BUTTS, Mary.

£2,250 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Armed with Madness. First edition, first impression, trade issue, of the author's scarce second novel, a treatment of the Grail myth that offers a salve for the conditions of sterility and decay famously described by T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land. Recent critical attention has repositioned Mary Butts as "one of the most important and original modernist authors of the inter-war years" (Blondel, p. 1).In its use of the Grail myth, Armed with Madness "casts modernism's relentlessly fragmented, disenchanting, and morally ambiguous narratives as a quest without end" (Emre), but where Eliot sees a barren and collapsing spiritual world, Butts suggests the hope of regeneration through communion with nature. Butts was well aware of Eliot's work, and half-jokingly complained in her journal that this book "might well have been called The Wasteland [sic]. Eliot always anticipates my titles... Eliot and I are working on a parallel" (Kroll, p. 159). Butts's interest in the Grail myth was grounded in the rich folkloric landscape of her home in South Dorset and the classical stories and myths her beloved father recounted throughout her childhood. Her interest in the mystical led Butts to spend three months at Aleister Crowley's Abbey of Thelema, where she contributed to his Magick in Theory and Practice. She was, however, disappointed with Crowley's form of mysticism, which she later referred to as "a desolate path" (Blondel, p. 102). Despite this, her brief friendship with Crowley had a mar

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