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.
1
Picus is a complex mythological figure, possessed of prophetic powers and usually taking the form of a woodpecker, the sacred bird of Mars. It is with Picus as woodpecker linked with Zeus, the great thunder-hurling god of Greek mythology, that