Armed With Madness

“The effect of Mary Butts’ unretouched negatives of raw nerves is quietly, darkly affecting,” wrote the American poet Marianne Moore in 1933, seeking to convey her appreciation of a writer whose novels stood somewhat apart in the 1920s and 1930s; as they still do, not easily available and largely unread. Ashe of Rings (1925), Armed With Madness (1928) and Death of Felicity Taverner (1932), all of diem set mainly in the Dorset countryside Butts so passionately cherished, offered a style and a vision that met the concerns of her age with a disturbingly particular voice. Of the three, Armed With Madness is doubtless the most interesting and original achievement, not least because it is less firmly contained than the others, less driven by a set of ideas that the development of the narrative then confirms. Rather, it takes us immediately and disconcertingly into an edgy world where “nothing [goes on] happening” and “noises let through silence”, where the sheer style of the writing holds moments of illumination, flashes of beauty, which at the same time reveal an underlying disquiet. “There is trouble about. The kind that comes with brightness,” says Ross to Scylla early in the novel: “Can you see that?” That indeed is what Scylla and the reader will see, as the novel catches them up in a game which brings with it a great deal that is raw and dark. Butts often quoted a line from an Elizabethan poem by Thomas Nashe, written “In Time of Pestilence”: “Brightness falls from the air.” Her world too is one of sickness, of “dis-ease” (the term used by her and her characters): brightness is falling, meanings are uncertain, and the moments of illumination “always take a turn for the worse”.

Butts was born in Parkstone in Dorset in 1890 to a retired army officer and his much younger wife. The family house, Salterns, and the countryside surrounding it gave her childhood a magical sense of place to which her writings return. Thanks to her father and the Butts lineage, in which she took much pride, her childhood was also “saturated with the arts”, as she put it in her autobiographical memoir, The Crystal Cabinet (1937). Her great-grandfather, Thomas Butts, had been a patron and friend of William Blake, whose pictures filled a room of the house (the title of her memoir is from a poem by Blake). The death of her father when she was fourteen (as if “a strong, small, gold sun had set”) left her and her four-year-old brother Tony in the hands of their mother, towards whom Butts felt little more than hatred, regarding her as the representative of a middle-class philistinism, incapable of anything other than a commercial response to the land and the art that Mary loved (her mother sold both Salterns and the Blakes). She was sent to finish her education at a school in St Andrews in Scotland and from there went on to Westfield College, London. At Westfield, she studied Latin and Greek, rebelled against conventions, wrote Sapphic poetry and was described by the Principal as a “mad idiot” (the Dostoievskian ring of that would have pleased her). Required to leave when it was discovered that she and a Westfield mistress for whom she had a passion had gone off to the Derby together, she enrolled in social studies courses at the London School of Economics and at the start of the war began working in the East End for the London County Council and then for the National Council of Civil Liberties, particularly concerned at the time with the rights of conscientious objectors. In the last years of the war she was torn between two lovers: Eleanor Rogers, with whom she lived and about whom little is known, and John Rodker, a poet and publisher, imprisoned as a conscientious objector, whom she married in 1918. The couple had a daughter, Camilla, who was left in the care of others, and Butts, who died when her daughter was sixteen, rarely saw her (“motherhood was not Mary Butts’s forte”, as Camilla was to comment). In 1920 she left Rodker for Cecil Maitland, a writer badly affected by his war experiences, and lived with him, mainly in Paris, until their separation in 1925. In France, and indeed throughout her adult life, which was lived to the full with a restless bohemian lawlessness, Butts was a heavy consumer of alcohol, cocaine, heroin, opium and anything else available (in her final years in Cornwall she brewed up poppy heads and knocked back generous quantities of “Champagne Wine Nerve Tonic”, a potent stimulant discovered in a local shop). What relations she had with her mother were bitter, turning largely on matters of money and the Butts inheritance, and those with her brother became equally strained (Tony in 1932 was assuring Virginia Woolf that Mary was a pretentious bad woman: a corrupter of young men who “are always committing suicide”).

