Armed With Madness
About the author
Mary Butts was born in 1890 in Dorset where she spent her childhood. She studied Latin and Greek at Westfield College, London, and social work at the London School of Economics. During the First World War she worked for the London County Council and then the National Council for Civil Liberties. In 1918 she married John Rodker, a poet, publisher and conscientious objector, with whom she had a daughter, Camilla. She began publishing poems and stories in important literary reviews of the time, including The Little Review, The Dial and The Egoist. She spent most of the 1920s in France, moving in literary and artistic circles in the company, among others, of Gertrude Stein, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), William Carlos Williams, and Ford Madox Ford. Her most important literary friendship was with Jean Cocteau who provided drawings for editions of two of her works. Speed the Plough and Other Stories appeared in 1923 and Ashe of Rings, her first novel, in 1925. Her second novel, Armed with Madness, was published in 1928, as was the novella Imaginary Letters.
In 1930 she returned to England, finally settling in Cornwall with her second husband, Gabriel Aitken. She published two historical novels, The Macedonian (1933) and Scenes from the Life of Cleopatra (1935), as well as a further volume of stories. She also reviewed extensively for a number of magazines and papers. Mary Butts died in 1937. Her autobiography, The Crystal Cabinet, was published posthumously that same year.
Although a figure on the literary scene and in contact with many of the important writers of the time, Butts remained marginaclass="underline" her interests and writing put her out of line with any group or movement. Largely forgotten after her death, her work is now being rediscovered and her particular contribution as a modernist writer reassessed.
Stephen Heath is a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge.
Introduction: Chances of the Sacred Game
“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 noveclass="underline" “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).