Mary Butts

Mary Butts’s second novel (published in 1928, and so before her first novel had its UK first edition), went under a number of working titles, including “In the Wood”, “People Among Trees”, “The Egg and the Cup”, “Landscape with Birds”, “Bees Under the Roof”, and even “The Waste Land”, before settling on Armed With Madness — which comes from a quote, “Armed with madness, I go on a long voyage”, though the quote seems to be from Butts herself. Of these titles, “The Waste Land” is the most intriguing, because like Eliot’s poem (already out by the time Butts began her novel, so she probably wasn’t serious about using it), Armed With Madness combines Modernistic concerns about the spiritual wasteland of the post-First World War 20th century with a powerful symbol of redemption and healing, the Holy Grail.

The story begins in the country house (“in which they could not afford to live”) of the Taverner siblings in Cornwall. Drusilla, known to everyone as Scylla, “ash-fair and tree-tall”, “sometimes a witch, and sometimes a bitch”, is the older, and Felix (to whom, we’re told, “love and death were one”, though entirely unconvincingly) is the younger. With them is a painter called Ross (who is mostly ignored throughout the rest of the narrative), and, soon, an American, Dudley Carston, who comes for the weekend. As he arrives, Felix is out visiting a local pair of similarly artistic souls living, like the Taverners, “in a chaos of elegant poverty”, the painter and sculptor Clarence Lake, and his companion Picus Tracy. (Whose name, meaning “woodpecker”, apparently has all sorts of mythological connections, tying him to “Zeus the Woodpecker”, though they are lost on me.) While there, Picus gets Felix to help him clear out the well at his cottage property, as it has run dry and hedgehogs have a tendency to fall into it in their search for water. Hauling the dead creatures out with a fishing spear, Felix finds a jade cup with “Keltic twiddles… round the rim”. He, Picus, and Clarence come to the Taverners and everyone gathers round the dining table to look at the cup.

Their modern defences are up. This “Keltic” cup, fished out of a well with a spear — “Good old Freud”, someone says — of course can’t be the Holy Grail. They talk about Tennyson, Wagner, and the “Keltic Twilight”, of which these proto-Modernists are all highly disapproving (“those awful pre-Raphaelite pictures”, “I hate the Keltic Twilight… Responsible for the world’s worst art”). But they can’t help feeling something — or perhaps trying not to long for something.

The next day, the cup is gone. After a long search, Carston finds it in his room, where he knows it wasn’t, and accuses everyone of playing a trick on him. He leaves in a huff, and in a nearby village bumps into Picus’s father, a disapproving patriarch who’s come in search of his son for stealing an item from his collection of antiquities, a jade cup he claims to have been a “poison-cup” from India (jade having the power to reveal poison), and after that a “spitting-cup” for a tubercular lady. (Both, notably, images of unhealthiness.) Carston begins to feel that the cup turning up in his room wasn’t the only trick played on him.

But there’s no doubt this is a world desperately in need of the Holy Grail:

“There was something wrong with all of them, or with their world. A moment missed, a moment to come. Or not coming. Or either or both. Shove it off on the war; but that did not help.”

Scylla, Felix, and friends, are distinctly jaded: “We know between us pretty well all there is to know.” And Scylla at one point lays out the age’s malaise:

“If the materialists’ universe is true… we are a set of blind factors in a machine. And no passion has any validity… They are just little tricks of the machine… If you stick to the facts as we have them, life is a horror and an insult.”

They have the feeling, these no-longer-bright young things, of having run through the gamut:

“…we tried the bad to see if it might be good. But the new lot aren’t interested. Don’t give a button for the good any more.”

And Carston, tricked though he has been, feels this, at least, to be genuine:

“They strike me as people who have loved and suffered a great deal. That purifies.”

But whereas King Arthur’s knights split up to search for the Grail, it’s when this “Grail” appears that these “knights” split up. After Carston’s exit, Felix goes to Paris — and this is an interesting sequence, as we move from the tatty poverty of a run-down country house in Cornwall (dead hedgehogs and all) to the vibrancy of roaring 20s Paris, where, overwhelmed by his return to glitz and glamour, parties and young folk, Felix at first struggles to connect. Scylla goes to visit an old girlfriend in London, only to find her married and exceptionally conventional. (Butts gets playful here, presenting part of their conversation as an opera libretto.) Picus goes to weep on his mother’s grave. She, we learn, killed herself after discovering her husband, Picus’s father, was having an affair, with the “tubercular lady” to whom Picus’s father gave the jade cup, giving that “Holy Grail” even more of a Freudian significance for this young man. Clarence, meanwhile, goes back to the dry-welled cottage to try to forget about his longing for Picus, but soon descends into dangerous madness.