Already in London Butts had published poetry and fiction in some of the significant literary reviews of the time (The Little Review, for example, with the support of Ezra Pound). In the Paris of the 1920s she found herself one of a host of English, Irish and American expatriate writers, meeting Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, H.D., Djuna Barnes, Ford Madox Ford and William Carlos Williams, among many others. She also spent periods in Villefranche-sur-Mer, near Nice, where she became close to Jean Cocteau, who was regularly to be found there with his entourage of young men (the “Achilles set”, as Butts called them). It was in Villefranche too that she met and fell in love with the bisexual painter Gabriel Aitken, marrying him in 1930. During this time her writing continued: Speed the Plough and Other Stories was published in 1923 and her first novel, Ashe of Rings, in 1925. Two books followed in 1928: Armed With Madness and Imaginary Letters, the latter a novella, set in Paris, dealing with a woman’s love for a homosexual Russian émigré and drawing directly, as does so much of Butts’s work, on biographical material. At the beginning of the 1930s she and Aitken moved back to England, finally settling in Sennen Cove on the Cornish coast, where Butts lived for the rest of her life; alone from 1935, when Aitken left her after a series of homosexual affairs. During these Cornish years, she published Death of Felicity Taverner (1932), a novel that picks up characters and setting from Armed With Madness, followed by two historical novels, The Macedonian (1933) and Scenes from the Life of Cleopatra (1935). The latter, together with the many reviews and short articles she contributed to newspapers and magazines, gave her a somewhat wider readership. There was a further collection of stories, Several Occasions (1932), and two pamphlets on the ills of contemporary civilization, Traps for Unbelievers and Warning to Hikers (both 1932). A final collection of stories was published after her death in 1937 as Last Stories (1938). Her books were subsequently allowed to go out of print and she disappeared from attention, barely mentioned, if at all, in literary histories, though her work was read by certain writers in the United States (notably by poets: Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer among others).

Looking back on her life, Butts regarded it as “a series of initiations”. What is clear is that it embraced a number of positions, with shifts and turns that, while often contradictory in the directions taken, are always sustained by a strong reaction to the age and its discontents and a concern to grasp and urge some other, vital truth of things—the “initiations” are the cardinal experiences that put her in contact with this truth. Her childhood, as she recounts it, was filled with revelations of “the mystery of being”, culminating in an intense experience at Badbury Rings, the Iron Age earthworks near Wimborne Minster, where she felt herself to have been magically “received”, “accepted”, brought to a deep awareness of “power, movement, a pattern” (the words are those of the heroine of Ashe of Rings, a novel in which Butts relies heavily on the Rings experience). Her young womanhood saw her rebellious, sexually adventurous, pacifist, feminist in certain of her views (though she disliked feminism and was no part of any women’s movement) and a self-declared socialist (again, this is a matter of certain attitudes rather than of sustained political commitment). She was a socialist, however, for whom what was essential lay beyond social reality and who was intent on phenomena she felt to be inexplicable by known physical laws; hence her study of magic and the occult (the study included a few primitive months in Sicily with the self-proclaimed magus Aleister Crowley at his “Abbey of Thelema”, taking “astral journeys” to new planes of consciousness; Crowley, for whom women were “dangerous to the career of a magician”, was irritated and unnerved by the independent-minded, wilful Butts, whose involvement with magic never destroyed her streak of tough common sense). Though she moved in modernist literary and artistic circles, she also remained marginal, not easily to be identified with any group or movement, and this not least because of her overriding sense of “an immediate supernatural”, her belief in some spiritual or magical or mystical “thing” that it was the purpose of her writing to approach. She had contacts with Bloomsbury, for example, but remained unassimilable, out of step with its ways of thinking which she could regard only as a sterile attempt to find reductive explanations for forces beyond the grasp of the intellect (reciprocally, Bloomsbury in the person of Virginia Woolf had little time for “the malignant Mary”). Indicatively, Butts herself seems typically to have been drawn to individuals or groups in one way or another excluded or exiled: her attraction to homosexual men is one instance; that to White Russians who had fled the Revolution another (Boris in Armed With Madness combines both). In Cornwall, after “years of disbelief . . . every fashionable kind of scepticism, magic, etc.”, she declared her socialism to have been an error of childhood, issued her pamphlets for the times, and espoused Anglo-Catholicism.

