The magnum opus of Compton Mackenzie

On Capri in 1925 Scott Fitzgerald met his ‘old idol’ Compton Mackenzie and found him ‘cordial, attractive and pleasantly mundane.

You get no sense from him that he feels his work has gone to pieces. He’s not pompous about his present output. I think he’s just tired. The war wrecked him as it did Wells and many of that generation.’ Fitzgerald himself survives, on the strength of two and a half novels and perhaps a dozen short stories, but, except in Scotland, Mackenzie is, I surmise, more or less forgotten, and even in Scotland it’s only Whisky Galore and perhaps his Highland farces which keep his name alive. It will surprise many to learn that Fitzgerald once idolised him, but This Side of Paradise, his first novel, is very much son of Mackenzie’s Sinister Street.

The 1914-18 war, in which he worked as an intelligence officer in Greece, may indeed have left Mackenzie tired, but it hardly ‘wrecked him’. Indeed, within a couple of years of Fitzgerald’s dismissive judgment, he would publish Vestal Fire, the first of two Capri extra-vaganzas. The other is Extraordinary Women, scandalous at the time on account of its lesbian theme. Both books remain amusing and readable. If not as good as Norman Douglas’s South Wind, they survive better than Aldous Huxley’s comparable novels of conversation.Mackenzie was 13 years older than Fitzgerald, but outlived him by 32, writing to the end. Not bad going for someone ‘wrecked’ half a century earlier.

He made his reputation as an English Edwardian novelist; too much gush in his first books. Sinister Street was banned by libraries and highly praised by Henry James. This irritated Hugh Walpole, who saw himself as James’s pet young novelist and was jealous of Mackenzie.