David Matless

A geography of ghosts: the spectral landscapes of Mary Butts

Keywords: ghosts, geography, Mary Butts, spectrality We have

The paper considers the writings of Mary Butts (1890-1937) to explore a geography of ghosts. After examining earlier geographical engagements with the spectral and magical, and outlining the terms of recent scholarly debate concerning spectrality, the paper introduces Butts' life and work, focussing on her ghostly writings in stories, novels, journals, autobiography and an essay on the supernatural in fiction. Butts' discussion of magic and place, and her accounts of the landscapes of Dorset and west Cornwall, demonstrate a version of spectral landscape conveying enchantment, secret meaning and a culturally select geography. The paper concludes by considering Butts in relation to current discussions of spectral geography.

I. Introduction

T hrough the writings of Mary Butts (1890Butts ( -1937)), this paper raises a geography of ghosts.

Butts' novels, stories, essays and journals allow an elaboration of spectral landscapes, suggest political variations on the spectro-geographic theme, and indicate forms of cultural authority claimed by the spectrally attuned. Her work also indicates the importance of genre in spectro-geographies, the forms and conventions shaping the ghost and producing it as a character. Butts' phrase: 'our choice of ghostly guests', quoted above, is from an essay on the supernatural in fiction. Butts sought to shape such choices via interventions deploying a sense of the magical qualities of things, places, landscapes, writing in an inter-war Britain where attempts to define, claim and protect magical, sacred geographies were not uncommon. The paper proceeds through an episodic structure, with an introduction to Butts' life and work following discussion of the recent critical currency of the spectral. Sections consider the ghost as literary figure, Butts' own magic places, her tales of ghostly happenings, and geographical claims to exclusive magic. We begin with some neglected items from the geographical past, which will return to meet Butts in conclusion.

of the University Boat Race result, visions of Lord Kitchener on his bedroom wall, sightings of possible ghosts. One April Saturday, leaving the RGS at one o'clock and having 'a light lunch' at the A. B. C., Reeves met the ghost of Knightsbridge tube station, 'a tall man in a long old-fashioned black cloak and a round black hat', who he took for an artist or musician, and who walked straight through a white-tiled wall: 'I could not believe my eyes!… Was it possible that there was some hidden door?'. Scrutiny of the wall showed nothing: 'Could it be some hallucination?'. [START_REF] Reeves | The recollections of a geographer[END_REF] Reeves had only had a coffee at the A. B. C.. Later he hears of a tube station ghost. These defiantly sober recollections set up the psychic as a matter of true experience and reasoned enquiry, though one beyond strictly geographical business. The world of work could however shape psychic experience, as when Reeves encounters deceased explorers to whom he once taught surveying: 'on several occasions some of these have made their presence known at seances and given me messages that could only have come from themselves'. 6 Reeves' example of credulous reason may be borne in mind for any geographical engagement with the spectral, spiritual and psychic.

Speier, Summers and Reeves indicate practices and fields of thought which have grazed the language and discipline of geography. The term 'grazing' can here imply categories feeding off and nourishing one another, or scarring each other through unexpected encounters. If the spectral, the magical, the demonic, the psychic carry a family resemblance which can lead to their being lumped together from without on a common cultural ground, they are often furiously demarcated from within. Geographical movement into more-or-less occult domains, from whatever motivation, entails an appreciation of such commonalities and distinctions, and of the nuances of belief, mockery, deceit, terror, scepticism, credulity and incredulity, which move across the field. [START_REF]Relevant cultural histories include: J. Hazelgrove, Spiritualism and British society between the wars[END_REF] With this in mind the paper now turns to the contemporary academic currency of the spectral.

III. The cultural geography of the spectral

The spectral, rather than the magical or spiritual or demonic, has gained recent scholarly currency. If Buse and Stott begin their collection Ghosts: deconstruction, psychoanalysis, history by suggesting that 'to be interested in ghosts these days is decidedly anachronistic', [START_REF] Buse | Introduction: a future for haunting[END_REF] their collection rides academic interest, prompted by Derrida's Spectres of Marx: 'Spectrality and haunting continue to enjoy a powerful currency in language and in thinking, even if they have been left behind by belief '. 9 Buse and Stott set up their project as moving beyond histories of a neglected 'outside of reason' (the occult, spiritualism etc.), instead seeking 'to inspect the inside of reason and see how it too is haunted by what it excludes'. 10 This moving beyond continues effectively to mark out properly sceptical scholarship from misguided credulity: 'even though it is now frivolous to believe in ghosts, they cannot shrug off the spectre of belief: it is simply that now they have been consigned to the task of representing whatever is not to be believed'. 11 Mary Butts played on similar cultural terrain, if for different ends, and, as discussed below, her stories of possession echo Buse and Stott's comment that 'where there are disputes over property, we find ghosts, or that where we find ghosts, there are bound to be anxieties about property'. 12 What might be the geographical currency of the modern scholarly spectre as it grazes disciplinary borders? Byron and Punter's 1999 literary collection Spectral readings, subtitled Towards a gothic geography, circumscribes its ghost: 'By referring in the book's subtitle to a 'Gothic geography' we are, of course, speaking as always in a metaphor'. [START_REF] Punter | Introduction: of apparitions[END_REF] The metaphor allows productive exploration of Gothic's limits of mappability, but the phrase 'of course' jars. Is this an embrace for the language of geography while anything smacking of the discipline is put to one side? Speaking 'as always' in a metaphor becomes speaking only in a metaphor, bypassing more complex possibilities of cultural geography. Such possibilities of the Gothic and spectral are more evident in Roger Luckhurst's essay on 'The contemporary London Gothic and the limits of the "spectral turn"'. [START_REF] Luckhurst | The contemporary London Gothic and the limits of the "spectral turn[END_REF] Asking what it means to place the spectre, Luckhurst pursues a scepticism concerning the 'generalized economy of haunting' informing the 'spectral turn'. 15 Considering the 'newly Gothicized apprehension of London' and the related 'discourse of spectralized modernity', Luckhurst argues that 'the generalized structure of haunting is symptomatically blind to its generative loci', 16 and counters in part via a 'geography of the genre'. 17 Deconstruction is turned on the general hauntology developed in the wake of Spectres of Marx, with singularity and the 'resistant residue of untranslatability' aligned with attention to the ghost as a specific symptom at a specific site. The ghost conjures a singular geography of unpredictable politics, rather than general rupturous possibility: 'The spectral turn reaches a limit if all it can describe is a repeated structure or generalized "spectral process" -perhaps most particularly when critics suggest the breaching of limits is itself somehow inherently political'. Luckhurst seeks geographical and historical purchase for spectrality, ending: 'we surely have to risk the violence of reading the ghost, of cracking open its absent presence to answer the demand of its specific symptomatology and its specific locale'. [START_REF] Luckhurst | Something tremendous, something elemental": on the ghostly origins of psychoanalysis[END_REF] Luckhurst raises the ghost-in-context. Clive Barnett's caution over context as a device of secure framing, of return to spatio-temporal origin, and subsequent explanatory confinement, is pertinent here, though he echoes Luckhurst in scepticism concerning the politics of liminal freedom: 'One lesson of deconstruction is that the political value of either fixing meaning (of closure or of identity) or of maintaining instability (of ambivalence or of difference) is not open to prior, conceptual determination'. [START_REF] Barnett | suggesting that while 'contextual, historicist readings of Lovecraft' are not 'worthless', we might instead '[END_REF] Buse and Stott's comment that 'there may be no proper time for ghosts', that 'haunting, by its very structure, implies a deformation of linear temporality', 20 indicates that the ghost-in-context is nevertheless liable to break narrow frames, indeed the deconstructed ghost becomes a creature of precise if not necessarily linear geographies, histories, temporalities, spatialities, all contributing to its make up. Precision here can release as much as restrain.

