My Life and Times: Octave One, 1883-1891 by Compton Mackenzie (1963)

By this stage Mackenzie was in part an old relic, and the ageing process was speeding up as the revolution that marked the 60s gathered pace. He was in the last period of his productivity, still producing comic novels every couple of years. He was also still reasonably prominent, in the backwash of the success of Whisky Galore 15 or so years earlier - the just postwar world that it typified was only now beginning to look a bit crumbly. He had been many and varied things earlier in his career and I guess they can be discussed when the autobiography gets there. This first volume is strictly to do with his early childhood, attached to his father's repertory company and its constant caravan of movement and interaction with aged stage-stars and literary ones and, as well, up and comers of those times. So there is opportunity for him to name-drop a little, which one can tell he likes. But he also provides a sound glimpse into the 1880s version of a child's world - jealousies, toys, night fears, puzzling over adult motivation. There are also recurring tropes here which give a window onto his internal nagging preoccupations: his nurse is depicted as an eternally thoughtless, conformist killjoy, determined to restrict in the name of something which even she doesn't quite understand - disappointment and curtailment of pleasure as a life lesson; psychology and psychiatry are consistently regaled as foolish misapprehensions by him, anticipating where such charlatans might interpret his actions as significant, and belittling their conclusions. The fact that he does these things in a pre-eminently reasonable tone, like an 'if you think about it sensibly, or have the right inside information, these things couldn't possibly be true', is testament somehow to a kind of holding off of challenge by utilizing bluff dismissal. I both get this, and see equivalents of the same very human behaviour in myself and others, and also wonder whether something else was going on - he does seem so very keen to make sure it is his interpretation which wins out. He mentions in the postscript that he is worried that the book is not interesting or entertaining enough, and claims in his usual forthright (or is it mock-forthright?) way that he ought to be excused, after a lifetime of being an entertainer, for writing for himself only for once. I can gainsay him in terms of interest and entertainment - this book is quite happily so. But I do need to add in the next breath that it doesn't produce thrills and excitement - if there was any poetry to Mackenzie, it is long gone.