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A Stroll down Sinister Street

A while ago on my bookshelves I came across an old copy of Sinister Street by Compton Mackenzie. Its cloth binding had faded and the yellowing pages were so fine that I sometimes had to blow on them to open them as I read.

Edmund Gosse believed Sinister Street was on a par with Swann’s Way by Proust, published the same year, 1913. I might well have agreed with him had I ever read any Proust. However, I do know that Swann’s Way was rejected by many French publishers and Proust was obliged to publish it at his own expense. The reviews were bad. By contrast, Sinister Street was greeted with acclaim. One work became a world classic. The other is barely remembered.

Henry James rated Compton Mackenzie as ‘the greatest talent of the new generation’. Ford Madox Ford believed Sinister Street to be ‘possibly a work of real genius’. Evelyn Waugh claimed it was his favourite novel when he was a student and, as young men, both George Orwell and Cyril Connolly admired it. John Betjeman and Max Beerbohm heaped the book with praise. Virginia Woolf, on the other hand, with a more fastidious eye, lumped Compton Mackenzie together with Hugh Walpole as ‘the old prostitutes’.

Books are like plants, one outgrowing another and keeping its rival in the shade. This struggle of books against each other is as deadly as all the hidden stranglings and overshadowings of the jungle. Agents, corporate publishers and critics, those literary gardeners, weed out lesser plants and spend much time nurturing their prize rose bushes. Their job, in cahoots with the chain bookshops, is to maintain the formal gardens of publishing with all the requisite editing, pruning, topiary and maintenance of pathways. It is in the dusty second-hand bookshops that the neglected plants flourish. That is where the rea

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A while ago on my bookshelves I came across an old copy of Sinister Street by Compton Mackenzie. Its cloth binding had faded and the yellowing pages were so fine that I sometimes had to blow on them to open them as I read.