In the narrowest subdisciplinary and broadest transdisciplinary sense, then, this article pursues, via the work of Mary Butts, a cultural geography of the spectral wary of either generalized models of haunting, or of ghosts trapped in contexts. Other geographical accounts pertinent to this approach and subject matter include Wylie's recent Derridean engagement with W. G. Sebald as exemplary practitioner of (and late haunting presence for) spectral geographies, and Nash's cultural-historical study of the 'Visionary geographies' of early twentieth century Irish poet and reformer George Russell. [START_REF] Wylie | The spectral geographies of W. G. Sebald[END_REF] Nash shows how, writing as 'AE', Russell aligned two senses of the visionary; a landscape transformed through rural reform, and a mystic vision of folklore, nature and nation. Butts performs parallel visionary geographies, and also echoes themes sketched in Lowerson's essay on 'The mystical geography of the English', moving through religion, folk religion, the parish church, pagan revivals, and the occult, the connection of all to senses of Englishness, and the cultural assumption that 'the countryside is full of places with permanent spiritual characteristics'. [START_REF] Lowerson | The mystical geography of the English[END_REF] From such work emerges a particular geoaesthetic of the spectral, embracing a geographical cultural politics at various scales. Ghosts work a cultural politics of nation, including versions of Englishness; of region, including in Butts' work areas such as west Cornwall and Dorset; and of locale, as something to be cherished, defended, retreated to. The combination of the spiritual, the ghostly and the intensely local leads Butts' spectral work to echo Freud's definition of the uncanny, 'that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar'. 23 In Butts' work the ghost belongs in marvellous or horrible form to the place. If she could also forcefully write against alien presence or influence in her claimed country, her ghosts and spirits were familiars haunting home.

IV. Introducing Mary Butts

Mary Butts was born in 1890, growing up in the family home of Salterns, in Parkstone on the edge of Poole in Dorset, in southern England. Salterns as landscape of memory, myth, possession and dispossession shapes Butts' memoir The crystal cabinet, published posthumously in 1937. [START_REF] Butts | The crystal cabinet[END_REF] Nathalie Blondel provides a comprehensive account of her complex life, [START_REF] Blondel | Mary Butts', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. A selection of Butts[END_REF] Cleopatra, 1935). Her many essays and reviews included '"Ghosties and Ghoulies"' (1933), on the supernatural in fiction, and the 1932 pamphlets Warning to hikers and Traps for unbelievers. [START_REF]Editions of key works by Mary Butts discussed in this essay are as follows: Ashe of Rings[END_REF] Butts married artist Gabriel Aitken in 1930, moving in January 1932 to Sennen Cove, near Land's End in Cornwall, living in a bungalow overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. The marriage broke up in 1934, Butts then converting to Anglo-Catholicism. She died suddenly in March 1937, and is buried in Sennen parish cemetery.

Butts' daughter Camilla Bagg describes the social milieu of her writings well, 'with their setting of taken-for-granted money, no necessity to find a job, cultivation of the mind, frequent assumptions that the reader was well up in French and the classics, and no interest whatever in ordinary people'. [START_REF] Bagg | Crystal cabinet[END_REF] Patrick Wright highlights her intimate connection of family and place; family 'a transcendent value threatened by its own historicity', and places of spiritual value threatened by materialism, suburbia, mass leisure, etc. 28 Butts' high literary modernism could resent modernity, with spiritual and class values merging in the evocation of landscapes of private meaning. Whether Salterns, the isle of Purbeck across Poole harbour, the Dorset earthworks of Badbury Rings a few miles inland, or Sennen and its environs in later life, Butts gave local topography literary form, vulnerable lands and strong coastlines dramatizing a conservative mythic modernism.

