The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/The First Book of Mary Butts
THE FIRST BOOK OF MARY BUTTS
Speed the Plough, and Other Stories. By Mary Butts. 12mo. 222 pages. Chapman and Hall, Ltd. London.
MISS BUTTS' collection of stories can be likened only to master-work: Dubliners or Mr Lawrence's England My England. It is the announcement of a new intellect, acute and passionate, to scrutinize experience with an unfamiliar penetration and to substitute for it, as it ceases, new form and light.
The light is tragic. Funereal mother, she hurries her exact heart-breaking figures into rigid graves or silence; without explanation or complaint; in a bare parti-coloured light, "all the epiphany you've got for the fine clothes, and the fine movements, and the sensual elegance, and the silly imagination, and the pain." What is done, is still; the memory can make these events a part of itself, but cannot turn them into theory or proposal. The result in sorrow and sweetness is great; halted by an aesthetic intuition at the exact point where it would become sensational.
English to the core, her good is serenity. Something over and above the décor of passion and inquisition of pain, like a David and Jonathan pact, is its nearest equivalent in conduct. The elaborate genius of her race enchants or bewilders a foreign mind: of two common labourers, "They were pleased that they recognized without philanthropy, or commiseration their contrasted pride and grace." Beyond that, there is no "impulse of malice, indignation, despair," and little comparative appraisal.
Therefore, the tales are sinister when not idyllic. No emphases are made for the benefit of society; hungriest youth could not regard these parables as aid. The fierce passions belong to the author's mind; it has not pretended, or spied on civilization. Particularly in In Bayswater, the absence of praise and blame gives a terrific tragic tonality to the whole; one choir of instruments stilled, for a purpose. The purpose is an artificial savagery, deliberate and strong; furthered by Miss Butts' refusal to employ any modern convenience of interpretation or terminology. The parent devouring its young; the cold girl warming herself by male catastrophe; the erotic friendship, drawn out and frustrated; "Festus like a thin rod incapable of evasion or compromise or the least adaptation," intolerably a suicide; the final reckoning of the friends—Homeric waste and slaughter, needless, pitiful: it draws from her no remark. The theme is a "hard, bright and sweet" male reality wasted and wounded by old female instincts, not swiftly enough altered to a new order—unrequired and perverted. The story is not as perfect as later ones will be; but they also may present no solution and no surcease.
For her work is an irresponsible evocation; the first and strangest resource of the human intellect, and, in our literature, longest in abeyance. Of all forms of utterance, narrative, the description of a mobile cluster of experiences, is the least easily comprehensible; the contrary appears to be true only because debased romancers have too long imitated a redundant theatre. The latter's devotees are bound to find "that which is done" in these stories much overlaid by that which merely is, the plot by something as displeasing as poetry. Their demands are in fashion; but fine writers have always differed from petty by understanding that the relation between experiencing itself and mere events is exactly that between the music and text of an opera.
As to mechanics and her system of speech, she combines a minimum of linear fluency with a maximum of swift continuity in emotion. Each movement or image stands out crisply, in full relief; intermediate phrases have been cut away. Very rarely her meaning depends on grammatical relations which take place in the ellipsis, and a part is lost. The eye does not predominate, and analogies are not made to prolong its portion of experience; but to illustrate or to probe into meaning: "A huge motor gauntlet like a dead animal." This prose is not something stretched between one mind and another, a mere telephone wire; it has weight and substance, "definitely an object of whatever shape lying upon the paper" (Dr Williams). In the dialogue, work of genius, the obliqueness of talk, its wide palette of meanings, are used with brevity and elegance; the violent atmospheres, the muscular haste, the sensual tints, the symbols and diagrams are handled with the balance of Congreve. The rhythm is subtle, short fluent jets retarded by spondaic forms. Never unnoticeable, it keeps the intellect nervous and watchful, before which the illustrative violence, the extremes of tenderness and sweetness, bud and increase and burst, incredibly primitive and bright.
Once more, beauty is not featureless. By these means of style it has boundaries, differentiating figure and surface and scent: "By the centurion's hard fire there was another arrangement of life like a base scale played firmly." To see and exist, and to see exist: the appetite of a race of navigators, with large stone eyes:
"There were little pieces of meat classified and no carcasses. The poor like thick gold watch-chains, and little earrings stuck on cards." . . . "Into a city of charwomen. They climbed out of deep areas. Soon he saw they were everywhere, descending, rising, in their rhythm; young in glazed cotton furs, mature and very pregnant, old with scum in their eyes." . . . "Rain began. Wetted at dusk, the streets' patina of filth gleamed like stale fish, and out of the crests of the houses came noises of weeping that never was, never could be comforted."
Beyond these collected slums, England "hammered by the sea," its "naked sun" and "grey, savage grass" and "cows, that sharpen their teeth on their sides"; the Holy Land's "pool of hot wood," its "grey tent and its gilt bird"; France full of trenches, and Greece—a world heavy with characteristics.
Now that religion has been broken which lay embedded in faith, the shivered emotion attaches again in crystals to objects: a kind of awe and apprehension of meaning. This moody haughty mind, essentially religious, collects no drawing-room symbols; but gathers exactly the sense of ploughs, blades, and blood. It is rich in the scholarship of a golden bough, of a stamen of wood twelve feet long hung with a fox-pelt and feathers, of a dark grail. Strictly contemporary experience is lit by an antique fiery light; life an "infernal saga . . . coming up-to-date." The racial memory, the animal memory, has been strangely extended; and memory is the identifiable soul.