Edmund Gosse believed Sinister Street was on a par with Swann’s Way by Proust, published the same year, 1913. I might well have agreed with him had I ever read any Proust. However, I do know that Swann’s Way was rejected by many French publishers and Proust was obliged to publish it at his own expense. The reviews were bad. By contrast, Sinister Street was greeted with acclaim. One work became a world classic. The other is barely remembered. Henry James rated Compton Mackenzie as ‘the greatest talent of the new generation’. Ford Madox Ford believed Sinister Street to be ‘possibly a work of real genius’. Evelyn Waugh claimed it was his favourite novel when he was a student and, as young men, both George Orwell and Cyril Connolly admired it. John Betjeman and Max Beerbohm heaped the book with praise. Virginia Woolf, on the other hand, with a more fastidious eye, lumped Compton Mackenzie together with Hugh Walpole as ‘the old prostitutes’. Books are like plants, one outgrowing another and keeping its rival in the shade. This struggle of books against each other is as deadly as all the hidden stranglings and overshadowings of the jungle. Agents, corporate publishers and critics, those literary gardeners, weed out lesser plants and spend much time nurturing their prize rose bushes. Their job, in cahoots with the chain bookshops, is to maintain the formal gardens of publishing with all the requisite editing, pruning, topiary and maintenance of pathways. It is in the dusty second-hand bookshops that the neglected plants flourish. That is where the reader, liberated from organized routes into uncharted meadows, is likely to make a rare discovery. And that is where you might find Sinister Street. Edward Montague Compton Mackenzie, born in 1888, came from a family with a long theatrical history. His grandfather, Henry Compton, was considered the best Shakespearean clown of his age, while his parents were actor-managers of the successful Compton Comedy Company which toured the provinces offering a repertoire of Shakespeare, Sheridan and Goldsmith. All Mackenzie’s siblings were connected to the theatre in some way. His sister, Fay Compton, played Ophelia first to John Barrymore’s Hamlet and later to John Gielgud’s. His brother pursued an acting career in America and his other sisters performed and helped manage the theatre company. This background informed his awareness that the life of theatre folk, those traditional ‘rogues and vagabonds’, sometimes overlaps with the sort of London riff-raff and ne’er-dowells found in the later chapters of Sinister Street. In my late teens, working in the theatre, I shared a flat in Soho’s Gerrard Street with Compton Mackenzie’s niece. That area of theatreland was also home to a variety of scapegraces, artists and small and big-time gangsters, all mixing together in late-night drinking clubs. In the evening a barrel-organist patrolled the streets, his music bringing a burst of life to the surroundings. A couple of times we visited Fay Compton, then in her seventies and appearing in Turgenev’s A Month in the Country a few streets away. Wearing her Russian costume, she would come to the stage door to chat and smoke a cigarette until called back on stage. One day my flatmate said, ‘Let’s go and see Uncle Monty in Edinburgh.’ And off we went. Drummond Place was an elegant Georgian terrace. By this time Compton Mackenzie was in his eighties and the author of some hundred books, including the popular Whisky Galore. He was also one of the founding members of the Scottish National Party. He lived with two sisters from the Outer Hebrides, Chrissie and Lillian McSween, wonderful dark-eyed, softly spoken Gaelic speakers. After the death of his first wife he had married Chrissie. She was his wife at the time of our visit. When Chrissie died he married her younger sister Lilli. Chrissie ushered us into his room where he lay in bed, fully dressed, watching a Western on television. He had a pointed white goatee beard and a good-humoured glint in his eye but his attention remained fixed on the Western and only occasionally alighted on us. That evening we were in the spacious basement kitchen with Chrissie and Lilli. Lilli was in a white flannelette nightie with her hair in curlers. They were trying to sell the house and were expecting prospective viewers. The doorbell rang and Chrissie went upstairs to answer it. Lilli, wanting to stay out of sight, slipped into the large cupboard which also served as a pantry. Chrissie showed the viewers around the house and then escorted them down to the kitchen. ‘As you can see, we have plenty of cupboard space,’ she said, flinging open the cupboard door to reveal Lilli standing there in her pale nightie, her black hair twisted into a halo of white rag curlers. ‘Och, there you are, Lilli,’ she said and shut the cupboard door again. The viewers quickly departed. Later, Uncle Monty came down to roar with laughter as they re-enacted the scene for him. ‘Enter Tilburina, stark mad in white satin and the Confidante stark mad in white muslin,’ he announced, chortling. Known for his phenomenal memory, he remembered the quote from one of his father’s productions of Sheridan’s The Critic. They never did sell the house, but Mackenzie scandalized his neighbours by converting the basement kitchen into a hairdressing salon because Lilli had always fancied herself as a hairdresser. It is difficult to know why the public libraries refused to stock Sinister Street when it was first published. The novel consists of four books, each one covering a stage in the development of the protagonist Michael Fane, from toddler to boy to student to adult. Mackenzie, in his foreword, says he aimed to keep the reader at the same age as the principal character and so allow us to see the world through his eyes. ‘The Prison House’ is the first book, a vivid introduction to the world seen