Good Things: Pederasty and Jazz and Opium and Research

Lawrence Rainey

• Mary Butts: Scenes from the Life by Nathalie Blondel
  McPherson, 539 pp, £22.50, February 1998, ISBN 0 929701 55 0
• The Taverner Novels: ‘Armed with Madness’, ‘Death of Felicity Taverner’ by Mary Butts
  McPherson, 374 pp, £10.00, March 1998, ISBN 0 929701 18 6
• The Classical Novels: ‘The Macedonian’, ‘Scenes from the Life of Cleopatra’ by Mary Butts
  McPherson, 384 pp, £10.00, March 1998, ISBN 0 929701 42 9
• 'Ashe of Rings' and Other Writings by Mary Butts
  McPherson, 374 pp, £18.50, March 1998, ISBN 0 929701 53 4

For the first time since Mary Butts died more than sixty years ago, all her major work is available in Britain, together with a first, full-length biography by Nathalie Blondel. Their appearance promises an occasion to assay the limits of the canon, for Butts’s second novel, Armed with Madness, first published in 1928, is, I would say, a masterpiece of Modernist prose. Her papers have been purchased by the Beinecke Library at Yale, assuring them a place alongside those of Pound, Marinetti and Stein; a short story has recently been published in the New Yorker and a late essay on Bloomsbury appeared in the April number of Modernism/Modernity.