Mary Butts - Six of the Best

By Mary Butts

Six has always been a number we group things around – Six of the best, six of one half a dozen of another, six feet under, six pack, six degrees of separation and a sixth sense are but a few of the ways we use this number.

Such is its popularity that

• Language: English
• Publisher: Six of the Best
• Release date: Dec 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9781835473153

Book preview

Six of the Best by Mary Butts

Six has always been a number we group things around – Six of the best, six of one half a dozen of another, six feet under, six pack, six degrees of separation and a sixth sense are but a few of the ways we use this number.

Such is its popularity that we thought it is also a very good way of challenging and investigating an author’s work to give width, brevity, humour and depth across six of their very best.

In this series we gather together authors whose short stories both rivet the attention and inspire the imagination to visit their gems in a series of six, to roam across an author’s legacy in a few short hours and gain a greater understanding of their writing and, of course, to be lavishly entertained by their ideas, their narrative and their way with words.

These stories can be surprising and sometimes at a tangent to what we expected, but each is fully formed and a marvellous adventure into the world and words of a literary master. 

Index of Contents

Mary Butts – An Introduction

With and Without Buttons

Magic

The Dinner Party

Angèle au Couvent 

Brightness Falls

In Bayswater

SIX OF THE BEST

Mary Butts – An Introduction

Mary Frances Butts was born on 13th December 1890 in Poole, Dorset.

Her early years were spent at Salterns, an 18th-century house overlooking Poole Harbour.  Sadly in 1905 her father died, and she was sent for boarding at St Leonard's school for girls in St Andrews.

Her mother remarried and, from 1909, Mary studied at Westfield College in London, and here, first became aware of her bisexual feelings.  She was sent down for organising a trip to Epsom races and only completed her degree in 1914 when she graduated from the London School of Economics.  By then Mary had become an admirer of the occultist Aleister Crowley and she was given a co-authorship credit on his ‘Magick (Book 4)’.

In 1916, she began the diary which would now detail her future life and be a constant reference point for her observations and her absorbing experiences.

During World War I, she was doing social work for the London County Council in Hackney Wick, and involved in a lesbian relationship.  Life changed after meeting the modernist poet, John Rodker and they married in 1918.

In 1921 she spent 3 months at Aleister Crowley's Abbey of Thelema in Sicily; she found the practices dreadful and also acquired a drug habit.  Mary now spent time writing in Dorset, including her celebrated book of short stories ‘Speed the Plough’ which saw fully develop her unique Modernist prose style.

Europe now beckoned and several years were spent in Paris befriending many artists and writing further extraordinary stories. 

She was continually sought after by literary magazines and also published several short story collections as books. Although a Modernist writer she worked in other genres but is essentially only known for her short stories.  Mary was deeply committed to nature conservation and wrote several pamphlets attacking the growing pollution of the countryside.

In 1927, she divorced and the following year her novel ‘Armed with Madness’ was published.  A further marriage followed in 1930 and time was spent attempting to settle in London and Newcastle before setting up home on the western tip of Cornwall.  By 1934 the marriage had failed.

Mary Butts died on 5th March 1937, at the West Cornwall Hospital, Penzance, after an operation for a perforated gastric ulcer.  She was 46.

With and Without Buttons

It is not only true, it is comforting, to say that incredulity is often no more than superstition turned inside out. But there can be a faith of disbelief as inaccurate as its excess, and in some ways more trying, for the right answers to it have not yet been thought up. It was only because Trenchard said at lunch that the mass was a dramatised wish-fulfillment that what came after ever happened. At least I wish we did not think so. It was trying to get out anyhow, but if he had not irritated us and made us want to show off, we would not have made ourselves serviceable to it. And it was we who came off lightly. To him it has been something that he has not been able to shake off. When it happened he behaved so well about it, but that didn’t save him. Now he cannot think what he used to think, and he does not know what else there is that he might think.

I am seeing him now, more vividly than I like. He was our next-door neighbour in a remote village in Kent. A nest of wasps had divided their attention between us, and we had met after sunset to return their calls with cyanide and squibs.

