Faith

In this recent article we saw how Compton Mackenzie, after unveiling the blue plaque at Oscar Wilde’s home in Tite Street, proceeded to fictionalize the pressures of leading a closeted life in an era of homosexual oppression with his novel Thin Ice (1956).

Ironically for Compton Mackenzie himself, that lifestyle was no fiction—it was a life that he and his wife knew only too well.

We can trace Compton Mackenzie’s relationship with same-sex attraction easily in his works, but also, less obviously, in his life as far back as the turn of the century when, at the age of sixteen, he befriended members of Oscar Wilde’s inner circle, including Alfred Douglas, Robbie Ross, and Reggie Turner.

But far too much attention has been paid to Compton Mackenzie in this respect, and not enough to his aptly named wife, Faith, the former actress, pianist, and music critic. No consideration of him is complete without an appreciation of her.

Faith Nona Stone (1878-1960) was five years older than Compton when they “married in 1905 in a passionate rush”.¹

She summarized the union this way:

“I knew from the first that I didn’t want a nice conventional marriage, and I was justifiably sure that I had avoided this.”

Compton Mackenzie Papers (Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin),
—Research by: Kate Macdonald: Faith Compton Mackenzie

This arrangement enabled Faith to form friendships with the notorious likes of Norman Douglas and Romaine Brooks—consequently, it would be a needless understatement to say they had an open marriage.

permissive society

In 1913 the Mackenzies moved to Capri, the island which, as Kristin Mahoney informs us “had operated since the Wilde trials as a refuge for sexual exiles from across Europe who retreated from persecution and criminal proceedings into Capri’s permissive expatriate society.”²

Their life proceeded in similar fashion—and for a useful summary we are grateful to the writer Andrew Doyle:

“The marriage between Faith and Compton Mackenzie lasted for 55 years until her death in 1960. They had no children — other than a stillborn son in 1909 — but their mutual love and respect never wavered. Remarkable for the time, theirs was an entirely open relationship, in keeping with Faith’s belief in the principle of “love and let live”. Both had sexual relationships with men and women. Mackenzie’s affair on Capri with Luigi Ruggerio (brother of Capri’s most famous gardener, Mimì Ruggiero) coincided with Faith’s affair with the Italian pianist Renata Borgatti. In his book Capri: Island of Pleasure, the historian James Money notes that Mackenzie had invested in a second property, a cottage in the Valley of Cetrella, “for private meetings with his boy-friends.”

The thriving community of lesbian expatriates on Capri during the First World War was the subject of one of Mackenzie’s best works,  Extraordinary Women (1928), the first novel about lesbians to be sold in British bookshops. Although often wrongly dismissed as homophobic, the subject of his satire is the pretensions of the privileged; the sexual orientation of his characters is treated throughout as entirely natural.

Andrew Doyle: The Forgotten Genius of Compton Mackenzie

this was not your life

In 1956 Sir Compton Mackenzie was the subject of the television programme This Is Your Life.³ It was broadcast live on Monday December 10, 1956 from the King’s Theatre, Hammersmith.

One might suggest that what was presented that evening was, in fact, not his life.

In 1956 the Mackenzies’ lifestyle was not publicly known; nor would it have been publicly accepted. There was, however, a recognition of it provided at the end of the show by his wife Faith, who gave a reading to her husband which constitutes an encoded defense of the nature of their marriage.

She chose a selection of verse from The Prophet — a book of 26 prose poetry fables by the Lebanese-American writer, poet, and visual artist Kahlil Gibran.⁴

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The Prophet [extract]

But let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.

Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.

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“love and let live, i think”

The live television reading by Lady Mackenzie proved so popular that for an end of series review programme, Stories Behind This Is Your Life, (broadcast in June 1957), the show’s host, Eamonn Andrews, visited her again at her home to record an encore.

By the mid-to-late 50s, Lady Mackenzie was what Scott Fitzgerald once described as “one of those elderly ‘good sports’ preserved by an imperviousness to experience into another generation.”⁵ And as a survivor on the brink of the next generation, her reasons for accepting this invitation must give us pause.

Her meaning had already been admired as a plea for healthy interdependence in relationships; but perhaps only the cognoscenti at the time understood its subtext to be a brave vindication of open sexuality. So perhaps she sensed a rare, and possibly last, public opportunity for an appeal to posterity.

Fortunately for posterity, that reading has been preserved.

It can be viewed in the video below.

© John Cooper, 2024.

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Links:

Kate Macdonald’s recent collection of Faith Compton Mackenzie stories set in Capri, Rome and London, all written in the 1920s, about sex, love, and bad marriages: Tatting and Mandolinata (2024).

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Footnotes:

1. Kate Macdonald: Writing about Faith. ↩︎
2. Mahoney, K,. Queer Kinship after Wilde: Transnational Decadence and the Family (Cambridge University Press, 2002), Chapter 3 – An Extraordinary Marriage: The Mackenzies and the Queer Cosmopolitanism of Capri. p.95. ↩︎
3. More on Sir Compton Mackenzie’s appearance on This Is Your Life. ↩︎
4. Kahlil Gibran (1883—1931) at Poetry Foundation. ↩︎
5. Tender is the Night. ↩︎

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