Armed With Madness was written between the end of 1925 and the middle of 1927, much of it during periods spent in Villefranche. It was published in London in June of the following year by Wishart & Company, a new publishing house committed to taking literary works regarded as not commercially attractive by other publishers; in addition to the trade edition, Wishart brought out a special edition of a hundred copies with three drawings by Cocteau (an entry in Virginia Woolf’s diary of August 1927 suggests that she earlier rejected the novel for publication by the Hogarth Press). It received a fair number of reviews, many of them acknowledging its distinctiveness while regretting what was regarded as its difficulty, indeed by some as its madness. Even one of her most loyal supporters, Hugh Ross Williamson, the editor of The Bookman, which published numerous pieces by her, was later to regret that “when in 1928, Mary Butts made her bow to the English public with a novel, it was unfortunately with a work so difficult to understand that it was almost a despair to her admirers”; he acknowledged, however, that it was the epitome of her writing. Marianne Moore stressed the novel’s distinctiveness as Butts’s triumph: “it is a mistake to recount anything she writes without recounting it in her own words.”

In 1925 Butts had read Arthur Waite’s The Holy Grail (1909), a lengthy account of “the deeper suggestions of the Grail legends”, and sketched out an idea for a play turning on the discovery of an object taken as the Grail. By early 1926 she was thinking of a country-house novel to “begin with ‘boys and girls’ finding the Grail cup. At S. Egliston”; or again, as she noted when completing the book: “erroneous find of the importance of the Sanc-grail—reactions in a country home, the Foyot and the Bœuf sur le Toit” (the Foyot is a Parisian hotel, the Bœuf a celebrated Parisian nightclub of the twenties where, in the words of a contemporary observer, “just about everyone but Proust was to be seen”). Probably, Butts was remembering a newspaper story of 1907, mentioned in writings on the Holy Grail by Arthur Machen, concerning the supposed find of the Grail cup—“a saucer-shaped vessel of blue glass, shot with silver”—in a well or stream near Glastonbury (the man who placed the cup there got it from his father, another suggestion from the story which finds its way into Armed With Madness).

The country-house, the “boys and girls”, the “erroneous find”, the Grail—these are central to the novel. The house is, naturally, in Dorset, isolated, near the coast, enclosed by a wood, with two paths running down through it to the sea. Butts had in mind the situation of the house in South Egliston in which she stayed in 1922: “a cottage at the top of the sacred wood under Tyneham cap”. This is Butts’s country, her place: precisely experienced, magically imagined, sacred. The inhabitants of the house are a sister and brother, Scylla and Felix Taverner, an “ash-fair tree-tall young woman” who wants to let things unfold to their utmost possibility, and “a flower-skinned, sapphire-eyed boy”, given to anger and self-pity and fed up with “the baby-brother business”; and a friend, Ross, possessed of a sacred peace, content with the simple satisfaction of his appetites; and two more friends, Clarence and Picus, who come over from their nearby cottage when their well dries up—the former war-scarred and suffering from the age’s lack of faith, the latter a cousin of Scylla’s, “light and winged and holy” but bringing tricks and trouble and pain.[1] The time is the 1920s, not long after the Great War which hangs over the novel; Scylla is of the generation before it; Felix is younger and missed it; Clarence and Picus served in it. All the characters are distant from any specific social life; none works; the men are artistic (Ross and Clarence are accomplished painters, Picus makes wax models of Scylla, Felix manages still lives of poisonous-looking flowers). A few secondary figures make appearances or are heard of—the Taverners’ old nanny, a fisherman, a drunk and obscene shepherd and his wife, the local doctor—but are barely more than novelistic class stereotypes. There is a gramophone and the latest records but not much more of the period specifically enters. Far from the imperatives of a social realism, Butts’s novel is itself enclosed in different concerns, in a different writing.

