Denis George Mackail was born in London on Friday 1892-06-03. The Mackail family was one of the upper-middle class liberal and artistic circle which flourished in late Victorian and Edwardian London. Denis’s father, J. W. (John William) Mackail (1859–1945), was a civil servant in the Ministry of Education from 1884 until his retirement as Assistant Secretary in 1919, and was also a noted literary historian: his collection Select epigrams from the Greek anthology (1890) was very popular in the ‘aesthetic’ 1890s. He was a close friend of William Morris (1834–1896), writer, craftsman and socialist, of whom he wrote the official biography (published 1899). From 1906 to 1911 he was also Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, a position which involved the presentation of a series of lectures, published as Lectures on Greek poetry (1911). In the 1920s and 1930s he held the presidency of various literary associations, including the British Academy (1932–1936), while continuing his publishing with works on Virgil, Shakespeare and the sayings of Jesus Christ.

In 1888 J. W. Mackail had married Margaret Burne-Jones (1866–1953), the only daughter of the ‘second-generation’ pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones and his wife Georgiana, who was one of the four ‘famous Macdonald sisters’. This reinforced the Scottish connection in J. W. Mackail’s life – he had been born on the Isle of Bute and retained traces of this ancestry in his voice. Through the Macdonald connection, Denis Mackail was a first cousin once removed to the writer Rudyard Kipling, and the MP Stanley Baldwin, later Conservative prime-minister. Unusually in those days of large families, Denis had only one uncle, his mother’s brother Philip Burne-Jones, who inherited some of his father’s talent for painting but lacked application and also suffered from a depressive illness for much of his life. However he seems to have been fondly remembered by Denis for his appropriately avuncular manner.

Denis had an older sister, Angela (born 1890-01-30, died 1961-01-29) and a younger, Clare (born 1896-06-30, died 1975-01-05). At this period the Mackails lived at 27 Young Street, Kensington, off Kensington High Street and close to Kensington Palace and Kensington Gardens. In 1898 the family moved to 6 Pembroke Gardens, just south of the artistic Holland Park area at the other end of Kensington High Street. This remained J. W. and Margaret Mackail’s home until his death, aged 86, a few months after the end of the second world war; she survived until 1953.

All three children were educated at the St Paul’s schools (that for girls opened in 1904) in Hammersmith. In 1910 Denis went up to Oxford, enrolled at Balliol (his father’s college). While there he wrote theatrical criticism for Isis and assisted with productions by the student dramatic society, but he had to leave the University in 1912, without taking his degree, because of ill health. He then spent three months in South Africa for the same reason. Back in England, he found work designing stage sets for west-end theatre productions. This began when the playwright and novelist J. M. Barrie, a family friend, remembered the childhood puppet theatre shows given by the Mackail children for friends and relations, with sets and electric lighting designed and constructed by Denis. Barrie asked Denis to design for his play The adored one, which Charles Frohman opened at the Duke of York’s Theatre on 1913-09-04. Subsequently Denis worked on The night hawk by Lechmere Worrall and Bernard Merivale, for the same management, and on the British première of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, for Beerbohm Tree’s company at His Majesty’s Theatre. The latter opened on 1914-04-11 for an acclaimed run and went on to New York in the autumn, with Denis in attendance.

He returned to England later in 1914, but his promising career in stage design was cut short by the Great War (world war 1), which had broken out in August. He was not fit enough for active service however, and reluctantly became a civil servant, in the War Office and the Board of Trade, which seems to have contributed to a lifelong distrust of the way English administration worked, or failed to work! For some of this time he lived in the Middle Temple near the City of London and later (like all good writers!) he had a post for a while in the print-room of the British Museum. On 1917-06-15, after many months trying to persuade her father that he could support a family, he married Diana Caroline Granet (born 1893-08-18), daughter of the Midland Railway’s general manager Sir (William) Guy Granet (1867–1943). With his background as a barrister, and as secretary to the Railway Companies Association from 1900–1905, Sir Guy had been the first to bring modern management skills to bear on the problems of the inefficient working practices which had grown up piecemeal on railways in Britain through the nineteenth century. Such was his success in the eight years after his Midland Railway appointment in 1906 that Granet was seconded to the War Office as deputy director-general of military railways and subsequently of movements and railways. He seems to have been a very strong-minded man!

