Status Updates From The Complete Stories

The final untitled story is slight, but underscores the recurring theme of expatriate Americans in Paris, their brashness and clash of ideas or style with the locals. I suppose this story needs to be here for the volume to be The Complete Stories, but Butts has done this theme much more ably in other stories throughout.

"Fumerie" contends for my favorite piece in this volume. It's a decadent how-to guide, told in demonstrative vignettes and sometimes outright instruction, on the world of the opium smoker. I smoked opium twice, and it's a good thing I couldn't get my hands on more, because I really, REALLY liked it. This sometimes tongue-in-cheek piece of realism presents the sociality of the pipe with all its quirks. Brilliant.

"The Master's Last Dancing" is a bacchanalian riot of dance and violence and the shedding of all social graces. I can imagine the room full of flappers and gents in a Berlin jazz club, though this dance took place decades after that, another place, another time. Some things are timeless? A shocking, sad, story that asks, in the end, if it is actually funny or not?

This last tale is less about "A Magical Experiment" than it is such. Written in the 1920s in France, you can guess where the strong surrealism came from. It's largely nonsensical, but at certain moments it is startling. Probably the story most influenced by Crowley, though it would be easier to analyze if it was clear who was who. I need more context to understand this experiment.

"Change" is actually about the lingering after-effects of change, specifically the ironies of being disinherited by one's wealthy family and living a life of poverty and shame - which has it's own richness and pride . . . of a sort.

Scrying is the preferred method in "Magic," a purely meditative piece on the ascent into light, the descent into darkness. This could bear several readings, which is no small task for such a small story.

"A Vision" is simply that, a hallucinatory terrain trodden by mice, macaws, and angels, with a stark lesson in the futility of taking on the essence of God (even successfully - no, especially successfully). Assuming the character of God might incur the greatest flaws of all. Perfection is not all it's cracked up to be.

"Lettres Imaginaires" is a one-sided correspondence from a spurned woman who may or may not be a goddess to a man who may or may not be a god. Butts captures the sense of loss and the yearning for the repair of a broken heart one encounters when one is essentially abandoned. The narrator here, though, is smarter by miles than I was as a young man who encountered similar circumstances.

There are bushels of bitter melancholy for such a small piece as "In the House". Poverty, death, unfulfilled promises, the breaking of familial trust, and decay are all suffused throughout. A poignant piece, but very depressing if you dwell on it too long. Sadness incarnate.

A young, self-loathing American overseas practices cynicism with great elan. I would love to read an entire novel about the main character in "Honey, Get Your Gun " a miscreant antihero that Nick Cave would be pleased to celebrate in one of his darker songs. It's a gloriously dark rumination and one of the more compelling characterizations I've ever read in this short of a piece of fiction. Depressing; oustanding!

Chaos reigns in "The House" as two pairs of renters sublet while on vacation. In the meantime, a new landlord purchases the property. Not-quite Jeeves and Wooster funny, nor Howard's End dramatic, Butt's story is . . . alright. With a touch of understated flair. Very English, one could say. Everything's alright. "Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way . . .".

"After the Funeral" pulls off a triple-feat by putting the focus on a dead woman after her funeral, damning the shallowness of sociality, and showing a myth, albeit a private one, in the making. It is the echoes of the tale, between the lines, outside of the actual words, which interest me the most; that life beyond the veil, or that death. One wants to walk past the foreground and find the underpinnings.

Butts channels M.R. James in "With and Without Buttons," and the story is James-worthy, but with a hint of dark comedy throughout. A delightful, creepy story, with Butts' trademark turns of phrase scattered here and there . . . like stray gloves . . .

I have not fallen in love and had my heart broken in the city of Paris after finding that the object of my devotion had been thoroughly corrupted by an evil sorceress and her coterie of cruel followers; not until I had read "From Altar to Chimney-piece". This story will stick in my brain for a long, long time. The ambiguity of supernatural power next to social corruption is delicious and wretched. Butts is a master.

"A Lover"? A lie. A deceit that makes a mockery of love, even of friendship. Dissimulation cracks its head open against The Truth, and one lover must simply walk away. This seems to be a theme in many of the stories in this collection. Deceit couched in the most beautiful of words, but what are words, other than masks? Layer upon layer of fiction. All of it false, yet speaking truth.

Mary Butts' work demands your attention. In some tales, every word counts. "Mappa Mundi" is a truly weird tale that requires your focus as a reader. The diligent reader is well-rewarded here. I had to go back and reread several sections twice, but once I got my focus and the brain grasped what was happening - or what might have happened - a door opened into a labyrinth . . .

Friends meet friends and become enemies in "The Warning," a cautionary tale (telegraphed by the title). Sometimes it's best to keep one's associates siloed away from each other. We've all had this experience, but never so eloquently.

A fictionalized account of the true story (!) of the young Julius Ceasar being kidnapped by pirates whom he later came back to crucify, "A Roman Speaks" presents the general on the cusp of assuming dictatorial power. Here Caesar presents his story of capture, life among the pirates, ransom, and his promised crucifixion of his captors (who thought it was a joke until it happened). An interesting insight into the man.