Julia and the Bazooka by Anna Kavan

First published: 1970

Type of plot: Psychological

Time of work: 1910-1940

Locale: London, England

Principal Characters:

• Julia, an adventurous young woman and heroin addict
• Her bridegroom, "a young man with kinky brown hair"
• The tennis professional, who first introduces Julia to drugs
• A doctor, who helps Julia get her heroin

The Story

"Julia and the Bazooka" is the story of a young girl who grows up to become a heroin addict, but who dies, not because of her addiction, but as a victim of World War II. The story is narrated in a nonsequential manner and overlaps and doubles back on itself, but even in its convoluted form, it is a simple and powerful narrative.

The story begins directly enough—"Julia is a little girl with long straight hair and big eyes"—but the chronological order is soon abandoned and past and present mix together without temporal value, and readers must piece together the chronology themselves. Rearranging the elements of the story into sequence, the narrative of Julia's life would look roughly like this: She has never known her father, and "her personality has been damaged by no love in childhood so that she can't make contact with people or feel at home in the world." As a child she loves flowers, but she has "sad" eyes and does not share the "enthusiasm for living" of her classmates. "She feels cut off from people. She is afraid of the world."

Drugs change all that. A tennis professional introduces Julia to heroin—or at least, he gives her a syringe to "improve her game"—and with her "bazooka," as the tennis professional jokingly calls the drug apparatus, she wins a tournament and a silver cup. By the time she gets married to "a young man with kinky brown hair" (and there is no way of telling the exact distance between events), the syringe has a permanent place in her purse. "Now Julia's eyes are not at all sad," and "she no longer feels frightened or cut off now that she has the syringe."

Julia lives for twenty years as a heroin addict, and the reader catches glimpses or fragments of her life. She travels "with her bridegroom in the high mountains through fields of flowers." Later she drives "anything, racing cars, heavy lorries. . . . Julia always laughs at danger. Nothing can frighten her while she has the syringe." Still later, she befriends a doctor, "understanding and kind like the father she has imagined but never known," who sees that the syringe "has not done Julia any great harm" and who tells her "'you'd be far worse off without it.'" Indeed, the narrator explains, "Without it she could not lead a normal existence, her life would be a shambles, but with its support she is conscientious and energetic, intelligent, friendly."

It is suddenly wartime. Julia has a rooftop garden—in London? space is as vague here as time—and as the bombs are falling, "Julia leaves the roof and steps on to the staircase, which is not there." She is covered by a blanket and dies alone, although she appears to retain consciousness for some time and to continue to recognize people. At the same time, her bridegroom of years before is killed in a battle at sea and dies because of the selfishness of another.

The last part of the story is even more dreamlike, as Julia passes through cold and then heat, pursuing the specter of death. She is cremated; her ashes are put in her silver tennis trophy and placed in a niche in a wall by a winter sea "the colour of pumice." There are no flowers. "There is no more Julia anywhere. Where she was there is only nothing."