A Prophecy

One look at the titles in my home library and you would notice, with a few exceptions, most of the fiction was written by writers who are no longer with us. The exceptions include such novelists as Mark Helprin, Gene Wolfe, Dean Koontz, V. S. Naipaul, Michael D. O'Brien, and a few others. I enjoy the work of authors who write well, who accept the reality of objective truth, and who believe in what T. S. Eliot called the "permanent things" that make us human beings what we are and lead us to what we are destined to become. You will find few atheists or relativists among the novelists residing in my modest library. I hear enough from them in the popular media.

Jane Austen and The Cottage in Chawton, Hampshire

I've written often of my fondness for that early nineteenth-century moral theologian, Jane Austen, a woman so unlike those dark, brooding Brontes. And I continue to enjoy and reread the work of Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, and Anthony Trollope. In truth, these days I don't read Trollope but instead listen to him during my early morning walks, thanks to the good folks at audible.com and the Apple engineers who made my iPhone. Trollope is really quite listenable. And then there are the writers whose stories and novels make me laugh again and again, authors like P. G. Wodehouse (1881-1975) and H. H. Munro (aka, Saki, 1870-1916). I've also come to enjoy the somewhat strange novels of the late Alice Thomas Ellis (1932-2005) and the ghostly stories of Russell Kirk (1918-1994). I remember my surprise when I learned that Kirk, one of the intellectual fathers of the American conservative movement, also wrote these wonderfully spooky tales. 

A Young Mackenzie

All of this talk of authors and books has brought me to Compton Mackenzie (1883-1972), another writer in whose works I delight. I first encountered him about 30 years ago when I picked up a used copy of his farcical novel, The Monarch of the Glen, a book I thoroughly enjoyed. Since then I've probably read a dozen of his novels. But one day, while browsing in the aisles of my favorite Cape Cod bookstore -- Parnassus Books -- I picked up a copy of Volume 3 of Mackenzie's My Life and Times. I soon discovered that his autobiography was a massive work, filling ten volumes -- yes, that's right, ten! Each volume covers an "octave," eight years of this man's remarkable life. 

Since reading that third "octave", I have searched for and purchased the other nine volumes and, believe me, few lives are more interesting than Mackenzie's. He knew everyone from Kaiser Wilhelm to Winston Churchill, from T. E. Lawrence to D. H. Lawrence, from William Faulkner to Lawrence Olivier. The child of a theatrical family, Mackenzie graduated from Oxford, was a lifelong Scottish nationalist, converted to Catholicism, and developed a deep distrust of invasive government. He also liked cats, a odd trait which I can overlook.

Last evening, while reading Volume 8, which covers the war years (1939 to 1946), I came across something Mackenzie had written late in 1940. This was a most difficult time for the British. In 1939 Stalin and Hitler had signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact, an agreement conceived in hell, one that would last until broken by Hitler in mid-1941. It would be well over a year before the United States entered the war after the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941. At the time Mackenzie was writing, Britain stood virtually alone against the most powerful army the world had ever seen. And that army had just blitz-krieged its way through France and the Low Countries forcing the British troops and a contingent of allied forces to evacuate at Dunkirk. Were it not an island nation, Britain too would have fallen, probably quickly.

Mackenzie's comments were published as the forward to a volume designed to raise money for a charity called the War Orphans Fund. Given that they were written almost 80 years ago, in the early years of World War Two, they are both insightful and prophetic. I have included some excerpts here.

"If would be more comfortable to believe that this great war was merely the result of the last Great War. We might then feel fairly certain of achieving a real peace, for we have learnt a lesson and are in the mood to benefit by it. If this war is part of an evolutionary struggle, whatever the result we cannot hope to see the world securely re-established, because our victory must in time be challenged again but our defeat would be final, at any rate for too long a period to make speculation worth while. 

