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”).