Butts claimed authentic measure of land against a supposedly false urban pastoralism driving contemporary country enthusiasms. Myth and magic serve for the critique of contemporary culture, marking out a select group of 'special people in special places'. 29 Butts' high European modernist style calls up an authentic green English world through myth and ritual, magic and ghosts, a modernism of ritual held to restore truth against an artificial modern culture. Butts, in common with modernists such as T. S. Eliot, drew on the classical anthropology of Jane Harrison and the Cambridge Ritualists, and Jessie Weston's 1920 From ritual to romance, an account of the Grail legends as rooted in primitive nature cults. Butts also explored formal magic though association with infamous occultist Aleister Crowley in the early 1920s, staying at his Sicilian abbey in summer 1921, though she later rejected his methods and views. [START_REF] Weston | Of Butts' complex engagement with the Grail in Armed with madness, Blaser explores how she 'tests the symbol' through its various uses and properties (p. 171), and presents Butts as pursuing, along with writers such as William Carlos Williams, a 'relational imagination[END_REF] Psychoanalysis too offered resonant treatment of myth, though for Butts this was a symptom of modern problems rather than a means to their resolution; as Jane Garrity suggests, Butts is 'involved with scientific and psychoanalytical discourses even as she attempts to disavow them'. [START_REF] Garrity | Step-daughters[END_REF] Butts upheld Jane Harrison against Freud, with ritual presented as the basis of religious value. Armed with madness and Death of Felicity Taverner work around 'the female protagonist as a kind of living Grail, a genealogical signifier of England's cultural mythology', with ritual practice, cycles of nature and the female body mapping onto one another. [START_REF] Garrity | See also A. Radford, 'Defending nature's holy shrine: Mary Butts, Englishness, and the Persephone myth[END_REF] The dead Felicity achieves presence in the latter novel as 'a ghost who is the real link to an authentic England rooted in an idea of ancient and timeless continuity with the rural past'. [START_REF] Garrity | Felicity is discussed in the context of Butts' wider approach to the supernatural in B. O'Brien Wagstaff[END_REF] As her life proceeded, Butts produced herself as a figure haunting England, a remnant of national essence and a sign of possible redemption. Moving to Sennen Cove, Butts haunts culture from the end of the land, a peripheral spirit set up as a true centre. Early death would help produce the ghost of a neglected modernism, her work later rediscovered as, variously, a lost female pioneer, a neglected seer, a skeleton in the modern cupboard.

V. Styles and thoughts of ghosts

There was never more curiosity than there is to-day about 'the uncanny' or 'strange things' -'things' that even in our father's day it was improper to believe in at all. 34 ' "Ghosties and Ghoulies": uses of the supernatural in English fiction' was published in four instalments in The bookman between January and April 1933. Butts' essay developed from an unpublished article written in Paris in August 1928 on 'Use of the supernatural in fiction', and is signed as written 'Paris-Sennen 1928-1932'. [START_REF]Butts would also send out a questionnaire to various writers on their supernatural experiences in January 1935, a[END_REF] Various dimensions of the ghost appear.

Butts addresses the ghost as an object of thought, citing Weston and Harrison as setting out 'the natural history of so many of our beliefs, in bogy, ghost, daimon, demon, angel or god'. 36 Butts' is a particular kind of modernist ghost. Traps for unbelievers states: 'An old ghost accompanies the advances and speculation of man, inexorcisable, inexorable, materialising at will'. 37 Here are 'receipts which linked the phenomenal world to an eternal', 38 laid to one side in the modern world but never truly discarded. 'Ghosties and Ghoulies' draws from Harrison and Weston conceptions which might come round again, 'a great wheel turned and ground gained -to initiations which will really initiate; not by haphazard; not by fraud or hypnosis or superstition, but inevitably'. 39 Here are 'formulae that are very old', whose ritual origins may be traced and powers known, and from whose various demons and angels a careful choice should be made. The essay ends: 'We have been careless lately what spiritual company we have kept; in our choice of ghostly guests. The results are observable'. 40 Butts also explores the ghost as literary form, having most time for the evocatory story, authors seeking 'only to produce horror and wonder; or at best, and without explanation, the consciousness of a universe enlarged'. 41 Butts deployed a chess analogy to indicate: 'the first law… of the interaction of other worlds with ours; that it can be somehow described by a parallel with the knight's move in chess. The other moves are comparable with ordinary activities. Only the knights move two squares and a diagonal, on and sideways and can jump'. 42 A clear grid reveals other capacities and dimensions. M. R. James is Butts' exemplary writer, and her own work sought parallel effect. While noting James' 'kind, sceptical disclaimers', Butts suggested 'some experience, apart from his immense scholarship, he must have had'. [START_REF]Butts' one formal ghost story, 'With and without buttons', is discussed below. Of contemporary writers Butts also praises E. M. Forster, 'whose special sensibility, curiosity and faith makes him indifferent to any ultimate distinction between pagan and Christian supernatural values' (p. 361), and May Sinclair's Uncanny tales, then recently reissued. The latter (billed as Uncanny stories) are the starting point of Glover's essay 'The "spectrality" effect in early modernism[END_REF] Butts developed her discussion in a 1934 London mercury essay on 'The art of Montague James', emphasizing a 'matter-of-fact' style, not seeking to demonstrate any particular theory of the occult: 'the essence of his art is a sudden, appalling shock of visibility. The intangible become more than tangible, unspeakably real, solid, present'. [START_REF] Butts | The art of Montague James[END_REF] James' 'matter' is taken 'from his own surroundings and experience', 45 with 'an affection for some very plain, very subtle, very unambitious English landscapes it takes a long time to appreciate and understand'. 46 Butts then claims country affinity with ghostly magic:

Everyone who has lived much out of doors feels something of what he tells. Not by association with tradition, but by a direct kind of awareness, an impact on the senses -and something more than the senses. It can be a recurrent, almost an overwhelming, experience. Much ancient bogey-lore was a rationalisation of it. To-day we talk of suggestion, exorcise with the magic word 'unscientific.' But I doubt if our ignorant scepticism is any nearer truth than our ancestors' ignorant credulity. 47 Traps for unbelievers similarly defines magic through a geographically-shaped capacity to grasp 'relations between things of a different order: the moon and a stone, the sea and a piece of wood, women and fish', a 'very peculiar kind of awareness, an awareness modified and sometimes lost by people whose life has been passed in towns'. [START_REF] Butts | Traps for unbelievers[END_REF] While applauding the evocatory ghost story, Butts has less sympathy for a second mode, that supporting a theory of life beyond perception, 'authors with a psychic axe to grind'. 49 Third, the 'lowest class', 50 comes 'the vulgar stuff, the sniggerers in the cheap magazines at stories of the appearance of the dead'. 51 Butts also notes purportedly non-fictional works, 'which profess to describe hauntings and disturbances', accounts so far written only by 'thirdrate journalists'. 52 Marking out her ghosts of distinction, Butts wonders that the best authors continue to produce 'excellent work on the subjects they are not supposed to believe in at all'. And all this in 'an age when the accepted view is that anything may be true, "that anything may happen," while that none of the explanations -especially the religious explanations -we were once taught, can be the right one'. Taking aim at psychoanalysis, Butts suggests that such a perspective 'leads us to describe the beliefs and faiths of our ancestors as science misunderstood; or the visions of saint or artist, profound or fruitful, curious or bizarre, as nothing more than a way of externalizing the unconscious'. 53 Butts instead argues that the best ghost stories evoke a truth of experience, the residue left when other explanations fail: 'a question remains, more easy to feel than to ask'. 54 On what she regards as a transhistorical and transgeographical belief in gods and demons, Butts comments: 'all nonsense and misunderstanding of natural phenomena apart, when imaginative writing reaches a certain degree of precision, produces such an effect of reality, it is difficult to see how this is done if the observation implied in the writing is without some foundation in experience'. 55 Transgeographical belief did not however imply a welcome for all geographically specific forms. Butts is dismissive of literary Celticism, chiding (with 'admirable exceptions' including Yeats, A. E. and Lady Gregory) 'shapelessness' and lack of realism:

