Introduction

While a prolific and successful author and broadcaster in his later years, as well as a meticulously detailed raconteur of his own life (including fifteen volumes of autobiographical writings), it would have been Compton Mackenzie's high profile as one of ‘les jeunes’ in the English Review circle1 and as a name in the theatrical world that first prompted KM and three colleagues to contact him when they were trying to raise subscriptions for Rhythm.

Mackenzie was the eldest son of Edward Compton, a successful actor– manager, and Virginia Bateman, an American actress, who were themselves both born into families connected to the theatrical world. His younger sister, Fay Compton, was, by the early 1910s, also an emerging actress, who went on to star in a number of London productions of plays by J. M. Barrie.

Mackenzie initially set out to maintain the family tradition. He recounts in his memoir, Literature in My Time (1933), that by the age of thirteen, he had read ‘every play of major and minor importance written and produced by the year 1830. In my mind dialogue and action were thus firmly fixed as the dominant expression of the imagination.’ Despite the positive reception of his early plays and a proposed contract as an actor, he nevertheless preferred fiction, and gave up professional training as a lawyer to devote himself to his craft. He published his first novel, The Passionate Elopement, in 1911. Theatricality, however, remained the keynote of his best-loved writing, and he had a widely acknowledged gift for comic repartee, sparkling social satires and fictional comedies of manners – as KM herself noted in her review of his Poor Relations in 1919. It was just this that ensured the success of his later Whisky Galore (1947), now remembered as one of the best films produced by Ealing Studios. One striking exception to this comic vein was his 1913–14 novel Sinister Street, an evocative, sometimes brooding, semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman (initially conceived as one in a series to be called ‘the Theatre of Youth’) that reflected Mackenzie's life-long admiration for Hardy, and which Ford Madox Ford deemed ‘a work of real genius’.