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 conventionaclass="underline" 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.”