Fumerie
Mary Butts
—Edited by Nathalie Blondel and Camilla Bagg
EDITORS’ NOTE
THE IMPORTANT CONTRIBUTION OF the English Modernist Mary Butts (1890-1937) is now beginning to be properly recognized. Although there have always been avid admirers, until recently the range and power of her writing were pushed aside by anecdotes about her flamboyant personality and dramatic lifestyle. Yet behind this persona, sustaining and driving it, was an impassioned writer whose prolific output includes novels, stories, poetry, essays, an autobiography, reviews and plays. She wrote of the Great War in her story “Speed the Plough” (1921) and her novel Ashe of Rings (1925). She explored Greek legend, the grail myth and history in works such as “Bellerophon to Anteia” (1923), “The Later Life of Theseus, King of Athens” (1925), Armed with Madness (1928), The Macedonian (1933) and Scenes from the Life of Cleopatra (1935). Her interest in the supernatural led her to write the haunting stories “With and Without Buttons” and “Mappa Mundi” (1938) as well as an in-depth study of the genre, “Ghosties and Ghoulies” (1933). Her concern for ecological issues and the breakdown of religious belief are repeatedly discussed in essays and reviews, and her novel Death of Felicity Taverner (1932) integrates a modern parable and a dramatic detective story.
A substantial number of her writings are now back in print (including all those mentioned above). “Fumerie” forms part of that still-too-large body of her work that was never published. In a diary entry in June 1927 Butts asked: “Is there a person among our ‘ever widening circle of friends’ who is not smoking, wishing to try, about to give up, giving it up, gives it up, starting again, or superciliously denouncing the practice?” “Fumerie” was written by Butts (already a drug user of long standing) during the summer and autumn of 1927 while travelling in Brittany and then in her flat in the Rue de Monttessuy, Paris, a small street dominated by the Eiffel Tower. It defies categorization, moving between essay and fiction, between the careful specifications of a technical manual and the witty, lyrical description of the Art of Opium Taking. While it extols the pleasurable and often disorganized aspects of the magical opium circle, darker elements are only just kept in check as the vulnerability of the opium-eaters in this country beyond the ken of day-to-day reality is powerfully conveyed.
In Paris in September 1927 Butts wrote of the pleasure of being among her friends, who included the French artist Jean Cocteau (who illustrated Butts’s work), the American composer Virgil Thomson and the English writer Douglas Goldring. There was “love, friendship, a little work, some cash” and, as she noted: “Much less opium needed” (Butts’s emphasis). Indeed, as she completed “Fumerie” she wrote of “the rather easy opium fight, as if we were laughing at one another, pushing an adored friend reluctantly and temporarily out of the house.” Towards the end of September she read Baudelaire’s Les Paradis Artificiels from which she quotes in “Fumerie.” There is one direct diary reference to this essay-story in early October when she decides to “question if Shakespeare knew what it was, and whether the pepper-trade and its passions were a mask for ‘It.’” Yet as her relationship with Virgil Thomson deteriorated, darker moods predominated with only temporary respites such as a day in mid-October when she reminded herself, somewhat shakily, to “remember this day: opium down to seven pipes: all the things done, grief over Virgil put in its proper place …”
Like many addicts, Jean Cocteau tried to convert several of his friends; more than one of her contemporaries testified that Mary Butts, although she believed strongly in the inspirational value of opium for her writing, never felt the need to do so. This was characteristic of her generosity of spirit and the fact that, as with all she did in her life, her motivation was rarely the act in itself, but what it evoked and explained to her. “Fumerie” is an excellent example of her ability to translate this understanding back into writing.
Mary Butts’s original spelling and punctuation have been retained in this first publication of “Fumerie.” The manuscript of “Fumerie” forms part of the Mary Butts Archive housed at the Beinecke Library, Yale University.