through the eyes of a toddler. We experience Michael’s daily reality, his interior life, fears and imaginings. When he creeps down at night and peeks through the kitchen door to see his nurse slumped in her chair, speaking loudly and jabbing her finger in the air at the cook, both of them red in the face, he finds their behaviour puzzling. We understand what the child does not, that the domestic staff in the kitchen are blind drunk. From there we progress to the real and imagined horrors of school and the thrill of playing with a friend and saying, ‘Maybe it’s haunted’ or ‘Maybe we’ll be murdered’. We see his imagination develop term by term. As a boy Michael is enthralled by a copy of Don Quixote with illustrations by Gustave Doré and from then on the spirit of Don Quixote accompanies him everywhere. In fact Sinister Street could be seen as a loose reworking of Cervantes’ themes, or at least a hat tipped in that direction. In the second book, ‘Classic Education’, all the upper-class snobberies of a public school are laid bare, but also the extraordinary depth of scholarship and range of classical knowledge to which pupils were exposed at the time. Mackenzie catches the ever-shifting cloudscape of Michael’s adolescent moods. His passionate attachment to his schoolfriend Alan has all the potential for a full-blown homosexual relationship until Michael suddenly becomes ecstatically involved with the Church. In the school holidays there are brief experiments with girls before he is picked up in a bookshop by a gay aesthete and is soon attending Sunday meetings in a room decorated in peacock blue with a group of other exotics who persuade him to read Baudelaire, Verlaine and Mallarmé. Identity is fluid and volatile at that age. Michael meets and falls head over heels in love with Lily, whom he encounters in Kensington Gardens. Back at school he has an outburst of hatred against the jingoistic attitudes of his classmates during the Boer War. There is something unremittingly tiresome, to modern ears, about the spoken language of the upper classes at the time. ‘By Jove, how horribly decent,’ doesn’t even sound credible to us today, but Compton Mackenzie had a good ear and I suspect it was an accurate reflection of the way in which his contemporaries spoke. Michael rejects the work of G. A. Henty, the imperialist idol of boy readers, and reverts once more to Don Quixote. All the way through the book we are shown Michael’s literary choices – a reminder that books can be as powerful an influence on developing personalities as genetics, family background or life experience. Then his obsession with Lily is temporarily put aside as he prepares for life at Oxford. ‘Dreaming Spires’, the third book, encompasses Michael’s life at an Oxford college. Dinners, drinking binges, clubs and cricket matches abound. The Bullingdon Club flourishes. Radicals are despised. But we see him progress to an understanding of and sympathy with a fellow student’s poverty in an era when some Oxford students chose to sit their Finals in evening dress. He returns once again to Don Quixote, accumulates as many editions of the book as possible and goes on impulse to Spain. The book is laced with satire. On his return from Spain he finds that his mother has joined an association to prevent premature burial: ‘My dearest boy, you have no idea of the numbers of people buried alive each year. I have been talking to Dick Prescott about it. I cannot understand his indifference. I intend to devote all my time to it. We are going to organize a large bazaar next season. Banging their heads against the coffins! It’s dreadful to think of.’ No wonder Evelyn Waugh liked the novel. The last book, ‘Romantic Education’, sees Michael leaving Oxford and diving straight into London’s low life, sharing lodgings with thieves and prostitutes whom he feels he has a mission to save. His obsession with an idealized Lily has returned and he is determined to find her, convinced that her appearance on stage in burlesque means that she has sunk to the lowest depths of degradation and he must rescue her. It is Don Quixote and his Dulcinea all over again. When he does find her she is in a clearly and sympathetically portrayed relationship with another woman. Michael briefly manages to lure her away but she returns to her gay lover. I’m not aware of any other female same-sex relationship in a British novel prior to the First World War. Perhaps this was what offended the public libraries. Michael finally accepts the situation. He understands that his chivalry is a form of self-gratification. He declares himself to be an anarchist and sets off for Rome on another quest. By this time his life and Don Quixote’s are almost indistinguishable. Sinister Street is a dense, humorous and intriguing book. Compton Mackenzie had the benefit of a classical education combined with a mountebank’s eye for drama and an extraordinary visual memory. Many contemporary novels are written, courtesy of creative writing classes, in the present tense. Their immediacy is as bracing as a slap in the face. Sinister Street takes its time, rambles and is meditative and thought-provoking. There are plenty of contemporary highbrow critics who would agree with Virginia Woolf and condemn it as populist, second-rate and trashy. What would Compton Mackenzie say to them were he alive? He might well have chosen a quote from one of his parents’ productions of The Merry Wives of Windsor: ‘Go to hell for an eternal moment or so.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 78 © Pauline Melville 2023


About the contributor

Pauline Melville is a British Guyanese writer whose awards include the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and a Whitbread Prize. Her latest collection of short stories, The Master of Chaos, was published in 2021.

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