The novels begins with an arrival, that of the American, Carston, disturbing the peace. What follows is the playing out of a drama in which characters tensely interact until a breaking-point is reached at which they disperse, going their different ways before the novel reassembles them for a violent moment of madness and an ending that brings no resolution, only another arrival, another foreign body; this time a White Russian with no papers, brought over from France in a boat by Felix and landing with him at the foot of their cliff just as Carston is leaving for ever, glad to get away from this “stable and unstable” household. Clarence and Picus bring news of a find: “an odd cup of greenish stone” fished up from the bottom of their well. The cup is just an object, a piece of jade that can be used as an ash-tray, but queer too, a recipient for different identifications: variously declared to be “a victorian finger-bowl”, “the poison-cup of a small rajah”, “an old cup of the sacrament people called ‘big magic’”, or “a Keltic mass cup”. “I can’t tell you anything,” says the wise Vicar consulted as to its identity, who counsels that it be taken back to the well, keeping its silence; “Why couldn’t the thing speak,” Carston frets, “Just once. Dumb was the word for it.” In the movement of the novel, however, the cup is not dumb. It provokes incidents, sets off characters, runs into meanings, reveals. This at one level is quite conventional: the cup is a bit of property owned by Picus’s father that Picus has taken and dropped down the well; perhaps accidentally, more probably with the intention of playing a trick. The cup plunges the novel into Picus’s particular family romance: his love of his mother and his hostility towards his father, whom he believes, or wants to believe, poisoned her with the help of his mistress, “his whore”—a whole Freudian scenario. It also involves the other characters in psychological conflict as they react to the find and then to the cup’s disappearance (Picus hides it); Carston in particular who, at a loss for a role (the constant emphasis is on the staging of a drama), decides that his purpose will be to seduce Scylla but then finds himself caught up in a very different action, a very different novel. For at another level, and most importantly, the cup is more man a psychological prop, a catalyst to bring out private griefs and sexual pains. With it comes the Grail story on which the imagination of the novel turns and with which it seeks to give its vision of dis-ease.

Soon after completing Armed With Madness, Butts noted that it might have been called The Waste Land and that she and T. S. Eliot were “working on a parallel” with the Grail story; save that he was working on its negative—waste land—side, while she was trying to push towards its positive one (the affinities between Butts and Eliot, “the american poet” from whom she quotes in Armed With Madness, were real—significantly, both were led to Anglo-Catholicism—but Butts had nothing of Eliot’s Calvinist heritage and Puritanical temperament; though they intersect at points, their lives and writing are very different). Eliot was to claim regret at having sent readers off “on a wild goose chase after Tarot cards and the Holy Grail”. For Butts, such an attitude would have been impossible: the Grail is no wild goose chase and her use of the story is bound up with her conviction of its fundamental truth, making it a necessary reference for her in a novel dealing with the chaos of the modern world—the Grail story is essential. For all the trickery and all the Freudian bits and pieces surrounding it, the cup in Armed With Madness allows a spiritual adventure, engages the characters in the sacred game. “We live fast,” says Scylla, “and are always having adventures, adventures which are like patterns of another adventure going on somewhere else all the time.” The material fact of the cup is as nothing to the strength of the experience it provokes, the possibility it gives of awareness of that other adventure. “This story as I see it is true Sanc-Grail,” says the old man present at the consultation with the Vicar and continues with what is effectively a summary of Armed With Madness itself: “it seems to me that you are having something like a ritual. A find, illumination, doubt and division, collective and then dispersed.” The idea of ritual is fundamental. For Butts, myths, rites, sacraments, all stem from “universal natural events” and bear on “the health and ill-health of the soul”. This is what the sacred game is about, a game in which we take chances, risk what truth we may discover. Butts was highly critical of Aldous Huxley for his atheism but enthusiastic about Antic Hay (1923) which she thought unique among his novels for its “implicit design, as though there lay behind it, maimed and exceedingly strange, a ritual dance as old as time or man”. Whether or not that is a good description of Antic Hay, it says much of the intended design and effect of Armed With Madness.

“There was something wrong with all of them, or with their world.” Butts’s diagnosis of the ill-health of the age is uncompromising: the modern world is in denial of essential, spiritual truth. Traps for Unbelievers was her account of what she saw as the bankruptcy of religion and the consequences of the disappearance of “the whole complex of emotions we call the religious attitude.” This is the critical condition indicated by Butts through Scylla’s reflections at the start of Armed With Madness: “But everywhere there was a sense of broken continuity, a dis-ease. The end of an age, the beginning of another. Revaluation of values. Phrases that meant something if you could mean them.” The war is a major factor in this sense of broken continuity; as is the alienation from the land of the mass of the population in an urban, industrial society; as is capitalism with its creation of a middle-class culture devoid of any but directly material values. The doctor’s mention of Wagner’s Parsifal (1882) when the characters play “the Freud game” of giving associations prompted by the cup is important here. Though Butts disliked much in Wagner’s treatment of the Grail story, she responded powerfully to the music and perfectly understood his urge to grasp in the mythical images of religion “the concealed deep truth within them” (as he put it in Religion and Art, 1880). Significantly, Wagner could think of the Grail as in contrast to the gold of the Ring, which is deprived of its “ideal content” by Alberich’s theft and the forging of the ring, this reducing it to a “real content” as possession, coveted for the power it gives; the Grail is anti-capital, not material wealth but revelation of divine riches. In Armed With Madness, Picus’s father expounds his rights of ownership and can see the cup only as “Prupperty: prupperty: prupperty”; everything that Butts values is swept aside as mere superstition, which is to say “A disgusting relic of non-understood natural law.”

