Armed With Madness полностью

“The worst is coming to the worst with our civilization”; but also, “something . . . is trying to get born . . . a ‘spiritual’ or ‘magical’, a mystical thing.” Knowledge of the waste land is already awareness of something beyond. This is the positive emphasis against, as Butts sees it, Eliot’s negative one in The Waste Land. The inconclusiveness of the Grail story itself is important for her in this context: it is the quest—the adventure—that is essential; what counts is awareness, imagination, the quickened sense of “the natural supernatural”. The modern problem is the eradication of any such sense, the contemporary blinkering of vision. Butts’s project is thus to “show beauty—soundness”. The modernist imperative to “make it new” becomes her insistence on the need for a new kind of seeing, of writing away from the given categories. Her problem, therefore, is that of expressing “an unknown in terms of the known”: “there aren’t any words or shapes, or sounds, or gestures to tell it by—not directly.” So it must be told indirectly, obliquely; much as, in Butts’s favourite image, the knight in chess moves sideways to go forward. The insertion of the Grail story into her modern novel is itself something of a knight’s move: it gets nowhere and yet at the same time allows something to be seen; the present is momentarily translated into another time which is itself lost but there, maimed and strange, an implicit design. This is what gives the peculiar tense of Butts’s novel: written in the present but unsettled, over and above the regular—realistic—time of action and characters. She writes and overwrites: always there is a presence of the writing which holds itself up in moments of language, fashions word and image and syntax into flashes on its surface, occasions of brightness. Even the modernist collage technique, which here mixes Celtic legends with spirituals, lines from Eliot or Gershwin with scraps of hermeneutic wisdom, references to Gide or Joyce with snatches from music-hall songs, has its part in this. The writing is scattered with these bits and pieces which enter with no particular directions to the reader (no particular irony resulting from clever juxtapositions, for example). They make their individual sense (this or that quotation will often have some local and perhaps overall significance, most clearly when it relates to magic or the Grail) but are also simply, unemphatically, that which the writing brings along in its elaboration, a cultural-spiritual bric-à-brac that makes up Butts’s unstable, unsettled present.

Above all, then, it is her style, her writing, with which Butts resists, with which she strives to tell what is only obliquely to be told. Her prose lets through colour, silence, uncanniness, something on the other side of the given—the assumed—reality. “Their land, as they knew it, equivocal, exquisite,” reflects Scylla, and it is this “equivocal, exquisite” that the style works to render. Immediately, in the opening pages, the wind rises off “the diamond-blue sea”, tree-fuchsias drip “with bells the colour of blood”, and under everything “the silence in the wood”. Wonder and horror come together: the sea sparkles and has the iron-greyness of a gun-barrel; it is “transparent, peacock-coloured” but “under the water the reefs [are] snakes”. The blood-belled fuchsias start a trail of blood that winds its way across the novel to end in Scylla’s arrow-pierced body, with the blood of the Grail story somewhere under it all. The required awareness brings a wrought preciousness of word, image, syntax, punctuation even: “Half an hour later they had packed into the car and shot away, up into the hills the night wind had now made exquisite, to a different wood from the one in whose red-glass darkness Picus had lost them, moist and shimmering, a repetition of the tremblings of the stars”; “For where the sun was turning down-Channel, a ball glared, surrounded by ranks of rose bars, and out from these clouds radiated that reached over to the eastern heavens, across whose spokes strayed loose flakes dipped in every variety of flame, the triangles of empty sky stained all the greens between primrose and jade”; “a white road sprung like an arrow across the moor that filled the lowlands like a dark dragon’s wing.”

“Besides,” says Picus to Carston in the closing pages, “did you ever enjoy a summer more? Hasn’t it been better than a movie?” Ironic enough, coming just after Clarence’s frenzy and after all of Carston’s frustrations, but true in its way, including in its irony, of the reading of this novel itself. In Armed With Madness Butts produced a peculiarly haunting, flawed, strangely original book that, within but aslant the modernist mainstream, forged from period commonplaces and personal intensities a way of seeing, a style, which are immediately recognizable as hers. It deserves to be read along with the other key novels that have come down to us from the 1920s.