In 1925 Butts had read Arthur Waite’s The Holy Grail (1909), a lengthy account of “the deeper suggestions of the Grail legends”, and sketched out an idea for a play turning on the discovery of an object taken as the Grail. By early 1926 she was thinking of a country-house novel to “begin with ‘boys and girls’ finding the Grail cup. At S. Egliston”; or again, as she noted when completing the book: “erroneous find of the importance of the Sanc-grail—reactions in a country home, the Foyot and the Bœuf sur le Toit” (the Foyot is a Parisian hotel, the Bœuf a celebrated Parisian nightclub of the twenties where, in the words of a contemporary observer, “just about everyone but Proust was to be seen”). Probably, Butts was remembering a newspaper story of 1907, mentioned in writings on the Holy Grail by Arthur Machen, concerning the supposed find of the Grail cup—“a saucer-shaped vessel of blue glass, shot with silver”—in a well or stream near Glastonbury (the man who placed the cup there got it from his father, another suggestion from the story which finds its way into Armed With Madness).
The country-house, the “boys and girls”, the “erroneous find”, the Grail—these are central to the novel. The house is, naturally, in Dorset, isolated, near the coast, enclosed by a wood, with two paths running down through it to the sea. Butts had in mind the situation of the house in South Egliston in which she stayed in 1922: “a cottage at the top of the sacred wood under Tyneham cap”. This is Butts’s country, her place: precisely experienced, magically imagined, sacred. The inhabitants of the house are a sister and brother, Scylla and Felix Taverner, an “ash-fair tree-tall young woman” who wants to let things unfold to their utmost possibility, and “a flower-skinned, sapphire-eyed boy”, given to anger and self-pity and fed up with “the baby-brother business”; and a friend, Ross, possessed of a sacred peace, content with the simple satisfaction of his appetites; and two more friends, Clarence and Picus, who come over from their nearby cottage when their well dries up—the former war-scarred and suffering from the age’s lack of faith, the latter a cousin of Scylla’s, “light and winged and holy” but bringing tricks and trouble and pain.[1] The time is the 1920s, not long after the Great War which hangs over the novel; Scylla is of the generation before it; Felix is younger and missed it; Clarence and Picus served in it. All the characters are distant from any specific social life; none works; the men are artistic (Ross and Clarence are accomplished painters, Picus makes wax models of Scylla, Felix manages still lives of poisonous-looking flowers). A few secondary figures make appearances or are heard of—the Taverners’ old nanny, a fisherman, a drunk and obscene shepherd and his wife, the local doctor—but are barely more than novelistic class stereotypes. There is a gramophone and the latest records but not much more of the period specifically enters. Far from the imperatives of a social realism, Butts’s novel is itself enclosed in different concerns, in a different writing.