"I believe that we may soon be witnessing the death agony of that habit of thought and system of economy which is too loosely called capitalism, too loosely as it seems to me because it overstresses the economic aspect and I am not a dialectical materialist who can accept Marx's theory that man's circumstance is entirely determined by this. I regard our period as the beginning of the reaction against the trend that was given to Western development by the Renaissance and the Reformation and the discovery of America, which led to an exaggerated conception of the rights of the individual and an insufficient appreciation of his duties. The process has been accelerated by the abuse of mechanical progress from printing to flying, by the corruption of the ideal of popular education, by the substitution of humanitarian theory for religious practice, by the continually growing power of money, and by the encouragement of an illusory freedom of thought at the cost of real freedom of action. The result has been that never in recorded history was the ordinary man so completely at the mercy of his environment as he is today. The liberty that seemed within his grasp at the beginning of the fifteenth century is now farther away than ever, and is likely to recede still farther as long as man elects to be the slave of self rather than the servant of God."

At this point Mackenzie refers to a drawing of the Holy Family fleeing into Egypt and writes:

"They too were refugees...but they are refugees at this moment. What that Holy Family stood for mankind is even now being driven more brutally into the desert by material progress than ever by Herod's violence...

"After the Great War of 1914-1918 people sat back and declared that another great war would mean the end of civilization. Pamphlets were published to warn the world what appalling weapons and poisons would obliterate humanity. Pacifism was feverishly preached on the text that war was too horrible; its missionaries forgot that only experience teaches and that a younger generation would be excited but not warned by books like All Quiet on the Western Front. Meanwhile for two fatal decades audiences sought a deliberate thrill from gangster films and plays and readers procured themselves a kick from tough novels.

"And then suddenly in September 1938 audiences and readers woke up to the fact that the thrills and kicks they had been administering to themselves, thrills and kicks more pernicious to moral stamina than any hashish or cocaine could supply, were expressions of such a zeitgeist as not even the far-sighted Goethe discerned upon the wing...

"In one last desperate effort to travel out of the respectable past into the disreputable present Neville Chamberlain flew to Berchtesgaden to allay the whispers of politicians who had betrayed their country out of laziness because it was easier not to disturb an electorate with warnings of a storm which after all might not break. To politicians willing to betray their country out of laziness it did not seem a grave offense to betray what Mr. Chamberlain called a 'remote country' like Czechoslovakia out of cowardice. Not that such cowardice was not immediately justified, let it be quickly said; war was impossible for Britain and France. Neither was ready..."

Neville Chamberlain and Adolph Hitler in Munich

Mackenzie goes on to address the muddled thinking of both the Left and the Right in the years leading up to the war, and then writes the following:

"The seat of the trouble was that confused thinking which led to the failure to recognize that Fascism and National Socialism were only different expressions of the same basic evolutionary drive as inspired Communism. Black ants or red ants, they are both ants. The initials of Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité provide the first three letters for the LEFT, and T stands for Totalitarianism...

"The Communist secure in a positive material creed declares the condition of Europe to be evidence that the death agony of capitalism has begun. The Catholic equally secure in a positive creed which transcends materialism .declared the condition of Europe to be the logical result of turning aside from the way of life God Himself indicated when He was Man..."

Interesting stuff by a man who served actively on foreign soil in British Intelligence during World War One. I look forward to reading more of his thoughts as he describes life during the war years.

Mackenzie who wrote upwards of 100 books, also penned a four-volume memoir of those years as an intelligence officer in and near Greece during Word War One -- something else to search for...

God's Peace, the only True Peace...

A Ten-Volume Autobiography?

A Young Compton Mackenzie

A few weeks ago I shared my summertime reading list of about a dozen books through which I'm picking my way ever so slowly. The slowness is due to a recent discovery of a forgotten box in a closet. Inside the box were all ten volumes of Compton Mackenzie's autobiography which he titled, My Life and Times. Some time ago I set out to acquire all ten books, long out of print. It took over a year to locate relatively good hardbound copies of each volume at reasonable prices, but through persistence and the help of several particularly kind online booksellers, I managed to acquire all ten volumes, one at a time and very inexpensively.

