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Armed with Madness
ARMED WITH MADNESS introduces a group of youthful but disillusioned characters who live a bohemian existence on a strange quest when an ancient chalice is found at the bottom of a well. A startling novel, ARMED WITH MADNESS introduces Scylla Tavemer, her lover Picus, her brother Felix, and their closely-knit circle of friends, all in the vigour of youth and overflowing with passionate intensity. The discovery of the chalice ignites a fury of conflicting emotion, and propels them on an adventure of mythic proportion -- a virtual re-enactment of the Grail Quest.
192 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1928
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601 people want to read
About the author
Mary Butts
41 books24 followersMary Francis Butts was a modernist writer whose work found recognition in important literary magazines of the time, as well as from some of her fellow modernists, T. S. Eliot, Hilda Dolittle, and Bryher. After her death, her works fell into obscurity until they began to be republished in the 1980s.
Butts was a student of the occultist Aleister Crowley, and as one of several students who worked with him on his Magick (Book 4) in 1912, she was given co-author credit. She was married to poet, publisher, and pacifist John Rodker from 1918 to 1927; their daughter, Camilla, was born in 1920.
Butts was a student of the occultist Aleister Crowley, and as one of several students who worked with him on his Magick (Book 4) in 1912, she was given co-author credit. She was married to poet, publisher, and pacifist John Rodker from 1918 to 1927; their daughter, Camilla, was born in 1920.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
July 25, 2019
a flight of birds:
into an exaltation of larks rides a lone ranger, an American abroad; into the mouth of modernism flew Mary Butts, an author now sadly obscure. five fanciful English, young and feckless and rich and poisonous; more than five streams of consciousness and Butts balances them all, their thoughts and motives and reactions ebbing and flowing and creating patterns melancholy and frustrating and possibly tragic.
an unkindness of ravens swarm and mock and toy with the poor American, or at least that is the situation from his rather limited perspective; Butts makes certain the reader understands the untruth of that point of view, the myopia, as well the fragility of the situation itself: five childish English who barely understand themselves, let alone each other, living in a castle made of snowflakes.
a siege of herons... a lamentation of swans... or perhaps more appropriately, a clattering of jackdaws... these sheltered, self-absorbed English birds frustrated me to no end. I did not enjoy learning about their lives. overlaying their antics with a veneer of mythic mysticism only served to make those antics appear all the more foolish. but I did sense intentionality in that decision. and I enjoyed Butts' marvelous prose! winsome yet coolly precise, detached but at times vibrantly alive. her appreciation of the absurd, of silly misunderstandings and even sillier egotism, made the experience rather fun. her references to primitive ritual made the telling of the story constantly intriguing, despite the banality of the characters themselves.
in the end, at last, after all of the ambiguous banter and unspoken words and la-di-da betrayals, all of the flights of poetic, hermetic navel-gazing... a murder of crows comes to visit. but perhaps the less said the better. here's a lesson for the fanciful English: if played with too roughly, your toys will break, cut, and infect. inevitably, shit will get real.
a portrait of the artist, pushed too far:
into an exaltation of larks rides a lone ranger, an American abroad; into the mouth of modernism flew Mary Butts, an author now sadly obscure. five fanciful English, young and feckless and rich and poisonous; more than five streams of consciousness and Butts balances them all, their thoughts and motives and reactions ebbing and flowing and creating patterns melancholy and frustrating and possibly tragic.
an unkindness of ravens swarm and mock and toy with the poor American, or at least that is the situation from his rather limited perspective; Butts makes certain the reader understands the untruth of that point of view, the myopia, as well the fragility of the situation itself: five childish English who barely understand themselves, let alone each other, living in a castle made of snowflakes.
