11 December 1918
Queer state of nerves. I could sleep all day & I dream all night. Sexual excitement, tears, depression. No work done. Nearly 28 & no work done.
3 June 1919
Two months spent in hard living. Time to sum up experience since Cornwall.
(i) The nature of magic more apparent. A focusing point where reason & intuition meet. [Eliphas] Lévi’s The History of Magic [trans. Waite (1913)] analysed.1 There a disappointment, but for that incomparable meditation of the Buddha. Corrected by Roger’s rationalism, not superseded.
More vital here my friendship with Philip [Heseltine], who rationalises, but does not rationalise away.2 Philip last night made a curious distinction—the uprush of power which is in your own nature, & ‘possession’ by a good spirit, inspiration. (Or by an evil spirit.) I feel a mistake, at least a misstatement here.
- a sense of certain objects charged with their past, or as foci for will—a worn farthing. These things easily forgotten as not part of the active brain’s proper preoccupation.
- a perpetual apprehension of the relations of objects, sensual or emotional. That everything that is has its answer & correspondence in the depths & shallows of all nature. I cannot think of an example! They rise like bubbles & break.
(ii) The book [Ashe of Rings] a difficult labour but is coming well. Grasp of the technique of free association of ideas, plus a structural unity.
(iii) The sexual will. I have realised that so much of the neurasthenia of these months has been the suppression of understanding of my real relations with John.
Fitz [Taylor] made me drink, & as so often, out of wine came truth. John does not want me so much as I want him—or our intensity in love—to say nothing of our demonstration of it—is at a different ration. It sounds simple. It has taken me nine months (the time of pregnancy) to realise it.
Now the conception is born. The conclusions have all been written down before John — I will have my lover—I will have Roger & other men with whom the relation will be noble, & John shall have his peace, & I do not think one fraction less of love than he wants.
With this there comes a sense of the priestly nature of love — very comforting, I hope true.3 But the agony of detaching my desire from so loved an object. That comes back. That will come back. But there is a way of escape — or rather a way to go in & out. Life flies past, & I run with it. Yet am conscious of a stability which may outlive life.
Here Butts copies out the last verse (lines 69–78) of T. S. Eliot’s “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” (1917).4
12 February 1928
Remember: light clusters on the battleships out on the silk-black Ville- franche harbour. Another sunset over the Estoural. That it was good, the undressing, fresh pyjamas, here in bed within sound of the sea. . . . here in the Mairie [Town Hall] wall is the stone to Septentrion, twelve years old, who danced twice in the theatre at Antibes & who pleased.
[…]
No thoughts come to me that seem worth writing, or if written, to be written well. There is only the discipline to make a note or two.
‘Quotes’ help, tranquillise me. Such as: “the world has got to see how many trials, catastrophes & re-births lie before the peoples who are determined to discover the ultimate secret of human liberty.”
Finished [E. F. Benson’s] The Image in the Sand [(1905)]. As often— a bad book about a good—a true thing. Paddy, flat, deflated hands laid on such an affair.
It ‘comes to me’ over & over again that I might—I should?—work now with a medium. Old enough, steady & instructed enough.
Last night, Mardi Gras, at Nice with Gabriel Atkin.5 There may be something left there still . . . need to do something, not just keep himself alive. And a good intelligence, like Tommy Earp’s. Fun & suffering, touch of madness.
Cocteau talked about poetry: how he had learned watching a plumb- line on board ship. He resaid Emerson’s argument—how “Le Cap de la Bonne Espérance,” reproached for not being a ‘love’ poem, was a “poème d’amour pur, c’est à dire l’amour transformé en autre chose [a poem of pure love, in other words love transformed into something else].” How all achieved art is like that: complete assimilation, reborn as something else.
[…]
Yeats speaks about the failure now of Emerson & Whitman for us (more of Whitman for me), “because they lacked the vision of evil.”[^27] And so Joyce, for lack of the vision of good, as Phil [Lasell?] said, putting his finger on it.
They did experiments in thought transference, one giving the symbol & the other getting the vision that are worth Richet’s attention.6
[Yeats] says, & I think it is so, that our materialisation has fallen on us like a disease; we are bound to suffer the discomforts of its illusion.
I belong to the war-ruined generation; those years lie like a fog on my spirit, mud, slough of despair, cynicism, panic. I have very little to say for myself. The Trembling of the Veil came my way: now curtains thick as clay-packed sacking.
I wonder if he will make me hate science, all that approach, & everything that is popularised by Mr H.G. Wells? Would it be a deliverance, jump out of prison? Into what?
[…]
An american writer said well that we love people two ways; for what they are & for what they might become: & that when they stay at something less than they might be, we can only love them half time. And love on half time is a source of much miseries & false expressions. [Struthers Burt, The Delectable Mountains (1927).]
This should be turned into a maxim!
Glenway said, about Joyce: that he was too literary, not content with the language given him, not content with the life given him, morning air & things: hence part of Ulysses & the post-Ulysses work.
9 December 1936
Health again: this time—pains in back, between shoulder blades etc. No wind. Aches in limbs, acute & spasmodic. Dislike of tobacco. Much less severe, no sickness, but great depression. Monday & Tuesday only really noticeable. Work of a sort possible. Slight griping pains in night especially.
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Eliphas Lévi, pseudonym of Alphonse Louis Constant (1810–75), defrocked priest who believed in the development of an empowering occult science enabling the adept to work miracles, which competed with religious miracles. Lévi’s work greatly influenced the French surrealist André Breton. ↩︎
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Philip Heseltine/Peter Warlock (1894 – 1930), composer and magician. Possibly introduced to Butts by Rodker, whose poem “Twilight” Heseltine set to music in 1916. See Heseltine to Delius, 11 October 1916, in Cecil Gray, Peter Warlock: A Memoir of Philip Heseltine (London: Jonathan Cape, 1938), 134 and Crozier, Poems and Adolphe 1920, xiv. ↩︎
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21 November 1919 True! But how impossible! ↩︎
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Butts incorporates a quotation from this poem in her novel Armed with Madness, The Taverner Novels, 32. ↩︎
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Butts’s first mention of her future husband, the British artist, Gabriel Atkin. See his biographical outline. ↩︎
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Charles Richet (1850–1935), French physiologist and parapsychologist. ↩︎