Compton Mackenzie (1883–1972), the descendant of a theatrical dynasty, played many parts—though as a writer rather than on the stage. Now remembered by many only as the humorist who wrote farces like Whisky Galore (1947), set on a mythical Scottish island, he began his life in London’s West Kensington. In the first phase of Mackenzie’s fame, Henry James praised him as a great hope of the English novel. His second novel, Carnival (1912), the tale of the doomed dancer Jenny Pearl and the dilettante Maurice Avery, made Mackenzie a cult novelist among the sophisticated young. Lady Diana Manners (later Cooper, the inspiration for Evelyn Waugh’s Mrs. Stitch) took Jenny Pearl’s phrase “there’s nothing wrong with this little girl” as her own, and she and her friends in the set they called the “Corrupt Coterie” loved repeating the cockney Jenny’s “don’t be soppy” and “I must have been potty.” Mackenzie’s next novel, Sinister Street, originally published in two volumes (the first in 1913, the second in 1914), consolidated his reputation. Sinister Street was lapped up by such young readers as Waugh, Scott Fitzgerald, Cyril Connolly, and his schoolmate the future George Orwell. When the First World War broke out, Charles Lister, a male member of the Coterie, hoped that he wouldn’t be killed before he could read Mackenzie’s next novel, Guy and Pauline (1915), a wish unfulfilled when Lister perished at Gallipoli just before the book reached him.

The lyrical Guy and Paulinenow seems more poignant