BOOKS AND WRITERS
0 NE night not long ago a chance arrival in a London club beheld a portent. Seven professional writers sat in a group around an eighth, listening in delight while he harangued them. Anyone who knows writers will understand that this was a portent indeed. He may well refuse to believe the story, since, unless they scent a chance of copy, writers do not usually make good listeners. Tell him, however, that the talker was Compton Mackenzie, and his incredulity will disappear. Coml:tton Mackenzie is one of the best talkers of his generation. He can hold a room- ful enthralled ; he can converse across the hearth ; he can listen. No one alive is better company.
It is possible, despite the quality of his writings, that future generations will be at a loss to understand the position accorded to Mackenzie by his colleagues. Digging into the literary history of our time, puzzled by the ubiquitousness of " Monty " in memoirs and periodicals, students may wonder how he made so deep an impression where solider, more consistent writers left little mark. The answer is probably the crucial fact about a brilliantly gifted writer who has hardly ever done what was expected of him. He is a talker who writes novels, rather than a novelist who talks. Both talk and novels are by-products of an extraordinary aptitude for being alive, sparks thrown off by a vital flame.
The early expectations of him were high. An article in The Bookman, published during the summer of 1915, subjected Compton Mackenzie's first five novels to a long analysis, and picked him out as the white hope among the younger novelists. The novels were a formidable handful. The Passionate Elopement, an essay in bravura with unforgettable touches of sentiment ; Carnival, now reprinted,* a story of life in the theatre which Mackenzie's own theatrical ex- perience helped to document ; Sinister Street, Volume I, a master- biece, and its vivid but inferior sequel, Volume II: and a cool and elegant pastoral, Guy and Pauline, slighter, more formal, more accomplished, suggesting that to the somewhat rambling eloquence of the preceding books might be added a discipline leading to novels in which classical and romantic would be blended.
This promise was not fulfilled. The next novels were chronicles in the picaresque tradition, where romantic energy and a Dickensian zest took the place of architecture ; stories magnificent in episode, but without a centre of gravity. Then, in the late 'twenties, mastery came again in another genre, with Extraordinary Women and Vestal Fire,t novels of which the most important fact is that they are shrewdly, consistently, and often outrageously funny. These were followed by some of the best books of reminiscence of the century, books in which the writer's genius for -talk found natural and con- trolled expression in print. These memories of Gallipoli and Greece and Athens have still the fascination they had when they first appeared, the charm, the energy, the sometimes explosive humanity that make a fireside companion of the reader.
That is Compton Mackenzie's quality at its happiest. He not only admits us to his confidence ; he invites. "My dear fellow "- one can hear the words of welcome, .warm and genuine, the words of a man who loves life and human beings enough to cherish-the gay and the courageous, the witty and the indiscreet, all who are vehemently themselves, not copies of others, and to poke malicious fun at their enemies. Heaven be praised for healthy malice, for wit that will pierce till the last drop of absurdity has been drained, for mockery that will abase the pompous and deflate the vain. This kind of wit Compton Mackenzie exhales as naturally as he breathes. It can be cruel, as when he ended the imaginary entry for Who's Who of an ambitious confrere with "Recreations: climbing "; but it is never spiteful. It ridicules what deserves ridicule. In fact, it is the complement of the warmth and expansiveness that make Mackenzie, among other things, a first-rate broadcaster.
Of the two books now reprinted, the later and slighter wears the better. Carnival has great merits. Its author related this summer to n audience at Bath how it was born from a chance meeting with a J.ondon barmaid, bewildered by marrying into the depths of. the West country. To the reader of today it is as much a period piece as The Passionate Elopement, quickening at the end from sentiment to something deeper ; Mr. Amor's posy matched by that last cry, "Snared, my lill wild thing! " and the shot that dismayed the sea * Ca' rnival. By Compton Mackenzie. (Macdonald. 10s. 6d.) Westal Fire. By Compton Mackenzie. (Chatto and Windus. 7s. 6d.) birds. Jenny is brilliantly observed, but not understood in depth, as are some of the characters in the later books. For all her realism— as in her reaction to the singer Previtale—there is something theatrical in the way she is presented, and her young man is uncon- vincing. We cannot be sure that the writer knows what he is about, or what valuation he puts upon his characters. This is to judge a young man's second novel by austere standards, but he has brought it on himself, for the best things in the book come up to them, and his next novel satisfies them altogether. Carnival contains passages which those who have read it early in life will never forget. Above all, it is wonderfully put over ; but a thread of unreality has been caught up in the pattern.
Vestal Fire comes off better, because, by the time he wrote it, Compton Mackenzie had developed his astonishing gift for fantasy, and got it under control. Experience had taught him to narrow his aim, and to keep his work more even in texture. He has lost nothing in energy, nor in those enchanting asides, those gratuitous extra touches which so often inebriated the pages of the Sylvia Scarlett saga. (One of my favourite characters in fiction, never appearing, mentioned only once, as a person likely to be interested in a fatuous piece of information, is Pastor Gollick.) In Vestal Fire the fireworks are continuous :— "' Most passionate, most passionate,' Mrs. Ambrogio burst out excitedly. 'Most passionate woman in Sirene. Not a bit passionate myself. Always laugh. Peter gets so angry. Can't help it." Discipline and a continuous paroxysm of mockery have produced a book which for sustained absurdity can only be rivalled by others from the same pen.
The discipline needs to be stressed, because the sheer exuberance of the fantasy has all but hidden it. Two points are worth mention here, if any attempt is made to measure Compton Mackenzie's work and the ways in which it has developed. One is the belief that being funny in print is on a lower level than being serious, and therefore that a writer who began seriously has in a sense gone' off, become less worthy of critical attention, when he writes to amuse. This belief, which incidentally has played hell with the English short story, has worked badly for Compton Mackenzie and prevented many readers from seeing how his technique has become surer as the years went by. The second point is that even his most pre- posterous flights are well based. The fantasy at its wildest springs from fact. It is founded in humanity. The majestic absurdities which passed on their delight to film-goers in Whisky Galore had a basis in both circumstance and character. The Highland nonsenses draw more than half their strength from the fact that they rise from foundations of observed nonsense, unerringly picked out.
The same thing is true of the talk. I once reminded Compton Mackenzie of certain grotesque episodes that occurred at Dublin during official celebrations in, I believe, 1924, and were recounted to me later by W. B. Yeats. He immediately started to complement them with a farrago which was not only fantastic but superbly documented. Everything to do with the occasion had been so well noted and filed by a pr6ensile memory that it could pour out at a moment's notice, to a single- listener, effervescent, spontaneous, com- posed, each detail springing from the character of the person involved, and the whole stamped with the teller's personality, for all the world as if those real people were characters he had himself created in order to amuse me. Such ease comes only from discipline, a discipline which zest and abundance are apt to hide. In the earlier books one fastens on incidents, simple characters, Mrs. Gains- borough's illness, good and bad eggery. The later books are wholes, consistent fabrics of absurdity„ giving their author as strong a claim to attention as the works surveyed by The Bookman in 1915. , Yet is it, I wonder, a purely personal taste that finds Compton Mackenzie best of all in reminiscences? In evocations of school and boyhood, in the Kensington twilight of Our Street, in the Greek memoirs, in passages that. catch the very tone of the incomparable talk, where his writing seems at its highest? Here, I think, time and again he touches greatness ; capturing on paper the gleam, the extravagance, the glow of wit and feeling that made his colleagues cluster round him that night at the club ; that earn him, by right of compassion and laughter, his place at the immortal dinner-table.
L. A. G. STRONG.
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