THE DUKE SAID: ‘Next Friday evening, wind and weather permitting, I propose to get drunk.’ A good statement, but it refers to a liberation of the spirits infinitely rowdy and gross in comparison with the subject of this sketch, which is the inhalation of the poppy-head juice called opium, rightly prepared and worthily received.
‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.’ Shakespeare, in a moment of enthusiasm about something else, has described its supreme social aspect as a uniter of friends, a solvent of prejudice, a gentle sapper working beneath the barriers of race.
The people whose existence will be lightly shewn, Helen and Martin, Charles, André and George might have lived in ignorance of each other, in casual contact or, a friendship once made, in squabbles and misunderstandings; might have passed years stealing the affections of one from the others, or in repeating highly coloured versions of what the others had been seen doing out the night before, in their cups. Some diversion is necessary, and life being what it is, few things should be allowed to stand in the way of a good time. But diversions in ‘boites de nuit’ are of the nature of costly public spectacles, necessary, from time to time, in this city, as were the classic games, but no alternative to regular hours of vision or repose.
Helen is american, Charles is english, Martin american and André french. George is almost too english to be true. Out each and every night on a spree, how little they would have known each other, how little race-personality would have filtered through race-personality, the french to clarify, the american to be generous, the english to make subtle. They might have drained their healths and their pockets and never discovered each other, or set out on the perspective-opening journey of opium into the secrets of the race and the human heart. What follows is not that story, but some notes it has amused me to make, hints from the Travel Bureau, the opium Baedeker, which, so far as I know, has not been written cheerfully enough in the western world. We have had ecstasy and mystery, descriptions touched with cold fear. De Quincey and Baudelaire. The Halitosis histories America gives us monthly suggest another description of that state which opium can never create but only elicit, the only moments of life whose value remains serene, the hours when man ‘se trouve, en même temps, plus artiste et plus juste’.
Elsewhere, Shakespeare calls it a ‘drowsy syrup’. Smoked, it is not so particularly, unless you take too much. But what did he mean by syrup? If he meant what we mean, he knew the stuff we use. This touches an enquiry. From the fifteenth century on, the world went mad on pepper and the spices of the far East. They were known in the middle ages, and have passed from an exciting luxury into the commonest of necessities. But did those ships which set out on the dangerous, interminable voyage after nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves return with something extra in the hold? Were the chests of food-and-health-preserving fruits of the earth alternated with such stuff as sacks of poppy-heads packed in clay? Was the spice trade, or what gave it its mysterious energy, a mask for the search after the strongest, least brutalising and most dangerous stimulant known to man?
It seems clear that it was smoked nowhere until the seventeenth century, and then first in China. If Shakespeare knew it as a syrup, he must have drunk it diluted, or, God help him, evaporated and chewed. Did the Doges at Venice throw an opium party? Did a little dinner at the Borgias include it? Subject for a historical enquiry of great human interest. But for such a research the writer must be interested in opium; to be interested, he must have tried it; and having tried it, he must have become a will-less, truth-less victim of morphine. People do not like to be called that. So it is not likely that we shall ever know.
In the sixteenth century, Paracelsus extracted morphia. That most sensible magician also insisted on a supply of pure water for the town whose ruler had made him its medical officer of health. He also restated the practical-mystical theory of ‘signatures’ or correspondences
between the visible and invisible regions of nature. Some day Science will have another Clerk Maxwell to spare, and that business will be looked into. Before that day, she might make an effort, and discover an antitoxin to the prison in the unripe seed of a common flower.
FIX YOUR TRAY!
Invitations to ‘come and smoke’ are not always a diplomatic passport to the land of heart’s desire. The slips between a jar of B____s and his lip only the apprentice smoker knows. There is the tray. The needles. THE LAMP. The moistened rag or piece of sponge. The pipe, its bowl, the vinegar. Tape. The dross-box and palette.
George has a tray, its original lacquer clotted with oil-soaked dross. His favourite needles are bent. The head has fallen off the mother-of-pearl bee that hangs on the lamp-glass and, choking inside in a pool of mixed opium and olive oil, impedes the flame.