a siege of herons... a lamentation of swans... or perhaps more appropriately, a clattering of jackdaws... these sheltered, self-absorbed English birds frustrated me to no end. I did not enjoy learning about their lives. overlaying their antics with a veneer of mythic mysticism only served to make those antics appear all the more foolish. but I did sense intentionality in that decision. and I enjoyed Butts' marvelous prose! winsome yet coolly precise, detached but at times vibrantly alive. her appreciation of the absurd, of silly misunderstandings and even sillier egotism, made the experience rather fun. her references to primitive ritual made the telling of the story constantly intriguing, despite the banality of the characters themselves.
in the end, at last, after all of the ambiguous banter and unspoken words and la-di-da betrayals, all of the flights of poetic, hermetic navel-gazing... a murder of crows comes to visit. but perhaps the less said the better. here's a lesson for the fanciful English: if played with too roughly, your toys will break, cut, and infect. inevitably, shit will get real.
a portrait of the artist, pushed too far:
February 3, 2015
Strange. Wonderfully strange. Confusingly strange. Frustratingly strange. Beautifully strange.
The mythic beneath and within the romantic and the familial. The land and its past. The Grail. Love and madness.
Unjustly and unforgivably Buried.
Here is a little more about her: http://writersnoonereads.tumblr.com/p...
(oh and dont try hunting down this edition - get this one - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1... )
The mythic beneath and within the romantic and the familial. The land and its past. The Grail. Love and madness.
Unjustly and unforgivably Buried.
Here is a little more about her: http://writersnoonereads.tumblr.com/p...
(oh and dont try hunting down this edition - get this one - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1... )
May 27, 2021
I thought this was going to be psychological horror, but that turned out to be only in the sense that the characters were all horrible people and imagining being around them was horrifying.
Still, the prose was unique and the characters were nuanced, so I don't regret the time spent reading it. I doubt I'll try Butts again, though.
Still, the prose was unique and the characters were nuanced, so I don't regret the time spent reading it. I doubt I'll try Butts again, though.
March 6, 2015
A peculiar story of a clan of youngish vacationer/hermit/aristocrat/bohemians in the reaches of the English countryside, spinning mythologies they can't really believe but romantically desire (as we do as readers) from the raw material of their own ennui. Essential mystery, which even by the 20s of this writing had apparently passed out of the world and been lost forever (they say here), forms the unseen subject of the novel though rarely is touched by the actual content. It is always escaping us, as it does the protagonists, who in their indirect way seem to somehow go on (heroically?) seeking it nonetheless. A quest into the particular landscapes of modern disaffection, rendered in a specific language of precise occlusion designed to lure us into believing in at least the outside possibility of the manifestly nonexistent.
Sentence by sentence, this is strange. Packed too dense with reference and meaning that my 20th century focuses keep me out of to some degree, the prose frequently shifting gears oddly to reveal a new nuance. And this is strange structurally, spinning out into a phase of knight errantry around its central ironically dismissed quest, then condensing through its actual melodrama to an unexpected conclusion of intense focus and seeming mythic relevance.
Sentence by sentence, this is strange. Packed too dense with reference and meaning that my 20th century focuses keep me out of to some degree, the prose frequently shifting gears oddly to reveal a new nuance. And this is strange structurally, spinning out into a phase of knight errantry around its central ironically dismissed quest, then condensing through its actual melodrama to an unexpected conclusion of intense focus and seeming mythic relevance.
August 7, 2017
Otherworldly writing here...prose that reads like a bewitched spider's web of words spun by spirits from another realm.
(Read in the Taverner Novels edition.)
Want to read
March 20, 2013yep, another from Writers No one Reads.
Admired by her contemporaries Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, and Marianne Moore, Butts’ writing (where it gathers any light at all) tends to be overshadowed by her notorious escapades, which included practicing black magic with Aleister Crowley, smoking enormous amounts of opium, and abandoning her only child.
but
Written as an inverse of Eliot’s desolate Waste Land, Armed With Madness is Butts’ finest work, an ecstatic, allegorical quest for meaning in a world shattered by war and nihilism.
here's a painting of her:
Admired by her contemporaries Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, and Marianne Moore, Butts’ writing (where it gathers any light at all) tends to be overshadowed by her notorious escapades, which included practicing black magic with Aleister Crowley, smoking enormous amounts of opium, and abandoning her only child.
but
Written as an inverse of Eliot’s desolate Waste Land, Armed With Madness is Butts’ finest work, an ecstatic, allegorical quest for meaning in a world shattered by war and nihilism.
here's a painting of her:
July 27, 2011
Don't read Virginia Woolf, read Mary Butts; and it's even better if you listen to PJ Harvey's album White Chalk at the same time.
