Abstract
In the spring of 1922, a young writer, her lover and their artist friend spent two weeks at South Egliston Cottage, a house which sits at the head of a fan-shaped wood between Tyneham Cap and Kimmeridge Bay, at the uncertain western edge of the Purbeck peninsula. The writer was Mary Butts, her lover was the occultist Cecil Maitland, and their friend was the painter and sculptor Gladys Hynes.1 This was familiar territory to Mary Butts, who had been born in 1890 outside Poole in ‘the kind of house the Dorsetshire gentry lived in’,2 and had spent her youth immersed in an ‘old, hardy, fragrant, rural world’, as she recalled in her autobiography, her family home looking out over what she called ‘the green body of the Purbeck Hills, like a naked god laid down asleep’.3 By the time of her stay at South Egliston in 1922, Butts had fled the strictures of her upbringing for the bohemian circles of Paris and London, and was starting to make a name for herself as an author, with her work published in The Egoist, The Little Review and The Dial; she would go on to publish poetry, essays and fiction, including three novels set in the South Dorset of her imagination.
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Notes
Nathalie Blondel, Mary Butts: Scenes from the Life (New York: McPherson, 1998), p.113.
Mary Butts, The Crystal Cabinet: My Childhood at Salterns (Manchester: Carcanet, 1988), p.20.
Mary Butts to Glenway Westcott, 1923, cited in Patrick Wright, The Village that Died for England, 2nd edn (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), p.439 n.10.
Mary Butts, ‘Warning to Hikers’, in Ashe of Rings and Other Writings (New York: McPherson, 1998), pp.267–295 (pp.271–272). (first pub. London: Wishart & Co., 1932).
Mary Butts, ‘Bloomsbury’, Modernism/Modernity, 5 (1998), 32–45 (p.39).
See for example Leon Surette, The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and the Occult (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993);
Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004);
and Robin Blaser, ‘Here Lies the Woodpecker Who Was Zeus’, in A Sacred Quest: The Life and Writings of Mary Butts, ed. by Christopher Wagstaff (New York: McPherson, 1995), pp.159–223.
T.S. Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’ in The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), pp.59–80 (p.76).
Mary Butts, The Journals of Mary Butts, ed. by Nathalie Blondel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 1 October 1929, pp.324–325.
Mary Butts, Armed With Madness (London: Penguin, 2001), p.67 (first pub. as Armed With Madness (London: Wishart, 1928).
Mary Butts, The Taverner Novels: Armed With Madness and Death of Felicity Taverner (New York: MacPherson, 1992), p.300 (first pub. as Death of Felicity Taverner (London: Wishart, 1932)).
A.P. Rowe, One Story of Radar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948), p.56.
Bernard Lovell, Echoes of War: The Story of H2S Radar (Bristol: Adam Hilger, 1991), pp.27–28;
Colin Pomeroy, Dorset: The Royal Air Force (Stanbridge: The Dovecote Press, 2011), p.12.
Mary Butts, ‘Corfe’, in An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology, ed. by Louis Zukovsky (Le Beausset: To Publishers, 1932), pp.36–39 (pp.38–39).
The zeal with which Jane Garrity, for example, conducts her prosecution of Butts leads her to errors of interpretation; on the basis of one description which when read in context is surely metaphorical, she concludes that Clarence, one of the characters in Armed With Madness, is black, and then constructs a racist subtext for the novel on extremely circumstantial grounds. See Jane Garrity, ‘Mary Butts’s England: Racial Memory and the Daughter’s Mystical Assertion of Nationhood’, in Step-Daughters of England: British Women Modernists and the National Imaginary (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp.188–241 (pp.211–213).
Whilst the novels under discussion were published before Neo-Romanticism had properly emerged according to most accounts (see, for example, David Mellor’s edited survey A Paradise Lost: The Neo-Romantic Imagination in Britain 1935–55 (London: Lund Humphreys, 1987)), Butts clearly shares so many thematic concerns with artists of the later 1930s and 1940s that to associate her with them is not mere anachronism. Such an expanded view of Neo-Romanticism, as ‘a way of seeing rather than an art-historical category’, has also been pursued by Kitty Hauser.
See Kitty Hauser, Shadow Sites: Photography, Archaeology, and the British Landscape 1927–1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p.13.
Ian Patterson, ‘“The Plan Behind the Plan”: Russians, Jews and Mythologies of Change: The Case of Mary Butts’, in Modernity, Culture and ‘the Jew’, ed. by Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), pp.126–140 (p.135).
Mary Butts, ‘Traps for Unbelievers’, in Ashe of Rings and Other Writings (New York: McPherson, 1998), pp.297–330 (p.323) (first pub. as Traps for Unbelievers (London: Desmond Harmsworth, 1932)).
Jane Harrison, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 4th edn (London: Merlin Press, 1989), p.68.
Gillian Beer, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p.298.
Steven Connor, The Matter of Air: Science and the Art of the Ethereal (London: Reaktion Books, 2010), p.148.
Joe Milutis, Ether: The Nothing That Connects Everything (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), p.37.
Linda Dalrymple Henderson, ‘Editor’s Introduction: I. Writing Modern Art and Science — an Overview; II. Cubism, Futurism, and Ether Physics in the Early Twentieth Century’, Science in Context, 17 (2004), 423–466 (pp.451–452).
See John Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), p.63.
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, The ‘Soul’ of the Primitive, trans. by Lilian Clare (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1928), pp.16–17.