Things happen as we know they do not happen, and as we do not want them to happen. The magic princessesfor this is just as explicit in their earliest epics -are too magic. Thirty invincible knights fight thirty invincible giants for thirty nights and days; without, as Professor Murray points out, any interval for meals. Not only do these things not happen; we do not care to pretend that they happen.

Butts presents such stories as potentially poisonous: 'an overdose of Celtic "magic" can give one a sense of something very like a special kind of evil'. Contrast is found in vernacular Celtic story: 'Very different are true countrymen's stories, of a small, green, strange, gay, earthy, child-stealing folk'. [START_REF]as with Harrison, Butts was influenced by Gilbert Murray's work on Greek religion[END_REF] Butts criticises the national use of the Celtic in Ireland: This essay is not the place to examine the Celtic field. Ancient or modern, there is too much of it. To-day it can be smug. Can assume, without so much as a polite gesture in the direction of evidence, that it is the mind of the debased Saxon, lost in materialism, which questions the stories of a supernaturally enlightened peasantry on the existence and nature of the Sidhe. Who exist in Ireland for the Irish; sole inspiration of the only art worth mentioning in Europe. … It is cult that is fatal. And the Irish to-day seem to make of their folk-mythology a national asset. 57 As a counter Butts upholds 'a supernatural story' from the Icelandic Grettir Saga, 'Glam's Ghost', reprinted in a recent ghost anthology, whose telling carries: 'a sober precision … It might be a report written by an imaginative, simple and accurate person for the Society of Psychical Research'. Butts sums up her own everyday supernatural aesthetic as: 'If it happened at all, it happened like that'. 58

VI. Magic of person and place

Elsewhere in 'Ghosties and Ghoulies', Butts indicates that things may have happened to her. 59 The supernatural in fiction meets supernatural actuality, as Butts evokes enigmatic and mysterious sites and occurrences. So Butts encounters 'a tree, a scarred pine' in a French park, which may have exerted some agency in her loss of an earring and a subsequent sickness. 60 And, 'To quote again one's own experience: there is a part of Lincoln's Inn which does not always "stay put." Also Great Russell Street. But that, whatever it is, is something projected out of the British Museum'. 61 Butts includes sites outside 'the regular places where men went for initiation', beliefs and traditions 'that certain places exist, of themselves and quite unofficially, charged with mana and tabu'. 62 Butts notes a 'transition' observed 'when a place becomes another place; and you know what you have suspected before -that all the time it has been two places at once'. [START_REF]Butts is here praising Scottish and Border poems and Thomas the Rhymer. 64 Butts, 'Ghosties and Ghoulies[END_REF] Half way through the essay Butts turns to the capacity of places to gather holiness: 'In the past certain holy spots, caves and "temenoi" were, at one and the same time, a place on this earth; a place where once a supernatural event had happened; and a place where, by luck or devotion or the quality of the initiate, it might happen again'. 64 Butts then makes 'a personal digression' to 'attempt to explain what is meant by the experience, so often used by writers on the supernatural, that a place can be more than its assembly of wood and leaf and stone visible to us; more than the atomic structure common to all things'. 65 Butts describes an unnamed Badbury Rings, a hill fort in south Dorset, with three rings of earthworks and a central grove of trees:

Not always places you would expect. Explanation or theory apart, a good many sensitive persons have a list of their own. For instance there is a neolithic earthwork in the south of England. It is better not to say where. The fewer people who pollute that holy and delectable ground the better. No shepherd, no farmhand will go there after dark. In mediaeval romance, a place identified with it was a 'temenos' of Morgan le Fay. (The country people have forgotten her.) But there are other earthworks nearby, including Stonehenge, where they will camp out all night at lambing time. Not that one. It is, or was until lately, mana of high potency and, at the same time, strictly tabu. The writer of this essay discovered it when young; and it is no exaggeration to say that a great part of her imaginative life was elicited by it and rests there. Archaeology had begun to interest me, but I knew none of its stories then. It entered into me, 'accepted' me. 66 Butts presents herself as drawn to the haunted, while the ordinary folk can sense the place but will not engage it. Garrity notes how part of the attraction of mana for Butts was its implication that things deemed foreign and contaminating should and might be expelled; Wright terms Butts' mana 'a secret rationality which discloses itself on occasion to the initiate'. [START_REF] Garrity | Step-daughters[END_REF] Contrary to Butts opening statement, an ancient earthwork is perhaps exactly the place you would expect some such thing to happen, indeed the associations of magic and prehistory would again alight on 'the fort of Badbury Rings' in 1936 in artist Paul Nash's Shell Guide to Dorset:

It is round rather than oval, and has the dread peculiarity of a crown of dense trees planted in concentric circles. I have read of enchanted places, and at rare times come upon them, but I remember nothing so beautifully haunted as the wood in Badbury Rings. Long afterwards I read of the tradition that King Arthur's soul inhabited a raven's body which nested there -indeed it is one of the last nesting-places of the wild raven in England -but I needed no artificial stimulus to be impressed. Beyond the outer plateau the rings heave up and round in waves 40 feet high. A magic bird in a haunted wood, an ancient cliff washed by a sea changed into earth. There is scarcely anything lacking. [START_REF] Nash | Dorset: a shell guide[END_REF] Badbury had long been a key site for Butts, and The crystal cabinet gives a similar account of historical and legendary associations, magical qualities, initiation, dream, Butts glimpsing 'the makings of correspondence, a translation which should be ever valid, between the seen and the unseen'. [START_REF] Butts | Crystal cabinet[END_REF] Butts plays on the ring motif to indicate her rescue from variants of modern thinking, contrasting ancient and eternal concentrated meaning with supposed repetitious circularities in modern thought: 'without the Rings, I know what would have happened to mewhirled away on the merry-go-round of the complex and the wish-fulfilment and the conditioned reflex, with Jung and Pavlov, Julian Huxley and Bertrand Russell, in all the consciousness of my group. On those rocking horses I might have pranced for ever, with the rest of us, in a ring we mounted with zest'. Butts then states a credo, with commentary alluding to the Rings and paralleling her warning on the results of ill-chosen ghostly guests:

Without God there can be no man; without supernature there can be no nature; without philosophy there can be no psychology; without theology there can be no science; without mysticism there can be no commonsense. This is truth, and our age has chosen, clause by clause, to reverse it, make the first of each term dependent on the second. With results we are beginning to appreciate, destroying piece by piece such natures as the war has spared. It is no part of this book to tell the secrets of Badbury Rings, yet it is no exaggeration to say that, in after years, it was because of them that I still remained, however uncertainly, critical of that reversal. 70

VII. Spectral encounters

Butts termed one mode of story the '"plain ghost," the sober kind, fit for the ears of the Secretary of the Society for Psychical Research, and no less convincing for that'. 71 While Butts may not have shared the SPR's search for the reasoned explanation of supernatural phenomena, her straightforward aesthetic of 'If it happened at all, it happened like that' shapes her one formal ghost story, 'With and without buttons', written in 1932. [START_REF]Adelphi or something like that -anyhow in a book -and given any quality it may have it owes to your influence, I want to be allowed to dedicate it to you'. Butts says that if she does not hear from James she will assume a dedication is in order; Blondel[END_REF] Butts tells of a narrator and her sister in 'a remote village in Kent', seeking to unnerve their neighbour Trenchard's 'pseudo-rationalizations' via a trick with gloves, yet ending with something altogether more mysterious. Trenchard is presented as 'calling the bluff, in inaccurate language, of God, the arts, the imagination, the emotions'. They seek instead to 'suggest to him an experience -the worse the better -wholly incompatible with the incredulities of his faith'. 73 The supernatural is triggered by its denial: 'It was only because Trenchard said at lunch that the mass was a dramatized wish-fulfilment that what came after ever happened'. 74 The sisters use old kid gloves, with and without buttons, from a shoe box in the loft. For the narrator the phrase 'with and without buttons' immediately takes on the status of a 'rune'. 75 Hints of witchcraft and female power come through the story, with the sisters aligned with female powers of the earth and attuned to the mysteries of the stars. Their decision to 'haunt him', to 'try his simple faith', is in part an exercise of a female power -'the pure, not erotic power' -over men. 76 The loft in their 'very old cottages' extends over Trenchard's dwelling, though his loft access door is bricked up. They rent their cottage from a friend who 'bought it as it stood from a local family which had died out, and of which very little seemed known'. Trenchard also rents, having returned to 'his own part of England to rest, after a long time spent looking after something in East Africa'. 77 The sisters leave gloves around the house in ways confounding explanation, inviting Trenchard to believe in 'a ridiculous superstition in the village that there is Something Wrong with the house'. 78 Before they begin their trick, however, a separate glove appears, as if their thinking of the scheme has triggered some other presence. The narrator asks in the village about the previous resident, Miss Blacken, and is told of her leaving gloves about, and of a petticoat dropped on the green which blew to the sky on a windless day and never came to earth, hanging torn in the trees. As gloves continue to appear, the sisters and Trenchard combine against them, putting the gloves back in the box and locking the loft door. Trenchard knows a smell in the loft from his travels: 'smelt it in Africa in a damp place. Bad skins'. 79 The haunting continues.

Gloves appear on stairs, on clothes, on the food laid out for Trenchard's birthday party. White buttons are sprinkled onto sweet bowls, and a glove ruins a centrepiece:

We went down together into the dining-room, and there my sister screamed. On the top of the centre strawberry pyramid, hanging over the berries like a cluster of slugs, was a glove, yellow-orange kid-skin, still and fat. A colour we had not seen in the box. The wrist and the fingers open and swollen. No buttons.

'What witches' trick is this?' he cried, and stared at us, for we were women. And like a wave moving towards us, rearing its head, came the knowledge that we were responsible for this; that our greed and vanity in devising this had evoked this: that we would now have to show courage, courage and intelligence to put an end to this, to lay this. And we had no idea how.

'The fire must burn,' I said. 'A great fire.' 80 The sisters are as disturbed as Trenchard. The narrator's perfume turns to a scent of old kid gloves. The sisters burn the haunted material in Trenchard's fireplace; the strawberries and glove are thrown on together, the precious perfume emptied onto flame, the glove box explodes in the fire. The sisters consider they 'came off lightly'; Trenchard cannot shake off the experience: 'Now he cannot think what he used to think, and he does not know what else there is that he might think'. 81 The supernatural, through everyday objects, pulls the rug from the accepted world.

In The crystal cabinet Butts outlines parallel ghostly happenings which have happened to her, moving from the speculative to things truer than one could possibly credit. Butts had wanted a ghost at Salterns, something to show the other girls: 'not the tree and wind and leaf and garden potencies I knew, but a Real Ghost. A Grey Man or a White Lady, with a proper story, who put in regular appearances'. 82 Once, aged about 16, she thought she saw one: 'Left with the memory of a sudden transit of a swift, soundless figure, a small woman in a dark mantle. In the scattered gold of sunset, in a wood, a figure that crossed my path for a second and was gone'. [START_REF]allusions to ghosts also come when a ghost of a suicide girl who saw her lover hang is said to walk the sand-hills[END_REF] At school in Fife, however, coastal walking aged 18, Butts walked across sand 'into a ghost':

Half-way across the next cove I was stopped short. The sun blazed palely above, but on the dry sand I had walked into a pool. An air-pool, it was grey and whirling … In dead, spinning cold I turned, not faint, but blind. With an immense effort, wrenched myself out of it. Torn on and sank on to a rock on the further side. What had I struck? It looked all right -or perhaps (I know more about it now) as if a patch of air in the mid-beach had gone dead.

