Imaginary letters

by Mary Butts, Robin Blaser (Afterword), Jean Cocteau (Illustrator)

Scarce title written by Aleister Crowley's student.

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

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

[Jack Rousseau · Rating 4 out of 5]

THE FIRST LETTER

Chere Madame,

I do not know what you think about being a mother; it's an odd department of one's existence, but I suspect that you love your son. And you are more than naturally cut off from the very little a mother can know. And I expect your curiosity has not weakened. While mine has been gratified, so that without knowing enough, I may even know too much.
(God forbid that I should give away the young to the old; but as you will never read this, written in Paris, you, a Russian exile at Yalta, who knows no English, still less mine, I do not think it will be impertinent of me to talk to you, as if you were a living ghost.)
Boris, your son, will be - one might say, he is - the cause of art in others. "C'est la poésie," as our friend Claude says. And there is something displeasing in new poetry. It is like new wine, the difference being what we are not fit for it, not it for us. Translate that again into the body of a young man, and you will see that it becomes difficult, because he is neither poetry of drink, but incalculable flesh and blood. I have said: "Your son Boris is poetry." (I have not said that he is a poet.) A monster of vanity and pride. A high-bred, honourable boy. Capricious, selfish, insensitive. Shy as a rabbit, helpful but shy. Lecherous, drunken, bold and chaste. He arouses equally unconquerable affection and despair.
As one person stands for the West of Scotland, black rock and skerry, another for the green wood, another for ragged vines and split soil; one for the Hotel Foyot, and another for the British Museum, so he is Russia to us. And you must take that sentence for much more than I said in the last. He has a fine intelligence, which it pleases us to see at last in use. He has led us a pretty dance. He is cruel, devoted, jealous, double-willed, capable of every perversion of sentiment. He is a gentleman, a saint, a cad, and a child who should not be led out alone. Our friend Claude has a good saying for him: "Another of these arrested developments," and there is a riddle in our set, "What is the difference between a cocatrice and a basilisk?" I asked it, and the beautiful America, who will always stand him a drink and a dinner, answered it: "Why, that's Boris Polteratsky"; the laugh that followed had now a touch of discomfort in it.
I suppose I should explain what Russia means to us. Apart from what your son has taught me, I mean - I believe I mean enough. Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov. Every variation of the Ballet, and hat I have seen during my life of your people. Your first batch of exiles and their successors in such remarkable opposition. Off by-product of the victory of principles, this crowd of émigré boys.
And this tradition as well; when I was a child, my father once said: "I fought them in the Crimea, but when you are grown up and meet many races, I think you will find that it is only the Russians whom you will understand. They are children, and gentlemen, and mad. Add to them tenacity and control and you have us."
Your son has just left my flat to call on some compatriots. His clothes I took away from a friend, are the clothes he would have always worn, and become him neither more or less than the rags that hung on him in days of his bitterest poverty. (The epoch just preceding this.) He is flushed to a tint like warm gold. A jay-feather picked up this summer in the high woods is a tiny heraldic bar in his hat. He is carrying a pair of my driving gloves, and for good luck a ring, a wheel in silver and enamel, on the last finger of his right hand.
You will see, with less cynicism than I, the tall bird-grace, the face tilted a little off the throat, the unspoiled green eyes glancing, the delicate body, a trifle too thin, the uniting principle harmonious and strange.
Brightness falls from the air. One of the responses of Claude's and my litany for him.
Never mind at once how we came to know him, not the year or so we watched his career, until I decided that I had better attend to it myself. I did not start without encouragement, and now I neither rejoice about it, or regret; but have a certain pleasure because I have been of use to him.
He was created to make people regret and rejoice:

Brightness falls from the air,
Queens have died, young and fair.

And I am the type that knows when it is beaten, and perhaps not sufficiently when I am not beaten.
He has gone, and however much you may love him, he is better out of the house. Or out of my house. For the people who love him are too gentle, and who dislike him, too stupid. And most of what I write is false, because I describe him as a person grown-up, a young man set, a coherent personality.
There is one thing I would like to know, and I do not see how I can find out. What did his father do to him? Did he beat him, sneer at him, lie to him? Boris won't tell, but somewhere your son is checkered by his memories of your husband, Madame. There can hardly exist a father less esteemed, nor one who vices live more in his child, who repudiates them. And does not understand. And the result is a check on the expansion of his nature. He is a picture cut in bits; the parts slide up and down each; shoot, crawl round, dart and chase each other. To his torment, certainly to ours, who greatly love what we have guessed of the design. On the other hand, I quote from Claude's litany:
"My dear, his eyes. They are not the eyes of a fool, they are not the eyes of a man who has seen what he has. They're the eyes of a baby." He is as innocent as the night when he was dressed as Cupid, and frightened by the lights, jumped down from his pillar to burrow in your skirts.
From this you will see that: "Il nous a beaucoup troublé." If I could know what his father had done to him, I might know what would give him power. What you seem to have done are most things becoming of a mother. A woman older than your son and much younger than you, will tell you more about it another night.
Adieu.