Read
March 13, 2017One of those books I should really have heard of sooner: a Machen-influenced West Country modernist refraction of the Grail quest, and after Penda's Fen the second story I've encountered this week which you could call a queer Dark Is Rising. Though unlike that film's rather lonely strand of resistance mysticism, the central band here might equally be an uncomfortably post-pubescent Famous Five (and how curious to see the modern use of "get off with" already thriving in 1928). Then again, the central coterie with their curious hobbies, tangled loves and a sense of great invisible dramas behind their actions reminded me of Iris Murdoch, not least because Butts has the same weakness for decorously implausible names (Scylla Taverner! Ficus Tracy!). Like Murdoch, Butts was bullish and bisexual (with a particular fondness for largely gay men), though unlike Murdoch her own tension between common sense and mysticism tipped a little further towards the latter; one can hardly picture Iris at Thelema. Alas, as too often during the mid-20th century, Butts' numinous sense of place would later curdle into blood and soil anti-Semitism, though mercifully there's scant trace of that here. Indeed, the closest thing to a villain is Ficus' determinedly philistine father, who can best be summarised as 'well Brexit'.
The plot? Well, bear in mind that Machen influence - the sense of the real world as a great symbol, the ritual encoded in the everyday. "Either this is a curiously coincidental hash, or we are taking part in events, only part of which are happening on the earth we see." Objectively, a holiday party grows tense and fragments shortly after a cup is found in a well. But part of the point is how meaningless the world must be if only external realities are considered valid. The extra dimension, though, is no mere consolation, endangers as much as it solaces. One character's muttering that no good ever comes from the Grail seems amusingly paradoxical, until you think back to the stories and how high the cost of the vision always seems to be, and reluctantly see his point. Though there's an interesting repeated idea that the Grail is "the saga story par excellence that has never come off, or found its form or its poet" - that none of its expressions quite capture the shining form which lurks deep in certain imaginations. And I don't say that's untrue, but is it not true of every great myth? Even Homer isn't quite as good as the distant dream one conceives of Troy and Ulysses from reading a dozen riffs on him.
Still, this is a very fine book, and a quick read considering the style recalls a spikier Woolf (they'd both hate me saying that - they didn't get on) or maybe Djuna Barnes before a thunderstorm. Most every page has lines to treasure, often relating to the Dorset landscape ("an angle of the little secret cliff where England rose out of the harvested sea") or the struggle for enlightenment ("our moments of illumination which always take a turn for the worse"), but not always ("Young men think sex is all the same, or at best a sacred or profane love, when it's as varied as art."). Making it all the more unfair that Butts should suffer the fate of the author rediscovered, only to then go out of print again. I was lucky enough to get a 2001 Penguin Modern Classic from the library, but already a physical copy will set you back £150 and no legitimate ebooks seem available. Copyright legislation could really do with a tweak or two, because that serves nobody who deserves it.
The plot? Well, bear in mind that Machen influence - the sense of the real world as a great symbol, the ritual encoded in the everyday. "Either this is a curiously coincidental hash, or we are taking part in events, only part of which are happening on the earth we see." Objectively, a holiday party grows tense and fragments shortly after a cup is found in a well. But part of the point is how meaningless the world must be if only external realities are considered valid. The extra dimension, though, is no mere consolation, endangers as much as it solaces. One character's muttering that no good ever comes from the Grail seems amusingly paradoxical, until you think back to the stories and how high the cost of the vision always seems to be, and reluctantly see his point. Though there's an interesting repeated idea that the Grail is "the saga story par excellence that has never come off, or found its form or its poet" - that none of its expressions quite capture the shining form which lurks deep in certain imaginations. And I don't say that's untrue, but is it not true of every great myth? Even Homer isn't quite as good as the distant dream one conceives of Troy and Ulysses from reading a dozen riffs on him.
