The Grail and its legend were a focus of interest in the years preceding and surrounding the writing of Armed With Madness and had been a source for literary and artistic creation (Wagner’s Parsifal (1882) and Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) being outstanding examples of this). In From Ritual to Romance (1920) the anthropologist Jessie Weston, inspired by The Golden Bough, had argued that the Grail story was “the confused record” of a much earlier ritual, that of a fertility cult: the original ritual has passed into the romance elaboration of the Grail legend, whose main features—for example, the barrenness of the world from which the Grail has vanished—are exactly those of such a cult. The Christianization of the story is purely external to its fundamental meaning, no more than new trappings for the old ritual.
Such an account of the Grail story as the record of a purely pagan legend into which Christian symbolism subsequently intruded was opposed in the period, notably in the work of A. E. Waite and Arthur Machen, both of whom Butts read. Waite, contrary to “the pagan school”, emphasized the Christian force of the story and its deep spiritual sense; it deals in “high symbols”, presenting “figurations to which the soul confesses on the upward path of its progress”. Machen, who saw Waite as wrongly playing down the Celtic elements of the story, was concerned to present it as “the glorified version of early Celtic Sacramental Legend”. Machen’s insistence on a Celtic origin comes with the idea of an early Christian Church that had its own Eucharistic rite and a closeness to a world beyond this one, experienced magically through numinous places, sacred trees and other such things. “To the Celt, and to those who have the Celtic spirit,” wrote Machen, “the whole material universe appears as a vast symbol.”
Butts is close to this. Celtic magic and the Celtic church play a large part in her imagination. For her, too, behind the Grail lies another consecration of the Eucharist, a Church which precedes and stands outside the establishment of the Roman Church in Britain that will then oppose it. When Ross in Armed With Madness offers as the association with the Grail legend that immediately springs to his mind “A mass said at Corbenic . . . a different mass which may have been the real thing”, it is precisely to this supposed original Eucharistic rite that he refers, as so often does Butts herself; Corbenic being the castle or church of the Grail where Lancelot witnessed this other mass. Corbenic was, in Machen’s words, “scarcely on earth” and the way to it was charted “only on maps of the spirit”. It is for its expression of this that the Grail legend is important to Butts. What is at stake for her is “an incident, a not yet exhausted event, in the most secret, passionate and truthful part of the spiritual history of man”.
Bibliographical Note
The major resource for knowledge of Butts’s life is the recent biography by Nathalie Blondel, Mary Butts: Scenes from the Life (Kingston, NY: McPherson & Company, 1998); Blondel was able to draw on, and quote extensively from, the journal kept by Butts for the last twenty years of her life (the Introduction in the present edition is indebted to her work). Important extracts from the journal, together with some Butts letters, can be found in Christopher Wagstaff (ed.), A Sacred Quest: The Life and Writings of Mary Butts (Kingston, NY: McPherson & Company, 1995). The Crystal Cabinet was republished in 1998 (Manchester: Carcanet, and Boston: Beacon Press). In the last decade or so McPherson & Company has reissued the other novels, a volume of stories and Butts’s pamphlets. A volume of stories was also published in Britain in 1991 by Carcanet under the title With and Without Buttons and Other Stories. Of the small amount of critical writing on Butts’s work, mention should be made of Robin Blaser, “Here Lies the Woodpecker Who was Zeus”, in the volume edited by Wagstaff mentioned above, and Patrick Wright’s “Coming Back to the Shores of Albion: The Secret England of Mary Butts”, in his book On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (London: Verso, 1985).
Armed with Madness
Armed with madness, I go on a long voyage.
Chapter I
In the house, in which they could not afford to live, it was unpleasantly quiet. Marvellously noisy, but the noises let through silence. The noises were jays, bustling and screeching in the wood, a hay-cutter, clattering and sending up waves of scent, substantial as sea-waves, filling the long rooms as the tide fills a blow-hole, but without roar or release. The third noise was the light wind, rising off the diamond-blue sea. The sea lay three parts round the house, invisible because of the wood. The wood rose from its cliff-point in a single tree, and spread out inland, in a fan to enclose the house. Outside the verandah, a small lawn had been hollowed, from which the wood could be seen as it swept up, hurrying with squirrels, into a group of immense ilex, beech and oak. The lawn was stuck with yuccas and tree-fuchsias, dripping season in, season out, with bells the colour of blood.
Once the house was passed, the wood gave it up, enclosed it decently, fenced a paddock, and the slip of dark life melted into the endless turf-miles which ran up a great down into the sky.
The silence let through by the jays, the hay-cutter, and the breeze, was a complicated production of stone rooms, the natural silence of empty grass, and the equivocal, personal silence of the wood. Not many nerves could stand it. People who had come for a week had been known to leave next day. The people who had the house were interested in the wood and its silence. When it got worse, after dark or at mid-day, they said it was tuning-up. When a gale came up-Channel shrieking like a mad harp, they said they were watching a visible fight with the silence in the wood.
A large gramophone stood with its mouth open on the verandah flags. They had been playing to the wood after lunch, to appease it and to keep their dancing in hand. The house was empty. Their servants had gone over to a distant farm. The wood had it all its own way. They were out.
There were two paths through the wood to the sea. A bee-line through the high trees, of fine grass, pebble scattered, springing and wet. Then, across the wet ditch that was sometimes a stream, a path through the copse in figures of eight, whose turns startled people. As the wood narrowed, this way ended in a gate on to the grass, the nearest way to an attractive rabbit-warren. These were the only two paths in that country, except a green road which led from the house over the down to the white road and from thence on to the beginnings of the world, ten miles away.