He was a sanguine man, positive, hearty, actually emotional. He had known and done a great many things, but when he came to give his account of them, all he had to say was a set of pseudo-rationalisations, calling the bluff, in inaccurate language, of God, the arts, the imagination, the emotions. That is not even chic science for laymen today. He might have thought that way as much as he liked, but there was no reason, we said, to try and prove it to us all one hot, sweet, blue-drawn summer, in a Kentish orchard; to sweat for our conversion; to shame us into agreement. Until the evening I told him to stop boring us with his wish-fulfillments, for they weren't ours, and saw his healthy skin start to sweat and a stare come into his eyes. That ought to have warned me, as it did my sister, of whom I am sometimes afraid. It did warn us, but it wound us up also. We went home through the orchard in the starlight and sat downstairs in the midsummer night between lit candles, inviting in all that composed it, night hunting cries and scents of things that grow and ripen, cooled in the star-flow. A world visible, but not in terms of colour. With every door and every window open, the old house was no more than a frame, a set of screens to display night, midsummer, perfume, the threaded stillness, the stars strung together, their spears glancing, penetrating an earth breathing silently, a female power asleep.

All he hears is nature snoring, said my sister. Let’s give him a nightmare. It was a good idea.

How? I said.

We'll find out tomorrow. I can feel one about. I got up to close the doors before we mounted with our candles. Through walls and glass, through open doors or shut, a tide poured in, not of air or any light or dark or scent or sound or heat or coolness. Tide. Without distinction from north or south or without or within; without flow or ebb, a Becoming; without stir or departure or stay: without radiance or pace. Star-tide. Has not Science had wind of rays poured in from interstellar space?

There is no kind of ill-doing more fascinating than one which has a moral object, a result in view which will justify the means without taking the fun out of them. All that is implied when one says that one will give someone something to cry about. It was that line which we took at breakfast.

We'll try his simple faith, we said. We'll scare him stiff and see how he stands the strain. We'll haunt him. And asked each other if either of us knew of a practising vampire in the neighbourhood or a were-cow.

It was several days before we hit on a suitable technique, examining and rejecting every known variety of apparition, realising that apparatus must be reduced to a minimum, and that when nothing will bear scrutiny, there must be very little given to scrutinise. In fact, what we meant to do was to suggest him into an experience—the worse the better—wholly incompatible with the incredulities of his faith. That it would be easy to do, we guessed; that it would be dangerous to him—that appeared at the moment as part of the fun. Not because we did not like him, but because we wanted to have power over him, the power women sometimes want to have over men, the pure, not erotic power, whose point is that it shall have nothing to do with sex. We could have made him make love, to either or to both of us, any day of the week.

This is what we planned, understanding that, like a work of art, once it had started, its development could be left to look after itself.

Suppose, said my sister, that we have heard a ridiculous superstition in the village that there is Something Wrong with the house. We will tell him that, and when he has gone through his reaction exercises—it may take a day or so and will depend on our hints, and if we make the right ones, the battle’s won—he will ask us what the story is.

What is it to be? I said, who can rarely attain to my sister's breadth of mind.

That does not matter. Because before we begin we'll do something. Anything. A last year’s leaf for a start, so long as it can go into a series—on his blotter or his pillow. We're always in and out. We'll put them there and get asked round for the evening and start when we see one, and that’s where our village story begins. All that he has to get out of us is that there zs a story, and that wet leaves or whatever it is we choose are found about. Signatures, you know. If he doesn’t rise the first night, he'll find that leaf when he goes to bed. It depends on how well we do it—

I recognised a master’s direction, but it all seemed to depend on our choice of stimulants. Last year’s leaves, delicate damp articulations; coloured pebbles, dead flies, scraps of torn paper with half a word decipherable.... A mixture of these or a selection?

Keep it tangible, my sister said—that’s the way. Our only difficulty is the planting of them.

Which, I asked, are suitable to what? It seemed to be necessary in laying our train to determine the kind of unpleasantness for which they were ominous. But I could not get my sister