Still, this is a very fine book, and a quick read considering the style recalls a spikier Woolf (they'd both hate me saying that - they didn't get on) or maybe Djuna Barnes before a thunderstorm. Most every page has lines to treasure, often relating to the Dorset landscape ("an angle of the little secret cliff where England rose out of the harvested sea") or the struggle for enlightenment ("our moments of illumination which always take a turn for the worse"), but not always ("Young men think sex is all the same, or at best a sacred or profane love, when it's as varied as art."). Making it all the more unfair that Butts should suffer the fate of the author rediscovered, only to then go out of print again. I was lucky enough to get a 2001 Penguin Modern Classic from the library, but already a physical copy will set you back £150 and no legitimate ebooks seem available. Copyright legislation could really do with a tweak or two, because that serves nobody who deserves it.
March 4, 2014
Mary Butts is an interesting and now little-read figure on the fringes of what might be called the British Modernist scene of the early twentieth century. Going from what little I’ve read about her, she lived a fascinating and wild life by the standards of any author: she was in Paris in the ‘20s with the likes of Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Ford Madox Ford and Wyndham Lewis (all favourites of mine), she was for a while a student of Aleister Crowley (he not so much), and she also developed something of a bad reputation for drug use and wanton affairs both straight and gay.
Most of her novels are now out of print, but this one’s been reissued as a Penguin Classic. It’s a fascinating read as a kind of relic of its style, but I’m not sure I can entirely recommend it. It’s a difficult read for reasons that are hard to pin down. Somehow it’s both underwritten and overwritten; it requires a certain amount of effort on the part of the reader to figure out what’s going on, and then when you do figure it all out you often find there’s just not much going on at all. I suppose I was expecting something strange and haunting, but too often it simply ambled towards a rather pedestrian, pastoral tone.
I had the constant sense of allegories and allusions at work that I wasn’t catching, and though many of the descriptions are beautifully composed, the whole book seems composed of awkward, stilted conversations in which nothing is decided. In many novels that would be perfectly fine but this one left me indifferent, cold. A disappointment.
Most of her novels are now out of print, but this one’s been reissued as a Penguin Classic. It’s a fascinating read as a kind of relic of its style, but I’m not sure I can entirely recommend it. It’s a difficult read for reasons that are hard to pin down. Somehow it’s both underwritten and overwritten; it requires a certain amount of effort on the part of the reader to figure out what’s going on, and then when you do figure it all out you often find there’s just not much going on at all. I suppose I was expecting something strange and haunting, but too often it simply ambled towards a rather pedestrian, pastoral tone.
I had the constant sense of allegories and allusions at work that I wasn’t catching, and though many of the descriptions are beautifully composed, the whole book seems composed of awkward, stilted conversations in which nothing is decided. In many novels that would be perfectly fine but this one left me indifferent, cold. A disappointment.
February 11, 2021
“No use waiting for day, because it was always dark in that country.”
Well, they said Mary Butts was strange and they weren’t wrong. Set in the heaths, woods, and chines of remotest Dorset, where “a white road sprung like an arrow across the moor that filled the lowlands like a dark dragon’s wing”, the novel recounts the interactions of a semi-feral group of middle-class dropouts practising arts and crafts in rural desolation – rather like an offshoot of the Kibbo Kift, but undoubtedly darker.
Invited to their cottage in the woods, the urban American Carston is well outside his comfort zone: "Life to him was an elaborate theatre, without scenery. Here the scenery seemed to be the play.” Left alone with the worryingly named Scylla (“A witch and a bitch they call me”), he awaits the arrival of her companions: “Must be a march of trolls in the night through the wood. Nothing natural was coming. Four tall young men crowded into the room.” One of them is carrying an old chalice that looks suspiciously like the Sanc-Grail. Maybe, or maybe not...
