in Teesside, addiction specialist Professor Sally Marlow discovered the library in Stockton-on-Tees and working her way through the titles began to discover books she designated 鈥渟trange.鈥� In her twenties she discovered Anna Kavan鈥檚 鈥淎sylum Piece,鈥� and despite having very different life experiences, Anna鈥檚 descriptions of mental distress and despair resonated deeply.

Anna Kavan had a traumatic childhood, abusive relationships, spent time in psychiatric institutions and used heroin for decades. She also wrote experimental fiction and painted furiously. She was a writer鈥檚 writer, fans included Anais Nin, J.G.Ballard. Sally wants to know who Anna was and why did she use heroin? Anna is unusual, women who use heroin are rare, about one woman for every 10 men.

Clues exist in Julia and the Bazooka published after Anna鈥檚 death, the title story tells of Julia who has a kind doctor who sanctions her drug use. In real life Anna was legally prescribed heroin by her psychiatrist Dr Carl Theodor Bluth. Between 1926 and 1968 the Departmental Committee on Morphine and Heroin Addiction recommended that medical professionals in the UK could prescribe heroin or morphine to those addicted to it if it would enable the patients to lead useful lives, and created a Home Office register. Anna was one of the comparatively few people on it. Heroin was considered a medical problem not a criminal problem and as a registered heroin user Anna was spared some of the dangers linked to criminal distribution.

Her relationship to Dr Bluth was platonic but extraordinarily close, and she was distraught when he died. She painted him in a painting now held at the Museum of the Mind which Sally visits. But even with Dr Bluth鈥檚 prescriptions she died younger than she should have done of heart failure and suffered enormous painful abscesses on her legs, the result of infected injection sites.

As Sally tries to piece together her life she is left with an overwhelming sense of fragments, and the dream-like quality of Anna鈥檚 writing adds to the difficulty of getting beyond glimpses of reality. But also despite her addiction Anna produced phenomenal literature.

Presented by Professor Sally Marlow
Produced by Geraldine Fitzgerald
A TellTale Industries Ltd production