'Sound Wood': Aldous Huxley's 'Two or Three Graces'

  

On 16 January 1928, Mary Butts recorded in her journal that her mind was full of ‘the worst book ever written on a superb theme, [John] Buchan’s The Dancing Floor, but as if it was illustrated, in a kind of lovely light.’ By contrast, a few weeks later, on 6 February 1928, she gave qualified praise to Two or Three Graces and Other Stories by Aldous Huxley (1926): ‘Blessed man: not a master of form or language—magical language—but clear, hard, witty, observant, pitiful, aseptic—like the sound wood of a Chippendale chair . . . I finished it with the words ringing: “it’s the truth, it’s the truth, it’s the truth.”

I think quite highly of Buchan’s book, and its theme of surviving paganism on a Greek island, despite some creaky plot mechanics. It seems to me that Buchan does have the ‘magical language’ she was seeking. I was interested in her contrasting praise of the Huxley. This year marks the centenary of its first publication. It is not one of his better-known works, so I thought it worth a look, and got hold of a copy which proved to have a history.  At least three previous owners had each left their mark on the book. 

On the fixed rear endpaper was a subscription lending library label printed in green ink, but the library is not named. There were erratically placed date stamps in violet ink for 29 May 1926, 9 Feb 1927, 23 Feb 1927, [?] Jun 1927 and 1 Jul 1927. The label had been over-stamped in red ink capitals: PURCHASED [F]ROM THE LIBRARY”. There was also the ghost of a shield shaped label on the blue front boards.

On the front free endpaper was the pencil signature of Mansfield D. Forbes, Clare College, Cambridge, and the note: ‘Rec’d Dec ‘27’. There was copious pencil marginalia and, on the verso of the rear free endpaper, notes on page numbers and key words, eg ‘Classical’, ‘Romance’, ‘Love falsified’. Cambridge University Archives have a brief note on him: ‘Mansfield Duval Forbes (1889-1936) became a fellow of Clare College, Cambridge in 1913. He belonged to a circle which included the musicologist E.J. Dent and others such as Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke’. There was a biography, Mansfield Forbes and His Cambridge by Hugh Carey (1984).

Forbes evidently enjoyed being in the know while reading Huxley’s book. In the title story there is a brief passage about a boy who climbed the Gothic pinnacle of his school and placed a chamber pot upon it: a pencil note in the margin identifies him as ‘D.R.P.’ Against the description of a character, ‘even her clumsiness was somehow graceful’, there is the note ‘Lady Caithness’, and when she is again described as having ‘graceful ineptitude’, the further note, ‘Lady C’. The modern artist in the book, Rodney Clegg, unflatteringly depicted, is annotated on page 61 as ‘C.R.W. Nev?’, presumably Christopher R.W. Nevinson.

On the fixed front endpaper there was also a rubber stamp ex libris in blue ink of a pot of flowers, signed underneath in ballpoint, E F Mawsley, Mansley or perhaps Hansley, but I have been unable to find out anything about anyone with these variant names.

These marks and marginalia I found more interesting, I am sorry to report, than the book itself, that so enthused Mary Butts. The title story has some astute and witty aphorisms, but embedded in a rather over-extended and somewhat ponderous plot, like shreds of orange zest in a suet pudding. An artist and an essayist in turn have a passion for a provocative woman, with a dull husband. She becomes drawn to bohemian circles. The essayist sees her abundant glee at this racy new world as ‘devilish’ and vampiric. Despite these epithets, there is not the slightest hint of the mysterious or supernatural. This is no femme fatale: in fact, she is merely gauche.

Moreover, Huxley often deploys the omniscient author mode to pontificate about his characters, and at times it is rather like reading a psychology case study. I can imagine that Mary Butts liked the tempestuous undercurrents, the frankness about modern love affairs, and the rather jaded worldliness of the narrator, but it all seems rather futile. Perhaps that was the intended point.

The other three stories, about minor ironies, are no more than magazine-filler fare. They include rather condescending, smirking sketches of a youth with a Lancashire accent and a stammer, and the son of a Midlands boot manufacturer, who affects a monocle. These caricatures, by the Eton and Balliol educated Huxley, are trite and snobbish, and they appear to be authorial attitudes, not merely those of his characters.

The collection followed on from Huxley’s success with Crome Yellow (1921) and Antic Hay (1923), witty satires that had won him a reputation as a bright young  author. But this volume does not match their brilliance or verve, and seems to be something of a stop-gap between better work, the author or publisher making the best of some miscellaneous products.

