Tatting and mandolinata, p.1
Tatting and Mandolinata, page 1
Tatting and Mandolinata
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This edition published in 2024 by Handheld Press 16 Peachfield Road, Malvern WR14 4AP, United Kingdom.www.handheldpress.co.uk
Copyright of Mandolinata © The Estate of Faith Compton Mackenzie 1931.
Copyright of Tatting © The Estate of Faith Compton Mackenzie 1957.
Copyright of the Introduction and Notes © Kate Macdonald 2024.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.
ISBN 978-1-912766-85-7
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
Series design by Nadja Robinson and typeset in Adobe Caslon Pro and Open Sans.
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Short Run Press, Exeter.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
References
Works by Faith Compton Mackenzie
Tatting
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Mandolinata
1 The Angle of Error
2 Mandolinata
3 La Bonne Mine
4.1 Variations on a Theme:
Miss Mabel Ebony
4.2 Variations on a Theme:
Lillie in Rome
5 The Suit
6 The Wedding Present
7 The Writing Case
8 With Custody of the Child
9 Queer Lady
10 The Poplar Avenue
11 The Unattainable
12 Children of God
13 Cushions
Notes on Tatting and Mandolinata
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Lisa Dowdeswell of the Society of Authors for her help in clarifying the administration of Faith Compton Mackenzie’s estate. Thanks also to Hilary Ely who gave expert research assistance with the Times Literary Supplement archives, and to Nic Bottomley who gave sensible advice about the book cover.
Note on this edition
The text for this edition was scanned from the first editions of 1931 and 1957 and proofread. Typographical errors have been silently corrected, and some spellings have been modernised. Some words from the stories in Mandolinata, routinely used in the 1920s and 1930s that are now offensive to modern readers, have been removed where their excision would not affect the meaning or effect of the text.
Kate Macdonald is a literary historian and a publisher. She has written previous introductions for Handheld Press, which she runs, for My Life and I (2023) by Betty Bendell, The Gap in the Curtain (1932) by John Buchan, The Runagates Club (1928) by John Buchan, The Voluble Topsy, 1927–1947 by A P Herbert, Personal Pleasures (1935) by Rose Macaulay, Business as Usual (1933) by Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford and (with Luke Seaber) England is My Village by John Llewelyn Rhys.
Introduction
By Kate Macdonald
Faith eclipsed
Faith Compton Mackenzie has not been well-served by biographers. The outline below has been assembled from her memoirs, from advertisements, from her husband Compton Mackenzie’s exhaustive accounts of his life and from Andro Linklater’s 1987 biography Compton Mackenzie. A Life, which did not mention Faith’s two novels. For most of her life Faith was not known as a novelist. As Mrs Compton Mackenzie, later Lady Mackenzie, she gained public attention from 1931 for her biographies, for a limited edition of her short stories and for her three memoirs. Her two novels, written in her late seventies, did not receive much critical acclaim. Any surviving copies of Tatting might be languishing unrecognised on the handicraft shelves in second-hand bookshops rather than in Fiction, since tatting is a craft like lacemaking.
Another strong reason for Faith’s eclipse as a writer was her husband. Sir Edward Montague Compton Mackenzie was one of the most prolific British writers of the twentieth century. He published over one hundred books, including over forty novels, copious volumes of history and a colossal ten-volume or ‘octave’ work of memoir. He embraced the media age enthusiastically, finding the television as receptive to his performing skills as was the stage. Mackenzie wrote on an epic scale and kept vast amounts of the paperwork of his life. His biographer notes with stunned horror that the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which houses the Mackenzie papers, holds what ‘appears to be the entire contents of his postbag from about the age of thirty onwards, together with copies of many of his own letters, typescripts of novels, tax returns, visiting cards, bills and press notices. There are also some of his mother’s and first wife’s personal papers, among them the latter’s diary covering the entire period of their marriage’. Linklater estimates that reading every word of this immense hoard during the Center’s opening hours would take at least two years (Linklater xiii).
The presence of Faith’s diaries among her husband’s papers explains in practical terms why her memory has largely disappeared beneath the volume of Compton Mackenzie’s paper remains. She also left no will. She may have assumed that making a will was not necessary: Monty would take care of her estate, such as it was. She may never have considered that she had a literary estate. Her confidence in her status as a writer may not have been high, as her eleven books – certainly an achievement – may have looked insignificant when measured against the mountain of volumes that her husband produced.
