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

Twentieth Century Literature, Jan, 1999 by Jennifer Kroll

Though Armed with Madness fell victim to a number of such shallow reviews, much of Butts's work, and especially her later work, actually fared quite well with reviewers. In fact, Mary Butts seems to have been well on her way to etching a permanent place for herself in English letters when she died suddenly in 1937, of a perforated ulcer and peritonitis. She was 46 at the time, living alone in a cottage in Cornwall, and hard at work on a seventh novel about Julian the Apostate. Her 40s had been an incredibly productive period for her. She had published three novels, a collection of short stories, two pamphlets, and a vast number of reviews and articles. Her notebooks were brimming full of ideas. She was in the process of searching out a publisher for a recently completed memoir of her childhood. T. S. Eliot had just offered to publish a collection of her stories with Faber.

It is unfortunate that this collection was in fact never published; the reason why is unknown. Four days after Mary Butts's death, Eliot wrote a letter to inform her that the stories he had requested had not yet arrived. When Butts's literary executor, Angus Davidson, wrote back explaining the circumstances, Eliot expressed the appropriate shock and remorse (Blondel 425). But the Faber volume never appeared. The collected stories intended for Faber were edited by Butts's friend, the novelist Bryher, and published by Brendin Publishing in 1938. "Had Faber published a volume of Mary Butts's stories," as biographer Nathalie Blondel notes, "there is no doubt that her reputation, albeit posthumously, would have been secured" (426).

As it was, Butts's passing was commemorated in a number of journals, and her posthumously published memoir, The Crystal Cabinet, actually proved to be her most popular book (Blondel 426). But Mary Butts never really experienced the "poet's success" that she "looked forward to" on The Little Review's 1929 questionnaire.(18) In the years following her death, her works quickly became unavailable. Already in 1943, she was mentioned only in passing in W. J. Entwhistle and E. Gillett's The Literature of England AD 500-1942, where she was dismissed as "among other women writers who have written workmanlike and, at times, satisfying fiction" (qtd. in Blondel 433).

Although Mary Butts has perhaps always maintained something of a small cult following, much of her writing had never been republished until very recently. During the past decade, McPherson & Company has been reissuing her entire oeuvre and has also published an excellent biography by Nathalie Blondel and a critical and commemorative volume edited by Christopher Wagstaff. Today's reader, no longer likely to be offended by either Butts's "frankness" or her experimental style, may find a great deal of interest and relevance in this modernist writer's works. Butts was an adamant campaigner for ecological preservation and for the preservation of historical landmarks. She saw a deep connection between the internal and external, the past and the present, the social and the spiritual. Almost all of her works, like Armed with Madness, show us a bountiful world infused with spirit, one simultaneously requiring and offering profound care. "Why catch up with the Holy Spirit when He is hovering over Asia and saying 'Shantih'?" Mary Butts would quip in a 1932 letter to her friend, Eliot critic Hugh Ross Williamson. "He is in a nut in a Glastonbury thicket." (Blondel 284).