Armed With Madness

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“The effect of Mary Butts’ unretouched negatives of raw nerves is quietly, darkly affecting,” wrote the American poet Marianne Moore in 1933, seeking to convey her appreciation of a writer whose novels stood somewhat apart in the 1920s and 1930s; as they still do, not easily available and largely unread. Ashe of Rings (1925), Armed With Madness (1928) and Death of Felicity Taverner (1932), all of diem set mainly in the Dorset countryside Butts so passionately cherished, offered a style and a vision that met the concerns of her age with a disturbingly particular voice. Of the three, Armed With Madness is doubtless the most interesting and original achievement, not least because it is less firmly contained than the others, less driven by a set of ideas that the development of the narrative then confirms. Rather, it takes us immediately and disconcertingly into an edgy world where “nothing [goes on] happening” and “noises let through silence”, where the sheer style of the writing holds moments of illumination, flashes of beauty, which at the same time reveal an underlying disquiet. “There is trouble about. The kind that comes with brightness,” says Ross to Scylla early in the novel: “Can you see that?” That indeed is what Scylla and the reader will see, as the novel catches them up in a game which brings with it a great deal that is raw and dark. Butts often quoted a line from an Elizabethan poem by Thomas Nashe, written “In Time of Pestilence”: “Brightness falls from the air.” Her world too is one of sickness, of “dis-ease” (the term used by her and her characters): brightness is falling, meanings are uncertain, and the moments of illumination “always take a turn for the worse”.

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