After her death Faith’s diaries were no longer accessible to anyone who might have wanted to write her biography. (Her husband’s memoirs do not mention that anyone had asked.) Faith’s papers went to Texas as if by right, as if they had no separate existence from him, or that there was any need for such material to remain in Britain. Even the family of Faith’s youngest brother, to whom she was always close, had no knowledge of where her papers might be. The administrators of the Sir Compton Mackenzie estate had no instructions or information about Faith’s literary estate, although after consultation they agreed that they should take her works into their care. Thus are the records of women writers eclipsed.
Faith and Monty
Faith Nona Stone was born in 1878 at Eton in Berkshire, the ninth in a family of ten children. Her parents were the Reverend Edward Stone, an Eton Classics maste r and later the headmaster of Stonehouse School in Kent, and his wife Elizabeth ‘Lily’ Vidal. While her five elder sisters all married into the Church or entered religious communities, Faith chose a diametrically opposite path. She began acting professionally from 1901 under the stage name of Faith Reynolds, becoming successful enough to make frequent tours in the USA.
Her younger brother Christopher Stone, later to become a pioneer in promoting recorded music on radio and the first BBC DJ, had become friends with another Oxford undergraduate, the dazzling and polymathic Edward Montague Compton Mackenzie. Monty was the eldest son of the distinguished English actor-manager of the same name, and the only one of his five children to not make his career on the stage. Christopher and Monty later rented Lady Ham together, a country house outside Burford in Oxfordshire. Faith, Christopher’s favourite sister, was a frequent visitor there and to Christopher’s London flat, where she and Monty fell in love. In November 1905 she and Monty were married in secret at a Pimlico church. One of the witnesses was a street sweeper who had been brought in by the verger in the absence of anyone more suitable being provided by the preoccupied bride and groom (FCM Dare 179).
In choosing the stage I had unconsciously laid a pretty good foundation for the peculiar structure of my future life. I was proof against surprises. I knew from the first that I didn’t want a nice conventional marriage, and I was justifiably sure that I had avoided this. (FCM Dare 188).
Faith was five years older than Monty, and Monty was a dynamic and authoritative young man, accustomed to having his own way in all things. At the time of their marriage he was reading for the Bar, and was already an accomplished actor, and a playwright and a poet as well. Faith’s engagement ring (designed by Monty) arrived from the jeweller the day after the wedding, and they kept the marriage secret for ten days, until their parents had been told. Predictably, none were pleased, though were soon reconciled.
Faith’s future life was spent entirely in Monty’s wake. His enthusiasms, and what she called his ‘earthquake tendency’ (FCM Dare 5) decided where she would live and how she would spend her time. She was quite aware of the sometimes devastating effects of his energetic support for a cause or a neglected object, but for her the results were worth it.
How many corpses or sickly infants has Monty revived with his life-giving enthusiasm, and abandoned as soon as they could stand alone! It is the creative instinct, and the most unhappy manifestations of this aspect of his genius are the gardens he has made and deserted, mostly island gardens swept by storms, pestered by rabbits, coming to life almost by a series of miracles, growing to beauty and richness under his watchful and affectionate eye. They grow; they are achieved. Then he leaves them without a backward glance. He has created something, and moves on …
I was prepared for almost any possibility in my marriage; neglect, abandonment, even divorce. With such a torch beside me, how could I guess which way its flame would sweep? (FCM Dare, 197)
Two years after their marriage Faith and Monty moved to Cornwall, initially to stay with Monty’s friend the Reverend Sandys Wason, because Monty had decided that he wanted to explore his inclination for ordination more seriously and wanted to train as a lay preacher. In early 1908 he was licensed as a lay preacher in the Anglican Church, becoming locally famous for his enthralling sermons. He became a popular Sunday School teacher as well, since he was always a showman. Faith, on the other hand, was without occupation, since her entire focus was on her husband, now concerned with his own projects.
Faith provided Monty with ‘the elegance and wit of an older woman. She understood his needs and adored him, and as his wife offered the sense of permanence he had lacked’ (Linklater 83). This did not extend to creating a house for him: Faith never learned to cook and refused to consider it, though she did find that she had to do the household chores at the Cornish vicarage since she did not get on with the servants. She found the combative and possessive atmosphere generated by local ladies competing to serve Reverend Wason very wearying (Linklater 92). In her first memoir, As Much As I Dare (1938), Faith is clearly rehearsing events from the Cornish years of twenty years earlier that would re-emerge, some of them almost verbatim from her memoir, in Tatting, twenty years later.