Charles enters, saying ‘Nien, nien’ in what he hopes is Chinese for an urgent need to smoke. Helen, Martin and André are sprawled, impatient; drawing fiercely on cigarettes. The lamp sputters, falls to a bead. Is coaxed: shoots up. The pipe on the bent needle bursts into flame, is blown out, skinned and stabbed again on the bowl rough with burnt dross. Falls off: is caught, licked, thrust on again. Crumbles to dust.
Interval.
George rolls over on his back and gives it up, while Charles cleans the bowl: another needle: licks his fingers. The shrill bubble of a perfectly cooked pipe rises agreeably, while Helen, Martin and André turn over, expectant at last.
Thud. Clatter. The heavy clay ‘fourneau’ drops off the pipe, shatters the lamp-glass (the only one). Charles crushes the opium-ball, which has fallen off the fourneau in its turn and lost itself behind the lamp, in his teeth, and rushes to the bathroom to spit. Like angry dogs, stretched out but not asleep, the party turns on George.
Affairs will probably right themselves in time; but meanwhile temperaments have been exasperated and auras, which had entered George’s fumoir all the colours of a healthy rainbow, have now been reduced to a monotony of dingy browns.
Memory-training is the smoker’s first obligation.
BE PREPARED.
For insufficient and too sufficient oil.
For waxed or moistened tape, which drying loosens the bowl.
For silver needle-points wrenched off the straight.
For each and every perversity of so-called inanimate matter.
For the live temperament, the diabolic perversity, the ingenious devilry, the highly-strung nature of opium; and each morning in anticipation of your ‘deux heures de calme’—
FIX YOUR TRAY.
George’s pipes are too large; André’s are too small. Through undercooking, Charles’ bubble on the bowl like porridge. Helen’s fall off because the fourneau is cold. Martin is notorious for his burnt pipes. How human nature repeats itself in our simplest acts! But the underlying fault from which these imperfections arrive is Impatience. It takes a year’s practice to make a pipe, and each of the band in his impatience to get down quick to a little peace tries to build up the source of pleasure too fast. ‘Sorry,’ they say, ‘it was the bottom of the pot.’ ‘My hand shakes.’ ‘The stuff is too thin.’ ‘The stuff is too thick.’ Such are the common excuses by which pipe after pipe is ruined; the rhythm of your regime perhaps destroyed. Pipes should be rolled on a palette: any piece of jade will do, and at the same time help preserve that atmosphere of the magic east, about which opium is rapidly correcting a number of our most cherished misconceptions.
DAMN THE LAMP!
Is it a subconscious protest, relic of a misapplied sense of sin which so frequently inhibits the purchase of oil and wick? You are in a hotel, and a descent into the salle à manger at midnight to rob a cruet is hardly the best preparation for your bedtime pipe. Nor is a strip cut out of your finest wool sock a convenient and economical substitute for the ‘mèche’ which should be the smoker’s first care.
… Unnecessary, on the other hand, to gild the lily, as Helen did in the days of her debut, when a famous smoker called to teach her the necessary arts, and she, instead of common olive oil had lit her silver lamp with Guérlin’s Après l’Ondée which burns a pale blue and scented instead of a yellow, vegetable flame, and added to the smokers’ anthology an imperishable joke.
Tape.
By tape I should mean tape, preferably waxed tape, to be cut in nicely calculated lengths. In fact I mean almost any piece of material, including lace shoulder straps, strips of handkerchief, shoelaces and string.
I have seen the bowl bound and jammed on the pipe by the stuffing out of a valuable tie, damp rose leaves, a piece of George’s braces.
And I have been present at more shattering moments when the heavy fourneau has crashed off the pipe, broken the lamp-glass and upset the drug; known more ruined pipes, and wasted opium caused by inattention to this preliminary measure than by any other smoker’s procrastination.
I do not know the french for tape.
I cannot remember it.