It is against such reductionism that Butts stands. As Scylla tells Carston: “If the materialist’s universe is true, not a working truth to make bridges with and things, we are a set of blind factors in a machine. And no passion has any validity and no imagination. They are just little tricks of the machine. It either is so, or it isn’t. If you hold that it isn’t, you corrupt your intellect by denying certain facts. If you stick to the facts as we have them, life is a horror and an insult.” There is no question for Butts of an overall refusal of materialist scientific explanations, no denying certain facts, but no question either of allowing such explanations the custody of the truth of the imagination, the emotions, religious experience. She was interested in the new physics, not least for its own challenge to orthodox materialist assumptions, but found nothing in that or the new psychology (“the merry-go-round of the complex and the wish-fulfilment and the conditioned reflex”) that could replace the beliefs shattered by the discoveries of science. Religion, and with religion the health of humankind, depends on recognition of a spiritual whole, the wholeness of a natural world transfused by the supernatural. Like many writers of the time, and in parallel again with Eliot, she was influenced by Sir James Frazer’s massive proto-anthropological study The Golden Bough (1890–1915), finding in its wide-ranging discussion of myths and rituals much to discover about magical and religious forms and valuing it for what Eliot described as the light it threw “on the obscurities of the soul”. Frazer’s account of his material, however, was one of an evolutionary movement from magic and religion to science; his underlying rationalist purpose was to challenge superstition. “What narrowness of spiritual life we find in Frazer,” commented Wittgenstein in 1931, reacting against the treatment of magical and religious notions as though they were so many mistakes, so much “false physics”: “his explanations of the primitive observances are much cruder than the sense of the observances themselves”. Butts would have agreed.

Much of Butts’s critique of the modern world is conventional, readily understandable within the radical conservative tradition of the criticism of “civilization” developed throughout the nineteenth century and continued in the first decades of the twentieth (the tradition described in Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society); for all the differences, Traps for Unbelievers and Warning to Hikers can reasonably be read alongside, say, Eliot’s After Strange Gods (1934) and The Idea of a Christian Society (1939). The particular inflection of Butts’s critique comes from her magical sense of place, the significance she gives to “the land” which she sees as being rapidly destroyed. This destruction, in Armed With Madness, as in Warning to Hikers and so much of her writing, is represented by “tourists”. Starn, the nearest village in the novel, is remembered by Carston as “half full of people from the world outside. Not peasants, people in vulgar clothes, on motorcycles, in Ford cars, come to stare because it was summer, whom his party treated as if they were a disease.” Tourists here are taken as an evident symptom of the process of desecration that railways and cars and new forms of leisure activity bring with them. On the one hand, Butts is insistent on the vital need for contact with the land (if city-dwellers “do not get back to some kind of contact with the earth, civilization will perish out of England”); on the other, contemporary attempts to regain contact are simply a violation (people bringing “their city vulgarities into the serenest and loveliest places”). Warning to Hikers gives strident expression to this double bind, mixing bits of Ruskin, Nietzsche and others into a general indictment of industrial capitalism and democracy (“the enemy is the democratic enemy”) with a specific focus on the contemporary “cult of nature”. Industrial manufacture produces “unvarying patterns of ugly vulgarity”, with the result that “a whole people has lost its power to distinguish between what is ugly and what is beautiful”; people are separated from the essential power of nature, which they then try to recover but are able only to do so in ways that confirm their alienation from it. Hikers—this was the great moment of the development of rambling—bring with them the very ugliness from which they seek to escape, incapable as they have been made of truly grasping nature’s mystery: “Either they destroy what they find or are lost in it . . . Lost and mindless and in fear.” In Death of Felicity Taverner, the novel which follows Armed With Madness, with the same Dorset setting and some of the same characters, the evil Kralin is bent on exploiting this false return to the country by buying up the Taverners’ sacred wood and the surrounding land in order to develop a leisure complex, with hotels, golf courses, car parks and “a cinema . . . with all the new sex films”.

