Compton Mackenzie (1)
The road from Sinister Street
Denis Brogan
One of the themes of Somerset Maugham's admirable literary debunking job, Cakes and Ale, is the stress on the age of the great man of letters — obviously Thomas Hardy — who had lived into uncontested glory although for a very long time indeed he had been either condemned or ignored.
Compton Mackenzie lived as long as Thomas Hardy and was a more dramatic figure. Almost from the beginning of his literary career, be was a best-seller and an increasingly public figure, especially as he developed his passionate devotion to Scottish history and to the House of Stuart. Like that of many other men of letters who have lived to be very old, his reputation went up and down, and perhaps at his death in his ninetieth year, it was for the moment going down. His autobiography was too long and too repetitive and lacked editorial control, but it still made very good reading and was a document pour servir for the literary history of England before and immediately after the first world war. Unlike the Thomas Hardy of Cakes and Ale, Compton Mackenzie — Monty, as he was always known to his friends — was extremely good looking, and nobody looked more like a Highland chief than this son of a well known repertory actor, Edward Compton.
The books which made Compton Mackenzie famous were written when he was a young man of very great promise. It is easy to forget how much he was admired by Henry James. It is easy to forget how much he was regarded with jealousy by a number of less successful authors. Even if his career as a Scottish politician, as a Scottish nationalist fizzled out, it gave him a place in Scottish history which is not totally negligible. There was perhaps something odd about the devotion of Monty Mackenzie to the cause of Edward VIII, later Duke of Windsor. The movement of ' Octavians ' didn't last very long. It was naturally difficult to believe in a quasi-dogma of divine right for monarchs of the House of Windsor. But the romantic devotion of Monty Mackenzie to the throne, if not necessarily to the House of Windsor, was part of his charm
As happens with a great many early successful authors, people began to hark back and regard him as somebody whose promise had not quite come off. In many ways, this was unjust, but he suffered from competition which he could not have anticipated, the competition of Evelyn Waugh. For there can be no doubt that Sinister Street is not as good as the best Oxford writings of Evelyn Waugh, although a good deal better than any of the writings of Aldous Huxley. Of course, Monty Mackenzie wrote too much. There are various reasons for this. He wrote too easily, he wrote too often, and he was
the victim of one of the most shabby persecutions that the shabby bureaucrats of the War Office have ever invented. Even today, despite the various promises that were made by the Franks Commission, the Official Secrets Act has no parallel that I know of in any reasonably civilised country. Compton Mackenzie was one of its victims. A faked charge was brought against him. It was conspicuous that the secrets he was accused of giving away were not in the least secret, and he was financially very badly damaged and almost wrecked by the malice of the faceless carpet warriors of the War Office.
One of the best, perhaps the best, of Monty's books was the semi-autobiographical Sinister Street. In it, I think, one can see some resentment about the obstacles, financial and other, which sent him to St. Paul's instead of to Eton. But on the other hand, had he gone to Eton, he might only have been one of the numerous Etonian writers that the world willingly forgets. After all, Evelyn Waugh, an author of more intrinsic genius, gained a great deal by going to Lancing and not to Eton or even to Winchester!
Then Monty Mackenzie gained by the role he played in the first world war on the staff of Sir Ian Hamilton, and as an intelligence officer in Greece in that extremely badly managed enterprise, British intervention hi Greek politics. If you read Monty's numerous books about his days, in Greece, you have to allow for his strong partisanship and his inability to see that perhaps the Greek rulers were right. It was not their fault that the barbaric Turks expelled the Hellenes from the Ionian shore. I discussed this once with Monty Mackenzie and I don't think he ever realised that there were at least two sides to the complicated and very Byzantine politics between Constantine, the Bulgar slayer and Venizelos.
Fortunately, Sinister Street can live by its own merits as a novel, and some of the comic novels, if not all of them, can live as highly entertaining pins stuck in the backside of the British military and Foreign Office bureaucracy. There is far too little savage hostility to the higher bureaucracy, military and civil, and it is not that Monty pulled his punches, but he was probably too good natured to realise how vulnerable these often odious characters were.
The various novels that Compton Mackenzie wrote dealing with Scottish nationalism are always amusing and sometimes more than merely amusing. The Scotland that Monty wrote about was very mythical indeed. I know Monty lived in Barra, consequently knew a good deal about the Hebrides; but my mother lived in Barra long before Monty was born, and she didn't take very seriously the picture of Hebridean life that Monty Mackenzie celebrated. The earlier volumes of the immense autobiography have very great merit because they recall the London around the last years of the Good Queen. But the picture of London life you get in Sinister Street and the picture of the stage that you get in some of his less serious works does give a very lively picture of the last years of the brief reign of Edward VII, just as, with all their
political naiveté, the books on the Greek campaigns explain a great deal in the disasters of the Dardanelles expedition.
The jokes in Monty's serious works are, if anything, better than in his more frivolous works — like the literary gent who called his dog Henri Beyle, or the reportage on theatrical activities all over Britain. He produced (from his own novel) the script for one very good film, Whisky Galore, in which he himself played a small but effective rOle, and which allowed Compton Mackenzie to score off the kind of dull or even half-witted English officials at whose hands he had suffered.
The temptation is to write Compton Mackenzie off as one who, like Garrick, by his death "impoverished the public stock of harmless pleasure." He was more than that. Sinister Street is almost a firstclass novel. Some of the war novels, like those associated with Sylvia Scarlett, have a good deal of historical value, and some of the other novels which recall the brilliant theatrical career of his sister Fay Compton should appear in any good history of the English stage. He was a patriotic Scot as well as a good if slightly eccentric Catholic, a highly industrious and versatile writer, and far better worth re-reading, or reading for the first time, than some of the more powerful efforts which now get large financial prizes that Monty earned but didn't get.
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