Butts' enquiries found 'no story about that beach, no evil meeting that took place and left its mark there'. Of her stepping 'into a focus, a column of energy, cold and vile and hateful, spinning there', she never found 'what it was doing on a Fifeshire beach'. [START_REF] Butts | Crystal cabinet[END_REF] This encounter in everyday space, a site which more than Badbury may fit her category of 'not always places you would expect', further claims attunement to and initiation in the supernatural; indicates that her ghost stories and grail renderings might just, for someone like her, qualify as realism. [START_REF]See also Butts' description of an encounter with a male 'full size figure I wish I could forget' at Sennen in March 1935: 'I had, I think, been repeating a psalm[END_REF]

VIII. Magic out the ordinary

Butts moved to Sennen Cove in January 1932, from May 1932 occupying a bungalow bought by her trustees. This small modern detached bungalow, 1 Marine View, was renamed Tebel Vos, Cornish for 'House of Magic'. Butts' life in Sennen offers an example of everyday surroundings transfigured, and daily life haunted, by past wonders and present anxieties. The naming of Tebel Vos indicates a dual movement, making the ordinary magical, while marking out a space from the ordinary around. Renaming helps magic out the ordinary, while making something out of the ordinary. Butts' journal entries from May 1932 suggest what Blondel terms a 'transubstantiation' of an ordinary bungalow into 'an extraordinary sanctuary, a kind of shrine'; [START_REF] Blondel | Hope's essay was first published in 1937, after Butts' death, as number 1 in a 'Sennen Pamphlet Series'; this would seem to have been the first and last pamphlet. See also Harcourt Wesson Bull's memoir, 'Truth is the heart's desire[END_REF] the interior furnished, objects accumulated, the garden lovingly tended as, in Butts' phrase, a 'nature sacrament', 87 the Atlantic viewed from the window. Turning 1 Marine View to a House of Magic, the everyday becomes of value if blessed with a capacity to be transformed, although in The crystal cabinet, referring to the 'Tide' of suburban villas and bungalows approaching Salterns in her youth, Butts indicates that Tebel Vos may not entirely have shaken off 1 Marine View: 'Under the scurf of bungalows, like the one on the Cornish cliffs I am at present inhabiting, as utterly, but not as blessedly, as if the sea flowed over it'. 88 The commonplace Cornish life and landscape around Sennen Cove could also work magic. In part Butts follows a conventional English embrace of the Cornish as exotic and mystical, within but not of England. [START_REF]Cornwall: the cultural construction of place[END_REF] Butts' comment in a letter to Hugh Ross Williamson on the renaming follows such a formula, with Tebel Vos, this 'good cornish' name, being 'a translation for what we wanted to call it, which in English would have sounded pretentious'. 90 Butts played on Cornwall, and West Penwith in particular, as a place of mystery, furthering the Grail preoccupations most evident in Armed with madness. In the winter of 1932-3 Butts considers that the church at nearby Sancreed might witness something: 'I think that the Grail might be seen here this winter'/'And I believe the Grail is stirring at Sancreed'. 91 Butts' move to Anglo-Catholicism followed the influence of Father Bernard Walke at the church of St Hilary, near Penzance, 16 miles from Sennen but where she attended Sunday service when possible between 1934 and 1936, drawn by Walke's ritualism and his devotion to the place of art in worship; St Hilary was decorated with the work of contemporary Cornish Newlyn School artists. 92 Blondel notes that in her stories from 1932 'the Cornish landscape reverberates', 93 and her journals too give a series of rapturous and reverent engagements with the place. Butts conveys an ecstatic immediacy in her encounters with sea, moon and landscape, and meets magic on the beach at night: Returning I met a stone, a rock, about 3 foot high, round, standing on end, the shape and the marks of the face of a little old goddess, an idol, a Notre dame de Sous Mer, this time. Perched on her haunches, not unfriendly but most strongly charged. Not so long ago we would have brought her up from the beaches, wreathed her in weed and shells and been very very careful in our tendance. As it was I saluted her with some reverence. 94 In December 1933 Butts reviewed nine books for The bookman under the title 'Magic of person and place', editor Hugh Ross Williamson noting Butts' own attention to 'the simple "magics" of place': 'Her books are, in a real sense, a self-revelation. Dominating everything is a passion for the actual land of England, not in the "happy country-side" sense, but as a concrete expression of mystical and spiritual forces'. To critics' suggestions that Butts was culturally a Left Bank Parisian, Williamson stated: 'The real Mary Butts is living quietly in a Cornish village'. [START_REF] Williamson | editorial note at the beginning of M. Butts, 'The magic of person and place[END_REF] 'Magic of person and place' includes praise of two books on Cornwall, novelist and Sennen neighbour Ruth Manning Sanders' The crochet woman, and archaeologist Hugh O'Neil Hencken's West Cornwall:

If it is not their native place, people have need of certain books to elucidate the piece of earth on which they live. For to know it, one must have a private map of one's own in mind. A magic map. Made on foot and by the senses that is usually in no more than two colours, of places which are 'mana' and places which are 'taboo'. They can overlap; and in West Cornwall you are living in a land where culture is overlaid on culture. This year two books have brought out its contours. 96 Butts hails Sanders' 'exquisite imagination, the complex of stone, water, plants, air and human character on the moor the Ordnance calls Selene, the Moon-Moor'. 97 Hencken's 'scientific precision' equally sparks Butts, showing that 'one is walking among the bones of the First Men.' Butts lays myth onto Hencken's archaeology of megalithic culture: 'A land whose after-history seems nothing but an anti-climax, whose beginning itself may have been an end, supposing Atlantis to be true record; and that what was essential Cornwall perished with it, leaving the place empty for wandering tribes to settle, the tenants of its ghosts.' Hencken's work also helped 'enhance the isolation dwellers here feel from the rest of England. Nowhere else is one so sure that one is in a foreign land, whose significant history was over before what we call England began'. [START_REF]Hencken was an American archaeologist who moved to live in Cornwall; his The archaeology of Cornwall and Scilly[END_REF] In her House of Magic, Butts was the latest English-in-Cornwall appreciative tenant of these ancient ghosts, but her view of the contemporary native Cornish could be more jaundiced. Early 1932 journal entries note: 'The people of the Cove are all cousins and watchful and hate foreigners'/'There is a brutal, bull-necked, full bodied blooded type about here… Morals, one hears, to match'. 99 The Cornish place carries more magic than its people, though the place is itself threatened by new kinds of prosaic life. Thus Butts opposes further bungalow development in Sennen Cove on the part of businessman Mr Barton, who had earlier constructed her own bungalow. 100 A journal entry for 9 January 1937 projects subjects for unwritten stories, including 'On Barton (blowing up his houses)'. 101 The sense of claiming a special place while pulling up the drawbridge to keep others out is echoed in Butts' novels, notably Death of Felicity Taverner, published in November 1932. Scylla Taverner, and her friends and relations, resist the plans of socialist Russian Jew Kralin to develop their beloved land with bungalows and leisure facilities: 'he would then build a hotel and a row of bungalows along the low cliff, light the sea lane and drain it. One of the least-known places in England, he would then advertise it'. 102 Scylla defends 'the flawless, clean and blessed, mana and tabu earth; strictly of their flesh, whose birds and beasts and eggs and fish, and fruit and leaf and air and water had nourished their bodies, "composed their beauties"; whose pattern was repeated in them, the stuff of a country made into man'. 103 The Taverners defend their England against multiple forms of the alien; Kralin stands for modernity, Left politics, racial otherness. Kralin is the widower of Felicity, Scylla's sister, and complicit in her death in an unspecified way. Felicity's ghost has a narrative presence, shaping relations between characters via hidden influence, present on the hill as Scylla describes to her friend Boris the ways in which Kralin's plans would transform the land: 'A breeze shivered in the grass beside them, the short grass of the high places that springs out of the earth upright, with a kind of sturdy passion, as the ghost of Felicity Taverner trod their light crest, looking down into the sea-valley over her cousin's head'. 104 Kralin approaches and 'The ghost left them', 105 not staying to hear Scylla damn Kralin to her betraying cousin Adrian as 'the blackmailer, your sister's murderer, the man who would sell the body of our land to the Jews'. 106 Felicity as ghost spirit of the land is addressed at the climax as Boris, an exiled White Russian and Taverner ally, murders Kralin in an island sea-cave, Felicity's own 'precious place'. 107 Kralin's body is left to the sea, though with the delicious possibility that his corpse might shoot from an island blowhole: 'that could only happen if there was a great storm, and the blow-hole worked in a jet with the strength of the Atlantic behind it'. 108 Wright notes of Death of Felicity Taverner that this is not simply an 'innocent pastoral…, drifting into unfortunate but occasional contact with unsavoury attitudes', 109 rather 'the Jew is actively given a meaning which is culturally necessary to the valued England which he contaminates'. 110 Commentators have variously diagnosed Butts' work as manifesting and/or dramatizing anti-semitism; her work proceeds through stark categories of race, as of class. Wright places such judgements as central rather than tangential: 'Exclusion and anathema are principles active at the foundation of Mary Butts' sacred geography, and in the writings they take two primary forms: one political, the other racial'. 111 The commonplace, everyday elements of Butts' aesthetic are far from any egalitarian social principle. This is a sensibility of a select few, who places like Badbury can accept and who might transubstantiate an ordinary bungalow. The everyday, the private, the elite and the numinous intermingle, and Butts' writings on the magic of place work alongside a publication such as Warning to hikers, where the kind of magic which would disturb those unfamiliar acts as cultural deterrent to the ordinary urban visitor. Butts ends that pamphlet by evoking a green deeper than the pleasantly pastoral:

For once they have taken one step across the line of protection, the belt of urban needs and values each of them carry strapped tight about them, they will find themselves in a world as tricky and uncertain, as full of strangeness, as any wood near Athens. No friendly greenwood, fixed by poets; no wise gnome-tapped mountain; no gracious sea. The dragon-green, the luminous, the dark, serpent-haunted. Will they face it? When the Sirens are back at their business, sisters of the Harpies, the Snatchers? When the tripper-steamer -her bows to the sun -turns into the boat called Millions-of-Years? Quiet in the woods. They can be very quiet when a wind from nowhere lifts in the tree-tops and through the pine-needles clashing the noise of a harp runs down the trunks into the earth. And no birds sing. 112 Butts here ends with a quotation from Keats' 'La belle dame sans merci', calling up a stern female nature spirit. If both dragon green and classical allusion are, by implication, unknown to hikers, nature knowledge and classical learning might yet combine to repel them, creating, in the divine sense, Panic.

IX. Conclusion

Mary Butts draws out cultural consequences of ghosts, the magics which might be worked, the claims to authority which might be made, the effects of one spectral aesthetic over another, the conventions through which ghosts perform, the thought which they might enlist. Alerting us to such matters, Butts can serve, in a time of academic fascination for the spectral, to direct us beyond the obvious dead (obvious for their anticipation of contemporary concerns or their clear theoretical antecedence), opening up the choice of ghostly guests who might fill any geographical ghost box. If ghosts notionally manifest at will, uncannily beyond the control of the haunted, there are evidently various strategies which invite their appearance, devices making haunting likely. The cultural history of ghosts shows the spectral as a carefully constructed and contrived field of pleasures and anxieties, with a range of investigative methodologies and techniques. Sensibilities of spectral retrieval include: genial folkloric gathering, the scavenging of found objects, delight in arcane scholarship, the tracing of lines of influence and descent, the identification and registering of things out of time (presupposing the ability to diagnose and juxtapose temporalities), connoisseurship of the strange antique, the pursuit of effects from terror to whimsy. The episodic structure of this paper has in part sought to echo Wylie's call that 'spectral geographies should themselves be spectral', 113 setting dimensions of ghostly work alongside one another, laying out material carrying resonance for the contemporary if without clear lessons to be learned or instruction to be imbibed, presenting in Mary Butts a person fit to haunt a contemporary geography of ghosts. To conclude, the paper returns to the geographical curios which opened the account. Introducing Mary Butts to Hans Speier, Montague Summers and E. A. Reeves indicates further possibilities.

Butts and Speier take their magic for different ends; Butts to search for select knowledge, Speier to deposit the magic of Nazi propaganda maps into a trash can, a gesture unsurprising for a refugee from Germany finding haven in the USA. Butts might also have put propaganda maps alongside official Celticism as a myth constructed narrowly for state power, yet seeks throughout her work to give belief foundation, reserving scepticism for what she might have regarded as a cult of reason. While her work shows fascination for a potential 'science of mysticism', 114 the latter is a term implying not sceptical explanation but the elevation of mystery. Psychoanalysis could for Butts sit as a practice drawing on myth and mimicking science yet ending as a symptom of rather than solution for modern dilemmas. Suspicion towards the claims of reason leads Butts towards an embrace of a truth defined as in essence supernatural. Magic ultimately points the way.