Having gained their ‘freedom’, the young couple’s first house was 23 Walpole Street, Chelsea, subsequently immortalized by the novelist as ‘Greenery Street’. Their first child, Mary was born on 1919-03-28. At this stage, as the war had ended, Denis was working for a commercial firm in the city, ‘commuting’ on the underground, but it was a difficult period, with the post-war recession and the international ’flu epidemic raging. His employer went bankrupt and, while looking for another opening, Denis wrote his first novel in just five weeks and started seeking a publisher for it. Meanwhile, to support his wife and daughter he took another office job, although this firm too hit hard times, and dispensed with his services in 1920. Luckily, by then, and after rejections from some seven other publishers, John Murray had accepted and published What next? to good reviews, so Denis decided to turn to writing full time. Perhaps it seems inevitable, given his family background, that he would become a writer, but light fiction was not really a part of this heritage!

After completing his second novel Romance to the rescue (1921), Denis tried his hand a writing a short story, and had immediate success when he sent it to the editor of the prestigious Strand magazine, who printed it and asked for more. At about this time also he acquired a literary agent (the famous A. P. Watt and Co., whose archives are now in the library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). Watt’s firm helped maximize Mackail’s earnings by getting better deals from publishers and they also arranged for his books to come out in America. In addition, Denis acted as a publisher’s reader for about eighteen months – which must have given him some useful tips on how not to write novels! The increased income was very welcome, as Diana gave birth to their second daughter, Anne, on 1922-01-12. From then on Denis took to dividing his writing time between short stories, which had a ready and lucrative market in daily, weekly and monthly newspapers and magazines (remember radio was in its infancy), and producing a new novel each year. In fact some of these novels are cleverly constructed sequences of related short stories which were first published in serials. The earliest such, and one of the best, was According to Gibson (1923) which has a multiple-level narrative and what we now recognize as a post-modern twist in its tail. Denis would spend the morning writing, occasionally destroying the previous day’s 1200 words on next reviewing them! Thus a novel would take about six months of the year, the remainder of his time being divided between holidays and writing short stories for magazines. Three collections of the latter came out in book form over the years. This pattern of literary achievement continued up to the start of world war 2 with only minor interruptions and is described in detail in his memoir Life with Topsy (1942) which is based on his diary for 1927-1939 – the years when he and Diana had a Pekingese dog called Topsy (see illustration).

After his first book, Denis had an appreciative letter from P. G. Wodehouse and the two novelists subsequently became great friends. When ‘Plum’ was in London, the pair occasionally took long walks, discussing the finer points of writing fiction as they went. I think the fruits of these talks show in some of Mackail’s more obviously planned effects, for example the ‘story-teller’ device of According to Gibson was earlier used by Wodehouse in his ‘oldest member’ golfing tales, although not to the same self-referential effect. The technique of linked short stories reappears in The fortunes of Hugo (1926) and The young Livingstones (1930). Mackail also takes great delight in the ‘dramatic unities’ of time and place. For example, there are novels set in one day, such as The flower show (1927), David’s day (1932) and The wedding (1935), using flashbacks or historic narrative to expand on the action. David’s day is a particularly daring and successful experiment which follows a chain of individual events, each in effect a short story in its own right but acting and reacting on each other, around London from David’s birth in the small hours of the morning back to his parents’ house the subsequent night. Novels concentrating on a single place include the critically acclaimed The Square circle (1930), which details the lives of the inhabitants of a London square over one ‘season’ (September to July), and the wartime Huddleston House (1945), set in a block of flats afflicted with the privations of total war. In both cases the narrative is not allowed to stray outside the chosen mise en scène. These more ‘controlled’ works contrast with the freer forms of comedies such as Another part of the wood (1929) and romances like Chelbury Abbey (1933). Taken altogether, although Mackail is often described as a comic writer, there is very little of the farcical in his situations and much more ‘real life’ when compared with, say, Wodehouse’s work. Perhaps his background and university influences led Denis to a rather more studied and intellectual approach to writing than his friend, who was seems to have been a ‘natural’.

