SOURCE: “Compton Mackenzie,” in Compton Mackenzie, Longmans, Green & Co., 1968, pp. 5-23.

In the following essay, Young offers a biographical and critical overview of Mackenzie's life and work.

I

It may seem superfluous, if not a presumption, to write about the life of Sir Compton Mackenzie when he has spent so much of it writing about it himself. To the five volumes of his first World War memories, Greece in My Life, books about his musical experiences and his cats, personal essays and broadcasts, he has recently added My Life and Times, an autobiography in ten volumes, seven of which will have appeared by January 1968, when he reaches the age of eighty-five. Nevertheless, such profusion—in which, incidentally, there is no breath of self-conceit—calls for a brief abstract of the biography, a highlighting of the salient characteristics, of this fecund and famous man who has written a hundred...