I can understand why the title does not stand high among Huxley’s work, and it does reveal a different side to the author later all-but-sainted for his interest in mysticism. But perhaps we might charitably credit him with at least trying, when older and wiser, to surpass his upbringing. And the book as an object, as its own miniature history, at least offered some unexpected interest. 

(Mark Valentine) 

Edwardian Esoterics

There has not, so far as I know, been any full study of the Metaphysical Thriller form. However, I was heartened to find, after I had formed my own sense of the field, one essay that had earlier noticed that these books belonged together. In the late Nineteen Forties the poet Peter Russell edited a quarterly magazine called Nine. It seems to have been a last flourish of the aesthetes and mystics against the kitchen sink realism which took over in the Fifties. Number Nine of Nine (Summer/Autumn 1952) included a long, thoughtful and well-informed essay on the novels of Charles Williams, by Antony Borrow. 

This begins by noting that, ‘In the last few decades a number of novelists have used a magical or supernatural background for purposes of spiritual allegory, as distinct from grotesquerie or deliberate arabesque, although that is often an ingredient.’ He then lists Mary Butts, Aleister Crowley, Dion Fortune, David Lindsay, C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams. This was not far from the list I had at first come up with, though I have since added others. Borrow, an interesting figure of the Neo-Romantic movement of the Forties and after, did not, however, go on to study any of these authors other than Williams. 

Most of the authors of metaphysical thrillers all belonged to the same generation. They were typically born in a fifteen-year time-span from the mid-1880s to the early Edwardian period, most of them indeed within four or five years of each other. Some of them knew each other, or of each other, but I am not in the least suggesting they make up a movement, with organised aims: they are more illustrative of a tendency. Their childhood years were spent in the Victorian twilight, the fin-de-siecle, and their formative youth and early adulthood in the Edwardian first decade of the twentieth century, both periods now understood as having marked characteristics. Though their books mostly appeared in the interwar period, their outlook was formed in the new mood of the Edwardian era.

They include Charles Williams, born in 1886; Ronald Fraser, 1888; Claude Houghton, 1889; Michael Maurice, 1889; Dion Fortune, 1890; Mary Butts, 1890; John Metcalfe, 1891; Geoffrey Dennis, 1892; Muriel Jaeger, 1893; Gerald Bullett, 1893; J M A Mills, 1894; Edwin Greenwood, 1895; C S Lewis, 1898; Alfred Gordon Bennett, 1901; Lewis Grassic Gibbon 1901. They were also contemporaries with some of the more reflective crime fiction writers, who also grappled with problems of good and evil and sometimes used a mystical dimension, such as Dorothy L Sayers, 1893; Josephine Tey, 1896; and Margery Allingham, 1904. 

There were, of course, authors working in a field similar to this, born in a somewhat earlier period, the 1860s and 1870s, such as Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, May Sinclair, G K Chesterton, Evelyn Underhill. Although these were important precursors, they were not part of the same generation, and therefore culture, as the interwar group. However, David Lindsay and Walter de la Mare, though they belong chronologically to this earlier generation, did not publish their major work until later in life, and were therefore working in the same milieu as the later group. Borrow’s timescale, of books ‘in the last few decades’ before 1952, seems to be broadly right, but it also raises the question whether the form continued into the Forties and Fifties. I can’t yet think of many obvious examples but this seems worth a look. 

The background to the metaphysical thriller form was the growth of interest in beliefs other than those offered by the mainstream churches in Britain, Anglican, Roman Catholic or Non-conformist. This took many forms: an exploration of Eastern Religions, eg from India and China; new movements such as Spiritualism and Theosophy; artistic trends with mystical aspects such as Symbolism, Decadence or the Celtic Twilight. Some of these influences will be seen either subtly or overtly influencing the ideas explored in metaphysical thrillers. 

Others draw on the congeries of beliefs now known as the Western Mystery Tradition, a perspective or movement in ritual magic that draws on systems of symbols such as the Kabbalah, the Tarot, Alchemy, Rosicrucianism, Neo-Platonism, Hermeticism, the Grail, Astrology and others. Williams, for example, used many of these in his books, as did Fortune. Some of these authors it is true, while rejecting the tepid conventionality of the churches, were attracted to the more ritualistic aspects of their ceremonies. They often came to this after first exploring the esoteric. 

