Husband Gabriel Atkin
Queer Places:
Sennen Cove, Penzance TR19 7DF, UK
Mary
Francis Butts, (13 December 1890 – 5 March 1937) also Mary Rodker by marriage,
was an English modernist writer. Her work found recognition in literary
magazines such as The Bookman and The Little Review, as well as
from fellow modernists,
T. S. Eliot,
H.D. and
Bryher. She was
bisexual and had lesbian relationships, including
May Sinclair,
Eleanor Rogers, a writer, and Mireille Havet, a
cross-dressing protégée of Apollinaire who, like Butts, relished passionate
sex, drugs, and writing. After her
death, her works fell into obscurity until they began to be republished in the
1980s.[1][2]
Butts was born on 13 December 1890 in Poole, Dorset,[3]
the daughter of Mary Jane (née Briggs) and Captain Frederick John Butts. She
had a younger brother, Anthony. Her great-grandfather was Thomas Butts, the
friend of William Blake, the poet and artist.[2]
She was brought up at Salterns, an 18th-century house overlooking Poole
Harbour (described in her book, The Crystal Cabinet: My Childhood at
Salterns), where she became an admirer of the Blake watercolors which her
father had inherited.[2]
In 1905 her father died; after which she was sent for a boarding school
education at St Leonard's school for girls in St Andrews (1905–1908).[4]
In 1906 her mother sold the Blake paintings and in 1907 remarried. From 1909
to 1912 Mary studied at Westfield College in London, where she first became
aware of her bisexual feelings. She did not complete a degree there, but was
sent down for organising a trip to Epsom races.[5]
She went on to study at the London School of Economics, from which she
graduated in 1914.
She became a student of the occultist
Aleister
Crowley. She and other students worked with Crowley on his Magick (Book 4)
(1912) and were given co-authorship credit.
Mary Butts, by Cedric Morris
In 1916, she began keeping the diary which she would maintain until the
year of her death.
In the first years of World War I, she was living in London, undertaking
social work for the London County Council in Hackney Wick, and in a lesbian
relationship. She then met the modernist poet, John Rodker, a pacifist at that
time hiding in Dorking with fellow poet and pacifist Robert Trevelyan.[6]
In May 1918 she married Rodker, and in November 1920 gave birth to their
daughter, Camilla Elizabeth. Butts also adopted Rodker's pacifism.[2]
She helped Rodker to set up as a publisher, and through him she met several
modernist writers, including
Ezra Pound,
Wyndham Lewis, Ford Madox
Ford,
Roger Fry and
May Sinclair.[2]
But shortly after the birth of her daughter she began a liaison with Cecil
Maitland.
During the early 1920s Butts was mostly in Paris, where she became friends
there with several writers and artists, including the painter
Cedric Morris
(a friend of her brother) and the artist, poet, and filmmaker
Jean Cocteau,[7]
who illustrated her book, Imaginary Letters (1928).[8]
In mid-1921 she and Maitland spent about twelve weeks at Aleister Crowley's
Abbey of Thelema in Sicily; she found the practices there shocking, and came
away with a drug habit.[9]
In 1922 and 1923 she and Maitland spent periods near Tyneham, Dorset, and her
novels of the 1920s make much of the Dorset landscape.[10]
In 1923 her book of stories, Speed the Plough and other stories was
published; which was followed in 1925 by her first novel, Ashe of Rings
(published by
Robert McAlmon).[11]
Ashe of Rings is an anti-war novel with supernatural elements.[12]
A portrait of Mary Butts was painted in 1924 by Cedric Morris, and a
portrait drawing of her was made by Jean Cocteau (reproduced as a frontispiece
to her memoir, The Crystal Cabinet).
In 1927, she and Rodker were divorced. In 1928, Butts published Armed
with Madness a novel featuring experimental Modernist writing revolving
around the Grail legend. In 1930, she married the homosexual artist, William
Park "Gabriel" Atkin or Aitken (1897–1937) (Mary then styled herself Mrs
Aitken, but retained her maiden name for her writings). After a time in London
and Newcastle, they settled in 1932 at Sennen on the Penwith peninsula on the
western tip of Cornwall, but by 1934 the marriage had failed.[4][13]
Butts was an ardent advocate of nature conservation, and attacked the
pollution of the English countryside in her pamphlets Warning To Hikers
and Traps For Unbelievers.[2]
Anxious to escape city life in London,
Naomi Royde-Smith welcomed an introduction to Mary Butts, who was living at Land’s End in Cornwall. The introduction was accomplished through Richard Ellis Roberts, editor of The New Statesman and Nation and then Life and Letters Today. Ellis was appreciative of Butts’s modernist fiction. Butts’s life had been complicated. Before her first marriage and during the 1910s, she had lived with her lover
Eleanor Rogers, from whom she separated when she fell in love with John Rodker, with whom she had a daughter. By the time that she and Naomi met in December 1932, Butts was living with her bisexual second husband, the artist Gabriel Atkin, from whom she divorced in 1934. Naomi described her initial meeting with Butts in Pilgrim from Paddington (1933).
In 1933, at Sennen, Butts was introduced to the young novelist, Frank Baker,
by George Manning-Sanders. Some time later, when Baker was living at
Halamanning Valley with his friend John Raynor, she and Baker met again and
became friends. They became members of the congregation of St Hilary's church,
where Fr. Bernard Walke would produce nativity plays broadcast by the BBC.
Shortly before her death, she was working on a study of emperor Julian the
Apostate. She died on 5 March 1937, at the age of forty-six, at the West
Cornwall Hospital, Penzance, after an operation for a perforated gastric
ulcer. Her funeral was held at St Sennen's Church, Sennen. Her autobiography,
The Crystal Cabinet, was published a few months after her death. Her
brother, Anthony, committed suicide in 1941 by throwing himself out of a
window.[14]
Mary Butts's papers are held at the Beinecke Library at Yale University.[15]
Her biography, by N. Blondel, appeared in 1998.[16]
My published books:
BACK TO HOME PAGE
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Butts