Kralin is another kind of foreign body, to be rejected, eliminated (and so at the end of the novel Boris, one of the characters carried over from Armed With Madness, duly kills him). His father fled the pre-Revolution Russia of the Tsars, not, like Boris, that of the Bolsheviks; the son is nihilistically materialist, probably a Red agent: a “superficial, scientific pornographist”, indifferent to moral values and recognizing no truth other than that there is no truth. He is also Jewish; except that “also” is misleading, since it is Jewishness that underpins this nihilism, that defines him as threatening. Though, significantly—a further twist—he is not even a “proper Jew” of devout religious and moral observance; but then of course, in this version of things, the distinction between proper and improper is a construction of the anti-semitism itself, which then trades too on the possibility the fantasy construction provides of collapsing the distinction—all Jews are potentially Kralins. Butts is close here to the Eliot of the notorious comment made the year after publication of Death of Felicity Taverner that “reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable”. Kralin, “a man whose interests were all cerebral”, represents in this novel the negation at the heart of the modern world and, more particularly, the end of all hope of the “proper balance between urban and rural” for which Eliot called immediately after his “undesirable” comment. Butts’s anti-semitism here is not simply a personal fact—to be explained, say, by animosity towards Rodker, her Jewish first husband. It is part of a cultural structure to which Death of Felicity Taverner gives rank expression and in which Jews stand as agents and symptoms of a felt decline of social cohesion and stable values.

There is a small trace of this in Armed With Madness when Philip, the husband of Scylla’s friend in London, is reported in his wife’s thoughts as having “gone out to meet a Jew whose favour they were nursing”; nursing no doubt in the interests of a deal of some kind. Philip, stupidly middle class, smug in his petty moralism, is aggressively hostile to the Taverners and their lifestyle and “The Jew” appears, as it were, as the edge of that hostility, adding briefly to Butts’s presentation of the forces antagonistic to her values, though here the formulation belongs to the wife and may be read as contained within the terms of the presentation of her. More generally, however, those values as expressed in the conception of the sacred land and given through the Grail story can easily come to seem to have precisely as a condition of their existence some negative outside force against which they can be defended, against which sanctity can be defined. In Armed With Madness we have the vulgar tourist masses and the philistine middle classes (figured by Philip and by Picus’s father); in Death of Felicity Taverner, the nihilistic Jew, as Butts collapses social into racial criticism and the novel becomes flatly conventional in its plot, its ideas, its anti-semitism (this from a writer capable in a review of Nancy Cunard’s Negro Anthology of writing with some thought on “race-prejudice”).

The strength of Armed With Madness is its uncertainty. There is little plot, no neat ending, no ideologically forced resolution. Its enclosed country-house drama of dis-ease, that the Grail story underlies and informs with a sense of what has been lost, peters out in griefs and wounds and doubts and fragmentations. The adventure can be seen as a “parody of a mystery”, getting nowhere since there is nowhere to be got (“‘Then we get nowhere.’ ‘Nowhere’”); it is “complicated, violent, inconclusive”. The dispersal of the characters after the first Dorset part of the novel is an indication of this. The novel abandons the sequence of numbered chapters and breaks off into a series of short sections with separate headings that shift disconnectedly from character to character (this can be seen, less sharply, earlier in the novel, which, in modernist style, shifts between different centres of consciousness, but there within the narration of a common story). Scylla in London confronts the pettiness of social conventions; Felix home-sick in Paris carries his inferiority complex from bar to bar; Picus prostrates himself weeping on his mother’s grave; Clarence cannot find escape from madness; Ross paints. The return of the novel’s focus to Dorset continues the disintegration, violently expressed in Clarence’s crazed assault on Scylla. As Carston leaves, Felix appears with Boris, the new find, and the novel ends, inconclusively indeed, on a memory from the latter’s childhood, a fragment of a past as though tacked on, another country-house, another wood, the nostalgia of loss.

