The critics were unanimous in their admiration, albeit with some reservations about the morality of the work. The Illustrated London News acknowledged that many readers would find it “an unpleasant book”, but praised it as “very sympathetic to one of the most touching and pitiful things in the world — the opening heart of a woman in unworthy surroundings”. The Spectator accused Mackenzie’s novel of displaying a “curious hostility toward the male sex” and a “frank disregard of the conventional canons of taste”, but admitted its “occasional brilliancy of presentation”.
Sinister Street is perhaps the most compelling of all. There are three key bildungsromane of this period that redefined the genre and offered realistic and unflinching portraits of adolescence. The first was Forrest Reid’s Following Darkness (1912), soon followed by the first volume of Mackenzie’s Sinister Street (1913) and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). According to Henry James, by writing Sinister Street Mackenzie had “emancipated the English novel”.
Sinister Street tells the story of the young Michael Fane, from his earliest memories in the crib to his graduation from Oxford University. Its frank depiction of the sexual impulse in youth, and even the homosexual activities that were commonplace in public schools, prompted many booksellers and libraries to ban it from their shelves. The added publicity inevitably made it a sensation. It was one of George Orwell’s favourite novels while a boy at prep school; he described in a letter to Julian Symons how he “got into severe trouble (and I think a caning – I forget) for having a copy”.
Although not in any sense an autobiography, Sinister Street does draw on many of the author’s experiences. While still at school, Michael finds himself in a social clique of homosexual aesthetes, led by the poet Arthur Wilmot. His manner of speech so perfectly captures that combination of the arch and the faux-grandiose that seems a perpetual characteristic of what has become known as the “gay sensibility”. “I should like to die as La Gioconda was painted,” says Arthur, “listening to flute-players in a curtained alcove; or you, Michael, shall read to me some diabolic and funereal song of Baudelaire, so that I may fearfully pass away.”
Mackenzie observed such characters at close quarters. He was only 16 when he befriended members of Oscar Wilde’s inner circle, including Lord Alfred Douglas, Robbie Ross and Reggie Turner. This was in early 1899, just four years after Wilde’s trial and a year before his death. On one particularly memorable night, Douglas invited Mackenzie to a dinner-party and took him afterwards to the Pavilion music hall in Piccadilly (now part of the Trocadero shopping centre). Douglas gave him a signed copy of his poetry collection The City of the Soul. “Someone pinched the volume from my library many years later,” Mackenzie notes in his autobiography. “I suppose it will turn up in a book-catalogue at some absurd price when I am dead.” A quick Google search confirms that he is correct; it was auctioned off for £1,000 in 2019.
Perhaps it was Mackenzie’s deep commitment to his Catholic faith that prevented him from dwelling on his unorthodox attitude to sexual convention. In all ten volumes of his autobiography, there is not one mention of his own bisexuality. When he lived on the island of Capri with his wife Faith between 1913 and 1920, the more tolerant attitude of the locals meant there was little need to keep such matters secret. After all, Capri had been the destination for many gay men fleeing England after Wilde’s imprisonment.
The marriage between Faith and Compton Mackenzie lasted for 55 years until her death in 1960. They had no children — other than a stillborn son in 1909 — but their mutual love and respect never wavered. Remarkable for the time, theirs was an entirely open relationship, in keeping with Faith’s belief in the principle of “love and let live”. Both had sexual relationships with men and women. Mackenzie’s affair on Capri with Luigi Ruggerio (brother of Capri’s most famous gardener, Mimì Ruggiero) coincided with Faith’s affair with the Italian pianist Renata Borgatti. In his book Capri: Island of Pleasure, the historian James Money notes that Mackenzie had invested in a second property, a cottage in the Valley of Cetrella, “for private meetings with his boy-friends”.
The thriving community of lesbian expatriates on Capri during the First World War was the subject of one of Mackenzie’s best works, Extraordinary Women (1928), the first novel about lesbians to be sold in British bookshops. Although often wrongly dismissed as homophobic, the subject of his satire is the pretensions of the privileged; the sexual orientation of his characters is treated throughout as entirely natural. The novel appeared a matter of months after Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, which became the subject of a famous obscenity trial for its portrayal of same-sex love. Perhaps the comedic tone of Extraordinary Women, and its male authorship, prevented it from stirring the antennae of the censors.
Extraordinary Women was the second of Mackenzie’s romans à clef about the people he knew on Capri. The first is the brilliant Vestal Fire (1927) , a work that reaches great satirical heights simply by accurately reflecting the realities of the colourful range of Anglo-American expatriates that occupied the island in the first part of the 20th century. The story revolves around the gay French aristocrat Baron Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen, who had fled Paris for Capri after a sex scandal, and the civil war that erupts in the expatriate community as a result of his presence.
The depiction of Kate and Saidee Wolcott-Perry, an American lesbian couple who had combined their surnames and lived as sisters, is particularly striking. Mackenzie changed the names of all the characters, and postponed writing the novel until the key figures had died in order to avoid libel, yet it provides a fascinating account of this bizarre little community who had found a corner of the world in which they could live without fear of judgement. Faith Compton Mackenzie had captured the sense of it when she later recalled that “everyone was either a little bit or extremely mad”.
It seems that Mackenzie was drawn inexorably to islands. Leo Robertson described him as an “island-addict” who was nonetheless “the least insular of persons”. After his time on Capri, he bought the lease for Herm and Jethou in the Channel Islands, living on one then the other until he eventually relocated to the island of Barra in the Outer Hebrides. Yet for a man who had lived such a rich life, and who had seen the utter transformation of his world, Mackenzie was never guilty of nostalgia. His was a belief in the eternity of the present. It was why he never revisited any of the islands where he had enjoyed his happiest moments. He only returned to Barra after his death, to be buried in the old churchyard of Eolaigearraidh.
He was able to retain his childlike energy and enthusiasm throughout his 89 years. “I am temperamentally incapable of dwelling upon unhappiness,” he wrote in My Life and Times, “I sympathise with the sundial’s preference for sunny hours.” There is a wonderful interview with Mackenzie for the BBC’s Face to Face, recorded in January 1962. At nearly 80 years of age, he has somehow retained the impish quality of his youth. That the interview takes place with Mackenzie lying in bed should not imply a lack of vigour; this was a theatrical device invented by the programme makers.
He did not necessarily fear death but, like a child, the idea struck him as faintly preposterous. He reflected on his own mortality in the ninth volume of his autobiography. “As I write these words on the edge of my 88th year I am becoming so much more and more aware of the sacredness of life that the obliteration of it by death becomes continuously more incredible.” Only his faith could make sense of it. “The Christian creed,” he wrote, “offers the only rational guide to an otherwise incomprehensible universe.”
A mere 50 years after Compton Mackenzie’s death, there is really no excuse for the way in which we have allowed him to be forgotten. And although most of his books are not easily found, they still merit our time and attention. That the most accomplished of artists are destined for oblivion is beyond our powers to prevent, but we might at least do our utmost to hinder the process.
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