18 - The Modernist Grail Quest

Summary

A Not Yet Exhausted Event?

For 60 years she had basked in Christ’s sun, and balanced her prayers with works. She had not married, but had seen how people behave, and out of her experience her innocent mind had polished its mirror to reflect the heavenly world.

IN MARY BUTTS’S short story ‘The Saint’, an apparently civic-minded elderly lady decides to pilfer a pre-Reformation communion cup from her village church. She cares little for what Charles Williams terms in his occult thriller War in Heaven the ‘stored power and concentrated sanctity’ of a time-crusted relic. By contrast, the old lady considers the altar vessel a plain ‘piece of jewellery’ – ornamental, not sacramental. She has few qualms about surreptitiously selling the trinket, for a fraction of its true worth, to an antiques dealer. Ultimately, ‘The Saint’ implies how the affective and religious significance of the artefact depends ‘largely on what you bring’ to it. As in Butts’s 1928 novel Armed with Madness and Williams’s War in Heaven published two years later, the cultural significance of the cup morphs according to which of its ‘defenders’ perceives it. The explicit and coded allusions to the Grail in all these texts transport us to a realm not of the ‘whodunnit’ but instead the ‘what-is-it’. In a 1933 review that affirms the bracingly eclectic erudition of Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920), Butts remarks that ‘no grail texts were clear’ about whether the receptacle formed the centrepiece of a sacred or a secular event. Butts implies that the Grail’s ongoing ability to ‘haunt men’s souls’ is inextricably tied to how it eludes scholarly interpretations which account for its cultural exclusivity. Butts notes that while Weston expounds a theory of the Grail as an ‘Aryan’ symbol, she also anchors the origin of the ‘Legend’ as it evolved as a crucial facet in ‘Welsh’ storytelling. Consequently, Weston’s claims about the roots of Arthurian romance were often treated (especially by Welsh nationalists) as a tribute to what Butts calls in her Journals the ‘Keltic’ resonance of the Grail.