And this, I think, is the key to the book’s title. The actual Grail knights — those who succeeded, anyway — were armed with righteousness and purity, but Butts’s “knights”, Scylla & co., have madness as their only resort. They have a self-conscious inability to relate to the Grail (real or not) as a symbol of transcendence and healing, but only as a symbol of reductive Freudian unconscious processes. They just don’t exist in a world where they can handle the Holy Grail’s holiness. So, it doesn’t matter if the cup (which is later revealed to actually be a “Keltic cup”, not the poison-cup and spitting-cup Picus’s father pretends it is) is the real Grail or not, or whether even if not real it still might offer some symbolic connection to a transcendent reality. To these jaded young things, there’s no possibility of transcendence except (perhaps) through art, (temporarily) through the disorientation of drink and drugs, or through fruitless and dangerous madness.

And so, they go through the pangs of loneliness, jealousy, longing, and so on, which ought to be the start of their healing journeys, only they have no way to go on from there, no transcendent state to aspire to.

The Grail myth becomes less important in the second half of the novel. Instead, the presiding image is of arrow-pierced Saint Sebastian, which is something Ted Hughes identified as a key figure throughout T S Eliot’s work, too (in his essay, “The Poetic Self”, in Winter Pollen).

Butts’ style, which I found driven by a sort of impatience with language in her first novel, is now clipped, dismissive, languid, broken — again, jaded — meaning the whole thing is quite laconic, exactly the sort of language her decadent, over-experienced, no-longer-bright young things use with one another. The result is that Armed With Madness really feels like it’s presenting something of the reality of its times. The heady, overwhelming glamour of Paris, and the too-sudden descents into sordid poverty and petty jealousy that run alongside it, all feel authentic. At the same time, Butts is aware of the malaise of her age:

“But notice what is happening now people have become used to the idea. Any little boy in a Paris bar, who never heard of physics knows. Everyone gets the age’s temper.”

To me, the characters are, as with her first novel, unequal to their self-dramatising pronouncements, but the novel itself feels like a far more on-the-ground and authentic document of its age than, say, Eliot’s highly intellectualised Waste Land, even though both draw from the same sources (Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, to which Butts adds A E Waite, Arthur Machen, and Jane Harrison). But both books share a theme of how the modern age doesn’t know how to deal with sacredness, and so loses out on awe, transcendence, and the deeper sort of healing it so desperately needs.

Butts’s next novel was a sequel of sorts to this one — or it features some of the same characters, anyway — though it doesn’t seem to have continued with the Grail theme. The Death of Felicity Taverner (1932) seems to be about land-developers seeking to despoil the Cornish countryside, and doesn’t tempt me quite as much as this novel did.

It’s also harder to get hold of. Armed With Madness seems to have been the only one of Butts’s novels to have had a paperback edition (in 2001 from Penguin Classics). I would like to try some of her short stories, if I can find them in a cheap enough edition. But Armed With Madness seems to be generally considered her best novel, and I suspect it might be more rewarding on a second go.

Written between 1918 and 1919 (or perhaps started as early as 1916, according to her biographer Nathalie Blondel), Mary Butts’ first novel, Ashe of Rings, went on to have a somewhat drawn-out publication history. The American modernist journal The Little Review (which serialised Ulysses between 1918 and 1921), began serialising it in 1921, but stopped after 5 chapters. It was published in full in 1925 in Paris by Three Mountains Press (for which, as with The Little Review, Ezra Pound was an editor), and then in New York in 1926. It was only in 1933 that Butts’ novel — by this time slightly revised, and with an author’s afterword — was published in the UK, by which time she had other books published, including a second novel.

Ashe of Rings is in three parts. In the first, set in 1892, we follow Anthony Ashe’s return to his family home of Rings, a country house named after a three-tiered earth-mound topped with sacred stones in its grounds. (Butts based this on Badbury Rings in Dorset, of which she later wrote that “a great part of [my] imaginative life was elicited by it and rests there”, in “Ghosties and Ghoulies”, an essay on the supernatural in fiction first published in The Bookman in 1933.) Ashe knows he must provide an heir, someone to be guardian to Rings when he dies, and sets about choosing himself a wife on entirely utilitarian grounds. (His lack of emotional regard for the woman he marries, a local called Muriel Butler, is signified by the fact that he requires her to change her first name to Melitta once she’s married.) Melitta provides him with a daughter, Vanna Elizabeth Ashe, but by the time she follows that with a son, she’s in the midst of an affair with another local landowner, Morice Amburton, and it’s unclear if the boy is an Ashe or an Amburton. (To make matters worse, she slept with her lover on the sacred mound of Rings, making it a double slap in the face to Ashe.) Ashe dies soon after; Melitta marries Amburton, and Vanna, the girl who ought to be the new guardian of Rings, is sent off to a boarding school, and after that is given a small annuity, to keep her away from Rings.

In the second part, Vanna — known to her friends as Van — is grown up and living in moderate squalor in a London wracked by the First World War, making what money she can by various means including working in the nascent film industry. She occasionally comes to stay with a friend, Judy Marston, who’s having an on-off affair with a Russian painter, Serge Fyodorovitch. Judy, it turns out, is a rather cold and selfish woman who leaves Serge as soon as a more profitable partner turns up (the son of Morice Amburton, Peter, who has returned somewhat shellshocked from the war). Van nurses Serge through a post-breakup fever, then decides to take him on her first return to Rings in her adult life.

