My current work is focussed on a comparative study of the classicism of Mary Butts and H.D.. Both authors embody the contradiction between an experimental approach to style and a preoccupation with accessing an occluded cultural tradition whose values matched more closely those which they wished to bring back. H.D. creates a fascinating collage out of the mythical figures with whom she identifies. I'm currently writing about her wartime novel Asphodel in which the semi-autobiographical protagonist Hermione is continually identified with Morgan le Fay, the witch who is Merlin's enemy in Arthurian legend. Also mentioned are the classical figures of Persephone and Artemis, goddess of the hunt, and all represent Hermione's construction of idealised versions of herself. As a consequence we are never quite sure who the 'real' Hermione, or H.D. for that matter, is. These associations have various political resonances which I'm hoping to trace in my work. For instance H.D. and her lover Frances Gregg imagined themselves as "wee witches" and in this light the association with these mythical witches and deities should be seen as a layered lesbian poetics. H.D. bolsters her marginalised position as a bisexual woman by placing a fictionalised version of herself within a matrix of mysterious, goddess-like literary figures, transcending history and the constrictions that the values of the day placed upon her sexual identity. My thinking on these issues has been inspired by Diana Collecott's excellent book, H.D. and Sapphic Modernism, which shows, among much else, how H.D. creates a redemptive lesbian poetics of identity through her alliance with the ancient Greek poet Sappho: what could not be expressed openly in her era is instead channelled into a network of literary references and faceted self portraits. When I get time to write more on this web log I hope to put up a summary of my previous work on Mary Butts' conception of the object. For her the kind of poeticised objects that crop up in her texts become paradigms for the interaction between the individual and the world, the impossibility of identifying with someone else's experience, and the possibility of magical objects with act as the signatures of invisible powers.

Have a look at this interesting article on Wired about Sonia Greene and H P Lovecraft. There are some fascinating parallels with Mary Butts' contradictory politics here and probably with her relationship with John Rodker too.

Work has begun on a new project, an investigation of Mary Butts' fascination for unusual symbolic objects. Whilst many of her modernist colleagues were exploring new methods of conjuring characters' interior lives onto the page, I've always been struck by how Butts subdued her use of forms such as interior monologue in favour of a focus on slightly odd objects. These items attest to, or perhaps cause the spiritual or psychological conditions in which her characters exist. In her fascinating novel Ashe of Rings, these include a mysterious cup which is retrieved with a long spear from a deep well.

My new work explores the genesis of these symbols, textually, for Butts writes in a manner which provides objects with a strangely active autonomy, and historically. Like T. S. Eliot, Butts takes symbols from the holy grail legends to bemoan the spiritual wasteland which she detected in modern European life. Both authors drew inspiration from a book called From Ritual to Romance, whose author Jessie Weston argued that the narratives and artefacts of the grail romances were echoes of pre-Christian vegetation cults brought to Britain by the Romans.

This argument must have had a weirdly destabilising effect on those who believed the grail myth to embody a certain type of chivalric Englishness. Weston did not allow that the story's origin was Celtic but rather situated it in a context which links the popular mythology of the grail to an occult tradition dating back to the ancient Greeks and to the Aryan ancestry thought to be common to all European peoples. This thesis would have chimed with the classicism of Butts and Eliot. Yet it also played a part in a cultural atmosphere which saw new disciplines such as psychoanalysis and anthropology shaking up the grounds for identification with familiar mythologies or narratives of belonging (see Michael Bell, Literature, Modernism and Myth on this point).

Weston's text had two main points of interest for Butts. On the one hand it evoked the idea of a wasteland, a place whose fertility needed to be restored by an appropriate reverence for nature. Yet on the other hand, in radically recontextualising the grail symbols, Weston's text also embodied the fragility of spiritual narratives in an era when scientific discourses such as psychoanalysis and anthropology were explaining them away as evolutionary functions, psychological crutches. This is perhaps the critical tension dramatised by Ashe of Rings, a text which in placing a mysterious jade 'grail' at its nub, traces the sentiments of curiosity, incredulity and mistrust elicited by characters whose desire for a comfortable world-view is crippled by the spiritual constrictions of the age of rationality.