Charles Williams, for example, was to become a High Church Anglican, but he developed some unusual ideas of his own and was earlier a member of orders practising ritual magic, the successors to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. His latest biographer, Grevel Lindop, finds some evidence that Williams continued in esoteric orders alongside his theological work. This element in his life and work is sometimes considerably underplayed, even denied, by his more devout champions, but his thrillers are absolutely rich with occult ideas, and these are not always those of his villains. Some of the protagonists with whom he most sympathises, even identifies, are attracted to them too. 

Similarly, Mary Butts navigated to a High Church Anglican position under the influence of Hugh Ross Williamson and Father Bernard Walke, a priest in Cornwall, but she was earlier associated with Aleister Crowley’s occult orders, and indeed Crowley recognised that she taught him much: and she never abandoned her deep interest in esoteric ideas. Her journals frequently invoke the unorthodox (and indeed semi-pagan) symbol of the Grail. 

Not all of the ideas explored in these books can be precisely defined. Sometimes there is a form of nature-worship or pantheism, at others a kind of secular mysticism (the development of secular mysticism is another area that could do with further study). Perhaps there may be a sense sometimes, too, of the possibilities of the arts as a passageway to the unseen, especially music. Others are about the spiritual absence at the heart of our lives, and a consequent longing for, reaching out to, some experience or dimension other than the world we know. Sometimes other dimensions are elusive, just beyond reach: there is the sense of a brink, which we approach, but from which either we draw back, or which draws back from us. 

But what these books have in common, even if they use different symbols and argue for contrasting beliefs or ideas, is a keen questing imagination. These writers were not content to describe the outer reality of the world presented to them, but wanted to go beyond that. They were still, usually, interested in the lives of their fellow creatures, but they did not suppose those lives consisted only of their families, their jobs, their leisure (if they had any), their vices and their virtues. The authors of metaphysical thrillers thought that we move in a world which may reflect or refract a greater reality, and it was this and its profound effect on us that they wished to explore. 

Part 1 of this note was The Rise of the Metaphysical Thriller.

(Mark Valentine)

 

THE COMPLETE STORIES OF MARY BUTTS

One of the last but most welcome publications of 2014 is The Complete Stories of Mary Butts, issued by Mcpherson on 15 December. After a long time in the literary shadows, Mary Butts' work has seen a revival in recent decades, with reprints of her novels and the first publication of her journal, and several critical studies. This year alone has also seen Mary Butts and British Neo-Romanticism: The Enchantment of Place by Andrew Radford and A Fractured Landscape of Modernity: Culture and Conflict in the Isle of Purbeck by James Wilkes, in which she features strongly.

As I said in my essay in Sacrum Regnum 1 ("Inner Bohemia - The Mystical Fiction of Mary Butts"): "Mary Butts is sometimes invoked as an associate of Aleister Crowley and Jean Cocteau, and as part of the wild Parisian-bohemian “Lost Generation” set of the interwar years, with a story and a life fuelled by drink, drugs, sex and the occult. But she was much more than this picturesque figure. She was an avant-garde, modernist writer whose work was yet also infused with a deep sense of tradition and of the past. She was an enthusiast of the work of M. R. James, championing him in an essay for the London Mercury, one of the first critical appreciations of his work. And she was also an admirer of the mystical fiction of Machen, E.F. Benson, and de la Mare. Most of all, her own work succeeded in uniting these two strands, the modernist and the mystical, with a force only otherwise seen in such achievements as Eliot’s The Waste Land, the alchemical poems of ‘H.D.’, or Malcolm Lowry’s work."

I commented: "some critics consider her real forte was the short story, and her piece “Mappa Mundi” has been particularly praised for the way it mingles inner and outer worlds, the streets of Paris becoming also a terrain of hidden dimensions: it recalls her own genuine experiences. Her characters struggle to explain it: “An extraordinary, a unique sense of all sorts of mixed pasts, a sense of the ancient city and all the fury of life that went to make it…that and something else. Like something out of which they all came. A matrix, which is Paris and the secret of Paris.” This sense of overlapping realities was not only known in London and Paris, but in Dorset, in Cornwall, in the country: the implication is that it might be encountered anywhere."

This edition of her complete stories should at last see Mary Butts take her place as one of the most original, thoughtful and innovative writers of supernatural fiction in English in the 20th century.

Mark Valentine