It’s only in the third part that things perked up, for me. Van begins to assert her guardianship of Rings, while Judy, using the wounded Peter, tries to oust her. Van now sees her former friend as embodying the sort of dark forces that are behind the war now raging throughout Europe:

“Have you known anyone who loves the war as Judy loves it?”

Rings itself, with its three-tiered mound and sacred stones, its mythic history tying it to Morgan Le Fay, druid priests, a witch called Ursula who wrote a strange book, and Florian Ashe who was crucified on the grounds by angry locals, has the air of a sacred place. Anthony Ashe called it “a priestly house, like the Eumolpidae” (these being the people who maintained the Eleusinian Mysteries in Ancient Greece), while Van says it’s “a place of evocation… where the shapes we make with our imagination find a body”. So, the battle for control over it has to be a magical one — or, rather, a Magickal one, because Mary Butts was a onetime disciple of Aleister Crowley, being named Soror Rhodon in his Argenteum Astrum order, and staying for a while at the Abbey of Thelema at Cefalu. (Which she came to hate, because of the lousy living conditions and poor sanitation, and which left her with a heroin habit — while Crowley hated her back, calling her “a large white red-haired maggot” in his autobiography, but nevertheless saying how grateful he was for her help in the writing of his Magick (Book 4)). There’s no summoning of demons or flinging bolts of magical lightning; rather, the confrontation between Van and Judy is through a symbolic (but still fraught) power-play on top of Rings late one night.

Prior to this third part, I found the style of Ashe of Rings a bit too impressionistic and flighty, driven forward by a sort of impatience with words and almost no attribution of dialogue. The characters seemed distant, their outbursts of passionate speech more like a pose than human passion. But this element is very much of its time. Ashe of Rings is a World War I novel, set during a time when, for that generation, life probably seemed both incandescent and fleeting, full of brief bright moments amidst a welter of turmoil and darkness. Butts calls it “the world of the next event” — a world sustained by nothing but a chain of sensations — but nevertheless it was hard to really feel that any of the characters had any depth to them, let alone believe them when they say they love one another (and the next moment say they hate one another).

On a deeper level — on the Magickal level of its plot — this is a novel about a new generation — or part of one, a tribe, perhaps — trying to find its place in a world caught between old, outdated traditions, and industrial levels of darkness and death. How to define this tribe? In its own words it is chic, exotic, damned, wearing “scandalous, bright clothes”. Like Valentine Ashe (Van’s younger brother), it’s “an attenuated exquisite” who:

“Won’t play games. Acts in Greek plays. Keeps Persian cats. All he can do is ride and sail a boat. Worships your ghastly old manor. Goes in for science. Reads German…”

But also it’s a group that understands the sacredness of Rings — perhaps, understands sacredness at all — and though it has to redefine that sacredness in new terms, as those of its forefathers no longer work, it knows it must do so, because of the forces ranged against it: those who have sided with power, with greed, and with the War. As Peter Amburton, allied to those dark forces, says:

“I went out to the war. There I saw what life is. When I come back, I find you people still here… We’re going to clean you out of the world. That’s what the war’s been for.”

I was intrigued into reading Ashe of Rings because of Mary Butts’ being part of the neo-romantic movement of the interwar years, who sought to find new meaning in a rootedness in the English landscape, its folklore, and its magic. This made me think of both the new rise of Folk Horror, and of David Lindsay’s Devil’s Tor, which belongs to the same time. Ashe of Rings has some interesting resonances with Lindsay. It was written in 1918 to 1919 in Cornwall and London — so, in the same place and time as Lindsay was writing his first novel, A Voyage to Arcturus. And there’s one snippet of Rings lore Van mentions that hints at another Lindsay novel, The Haunted Woman:

“…there is a tower in Rings. In the tower there is a lost room… In Ursula’s day the room disappeared. No one has found it again. Only once in a while we walk straight into it.”

Ashe of Rings has a few autobiographical touches. Like Van Ashe, Mary Butts’ father died while she was still young, after which her mother sent her off to boarding school and remarried. Mary was a great-granddaughter of Thomas Butts (1757–1845), a government clerk best known for being William Blake’s main patron, and in the house where she grew up there were a number of Blake’s paintings. Mary’s mother, though, sold these soon after the father’s death, and all this must surely have coloured Van Ashe’s relationship with her mother in the novel, who at one point she characterises as being “an almost infernal power”, drawing her “back again into the formulas of childhood”.

In her 1933 afterword, Butts calls the novel “a fairy story, a War-fairy-tale occasioned by the way life was presented to the imaginative children of my generation”, and one which was written under the “overwhelming influence of Dostoevsky”.

It was only in the third section that it really caught fire for me, but enough so that I now want to read her next novel, Armed with Madness (1928), which apparently mixes interwar bohemianism with the Grail myth.