Mary Butts's "Unrest Cure" for The Waste Land - Critical Essay

Twentieth Century Literature, Jan, 1999 by Jennifer Kroll

In 1928, Lost Generation writer Mary Butts published Armed with Madness, a novel that utilized Arthurian grail-quest mythology to comment on the conditions of modernity. She was, of course, not the first to connect these themes: T. S. Eliot's celebrated long poem, The Waste Land, had been published in 1922. In a journal entry from 1927, Butts half-jokingly complains that Armed with Madness "might well have been called 'The Wasteland.' Eliot always anticipates my titles. . . . Eliot and I are working on a parallel," she says, "but what is interesting is that he is working on the San [c] Grail on its negative side" ("Selections" 172). A simultaneous reading of Eliot's The Waste Land and Mary Butts's Armed with Madness is fascinating precisely because these contemporary works have so much in common, and yet manage to present such different visions. Working from an understanding of the grail myth similar to Eliot's own and even utilizing elements of his topography, Armed with Madness is nevertheless nothing like a mere reiteration of The Waste Land. Through its suggestion of readily available cures for the condition of barrenness and sterility illustrated in Eliot's poem, Butts's novel subtly critiques both Eliot and The Waste Land.

Those who knew both Butts and Eliot might have anticipated the nature of Butts's response to The Waste Land. Even the physical presences of these two authors would have suggested critical differences in vision and tone. In her memoir Shakespeare & Company, Sylvia Beach describes a Mary Butts who "bounced in and out . . . in the Paris of the twenties, with her red cheeks and red hair, [and] wasn't melancholy at all" (113). The Eliot of the same period showed artistic Bloomsbury "a face tinted green with powder to look cadaverous" (Gordon 5). Butts seems to have known nearly every artistic personality of Paris and London in the 191 Os and 1920s.(1) Her friends and admirers included Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, E. M. Forster, H.D., and Marianne Moore (Blondel xv). Nevertheless, her situation as a writer, in the late 20s, differed significantly from Eliot's. By this time, Eliot was "established . . . at the centre of London's literary society" (Gordon 1). A "member of the underground"(2) living mostly in Paris, Butts was much less well known, despite the fact that her individual stories, her first collection of stories (Speed the Plough, 1923), and her first novel (Ashe of Rings, 1925) had all received critical acclaim.(3) While the conservatively clad Eliot prayed on the London subway during his daily commute to the offices of Faber and Faber (Gordon 6), Mary Butts was pub-crawling through Paris by night, squandering her meager income on opium and penniless men.

Eliot and Butts knew each other, although they were never close friends. In 1920, Ovid Press, run by Butts's then-husband, John Rodker, had published Eliot's second book of poetry, Ara Vos Prec. In the 1927 journal entry in which she describes the "parallel" between Armed with Madness and The Waste Land, Butts indicates her sense of her relationship with Eliot. "T. S. Eliot . . . the only writer of my quality, dislikes me and my work, I think," she says (qtd. in Blondel 186).(4) She then describes the incident that "made [her] after years 'see through' T. S. Eliot (not to lose an ounce of . . . admiration for his poetry)." She recalls a time when "[Eliot] said: 'that - in some such a way - the mandarins who went to M. Bergson's lectures at the Sorbonne may have been said to have been using their minds.'" An admirer of Eastern philosophy and culture, Butts claims that the "provincialism" of this racist comment is what "at last . . . decided [her]" against Eliot ("Selections" 172).(5) Her decision against him easily could have been influenced by other factors as well, including Eliot's refusal to write an introduction for Ashe of Rings, despite his pronounced esteem for this work (Blondel 416). In his post as editor of The Criterion, Eliot had also rejected a number of Butts's stories in 1925 (Blondel 141).

The extent to which Eliot actually disliked either Mary Butts or her writing is unclear. Virginia Woolf's few recorded comments about Butts, however, seem to indicate a marked dislike, which was probably shared by at least some other members of her circle.(6) Butts's abandonment of John Rodker seems to have played a part in triggering Bloomsbury's aversion (Wagstaff 44). Her brother Anthony, well known to the Woolfs as writer William Plomer's companion, also seems to have done much toward turning Bloomsbury against his sister.(7)

Although their personal situations and personalities differed significantly, Butts and Eliot have a number of similarities as writers. Both authors are difficult. Butts, who also wrote poetry, writes very poetic prose. It has been called "some of the most elliptical prose in English," prose that "reveals the space between things, inciting the reader to fill the space or begin to commune with what is there already, in between" (West vii). Like Eliot, Butts is given to splicing borrowed quotations into her work without warning or explanation. And like Eliot's poetry, her prose requires a fairly high level of intellectual as well as emotional engagement.