My piece about Mary Butts' "With and Without Buttons" has just been published in the Durham University Postgraduate English journal. You can read it online here.

Accompanied by this unsettling caption, here's another one of Nan Leeder's wood engravings, which accompanied "Ghosties and Ghoulies" in the Bookman magazine. Recent research has focused on Mary Butts' ghost story "With and Without Buttons" (see below). One thing that has come to light is the common ground between Butts' thinking and that of M. R. James, to whom she turned for insight into the execution of supernatural themes. She took from James her advocation of "signatures"1 as the key device of good ghost fiction. As something of a meta-ghost story, "With and Without Buttons" itself explains this device. "Rejecting every known variety of apparition"2, the two sisters realise that in order to convince their next door neighbour that he is being haunted, "apparatus must be reduced to a minimum"3, and they must opt for a "signature" of the apparition:

I recognised a master's direction, but it all seemed to depend on our choice of stimulants. Last year's leaves, delicate, damp articulations; coloured pebbles, dead flies, scraps of torn paper with half a word decipherable ... A mixture of these or a selection?(4)

Their development of this method echoes that which Butts advocates in "Ghosties and Ghoulies": "If the test of these stories is evocation, no trick of technique is more useful than the use of "signatures""5. James' own "damp articulations" include a bed "disturbed" by an unknown occupant - "all the things was crumpled and throwed about all ways ... quite as if anyone 'adn't passed but a very poor night, sir"6. The signature is vital to the feeling of suspense in the ghost story: it allows one to infer that a supernatural force is unfurling itself, yet circumvents the deployment of hackneyed spooks. This is important, as it allows for more challenging meanings to be evoked than if the story employed what Butts calls "simple horror"7. She tells us that the ghost story's

common purpose is to “make our flesh creep”. And by that we mean, not simple horror or terror at a new and generally evil world, usually invisible but interlocked with ours; we mean also a stirring, a touching of nerves not usually sensitive, an awakening to more than fear – but to something like awareness and conviction or even memory"(8).

This creates a certain dramatic irony: the reader always spots these 'clues' before the character does. The reader is thus implicated in a portion of that power which the author or ghost has over the characters, an unsettling experience in itself. I have been pursuing the notion that this suggestively rendered layer of terror may act as a conduit for more complex cultural and/or political undertones. Butts shared with James, and other horror writers such as Arthur Machen, a concern for supernatural experiences that occur in unfamiliar parts of Britain: archetypes such as The Naive American or The Rational City-Dweller find themselves in places where their world-views are thrown off kilter by giddily unsettling new surroundings. In M. R. James' "Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad" a rather arrogant university professor is on holiday on the east coast. Whilst exploring this unfamiliar terrain he finds a whistle in a ruined Knights Templar building. This "signature" proves irresistible to the academic - he blows it and unwittingly draws the ghost, which manifests itself in the sheets of the spare bed in his hotel room. Although James modestly claimed that his stories were just to entertain, the tale implicitly carries a cultural and religious debate with it. The professor's modern, rational scepticism is depicted as the cause of his haunting, and he eventually has to be rescued by a local protestant gentleman. This man understands that the dangers of such metaphysically charged artefacts lie beyond the grasp of mere academic archaeology. Meanwhile the contrast between the scholarly and native wisdom is inflected with religious undercurrents. The troublesome whistle comes from a ruined Knight’s Templar chapel, and so by implication, the tale taps into a Protestant tradition of suspicion against perceived fallacies and idolatries stemming from the Catholic tradition. This is important because it means that much like “With and Without Buttons”, James depicts an excess of scepticism as equivalent to superstition or misplaced religious faith. For Butts, these evoked layers of meaning are capable of arousing something of the primitive man in readers, and through this, of prompting an awareness of the limits of the modern, rational-scientific mindset. In “With and Without Buttons”, the sisters want to try the "simple faith"9 of their neighbour in the ability of science to explain everything. James' stories offer to Butts the subversive potential of “pure evocations of man’s still latent fear that there is an animal life outside the animals he knows, less than human life and more”10.

