Armed With Madness полностью

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 marginal: 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.

“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 novel: “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”.