The Journals of Mary Butts (review)

In these personal, presumably private writings, Mary Butts exposes a being made restive by her chafing at boundaries as diverse as gender, literary authority, and even the material world. She shows what it was like for an intelligent contemporary to encounter the works of writers now considered central, or nearly so, to modernism: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, H. D., Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, Ford Madox Ford, E. M. Forster, Wyndham Lewis, Marianne Moore, Aldous Huxley, Rebecca West, H. G. Wells, G. B. Shaw, and Fydor Dostoevsky. She spans the arts, sciences, and pseudo-sciences, alighting upon Bertrand Russell, Roger Fry, Constantin Brancusi, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, Jane Harrison, Albert Einstein and Aleister Crowley (the occultist she briefly hoped would serve her mystical interests). Her readings, and in some cases meetings, with these figures may serve a line of metaphysical thought (Yeats), offer a useful experiment in style (Joyce), a personal warning (West), or register a significant miss (H. G. Wells, along the same lines that disappointed Woolf). Regrettably, Butts's record and reactions are often only a sentence or two in length. Quotations from Violet Hunt and Ford at Selsey appear without context, and we find no details of a dinner with the Joyce family. One exception is an inventory of objects (but not paintings) at Gertrude Stein's apartment, where she collected composer Virgil Thomson's description of Eliot as "a 1^st class or refined literary mortician" (253). Though she makes several references to the consumption of opium in various forms, Butts never says where.

Nathalie Blondel is to be praised for her extensive, carefully-researched notes that include supplements from Butts's letters; for biographical outlines of the semi-obscure modernists closest to Butts's life; a glossary that opens up Butts's mystical, mythical terminology; and for the biographical introduction and interspersed records of Butts's movements over the years. Indeed, Blondel is the world authority on Butts, having authored a thoroughgoing biography, Mary Butts: Scenes from the Life, and seen into print, or reprint, many of Butts's works. Still to come is her edition of Butts's early lesbian novel, Dangerous , co-edited with Camilla Bagg (who I assume is Butts's elusive daughter, rarely mentioned in the diary). One quibble about her editing is that I would have liked to have had omissions signaled, even at the expense of the flow of the text. I liked the sample page of the diary used as wallpaper for the page which starts each new year, but I wondered what sorts of volumes and what color ink Butts wrote in. I found myself questioning some of Blondel's assertions in her introduction and notes. I think Butts deliberately left in doubt who fathers the younger brother in whom Van, the female protagonistof Ashe of Rings, later finds a spiritual ally (15). I wonder at the statement that "Eliot did not share Butts's view of the importance of place, or her spiritual view of the English landscape" (475)—granted he had a different spirituality.

Blondel exaggerates Butts's influence on modernism and modernists, I feel, and she makes the most of sparse praise, though she unflinchingly records stunning rejections (e.g. Woolf's of Ashe of Rings) . Butts learned far more from the common interests she articulates with Eliot (with his grail quest and titles that seem parallel to her own), and H. D. (with her devotion to the Eleusinian rituals), than she contributed to influence or advance them, as Blondel strains to suggest in both cases. Enrichment of the modernist scene, where it comes in these journals, is in the lighting up of shadowy figures, and the reinforcing of patterns of modernist production. The figures include the poet and novelist, John Rodker, her first husband, whose efforts as a publisher she briefly shared, and whose socialism and pacifism offer a...