1 Mary Butts, "Ghosties and Ghoulies", Ashe of Rings and Other Writings. New York: McPherson & Co., 1998, p347.
2 Mary Butts, “With and Without Buttons”, From Altar to Chimney-piece: Selected Stories, New York: McPherson & Co., 1992, p86.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid p87.
5 Ashe of Rings and Other Writings, p347.
6 M. R. James, The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James, London: Wordsworth Editions, 1931, p74.
7 Ashe of Rings and Other Writings, p334.
8 Ibid. pp334-335.
9 From Altar to Chimney-piece, p23.
10 Ashe of Rings and Other Writings, p335.

I've been preparing my paper for a conference on the short story in Lisboa. The paper deals with ghost stories, a preoccupation of mine, and especially with Mary Butts' wonderful With and Without Buttons1. In the story, two sisters invent a ghostly intrigue with which to scare their incredulous neighbour. Yet they discover that they have summoned up a real ghost in the act of doing so. The ghost manifests herself through mysteriously appearing gloves and hand-shapes which ruin preparations for a dinner party. A deeply visual and metonymic haunting, which disturbs as much by the body it conceals as through the dislocated parts it reveals. This omission, I believe, is a space in which a concealed historical narrative resides. Writing on the anti-semitism of Butts' Death of Felicity Taverner, Patterson argues that

“If a writer becomes estranged from a culture which is nevertheless felt intensely to be both a homeland and the source of spiritual and intellectual nourishment, and at the same time adopts the position of its advocate or defender, some displacement or reworking of this estrangement is likely to be figured in the writing.”2

The uncanny machinations of the ghost story, unfolding occluded power, offer a convenient space for displacement. With and Without Buttons was written shortly after Butts was rescued from poverty in Paris by her mother, and I shall be exploring the idea that this tale contains a displaced autobiographical narrative of exile and estrangement. This is inspired by the intuitional sense that we do not discuss problems of national identity explicitly. In part because the length of the short story encourages one to write metonymically, it is a very suggestive medium in which to work-out such problems of belonging indirectly. Butts had long engendered the theme of women as defenders of regional identity through an autobiographical identification of the female body with the land. With and Without Buttons however, problematizes this spiritual and sexual identification: the only body we read of is ethereal, smelly and fragmented. It renders the 'home' a terrifying place for the two sisters, who like the freshly repatriated Butts, are settlers in an unfamiliar land.

1 Which appears in the volumes With and Without Buttons, and From Altar To Chimney-piece.
2 Ian Patterson, ‘‘‘The Plan behind the Plan’: Russians, Jews and Mythologies of Change: The Case of Mary Butts”, Bryan Cheyette, Laura Marcus (eds.), Modernity, Culture and ‘the Jew’, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998, p126.

This is how Mary Butts characterised the popular view of the Bloomsbury set:

"A picture-world follows them about, a popular film, of untidy figures in shapeless, expensive tweeds and horn-rimmed glasses"1

1 Mary Butts, 'Bloomsbury' quoted in Nathalie Blondel, Mary Butts: Scenes from the Life, New York: McPherson & Co, 1998, p402.

One of the interesting hallmarks of Mary Butts’ childhood was that education was not represented as providing a bridge into the adult world. Rather it was consistently understood as offering a means of escape from it. This continues the sense of the child Butts inhabiting two worlds (see below). The association of an authentic education with escape begins with her father reading her classical texts as a very young child:

"Gradually, with nothing said about it, like so many bricks provided, my father supplied me with material for a picture of the world. The cycles of antique story-telling into which man’s consciousness has passed, that pleased me as they please all children, the first pleasing that never wears out, only deepens and re-quickens … a hidden source of loveliness and power."1

Here Butts depicts her youthful worldview as constructed through patrilineal reception of a literary canon. This was decidedly not the education she received at school, but one which spurred on her creation of an anti-institutional, interior world. Worldviews, Butts implies, help habituate one to the world, but are also abstractions from it, “pictures” held within frames, or walled-off with father’s “bricks”2. Constructing literary learning as the disclosure of a repository of human consciousness, this passage looks forward to that association of artistic development and mystical experience which characterised Butts' future literary career.

