From Altar to Chimney-Piece: Selected Stories

by Mary Butts

The short stories of Mary Butts possess an intriguing relation to the present moment. "Lost" for sixty years, they reappear now with freshness and panache, capturing that mixture of hopeful anxiety which describes the contemporary vogue, including our various fascinations with "realities" usually beyond physical experience. The power of hidden things and the things of hidden power preoccupy these sixteen distinctive tales of unusual love and betrayal, magic and mummery, belief and folly. Here, in the realm of active imagination, the veil between natural and supernatural may be rent apart in an instant, and just as quickly restored. As John Ashbery remarks in the preface, "After reading Butts one is left with an impression of dazzle, of magic, but what made it is hard to pin down...One keeps getting the feeling that these stories were written yesterday." The novelist and poet Glenway Wescott declared Mary Butts’s first collection of stories, Speed the Plough, "the announcement of a new intellect, acute and passionate, to scrutinize experience with an unfamiliar penetration," which he then compared epochally with James Joyce’s Dubliners. Concurrently, Marianne Moore, HD and Ford Madox Ford championed her work, and during her tragically brief lifetime Mary Butts’s reputation rivaled Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf for stylistic innovation. That style is swift, elliptical and emotionally charged, exactly matching the free wheeling lives of her characters in Paris and London and their explosive era. Yet these "acute and passionate" stories transcend details of time or place or class, offering an uncompromising vision of human motivations and spirit.

Genres: Short Stories

295 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 1992

About the author

Mary Francis Butts was a modernist writer whose work found recognition in important literary magazines of the time, as well as from some of her fellow modernists, T. S. Eliot, Hilda Dolittle, and Bryher. After her death, her works fell into obscurity until they began to be republished in the 1980s.

Butts was a student of the occultist Aleister Crowley, and as one of several students who worked with him on his Magick (Book 4) in 1912, she was given co-author credit. She was married to poet, publisher, and pacifist John Rodker from 1918 to 1927; their daughter, Camilla, was born in 1920.

Reviews

[Bill Hsu · Rating 2 out of 5]

"The House Party" has to be one of those classic culture-clash stories involving rich older gay men and poor gay boys, if there's such a genre. There's much to enjoy in Butts' disjointed style and abrupt transitions. However, with my short attention span at the moment, I'm having a hard time putting together most of the stories.

There are also some pretty clear typos. Some of Butts' sentences take a lot of attention to parse, so even an occasional typo can be very annoying.