Compton Mackenzie's Youth

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30342, 18 January 1964, Page 3

Compton Mackenzie's Youth

My Life and Times; Octave Two, 1891- 1900. By Compton Mackenzie. Chatto and Windus. 327 pp.

Only a man with a remarkable gift for detached observation and a still more remarkable memory could have written this book. Granted he had the help of class lists saved from tiis time at St. Paul’s School in London and at its preparatory division known as Colet Court; but he takes the shadows and shades of the far past and gives them the bloom of life as it was in the London, the provinces and English countryside. and in the south of France between 60 and 70 years ago. Only a photographic memory could have done that. This second section of an octogenarian’s autobiography fairly sparkles with events that have become history, and men and women who have left a mighty mark, be it good or bad. The reading of it has left this reviewer with the hope that the author will be spared to write the third and fourth octaves, as he promises. The Mackenzies were theatrical folk of distinction (stage name Compton), and Mrs Mackenzie was a Bateman. a family of equal theatrical distinction towards the end of the last century. So young Compton—the bright boy, brilliant beyond his years at Latin and Greek, a "real boy” with a perpetual penchant for fun and mis-

chief that could have led him to be classed as a delinquent these days—is in the midst of streams of life as various as aristocratic and middle-class conservatism, radicalism, intellectual and political outlooks, and the piquant and bizare. At school one finds him striving with masters and getting higher marks for Divinity than a certain W. Temple (afterwards Arclibishop of Canterbury). He was both the pride and the despair of the school. Away from school he and his family move among such people as Ellen Terry and Henry Irving (and a venal Irving at that). The Oscar Wilde sensation bursts on society to shock it. This boy v ith his feet shrewdly and and safely on the ground moves among a homosexual coterie. At 16 he wants to be a parson and is High Church He tells of the bitter struggles at that time between the Anglo-Catholics and the Evangelicals and of some amazing things involved in that bitterness. He writes of his calf loves frankly, of his love of the countryside, of his butterfly collecting, of countless things, events and people too numerous to mention but all of great human interest. . . And the background reasons for that great novel “Sinister Street” are revealed. The book, which carries a number of photographs, ends with an appendix of letters to Mackenzie's parents from the author and playwright Henry James, and an index of both the first and second octaves.