1 Mary Butts, The Crystal Cabinet: My Childhood at Salterns, pp19-20.
2 Ibid, p19.

Mary Butts' autobiography, The Crystal Cabinet: My Childhood at Salterns, records a child growing up at odds with conventional social mores. She saw her mother's uncritical obedience to Victorian Puritanism as retarding her youthful development: the books she desired were banned or burnt. She recalls being told off by her nurse for singing "Fifteen men on the dead man's chest - Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum"1. These were grave injustices against a curious mind as it sought to expand into the world.

Shortly after her father's death in 1905, Butts was sent to boarding school in St. Andrews, Scotland, hundreds of miles away from her native Dorset. The school, following the example of boys' public schools, treated the girls like boys, enforcing a bleak regime of physical endurance and cold hot water bottles. It's authority rested on a sense of false refinement, and the bleakness of its surroundings compounded Butts' sense of isolation.

Butts soon found herself "leading a life entirely in two worlds - the school world with its deadly pressure, and a world within, where every song that Shelley ever wrote sang in a kind of super-chorus together"2. Percy Bysshe Shelley, with his early belief that institutions were the cause of evil, became Butts' personal guide, echoing her dislike of the distant "authorities"3, who were failing in their duty to encourage the sensitive child. Butts presents her teenage self as "the gentlest, most trusting ... child"3, an innocent whose innate goodness was harmed by the discipline of the school, and so was forced into introspection. This solitude provided her with a critical perspective on her fellow pupils' behaviour. "Thrusting"4, "flaunting" personalities attained popularity while the qualities of "sarcasm and ... vivid curiosity"5 which Butts treasured were disdained. This was a social medium that existed by maintaining "a whole number of stupid pretences which were doing their best to make us a less living ... community than we might have been"5. On losing her only real friend to such a "flaunting" girl, Butts describes watching that friend "blunted, acquiescing" but "going up in form and team"5. As Butts developed, her personality was characterised by a shyness, which looked inward to Shelley and Spenser, and an anti-institutionalism, which berated the conventional customs of her contemporaries. The experience would have fostered her sense of living in a different world to that of her contemporaries. A world whose outlook was determined by opposition to the popular voice, and whose ideals would in future need to find definition within the imaginative world of fiction. This sense of living in another world was crucial to the development of Mary Butts' literary poetics, with its disillusionment with the "Waste Land" of post war morality, and its emphasis on occult mysteries, on secret inheritances.

1 Mary Butts, The Crystal Cabinet: My Childhood at Salterns, p28.
2 Ibid, p189.
3 Ibid, p198.
4 Ibid, p208.
5 Ibid, p209.

My DPhil is aiming to give an overview of Mary Butts' career, centred on the idea that she used fiction to explore the possibility of making magical worlds, an escape from and critique of the real world. As an intensely imaginative person, with a strong interest in magic, Butts had a complex relationship with the real world.

Her autobiography, The Crystal Cabinet: My Childhood at Salterns embodies this complex relationship, and it's this that I'm working on at the moment. The image comes from William Blake's poem of the same name:

I strove to seize the inmost Form
With ardour fierce & hands of flame,
But burst the Crystal Cabinet
And like a Weeping Babe became.*

It embodies some of the central problems of the autobiography, for the cabinet is a symbol of the fragility of innocence. I'm working on my idea that the cabinet represents childhood memory as a source of imaginative escape; the desire to recover innocence in later life through an act of imaginative empathy. But just as such an act looks to escape from history, the desire to do so of course reflects an accumulation of historical factors. It's this relationship that my current chapter tries to explore, and they include the loss of her childhood home, disillusionment with the materialism of modern society, and a disappointment at the failure of love and marriage. Butts herself acknowledges the complexity of her relationship with the imagined past, saying that the crystal cabinet was something which could only be inhabited “inside and outside of at once”**.

*William Blake, 'The Crystal Cabinet". Click this link to see the full text.
** Mary Butts, The Crystal Cabinet: My Childhood at Salterns, p237.

I'll be using this page to document my research on Mary Butts. I'm currently doing a DPhil about her at the University of Sussex. I've built this website as an introduction to her work, and I hope to add more to it in the coming weeks. I'm also keen to attract comment from anyone else who's interested in her fiction. So please go ahead!