Not all magic though. Summers' Catholic discrimination is matched in Butts' rejection of the once-admired Crowley, whose magic is rejected as misguided or even charlatanry. Butts can pursue a comparative religion via Frazer, can suppose insights proceed from the mythic mutuality of different traditions, yet is always ready to dismiss myths deemed of lower order. Present in the very high modernist circles anathema to Summers, and with rather more sympathy for witchcraft, Butts nevertheless echoes his desire for foundation, her experiments in artistic life leading in the end to an embrace of Anglo-Catholicism. Butts' March 1935 description of her Sennen Cove garden as a nature sacrament is no pagan evocation: 'Yet today I praised God and Our Lady from my soul for this afternoon's gardening. A nature sacrament with the flowers and the earth and the quickening sun'. 115 Butts works across supernatures to end in orthodoxy.

It is doubtful that Butts ever haunted the RGS, though she might have unknowingly shared an underground carriage with E. A. Reeves. To approach ghosts and the occult via psychic research carries in Butts' work an aura of worthy yet futile scientism, a respect for the supernatural expressed through a misguided desire to search it out and pin it down. The consolations of spiritualism, of conversations with grandmother via ectoplasm over the suburban table, miss the wonders of mana and tabu. The sensibility which takes Butts to Badbury rather than the séance, which entertains the possibility that an approach to the Grail might be discerned, signals another distinction between Butts and Reeves. Studies of spiritualism indicate the ways in which magic circles draw from particular social circles, with the psychic pursuits appealing to Reeves via sèances or domestic experiments in his Surrey home being associated with the middle or upper working classes. 116 Butts and Reeves show in their different ways how magic as social practice works through cultural distinction. Pursuing the occult with Crowley during her six weeks at his Abbey of Thelema at Cefalu in Sicily in the summer of 1921 was one thing; one doubts Butts would have been seen dead at a suburban sèance. The supernatural for Butts acts as the supersocial, a device to mark out an elite, elect crowd.

Remarkable writings follow. Butts retains a presence through her novels, stories, essays and journals, works worthy of remark if not, for everyone, things to delight in. Labelling Butts as an 'acquired taste' would however be to exhibit precisely those judgements of aesthetic value which she sought and lived through; the assumption being that most people would neither wish nor be able to acquire such taste. Butts' rarefied modernism of high style, like her essay on 'Ghosties and Ghoulies' -whose title, gesturing to the popular and amusing, simply gives it house room while seeking to go much further -helps highlight her aesthetic of the ghost, always a geoaesthetic of haunted sites, spatial encounters and arcane claims to places deemed special. We should not however thereby assume that such self-evidently magical style exhausts a ghostly geoaesthetic. To use Butts' own already-cited phrase, 'it is cult that is fatal', and questions of aesthetic value do not only pertain through Butts' claimed aesthetic values. If Butts' work is distinctive and remarkable, it carries no unique capacity. Any person calling up ghosts, through whatever modes of expression and experience, might receive similar treatment to that given in this essay, whether 'third-rate journalists', 'the vulgar stuff ', 'authors with a psychic axe to grind', fatal cultists. Speier, Summers and Reeves play out their own geographical aesthetic of the spectral, the magical, the demonic, the religious, whether through an aesthetic of clearly supreme reason, discriminating veneration, or credulous enquiry concerning visions of Lord Kitchener on a Surrey bedroom wall. A world of geographic possibility becomes apparent. Mary Butts' choice of ghostly guests can, in its distinctive elective manner, help alert us to a geography of ghosts beyond anything she might have imagined.

Biographical note

FIGURE 1

 1 FIGURE 1 Grave of Mary Butts, Sennen parish cemetery (photographs by the author, September 2006). The lower inscription on the gravestone, dating from 1937, reads: 'Mary Butts/Wife of Gabriel Aitken/Born Salterns, Dorset, December 13th 1890/Died Sennen, March 5th 1937'. The additional inscription, added when the gravestone was restored by Butts' daughter Camilla Bagg in 1984-5, and shown in the lower left image, includes a quote from William Blake: 'Mary Butts/writer and poet/I strove to seize the inmost form'.

  Matless is Professor of Cultural Geography at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of Landscape and Englishness (1998), and of numerous papers on cultures of landscape and nature in twentieth century England, and the cultures of geographical knowledge. His recent research includes work on the cultural geography of East Anglian landscapes, and (with Laura Cameron) on the ecologist/artist Marietta Pallis. The work of Mary Butts connects to his longstanding interests in mystical geographies, English landscape and the geographical imaginations of figures deemed maverick and/or eccentric. He can be contacted at: School of Geography, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK; email: David.Matless@Nottingham.ac.uk Notes 1 D. Livingstone, The geographical tradition (Oxford, Blackwell, 1992), pp. 349-50. 2 H. Speier, 'Magic geography', Social research 8 (1941), pp. 310-30, quotation p. 313; Speier was a Jewish émigré political sociologist who left Germany to join the Graduate faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York. Between 1942 and 1948 Speier carried out US government service, including for the State Department, before joining the Rand Corporation as head of their Social Science Division. 3 M. Summers, The geography of witchcraft (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1927), pp. 184-5; M. Summers, The history of witchcraft and demonology (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1926). For a more consciously sober enquiry into witchcraft in a specific geographical historical context (sixteenth century Essex), carefully mapping events and prosecutions, see A. Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: a regional and comparative study (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970).

  her studies in London, pacifism in World War One, lesbian relationships, 1918 marriage to John Rodker, an intermittent relationship with her daughter, born in 1920, her subsequent lovers and Bohemian life in 1920s Paris and southern France. Butts moved in high modernist circles, Cocteau illustrating her prose sequence Imaginary letters in 1928. Butts' first story collection, Speed the plough, was published in 1923, with her first novel, Ashe of rings, written during the war, issued in 1925. Armed with madness followed in 1928, Death of Felicity Taverner in 1932, with further historical narratives on Alexander the Great (The Macedonian, 1933) and Cleopatra (Scenes from the life of

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Mike Heffernan and two anonymous referees for comments on an earlier version, and to Rob Fish for field accompaniment. A preliminary paper was presented at the RGS-IBG conference in August 2005 in a session on 'Spectro-geographies', organized by Peter Adey and Joanne Maddern.