Mary Butts

Born: 13 December 1890 in Parkstone, Dorset, England.

Died:   5 March 1937 in Penzance, Cornwall, England.

The English writer Mary Butts was a pioneer in the modernist style, writing between about 1910 and 1937, and often published alongside authors such as Ezra Pound, H.D., Gertrude Stein, and James Joyce. Profoundly interested in the supernatural, and writing as often about the classical world as the modern, she was acclaimed as a short story writer and novelist in her lifetime. For many years after her death at the age of forty-six, her work was little known and her place among her contemporaries largely unrecognized.

Born Mary Franies Butts on December 13, 1890, in the village of Parkstone in Dorset, England, she was the first child and only daughter of Captain Frederick John Butts, a veteran of the Crimean War, and his second wife, Mary Jane (Briggs) Butts. A second child, Anthony Butts, was born in 1901. The family also included Mary's maternal grandmother and four unmarried aunts, who lived close by in Parkstone. Of these, she was closest to Aunt Irlam Briggs, an artist who often used her niece as a model, and especially to Aunt Ada Briggs. Ada remained a central family figure throughout Mary's life, lending her money, mediating disputes between Mary and her mother, and later raising Mary's own daughter. Butts's relationship with her mother was always strained, and grew steadily worse after her father died, when her mother sold first a collection of William Blake prints and drawings inherited from Mary's great-grandfather Thomas Butts, Blake's patron, and then the family home, Salterns, in 1923.

Mary Butts spent her childhood at Salterns, and attended the local schools until the age of fifteen. After her father's death in 1905, her mother married Francis Frederick Musgrove Colville-Hyde, and Mary was sent to St. Leonard's School for Girls in St. Andrews, Scotland. In 1909, she enrolled at Westfield College, London University, which she attended until 1912, when she was sent down for breaking college rules. She went on to earn a Social Science Certificate from the London School of Economics in 1914, and worked for some time for the Children's Care Committee in Hackney. In 1916 she worked for the National Council for Civil Liberties, under Raymond Postgate.

Once in London, Butts shed the constraints of her Victorian upbringing and adopted a bohemian lifestyle. Her social circle encompassed artists of all types: actors and particularly dancers, for she admired both the provocative Ballets Russes and the free dance of Isadora Duncan; painters, for whom she often modelled, including Gladys Hynes, Nina Hamnett, and Roger Fry; and, importantly for her own work, many of the literary avant-garde, including Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Ford Madox Ford. Her social work involved her to some extent in the suffrage movement, and she was friendly with the outspoken feminist Wilma Meikle, among other well educated young women for whom sexual freedom was an important component of intellectual and political equality.

For several years in the mid-1910s, Butts lived with her lover Eleanor Rogers, about whom little is known. She broke with Eleanor gradually after she fell in love with the publisher and writer John Rodker. Like Butts and most of her friends at that time, Rodker opposed the First World War, and spent much of 1917 in prison as a conscientious objector.

Mary Butts and John Rodker married in 1918, and operated Rodker's Ovid Press together. In November 1920 their daughter, Camilla Elizabeth Rodker, was born. Just three months after Camilla's birth, Mary Butts left Rodker for Cecil Maitland, a wounded war veteran who frequently attempted suicide. Maitland shared her interest in magic and the occult, and the two of them spent the summer of 1921 at Aleister Crowley's Abbey of Thelema in Cefalù, Sicily, where they studied clairvoyance and practiced black magic under Crowley's guidance. At about this time Butts began to use drugs regularly; she remained addicted to opium for the rest of her life.

Butts spent the better part of the 1920s at parties and nightclubs, and, by all accounts, did more than her share to give that decade its reputation for hedonism. In her own view, however, the First World War had so damaged the few of her generation who survived it, and so blighted their chances for traditional happiness, that every day was a battle of courage against despair, and the endless party was a movement, a spiritual duty, to keep joy, beauty, and hope from going out of the world altogether. Explaining this philosophy to her Aunt Ada in 1929, Butts wrote, "But if you pray for me, my dear, don't bother about my young men, my cigarettes, dances, adventures which are one's distractions, refreshments, and have been fairly earned. There is a rather beautiful bacchanale going on for a few hundreds of us who earn our play, quite as good as any Greek one—like all lovely things, we've had to create it and keep it bright".

During this time Butts lived alternately in Paris and London, basing herself primarily in Paris in the latter part of the '20s. She also spent much time among fellow writers and artists in the South of France and in Brittany. Among her many friends at this time were Jean Cocteau, Monroe Wheeler and Glenway Wescott, Peggy Guggenheim, Mireille Havet, and Duff Twysden. She left Maitland in 1925, but was greatly upset by his death in 1926. Over the next several years she was involved with a number of people, including the composer Virgil Thomson and a Russian emigré named Sergei Maslenikoff, before she met Gabriel Atkin, an artist, in 1928. Butts married Atkin (she preferred to spell it Aitkin) in London in 1930, and moved back to Britain permanently.

Butts's divorce from John Rodker was not final until 1927, and in the years following their separation responsibility for their daughter had become a source of conflict. In 1921 Camilla was left in the care of a friend in London, Poppy Vanda, where she remained until 1926. Mary Butts then took her to France and put her in a series of lodgings and schools until late 1928, when Rodker, alarmed by a visit to Camilla, insisted that she be looked after properly and educated in England. After several false starts, in 1929 Camilla was enrolled in the local school in Parkstone, where Mary Butts herself had been a student, and came to live with her great-aunt Ada Briggs, who essentially raised her from that point on.

For the first two years after their marriage, Mary Butts and Gabriel Atkin lived in London and Newcastle, near his family. In 1932, they moved to Sennen, a village near Land's End in Cornwall, and bought a cottage there which they called Tebel Vos. The marriage with Atkin was troubled, and he left her in 1934. At about this time she returned to the Christian faith, attending church in Sennen regularly. Her closest friend during this period was Angus Davidson, who bought a cottage near hers in 1934, and whom she designated her literary executor. On March 5, 1937, Mary Butts died suddenly after emergency surgery for a perforated ulcer.

Mary Butts and

Cecil Maitland

Italy 1921

Mary Butts, Cecil

Maitland &

Douglas Goldring

Paris 1922