If Faith had had children they might have given her a different focus for her devotion, but her only child, a son, was stillborn in 1909. ‘Monty didn’t want children; she was persuaded not to try again (due to her premature labour), but she explored adopting a child later in life twice, and never forgot her son’ (Linklater 96).
Monty’s career as a playwright and a novelist had taken off like a rocket by 1912, but his health was precarious, and constant international travel played havoc with his sciatica and his nerves. In 1913 Faith and Monty travelled to Italy in search of a home in a warmer climate. The author Norman Douglas, whom they had met once at a dinner in New York, had praised Capri, so they went to stay there for a weekend. They instantly began looking for a house, bought some land, and Capri became Faith’s home, in a series of houses, until 1927. Many of the stories in Mandolinata, and Monty’s novels Vestal Fire (1927) and Extraordinary Women (1928) are based on people and events from their Caprese lives.
During the First World War Monty served as an officer in the Royal Marines at Gallipoli and then was appointed to run British counter-espionage operations in Athens. Faith tried volunteering with canteen work in London but found that she was not helpful in that role, and retreated back to Capri, to live out the war among her friends in an international and flamboyant community of rich ex-patriate residents, many of them homosexual and/or artists. She re-encountered Norman Douglas, who would become the most important of her friends from Capri. He was ‘the first in a distinguished line of homosexuals of both sexes to discover in her a strength of character and sharpness of wit which owed nothing to her husband. In the summer of 1916 she typed his novel South Wind.’ (Linklater 164). Throughout the war and the early 1920s Faith became close to many leading artists and writers of the day, including Rebecca West, Romaine Brooks and, briefly, D H Lawrence.
During the war, perhaps inevitably, given Monty’s enforced absence for several consecutive years, Faith had an affair with a much younger man, Nini Caracciolo, on Capri. She later wrote: ‘when a Northern woman loses her head over a Latin she seldom finds it again’ (FCM Sibyl 73). One of the rare sightings of Faith in modern literature is in Giuseppe Aprea’s collection L’Aria blu – Lettere da Capri mai scritte, mai spedite (The blue air – Letters from Capri, never written, never sent) (La Conchiglia Press 2008). This recounts the imaginary letters from famous writers and other artists who lived on Capri, in which Faith features prominently, including her invented farewell note to Monty about her affair with Nini.
When Monty discovered the affair he asked Faith not to meet Nini that night. Nini, who had waited patiently for Faith outdoors in a rainstorm, developed pneumonia and died some days later. Both the Mackenzies attended his funeral, but their marriage was effectively over, since Monty would not tolerate such a public betrayal. (Monty’s own infidelities, pre-dating and continuing during their marriage, of course did not count.) He could not decide to leave Faith, since he depended on her for her nursing (he was frequently debilitated by psychosomatic illnesses) and for her superb piano playing which he required as a stimulus while he was writing his novels. On the other hand, he was conflicted ‘between the wish to behave well and the need to punish her’.
[Their friend] Axel Munthe … advised [Monty] neither to abandon his wife nor to overlook her infidelity, but to follow a third course. “Why don’t you both admit that marriage in the conventional sense is no longer possible? Why don’t you give freedom to each of you to live his or her own life and yet agree to live together in friendship as man and wife?”
[…] Once this solution had been arrived at, the continuous emotional pain, registered by his sciatica, gradually became more sporadic … For the rest of Faith’s life the public appearance of their marriage was of a civilised friendship. They often shared the same house, and went to the same parties. Monty continued to trust her judgement and liked her to participate in each of his new adventures. He wrote to her regularly; when he could he paid the enormous bills which she ran up, and he never forgot their wedding anniversary. The observance of their bargain presented little difficulty to one so accustomed to private self-discipline and public performance, but Faith was less experienced in these matters. It was also true that during their marriage she had given herself up more completely to him than he to her. There were, in consequence, flaws on her side of the bargain … Once in his presence her spirits soared at any attention and wilted at each rebuff until, irritated by the intensity of her feelings, he contrived an excuse to send her away again. A quarter of a century was to pass before she was emotionally independent of him. (Linklater 175–76)