“The worst is coming to the worst with our civilization”; but also, “something . . . is trying to get born . . . a ‘spiritual’ or ‘magical’, a mystical thing.” Knowledge of the waste land is already awareness of something beyond. This is the positive emphasis against, as Butts sees it, Eliot’s negative one in The Waste Land. The inconclusiveness of the Grail story itself is important for her in this context: it is the quest—the adventure—that is essential; what counts is awareness, imagination, the quickened sense of “the natural supernatural”. The modern problem is the eradication of any such sense, the contemporary blinkering of vision. Butts’s project is thus to “show beauty—soundness”. The modernist imperative to “make it new” becomes her insistence on the need for a new kind of seeing, of writing away from the given categories. Her problem, therefore, is that of expressing “an unknown in terms of the known”: “there aren’t any words or shapes, or sounds, or gestures to tell it by—not directly.” So it must be told indirectly, obliquely; much as, in Butts’s favourite image, the knight in chess moves sideways to go forward. The insertion of the Grail story into her modern novel is itself something of a knight’s move: it gets nowhere and yet at the same time allows something to be seen; the present is momentarily translated into another time which is itself lost but there, maimed and strange, an implicit design. This is what gives the peculiar tense of Butts’s novel: written in the present but unsettled, over and above the regular—realistic—time of action and characters. She writes and overwrites: always there is a presence of the writing which holds itself up in moments of language, fashions word and image and syntax into flashes on its surface, occasions of brightness. Even the modernist collage technique, which here mixes Celtic legends with spirituals, lines from Eliot or Gershwin with scraps of hermeneutic wisdom, references to Gide or Joyce with snatches from music-hall songs, has its part in this. The writing is scattered with these bits and pieces which enter with no particular directions to the reader (no particular irony resulting from clever juxtapositions, for example). They make their individual sense (this or that quotation will often have some local and perhaps overall significance, most clearly when it relates to magic or the Grail) but are also simply, unemphatically, that which the writing brings along in its elaboration, a cultural-spiritual bric-à-brac that makes up Butts’s unstable, unsettled present.

Above all, then, it is her style, her writing, with which Butts resists, with which she strives to tell what is only obliquely to be told. Her prose lets through colour, silence, uncanniness, something on the other side of the given—the assumed—reality. “Their land, as they knew it, equivocal, exquisite,” reflects Scylla, and it is this “equivocal, exquisite” that the style works to render. Immediately, in the opening pages, the wind rises off “the diamond-blue sea”, tree-fuchsias drip “with bells the colour of blood”, and under everything “the silence in the wood”. Wonder and horror come together: the sea sparkles and has the iron-greyness of a gun-barrel; it is “transparent, peacock-coloured” but “under the water the reefs [are] snakes”. The blood-belled fuchsias start a trail of blood that winds its way across the novel to end in Scylla’s arrow-pierced body, with the blood of the Grail story somewhere under it all. The required awareness brings a wrought preciousness of word, image, syntax, punctuation even: “Half an hour later they had packed into the car and shot away, up into the hills the night wind had now made exquisite, to a different wood from the one in whose red-glass darkness Picus had lost them, moist and shimmering, a repetition of the tremblings of the stars”; “For where the sun was turning down-Channel, a ball glared, surrounded by ranks of rose bars, and out from these clouds radiated that reached over to the eastern heavens, across whose spokes strayed loose flakes dipped in every variety of flame, the triangles of empty sky stained all the greens between primrose and jade”; “a white road sprung like an arrow across the moor that filled the lowlands like a dark dragon’s wing.”

“Besides,” says Picus to Carston in the closing pages, “did you ever enjoy a summer more? Hasn’t it been better than a movie?” Ironic enough, coming just after Clarence’s frenzy and after all of Carston’s frustrations, but true in its way, including in its irony, of the reading of this novel itself. In Armed With Madness Butts produced a peculiarly haunting, flawed, strangely original book that, within but aslant the modernist mainstream, forged from period commonplaces and personal intensities a way of seeing, a style, which are immediately recognizable as hers. It deserves to be read along with the other key novels that have come down to us from the 1920s.