Mary Butts evokes her wild setting – a wasteland for human beings – in extraordinary language, intercut with myth, rituals, and symbols. But interpreting them (and the weirdly sketched characters) is another matter. The sentences seem to disintegrate in places, the characters disperse, the plot thins, and – like Carston – I’m left wondering what’s going on . “The boys were off by now, somewhere on Gault cliffs, which was not a nice place, but a wonder and a horror, overhanging a gulf over a wood full of foxes the surf lapped, where even she had never been. The boys would be sitting there, dangling their legs, the gulls fanning them, an unsailable bay under them, transparent, peacock-coloured, where under the water the reefs wound like snakes.” Mystifying, but satisfyingly so.
Well, they said Mary Butts was strange and they weren’t wrong. Set in the heaths, woods, and chines of remotest Dorset, where “a white road sprung like an arrow across the moor that filled the lowlands like a dark dragon’s wing”, the novel recounts the interactions of a semi-feral group of middle-class dropouts practising arts and crafts in rural desolation – rather like an offshoot of the Kibbo Kift, but undoubtedly darker.
Invited to their cottage in the woods, the urban American Carston is well outside his comfort zone: "Life to him was an elaborate theatre, without scenery. Here the scenery seemed to be the play.” Left alone with the worryingly named Scylla (“A witch and a bitch they call me”), he awaits the arrival of her companions: “Must be a march of trolls in the night through the wood. Nothing natural was coming. Four tall young men crowded into the room.” One of them is carrying an old chalice that looks suspiciously like the Sanc-Grail. Maybe, or maybe not...
Mary Butts evokes her wild setting – a wasteland for human beings – in extraordinary language, intercut with myth, rituals, and symbols. But interpreting them (and the weirdly sketched characters) is another matter. The sentences seem to disintegrate in places, the characters disperse, the plot thins, and – like Carston – I’m left wondering what’s going on . “The boys were off by now, somewhere on Gault cliffs, which was not a nice place, but a wonder and a horror, overhanging a gulf over a wood full of foxes the surf lapped, where even she had never been. The boys would be sitting there, dangling their legs, the gulls fanning them, an unsailable bay under them, transparent, peacock-coloured, where under the water the reefs wound like snakes.” Mystifying, but satisfyingly so.
March 1, 2019
Not an easy style, I needed a good grapple to get to grips with it, but it grows and spreads through you slowly but insidiously. You may want to give it up, put it down, exasperated by its obscurity but it needles away at your brain, challenges your intellect. Against your will you find yourself giving it another go, fascinated by its wilful weirdity and otherworldliness. Much shortness of phrase, snappy but vivid. Strange fey creatures living in this isolated peninsular world, very much of their time in the 1920s, post the trauma of WW1. Time of great change and uncertainty. The house on the edge of a quarry, a cliff, the sea, the wood, they will all linger with you long after you read the last word. All on the edge of sanity, flowing between mystic and myth, reality and fictions. Picus the woodpecker mischeiviously disrupting the calm, the catalyst for that shocking final assault. American giving way to a Russian. Could it all start over again? If you want an obvious plot, a well linked sequential storyline handed to you on a plate, a no brainer of a story, then this is not for you. If you want a 3D puzzle of a narrative with some of the pieces missing, pieces you have to find yourself then this could be it.
August 11, 2014
The words flow like water. It's like Mary Butts was Virginia Woolf's eccentric little sister.
February 23, 2021
“Si el universo materialista es verdad, no una verdad fabricada para tender puentes con él y con las cosas, somos un conjunto de factores ciegos en una máquina. Y ninguna pasión tiene la menor validez ni imaginación. Sólo son truquitos de la máquina”.
.
