Episode 34: 'With and Without Buttons' by Mary Butts
Producing the EnCrypted podcast has upsides and downsides. One downside is that, since so much of my time is focused on the show, I am now exclusively reading horror/supernatural/macabre short stories. No bad thing, you might think, but the other fiction and non-fiction books I hoped to read this year now taunt me from my physical and virtual bookshelves. The upside is that I keep being introduced to writers I have never read or heard of before.
One instance of this is Mary Butts, who, although a contemporary of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, May Sinclair et al, and also of the occultist Aleister Crowley (she is listed as co-author on his Magick, Book 4), remained something of a fringe literary figure until her death in 1937 and, for a long time, her work languished in out-of-print obscurity.
Born in 1890, she died young, aged 46, having lived, nonetheless, a full life that saw her explore her bisexuality, brought her into contact with numerous writers, artists and film makers (she was a friend of Jean Cocteau), develop a drug habit at Crowley's Abbey of Thelema in Sicily, and become an ardent advocate of pacifism and conservationism. She was a modernist not least in the literary sense.
Some of this - a lot of this - is evident in her story With and Without Buttons, on the face of it a rather slight supernatural tale in which the scariness is undercut by whimsy, but shot through with a strangeness and sensuality that I think stands apart from any of the other stories covered on the channel so far.
You can read some interesting perspectives on the story on the following blogs:
https://www.thisishorror.co.uk/bloodlines-lost-and-found-mary-butts-with-and-without-buttons/
https://marzaat.wordpress.com/2021/08/04/with-and-without-buttons/
I would add that there is a trickery in the story-telling here - a mischievous playing with traditional conventions of gender, a blurring of identities, a narrative that feels propelled by instinct rather than logic.
I found it quite charming and refreshingly different, and I am delighted to bring it to the attention of other readers/listeners through the podcast.
Jasper
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