On Capri in 1925 Scott Fitzgerald met his ‘old idol’ Compton Mackenzie and found him ‘cordial, attractive and pleasantly mundane.
You get no sense from him that he feels his work has gone to pieces. He’s not pompous about his present output. I think he’s just tired. The war wrecked him as it did Wells and many of that generation.’ Fitzgerald himself survives, on the strength of two and a half novels and perhaps a dozen short stories, but, except in Scotland, Mackenzie is, I surmise, more or less forgotten, and even in Scotland it’s only Whisky Galore and perhaps his Highland farces which keep his name alive. It will surprise many to learn that Fitzgerald once idolised him, but This Side of Paradise, his first novel, is very much son of Mackenzie’s Sinister Street.
The 1914-18 war, in which he worked as an intelligence officer in Greece, may indeed have left Mackenzie tired, but it hardly ‘wrecked him’.
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