At the time Diane and I had just completed our move to Florida and I was simply too busy to begin the reading of this man's remarkable life -- hence the forgotten box in the closet. I have always believed that biographies, autobiographies and novels should be read straight through, interrupted only by sleep and life's other necessities. And when the reading involves a ten-volume autobiography (close to 3,000 pages)...well, this demands I set aside a significant block of time. This time has now come and already I have completed the first three volumes. As a consequence, the summer reading list has suffered.

Compton Mackenzie in his old age

Unless one is particularly fond of English literature of the first half of the 20th century, I suspect few today have even heard of Compton Mackenzie. Born into a famous theatrical family in 1883, Mackenzie lived a long and productive life, dying in 1972 a few months short of his 90th birthday. He was actually quite the prodigy as a youth, and attended London's St. Paul's School and then went on to study at Oxford's Magdalen College. Not only did he publish over 100 books during his long life, but he also founded (in 1923) the authoritative and still-published classical music magazine, The Gramophone. He served in British Intelligence during the First World War and later wrote several best-selling books about his experiences in the Eastern Mediterranean. Particularly proud of his Scottish ancestry, Mackenzie was an unapologetic Jacobite and actually co-founded the Scottish National Party. Born an Anglican, he held strong Anglo-Catholic beliefs from his youth and eventually converted to Catholicism in 1914.

I first stumbled across Mackenzie about 30 years ago when I picked up a copy of his novel, Vestal Fire, in a used bookstore. Although I recognized his name, having encountered brief references to him in a few literary biographies, I really knew very little about him. Vestal Fire is a novel about an odd collection of ex-patriots living on the Italian isle of Sirene, a fictitious name for Capri where Mackenzie lived for a number of years. I actually enjoyed the novel and so began to pick up other examples of his fiction as I came across them. As I read more of his work, I became increasingly intrigued by the man himself and turned to his non-fiction, much of it autobiographical. It was then that I bought a copy of the first volume of My Life and Times. He began writing the ten volumes when he was 80, dividing his life into ten eight-year periods he called octaves. Probably the most honest autobiography I've ever read -- Mackenzie doesn't shy away from his exposing the mistakes and sins of his long life -- it not only describes the man, but also provides wonderful insights into the remarkable times in which he lived and many of the famous and not so famous he numbered among his friends and acquaintances.

This is why my summer reading list might well remain unfinished when September rolls around. If you're interested in reading some of this author's works, here's a few suggestions:

Whiskey Galore, Mackenzie's 1947 novel set in Scotland that was later (1949) made into a feature film.

Monarch of the Glen, another Scottish novel (1941) on which was loosely based the BBC TV series (2000-2005) of the same name. The series also appeared on PBS in the US. (The link I've provided is to a book that includes this novel, as well as Whiskey Galore and The Rival Monsters.)

Sinister Street, a novel focusing on the lifelong psychological and moral growth of his protagonist. His depiction of life at Oxford in the early 1900s is particularly interesting. One of my favorites.

The Four Winds of Love, was published in six volumes between 1937 and 1945. Almost 1 million words in length it was truly ambitious, a remarkable 20th-century Scottish novel. 

Gavin Wallace, one of Compton Mackenzie's biographers, offers this insight into the man:

"Although Mackenzie's output of novels (including delightful books for children), essays, criticism, history, biography, autobiography, and travel writing was prolific - a total of 113 published titles - it can truly be said that if he had never written a word he would still have been a celebrity. He had a personality as exhibitory and colourful as his writing, and remained throughout his life a gregarious man with a brilliant sense of comedy. Flamboyant, a raconteur and mimic, he was no less memorable as the formidable scourge of politicians, bureaucrats, and governments, and the passionate defender of the ostracized, the shunned, and the wronged."

Mackenzie was a remarkable man, and I'm truly enjoying this lengthy glimpse into his life and times.