Plum and his wife Ethel also shared with Denis and Diana a love of Pekingese dogs, and the friendship continued until Denis’s death in 1971 – mostly by letter because of the long periods when the Wodehouses lived abroad, first in France (up to the war) and then in America (from 1946). Of their regular correspondence, much of Denis’s side was lost, firstly when the Wodehouses were interned on the German invasion of Le Touquet, and much later when Ethel cleared out old papers. Very luckily for their friendship, Diana had accidentally tuned the Mackail’s radio into a relevant frequency during one of Wodehouse’s recorded broadcasts from Germany to America, made after his release from internment in 1941, so Denis knew first-hand that the content was innocuous as to the war effort and gently mocking of their German ‘hosts’. Also, knowing Plum so well, he realized that his friend would have had no idea of the political context of any apparent co-operation with the German authorities at the time. He was thus able to rebut, in a small way, the propagandist charges of ‘Cassandra’, which the Ministry of Information forced the BBC to broadcast.

Another shared interest with Plum was in the musical theatre. Wodehouse is noted for his books (that is, plots) and lyrics in collaboration with Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern. Denis was involved in the book for the musical comedy Patricia which ran for 160 performances after its opening night on 1924-10-31 at His Majesty’s Theatre, London. Dorothy Dickson (1893–1995), star of Patricia and earlier of Bolton and Kern’s Sally (in its London production, 1921) amongst many other hits, became another of the Mackails’ close friends: they were honorary aunt and uncle to her daughter, also Dorothy (Hyson).

As outlined in his novel Greenery Street (1925, his first major success), the young couple found that their house contracted as children arrived, with their attendant nurse/nanny and increased domestic staff, so for about two years, at around the time of Patricia, the family were ‘exiled’ to a larger house at 14 Essex Villas, in the area to the north of Kensington High Street, near where Denis had been brought up. However he always felt more at home in Chelsea, so by 1926 they were installed in an even larger property at 107 Church Street (now Old Church Street) in that district, on the west side of the street, north of the King’s Road. In this location they were close to the home of Daphne and Alan (A. A.) Milne, who became another pair of close friends after the latter congratulated Denis on Greenery Street. (Denis had first met Milne at the cricket matches organized by J. M. Barrie.) At this time Milne was becoming even more famous than his writing in Punch and his enormously successful stage plays such as Mr Pym passes by (1919) had made him, with the publication of When we were young (1924) and Winnie-the-Pooh (1926). The Milnes lived literally ‘round the corner’ in Mallord Street, as 107 was on that very corner! Another point of contact was that E. H. Shepherd, famous illustrator of the Pooh books, designed some of the dust jacket illustrations for Mackail’s work (for example the Greenery Street series and Another part of the wood). Like Milne, Mackail wrote one detective story, but whereas Milne’s The Red House mystery (1922) is fairly conventional, Mackail’s The ‘Majestic’ mystery (1924) – set at the Majestic Hotel in ‘Splashcliff’, one of his recurring fictional locations and based on a cross between Brighton and Seaford, near which the Mackails had a summer retreat – is like the classic Trent’s last case of E. C. Bentley (1913) in that it has a ‘false’ solution and a later ‘true’ one, but with the added bonus of another of Denis’s meta-fictional twists on its final page.

The settled tenor of Mackail’s life was slightly ruffled when his bossy elder sister Angela returned to England and started publishing novels too! She had married an older man, the singer J. Campbell McInnes in 1911, six weeks after being introduced to him through her sister’s musical circle. Campbell and Angela had two sons, Graham and Colin, and a daughter, Mary, but when his career flagged during the war and his drinking became insupportable, she divorced him in 1917. Subsequently she emigrated to Australia with her second husband, George Thirkell. When this relationship too ran aground, Angela returned to England in the late 1920s bringing her youngest child, Lancelot Thirkell, with her. Living initially in Pembroke Gardens with her parents, Angela took to writing novels in order to support herself and her family – and perhaps in emulation of her brother (she seems never to have been happy to be left out of things!) – under her second married name, Angela Thirkell. Rather than Denis’s London settings, she drew on Anthony Trollope’s fictional county Barsetshire for her backgrounds. Subsequently of course she has become much better remembered than her brother, even if only as a shining example of the derided English ‘middle class’ novel. Although Denis’s work often concentrates on the (upper-)middle classes, I find his sympathy for his characters and his inimitable commentary on life-as-he-sees-it very much more to my taste than the rather straight-forward and occasionally patronizing Angela Thirkell. To complete this part of the tale, both Graham McInnes (1912-1970) and Colin (1914-1976), spelling his surname MacInnes, became well known as writers in the 1950s, as, respectively, autobiographer (Road to Gundagai, etc.) and novelist (Absolute beginners, City of spades, etc.).