Para conocer esa máquina Mary Butt se empeñó en internarse en los caminos de la magia y los mitos. Conoció a Aleister Crowley y estuvo en su casa de Córcega. Quizás de aquellas experiencias surgió su deseo de “escribir un libro […] sin bailes en torno a los secretos ni desdén hacia los no iniciados. [...] que muestre la relación del arte con la magia y al artista como lo verdadero” en su manifiesto de 1921 (el texto completo puede leerse en el blog de @ubulibros , traducido por Teresa Soto). Unos años después, en 1928, publicó esta historia de locura y libertad, en contra de la máquina de la física cuántica recién descubierta, plena de delirios surrealistas y transgresiones poliamorosas de un grupo de jóvenes que conviven en la costa de Inglaterra y encuentran una copa de jade que quién sabe si no será el Santo Grial. Como si Virginia Woolf se hubiera soltado la melena.
.
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Para conocer esa máquina Mary Butt se empeñó en internarse en los caminos de la magia y los mitos. Conoció a Aleister Crowley y estuvo en su casa de Córcega. Quizás de aquellas experiencias surgió su deseo de “escribir un libro […] sin bailes en torno a los secretos ni desdén hacia los no iniciados. [...] que muestre la relación del arte con la magia y al artista como lo verdadero” en su manifiesto de 1921 (el texto completo puede leerse en el blog de @ubulibros , traducido por Teresa Soto). Unos años después, en 1928, publicó esta historia de locura y libertad, en contra de la máquina de la física cuántica recién descubierta, plena de delirios surrealistas y transgresiones poliamorosas de un grupo de jóvenes que conviven en la costa de Inglaterra y encuentran una copa de jade que quién sabe si no será el Santo Grial. Como si Virginia Woolf se hubiera soltado la melena.
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Read
May 17, 2022Weird book
August 24, 2013
Mary Butts had an interesting life. She smoked loads of opium (one day recording in her journal that she had managed to restrict her consumption to seven pipes), was friends during her bohemian years in Paris with the likes of Jean Cocteau, and studied under Aleister Crowley. In 1932, five years before she died, she settled into a bungalow on the cliffs above Sennen Cove in West Cornwall, looking out across the Atlantic towards the Scilly Isles. Every Sunday she travelled 15 miles to attend Mass at St Hilary, whose Vicar, Bernard Walke, she greatly admired. Given all that, one would not expect her to produce a conventional novel for her crowning achievement, and by golly she didn't. Armed With Madness is extraordinary. According to the London Review of Books, it's a 'masterpiece of Modernist prose'. I haven't read enough modernist prose to be able to make the judgement, but it's certainly distinctive. The only thing like it I've ever read is The Sheltering Sky, which resembles it very closely. If Paul Bowles had not read Mary Butts, I'll eat my hat. Butts' language is remarkable - brittle and sharp, full of metaphors which are unexpected yet perfect. The novel is not an easy read (I'm probably being premature in writing a review after only one encounter; that I shall be reading it again is not in doubt); one has to do quite a bit of work oneself as a reader to make sense of what's going on, but it is well worth the effort. I suspect that after I have read it again, I shall be wanting to come back and give it four stars. But this will do to go on with.
May 26, 2018
You can listen to an in-depth discussion of Armed with Madness on Sherds Podcast: http://www.holdfastnetwork.com/sherds...
June 1, 2019
Exciting, if hard to follow, freak modernism.
April 13, 2024
There had been an apple once. There had been an apple tree. When it gave no more apples, it had made fire, and a slice of its trunk had become a bowl cut out into birds. The bowl unless it was turned into fire again, would stop growing and last for ever. Things that came out of time, and were stopped; could be made over into another sort of time.
May 6, 2023
This has to be adapted into a film directed by Robert Eggers
August 4, 2024
Història curiosa amb una prosa elevada
September 16, 2024
Clarence za ním stoupal po svahu plný vzteku a snídaně.
October 11, 2024
Mary Butts prose makes more sense once aware of her opium habit
January 16, 2025
Strašně zvláštní, ale hodně mě to bavilo
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