Brian Wynne ‘Natural Knowledge and Social Context: Cambridge Physicists and the Luminiferous Ether’ in Science in Context: Readings in the Sociology of Science, ed. by Barry Barnes and David Edge (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1982), pp.212–231 (p.217).
Douglas Hague and Rosemary Christie, Lighthouses: Their Architecture, History and Archeology (Llandysul: Gomer Press, 1975), p.94.
John Hutchins, The History and Antiquities of the County of Dorset, rev. by William Shipp and James Hodson, 3rd edn, 4 vols (London: John Bowyer Nichols and Sons, 1861), Vol.1, p.698.
John Naish, Seamarks: Their History and Development (London: Stanford Maritime, 1985), pp.21, 40.
Judd Case, ‘Geometry of Empire: Radar as Logistical Medium’ (University of Iowa PhD Dissertation, 2010), p.119.
Bernard Lovell, ‘The Cavity Magnetron in World War II: Was the Secrecy Justified?’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 58 (2004), 283–294 (p.286).
Richard Scarth, Echoes from the Sky: A Story of Acoustic Defence (Kent: Hythe Civic Society, 1999).
F.T. Marinetti, ‘The Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature’, in Let’s Murder the Moonshine: Selected Writings, ed. by R.W. Flint, trans. by R.W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1991), pp.92–97 (pp.92, 96).
Raviv Ganchrow, ‘Perspectives on Sound-Space: The Story of Acoustic Defence’, Leonardo Music Journal, 19 (2009), 71–75 (p.74).
Mary Butts, Ashe of Rings and Other Writings (New York: McPherson, 1998), p.169 (first pub. as Ashe of Rings (Paris: Contact Editions, 1925)).
J.W.N. Sullivan, ‘The Entente Cordiale’, The Athenaeum, 4693 (1920), p.482,
cited in David Bradshaw, ‘The Best of Companions: J.W.N. Sullivan, Aldous Huxley, and the New Physics’, The Review of English Studies, 47 (1996), 188–206 (p.204).
Patrick Wright, ‘Coming Back to the Shores of Albion: The Secret England of Mary Butts (1890–1937)’, in On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (London: Verso, 1985), pp.93–134 (p.106).
Clough Williams-Ellis, England and the Octopus (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1928);
Britain and the Beast, ed. by Clough Williams-Ellis (London: J.M. Dent, 1937).
O.G.S. Crawford, Antiquity, 3/9 (March 1929), 3, cited in Hauser, Shadow Sites, p.142.
This revival began in the 1980s in the context, as Kitty Hauser puts it, of a ‘crisis of confidence both in modernist art practice and in a modernist reading of art history’ (Hauser, Shadow Sites, p.10). Today it is reflected in works of popular scholarship such as Alexandra Harris’s Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (London: Thames & Hudson, 2010), and in exhibitions such as ‘Paul Nash: The Elements’ at the Dulwich Picture Gallery (February–May 2010) or ‘Graham Sutherland: An Unfinished World’ at Modern Art Oxford (December 2011–March 2012), the latter curated by the Turner Prize nominee George Shaw.
Emily Thompson implies that it was just this perceived combination of the industrial and ‘primitive’ that made jazz so modern. See Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), pp.130–132.
Virginia Woolf, Between The Acts (London: The Hogarth Press, 1941).
On the politics of Woolf’s gramophone, see Michele Pridmore-Brown, ‘1939–40: Of Virginia Woolf, Gramophones, and Fascism’, PMLA, 113 (1998), 408–421.
H.J. Massingham, The Faith of a Fieldsman (London: Museum Press, 1951), p.31.
Rolf Gardiner, England Herself: Ventures in Rural Restoration (London: Faber and Faber, 1943), p.126.
C.E.M. Joad, A Charter for Ramblers (London: Hutchinson, 1934), p.26.
H.J. Massingham, Remembrance: An Autobiography (London: B.T. Batsford, 1941), p.20.
As David Matless notes, there were prominent women in the organic movement, but none of them were members of Gardiner and Massingham’s ‘Kinship in Husbandry’. See David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), p.305 n.12.
Robert Watson-Watt, Three Steps to Victory (London: Odhams Press, 1957), p.153.
Sam Smiles, ‘Equivalents for the Megaliths: Prehistory and English Culture, 1920–50’, in The Geographies of Englishness: Landscape and the National Past 1880–1940, ed. by David Peters Corbett, Ysanne Holt and Fiona Russell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), pp.199–223 (p.209).
H.J. Massingham, Downland Man (London: Jonathan Cape, 1927), pp.328–329.
Clough Williams-Ellis, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in Britain and the Beast, ed. by Clough Williams-Ellis (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1937), pp.xiv–xviii (p.xv).
Michel Serres, Genesis, trans. by Geneviève James and James Nielson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), pp.57–58.
Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. by Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p.121.
Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Allosemitism: Premodern, Modern, Postmodern’ in Modernity, Culture and ‘the Jew’, ed. by Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), pp.143–156.
Lewis Mumford, ‘Authoritarian and Democratic Technics’, Technology and Culture, 5 (1964), 1–8 (p.6).
Mary Butts, ‘The art of Montague James’, The London Mercury, 29/172 (February 1934), 306–317 (p.307),
cited in David Matless, ‘A Geography of Ghosts: The Spectral Landscapes of Mary Butts’, Cultural Geographies, 15 (2008), 335–357 (p.341).
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© 2014 James Wilkes
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Wilkes, J. (2014). The Hollow Land. In: A Fractured Landscape of Modernity. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137287083_3
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