Denis seems to have been prone to bouts of depression and suffered some sort of breakdown in January 1937. He had recovered sufficiently by the summer to resume work on Morning, noon and night (1938) and his customary batch of short stories. Thus, as a sort of therapy, he took up Peter and Nico Davies’s offer in February 1938 that he should write the official biography of J. M. Barrie, who had died the previous June. With his life-long friendship and wide circle of contacts among Barrie’s friends, Mackail was ideally suited to this task although he doubted his ability to write non-fiction. Fortunately he had finished amassing materials by the outbreak of war and his hefty but understandably deferential tome came out in 1941 comprising 700 pages… despite the ‘authorized economy standards’!

Perhaps prompted by the nostalgic thoughts engendered by recalling scenes for this biography, Mackail’s next publication was the aforementioned reminiscence of the years 1927 to 1939, bracketed by the arrival and death of the peke Topsy. Life with Topsy probably also served as an escape, both for Denis and his readers, from the privations of war-time Britain. The Mackails seem to have had to shut-up their house in London and put much of their furniture into store (empty properties were exempt of rates). Also, they sold their house in Bishopstone, on the south coast near Seaford, after the German capture of France. As described in Ho! or, How it all strikes me (1944) and the wartime novels Upside-Down (1943) and Huddleston House (1945), life in a flat was the order of the day. These works remain a valuable testimony to the resilience of civilians at the time.

In the improved post-war housing market of 1947-1948 the family decamped to Hove, again near Brighton. This may have been for the health benefits of the fresh sea air – Life with Topsy frequently reports their bad colds and ’flu – and the choice of Hove was probably influenced by Denis’s researches in the town when asked in 1939 to write praising it for a guide-book. The family took a flat in one of the noted Regency houses in Brunswick Terrace, on the sea-front. Denis continued writing, still producing the customary novel each year, including a couple of interesting, if rather ‘whimsical’, works: We’re here (1947), which is in the tradition of Victor Canning’s ‘Mr Finchley’ books and also perhaps a little like Kenneth Graham’s The wind in the willows but with human characters, and Her ladyship (1949) which tells the story of Lady Godiva but explained in twentieth-century middle-class terms and with a deep, but of course anachronistic, psychological insight (the novel is a lot better than it sounds put like that!). However, with the death of his wife late in 1949, at the early age of 56, Denis gave up publishing altogether – that she had always been his inspiration is attested by the fact that the majority of his books are dedicated to her.

Despite his being awarded a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL) in 1950, Denis’s works quickly went out of print during the decade and of course the market for short stories had been very much less after the rise of radio during the 1930s and the reduction in magazine publishing caused by the war. As both his daughters were now married – the younger shortly after her mother’s death – his domestic expenses were on a much smaller scale, even if inflation had made it more difficult to meet those that were left! But, possibly, he felt rather cut-off in Hove, or perhaps the place came to have too many memories of Diana’s death, and he soon moved back to London, first to a flat in Burton Court, Chelsea (1952-1964), then to one in Elm Park Gardens, just a few streets away from his beautiful former family house in Church Street. There he lived quietly until his death on 1971-08-04. In addition to its obituary, The times later reported that the value of Denis Mackail’s estate was £101,244, roundly one million pounds in present values, although the author would have been horrified that nearly £45,000 of it went to the tax man to support a bureaucracy with which he was always disillusioned!

In the late 1960s and early 1970s a handful of his books were reprinted because of continuing demand in public libraries, so he wasn’t completely forgotten by readers, but with no new works coming out, the books gradually became period-pieces. Some will say that they always had been, but since Persephone Books reprinted again one of those ‘in demand’ titles in 2002, Greenery Street, a new generation of readers has a chance to sample his elegant, insightful writing about Londoners between the wars.

you can consult a note on my sources

on other pages :
introduction – checklist of books
checklist of short stories – descriptive bibliography