The Modernist Grail Quest

This chapter argues that for the technically experimental interwar writer Mary Butts, as for less stylistically vanguard novelists such as Arthur Machen and John Cowper Powys, Grail lore offered the most compelling means of exploring an array of numinous experiences, feelings, and phenomena. Standard readings of European modernist engagements with the Grail frequently cite a limited and predictable cluster of canonical male authors, such as Henry James, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, and Samuel Beckett. In this ‘Authorized Version’ of the modernist Grail quest – synonymous with recent research by Jonathan Ullyot and Leon Surette – the vessel, instead of offering access to a domain of sacred signs, only highlights a want of faith in providential patterning. Scylla Taverner, dubbed ‘damsel’ of the ‘Grail’ in Mary Butts’s 1928 novel Armed with Madness, concedes that while ‘faith was necessary for the knowledge of God’, very few people ‘wanted to believe any more’. It is ironic that the main protagonist appears to lend weight to this ‘Authorized Version’ given that Butts’s oeuvre provides a radically contrasting vision and approach. This chapter shows that Scylla’s opinion is belied by the conceptual verve with which British interwar literature embraces Arthuriana.