I buy mending for my boy-friends’ socks and carry the colours in my head: their different kinds of cigarettes, and all shades of ribbon.
I cannot buy tape.
It is good luck to be a woman: you always wear shoulder straps.
I went out the other day and bought a mile of it.
‘What Did They Think They Smelt?’
You are in a hotel. Your friends (non-smokers) gather round your bed.
‘Why haven’t you opened the window?’
‘They can smell it half way down the corridor.’
The drug just set on your needle bursts into flame, or crumbles as you press it on the bowl. The window is flung open, the night wind rushes in: sets our papers flying—rain follows and the uncontrollable outside world. Emotion will spoil your ‘kief.’ Spoils it.
And what will the other people in the place, some who are undoubtedly hurrying to their rooms for their daily dose of peace, if they have not smelt what will be most agreeable to them, think they have smelled?
‘We are down to twice-cooked dross, and drinking George’s bowl washed out with Dubonnet—’ You sympathise, perhaps press tighter to your breast the little tin you have ordered and paid for a month past, expected for a fortnight, given up hope of a week ago; and, after a rendez-vous fixed for successive days at your flat, received after a two-hours’ wait in a workman’s café off the Port St Denis.
Perhaps you will share it with them.
Perhaps the last time they left you to derange your interior with three times distilled burnt morphine. BUT—
IT IS USELESS TO ORDER IN TIME. ANTEDATE NECESSITY AS FAR BACK AS IMAGINATION WILL CARRY.
‘I DON’T FEEL WELL.’
‘Yes, make me another—It doesn’t seem to be doing me any good.’
The novice gasps away at the seventh, seventeenth or twenty-seventh pipe the careless or malicious friend has rolled: while the well-meaning spectator (non-smoker) goes away to prepare black coffee.
Administers it.
DISASTER.
Your pleasure consists not in the number of pipes, but in the attitude, mental and physical, of repose.
OPIUM IS NOT A WHISKEY AND SODA.
KEEP STILL!
How can you expect Nature to do her work if you do not assist her, and frequently outrage her inviolable laws?
Helen is running about making tea for Martin, who has exceeded his ration while he offered battle this time to the french telephone. André has roused himself to argue with a non-invited non-smoker who arrived drunk. George and Charles were late, and could not agree to take turn and turn with the lamp. The interval between tea and dinner was a mere spell of agitation; the meal a discord; the evening devoted to important social obligations, a fiasco.
All this could and should have been avoided.
KEEP STILL.
You are going away for the first time with It. Probably it will not have occurred to you that the problem of packing now presents serious developments.
In default of a travelling s
et you have followed the usual course in the case of extraneous objects, and your smoker’s outfit is secreted in socks, between handkerchiefs, in a shoe.
Lucky for you if you have committed to the sponge bag the bottle, tin, flask or jar on which all depends.
If you have not, on unpacking you may find a morass; chemises, or shirts, toothbrushes, make-up and books gummed together by an inseparable, uncollectable mass of semi-solidified opium.
Useless to repine, you will probably soak each article in your wash-hand basin, bottle the result collected by means of your douche and drink it day by day.
NEXT TIME YOU WILL HAVE LEARNED:
that opium has the qualities of treacle, glue, quicksilver and india rubber.
ALSO:
that liquid, blown to bubbles, cooked to paste, to dust, opium is a living substance, a magic extract. One that knows its own business and who are its own people. If you do not learn its ways, it will leave you, and leave ruin behind it.
The band had brought its dross to be cooked at Helen’s flat. Left alone she would be sufficiently competent to deal with it.
In the privacy of her kitchen she assembled a clock, a casserole, fan-folded filter papers. A lawn cloth, a razor blade, a spoon. The stripped wood of more than one matchbox. A slag-heap of volcanic-looking cinders. Tied in a pudding bag, bobbing in a frothy brown sea, the precious extract begins to separate from its ash, when—Martin enters: a minute later Charles and André. Then George, who says, while the others peer:
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