Ok there are no arse jokes in this post so if that's what you're here for give up now...

Still here? Good.

I posted a while back about Mary Butts but that was before I had read much of the book we have in stock - The Taverner Novels. (There are in fact two novels in a single volume - Armed With Madness and the Death of Felicity Taverner.)

I often get a feeling about books though and I knew it was a goodie right away. Now, having just finished Armed With Madness, I can safely say that Mary Butts is my new favourite writer.

The more I find out about her (several of her books are illustrated by Jean Cocteau who she hung out in Paris with in the 1920's - ages before Colette was on the scene. There is a brilliant description of her "the gentle-born roisterer who wore a single dollar-sized white jade earing under a man's felt hat tipped-up, who "toddled" because one of her knees came easily out of joint, and who revelled in the pub-crawl.") the more I think I would have liked her...

She was also hated by Virginia Woolf - a fine writer - but can you imagine HER in the pub? What a bore!

Yep - sounds like Ms Butts was a bit of a nut but what a writer. Armed With Madness is heavily affected by TS Eliot's The Waste Land. Her characters have survived the War physically (but not always mentally) and are trying to begin to live in a new world - a place without God or any of the certainties that used to underpin society. Instead we have a group of young people in an old house in the country trying to find something, anything really, that seems real and of value.

In many ways Butts is also a visionary writer, appropriate as she was the great-granddaughter of local author (Eat THAT BSTTS!) William Blake's patron. She writes in a manner which is peculiar to say the least but that makes more sense when placed in context - modernism, Freud, Woolf et al, TS Eliot etc.

"He grinned at the old nurse's horror-story, went back to the studio and watered one of the shallow pans stuck with the seeds he had gathered tramping Europe. A bee-orchid had come up: an odd-scented herb from a pass on the Pyranees: a rare lily was over. Whenever he touched it life grew. Plants and dogs and children. Eggs hatched. And men? They were there to make him laugh. If they found rest in him, he was indifferent as Nature, and in general as kind."

Her writing is like poetry in that it avoids any attempt to be specific, to trap meaning in a cage of words. Instead she lets meanings leak out...

Behind all her writing I sense an allegorical, symbolic world, like Blake's personal mythology. This world, more real to her than the physical world, was populated with spirits and other wonders. It is glimpses of this vision that the reader sees while immersed in her prose.

Mary Butts died tragically young and her party-animal image tended to eclipse what she wrote though while she was alive she was an important and respected player in the British modernist scene.

Seekers seek her out!

On the table at Crockatt & Powell, always a little different...