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

Twentieth Century Literature, Jan, 1999 by Jennifer Kroll

NOTES

1 She is described as one of "the Crowd" in Sylvia Beach's memoir Shakespeare & Company (113), and also appears in the memoirs of Aldous Huxley, Robert McAlmon, Elsa Lanchester, Evelyn Waugh, and Wyndham Lewis, among others.

2 In an interview with Robert Byington, Quentin Bell recalls his aunt, Virginia Woolf, referring to Mary Butts as a "member of the underground" (Wagstaff 44).

3 The extent to which Mary Butts was known during the 20s is an interesting question. Nathalie Blondel, Mary Butts's biographer, notes that a 1022 article by Douglas Goldring in the Sunday Tribune suggests that her name would have meant something to an American audience at this time (121).

4 This passage is transcribed differently in "Selections from the Journal." There it reads: "Eliot only writes of my quality, dislikes me and my work, I think" (172). Either transcription seems equally possible.

5 In this same journal entry, Butts also records the following humorous poetic critique of Eliot, attributed to Virgil Thomson: "between the idea and the creation / falls the shadow, / of his education."

6 Quentin Bell remembers how a memorial poem by John Raynor in Time and Tide, calling Mary Butts a "fire bearer," yielded Virginia Woolf's sarcastic comment: "I think the fire was fed by alcohol" (Wagstaff 44). In her diary, Woolf refers to Butts as "the malignant Mary Butts" (5: 138), and makes a derogatory comment about her perfume (2: 209).

7 In a March 18, 1932, diary entry, Virginia Woolf records Tony Butts as saying the following of his sister, Mary: "I cannot say anything of my sister - She is a bad woman - pretentious - I can see no merit in her books - pretentious. She corrupts young men. They are always committing suicide." Woolf comments that "Tony is ashamed of Mary, who thus defiles the Butts blood" (4: 84).

8 For a discussion of Eliot's and Pound's later attempts to distance themselves from the Jessie Weston acknowledgment, see Surette. Koestenbaum's article is also interesting in relation to this issue. Koestenbaum discusses Pound's efforts to "defeminize" The Waste Land by removing from the poem all of Eliot's identifications with women.

9 See, for instance, Edmund Wilson's 1922 essay on the poem (Cuddy 27-31). Cleanth Brooks's 1939 essay (Cuddy 87-112) discusses The Waste Land in similar terms, though it argues against aspects of Wilson's interpretation.

10 See Alter, Koestenbaum, Mitchell, and Trosman.

11 See Trosman and Koestenbaum.

12 Gordon says that "the simple view, endorsed by all his friends was that, since Vivienne was (in Virginia Woolf's phrase) a 'bag of ferrets' around Eliot's neck, and a bar to further progress, he must leave her" (51).

13 Quoted by Theodore Spencer in a lecture at Harvard University and recorded by Henry Ware Eliot, Jr., the poet's brother. The quotation is used epigrammatically in Facsimile (1). Eliot was critical of readers who "fastened on superficial details" in his work, "and ignored biography . . . in what [he] did write from personal experience" (Gordon 8).