Note on the Holy Grail

The legend of the Holy Grail, the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper, was developed in a body of early medieval romances. The cup is associated with St Joseph of Arimathea, who is said to have caught blood in it from the wound in Christ’s side made with his spear by the Roman soldier Longinus at the Crucifixion (hence the significance in Armed With Madness of the cup having been fished out of the well with a spear). Joseph brought the cup to Britain, where he founded the abbey at Glastonbury which became the Grail shrine. The Grail was lost and became the object of holy quest: to restore purity, the Christian Knight must journey through the desolate world in search of it. The romances vary in their telling of the story but depend in one form or another on: the terrible loss (“what they wanted had been lost out of the world,” Scylla tells Carston; adding, “Might have been any time, the Middle Ages, or the day before yesterday”); the strife that befalls the land bereft of the sacred object; and the perilous adventures entailed by the quest. Carston gives a very Buttsian summary for the purposes of Armed With Madness: “There had been a story . . . of a king, a comitatus called Arthur, whose business had been divided between chasing barbarians and looking for a cup. A kind of intermezzo in history, in a time called the Dark Ages, which had produced a story about starlight. Suns of centuries had succeeded it, while the story had lived obscurely in some second-rate literature, and more obscurely, and as an unknown quality, in the imaginations of men like Picus and Scylla, Felix, Clarence and Ross.”

The Grail and its legend were a focus of interest in the years preceding and surrounding the writing of Armed With Madness and had been a source for literary and artistic creation (Wagner’s Parsifal (1882) and Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) being outstanding examples of this). In From Ritual to Romance (1920) the anthropologist Jessie Weston, inspired by The Golden Bough, had argued that the Grail story was “the confused record” of a much earlier ritual, that of a fertility cult: the original ritual has passed into the romance elaboration of the Grail legend, whose main features—for example, the barrenness of the world from which the Grail has vanished—are exactly those of such a cult. The Christianization of the story is purely external to its fundamental meaning, no more than new trappings for the old ritual.

Such an account of the Grail story as the record of a purely pagan legend into which Christian symbolism subsequently intruded was opposed in the period, notably in the work of A. E. Waite and Arthur Machen, both of whom Butts read. Waite, contrary to “the pagan school”, emphasized the Christian force of the story and its deep spiritual sense; it deals in “high symbols”, presenting “figurations to which the soul confesses on the upward path of its progress”. Machen, who saw Waite as wrongly playing down the Celtic elements of the story, was concerned to present it as “the glorified version of early Celtic Sacramental Legend”. Machen’s insistence on a Celtic origin comes with the idea of an early Christian Church that had its own Eucharistic rite and a closeness to a world beyond this one, experienced magically through numinous places, sacred trees and other such things. “To the Celt, and to those who have the Celtic spirit,” wrote Machen, “the whole material universe appears as a vast symbol.”

Butts is close to this. Celtic magic and the Celtic church play a large part in her imagination. For her, too, behind the Grail lies another consecration of the Eucharist, a Church which precedes and stands outside the establishment of the Roman Church in Britain that will then oppose it. When Ross in Armed With Madness offers as the association with the Grail legend that immediately springs to his mind “A mass said at Corbenic . . . a different mass which may have been the real thing”, it is precisely to this supposed original Eucharistic rite that he refers, as so often does Butts herself; Corbenic being the castle or church of the Grail where Lancelot witnessed this other mass. Corbenic was, in Machen’s words, “scarcely on earth” and the way to it was charted “only on maps of the spirit”. It is for its expression of this that the Grail legend is important to Butts. What is at stake for her is “an incident, a not yet exhausted event, in the most secret, passionate and truthful part of the spiritual history of man”.

Bibliographical Note

The major resource for knowledge of Butts’s life is the recent biography by Nathalie Blondel, Mary Butts: Scenes from the Life (Kingston, NY: McPherson & Company, 1998); Blondel was able to draw on, and quote extensively from, the journal kept by Butts for the last twenty years of her life (the Introduction in the present edition is indebted to her work). Important extracts from the journal, together with some Butts letters, can be found in Christopher Wagstaff (ed.), A Sacred Quest: The Life and Writings of Mary Butts (Kingston, NY: McPherson & Company, 1995). The Crystal Cabinet was republished in 1998 (Manchester: Carcanet, and Boston: Beacon Press). In the last decade or so McPherson & Company has reissued the other novels, a volume of stories and Butts’s pamphlets. A volume of stories was also published in Britain in 1991 by Carcanet under the title With and Without Buttons and Other Stories. Of the small amount of critical writing on Butts’s work, mention should be made of Robin Blaser, “Here Lies the Woodpecker Who was Zeus”, in the volume edited by Wagstaff mentioned above, and Patrick Wright’s “Coming Back to the Shores of Albion: The Secret England of Mary Butts”, in his book On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (London: Verso, 1985).