The Young Desire It (2 page)

As Mackenzie has observed earlier, this is a school ‘where many of the boys are old for their years and many of the Masters seem young for theirs'.

It is the delicacy with which Mackenzie negotiates the difficulties here that is remarkable: the way we see Penworth; the way Penworth sees himself; the extent to which the narrator stands clear of judgment.

On Charles's first night in the dormitory, Penworth, as duty master, has stepped in on a scene of bathroom bullying and is surprised, when he tumbles Charles out of a laundry basket, by the shock to his senses of the boy's nakedness. What the moment uncovers in him is entirely unexpected.

Later, after the ‘hard, clumsy kiss', the scenes between the two are full of tension, but of different kinds, though they spring from the same cause: loneliness in the proximities of communal living, and an uncertainty in the school's culture about the distance that should be kept between masters and boys. On Charles's side there is his unwillingness to hurt Penworth, but also his own need for contact: ‘the goodness of having such a friend, so quickly in sympathy…was a warm glow in his heart'; on Penworth's a growing confusion at ‘the warm desires, complex, multiplied, and ceaselessly relevant to his awareness of the boy'.

Later again, disappointed and out of control after he has trapped Charles into revealing his secret—the relationship with Margaret—Penworth moves on from formal schoolmasterly banter and accuses Charles, in front of the whole class, of being one of those who set themselves above the rest ‘because Nature has by mistake given them pretty faces and pretty ways, and has further erred in making them aware of her unfortunate gifts'. When Charles, as ordered, comes to see him afterwards and gives way to ‘childish hysterics', Penworth finds himself ‘enjoying the curious sensation of his secret shame and elation, and above all enjoying now that supreme and most godly power, the power to comfort when his dramatic sense permitted comfort'.

Penworth has had his own revelation, a dark one: ‘He could not see the anguish he had brought into the boy's face without seeing also that it was as true as his own pretended coldness was false and cruel. Yet the pain he watched gave him a surge of—was that pleasure?'

There is not much Australian fiction, of this or any other time, that ventures into such uneasy territory, and works so powerfully there. Penworth, weak, inexperienced, emotionally undeveloped, out of place in a country so unlike his own, painfully devoted to ‘that eternal tenant of the mind, Reason', but increasingly vulnerable to passions that he recognises from his classical studies but has never expected to be touched by, is the book's most complex character and in some ways its most complete achievement. He is awed by as well as attracted to Charles Fox, whom he recognises, for all his youth, as nobler and more manly than himself. His angry disappointment has less to do with Charles's rejection of his advances than with his realisation that this boy, at barely fifteen, has already come to what he himself yearns for but has still to attain: that perfect communion he had hoped a relationship with the boy might at last bring him.

There is disappointment for Charles as well. He preserves his relationship with Penworth but is increasingly wary of him. More significantly he sees in the man a likeness now to his mother that makes him distrustful of her as well: a quality in someone whose affection he has come to rely on that is not pure care but a wish, under the guise of care, to steal from him his life, his youth. For the first time he applies to his mother his newfound resistance, and she in turn warns him, in terms that are chilling in their prescience of Mackenzie's own future, against the man who has abandoned them both. ‘Your father,' she tells him, ‘always went to extremes. If he was happy, or miserable, I always thought he was too much so. He let himself go completely…It made him drink to forget; and drink took him away from me—from us. Took him away from you; that's what I mind most.'

The question that arises is less the degree to which Mackenzie is drawing on his own experience for Charles Fox—that is clear—than how far, in the writing, he moves away from it.

The Young Desire It
is a third-person narrative but of a peculiar sort. By settling on a single consciousness and a deeply interior point of view, it becomes in effect a first-person narrative in third-person form. At least, that is how it begins. But fifty pages in a new perspective is introduced, that of Charles's classmate Mawley. We never quite enter into Mawley's consciousness as we do Charles's; his is an observatory rather than a reflective intelligence. But one of the objects of his scrutiny is Charles himself, and while Mawley never becomes either a fully developed character or actor in the book, he may, in the end, be its real narrator.

It is Mawley's accident in the gym that causes Charles to faint, and Mawley's need to remain in the school sick bay over the vacation (while Charles is engaged on his second meeting with Margaret) takes up a good part of the middle section of the book.

Each evening Mawley is visited by the headmaster, and in the shared isolation and loneliness of the empty school a kind of friendship develops between them:

It was impossible not to be drawn closer under the kindly shadow of his great personality; he did indeed seem young, with the essence of youth, with all its ability to feel, quick and deep, the drama of fortune's ceaseless mutation; without youth's clumsiness of thought or speech to divide Mawley from him. The boy's sympathy was not of embarrassment but of what, thought he in his pride, was genuine understanding.

This is an ideal version of a relationship of which Penworth's approaches to Charles are an unhappy distortion. The confidences offered when the headmaster settles on the edge of Mawley's bed, which are intimate enough, stand in stark contrast to the exchanges between Penworth and Charles that lead up to the kiss. On the last of his visits, on the eve of his suicide, the headmaster speaks of love and the responsibilities of the lover. ‘Once,' he tells Mawley,

when I was young, someone said to me in reproof for some thoughtlessness, ‘You must learn how easy it is to hurt those you love…' Then, I believed that; afterwards I found that it was not true, for it is easiest to hurt those who love you—those you yourself love may not be open to harm from you, according to the measure of their regard for you. But if they in turn love you, then beware.

In the early forties, Mackenzie, writing to Jane Lindsay, offered this version of his time at Guildford Grammar:

When I was at school I, being angel-faced and slim and shy, was apparently considered fair game by masters as well as certain boys. The boys were at least honestly crude in their proposals; but the masters—young men whom I thought very mature and wise—had a much better technique. They wooed the intellectual way, just at the very time I was beginning to comprehend something of literature and music, and so was most gullible. Again and again, like any simpleton, I was tricked, only to realise that what I had taken for special interest in possible intellectual promise of mine was not that at all.

This was written nearly fifteen years after the event, and after a good deal of disappointment and disintegration; Mackenzie is in some ways making excuses for himself. But the important point is that the bitterness of this account is nowhere to be found in his novel. He goes on:

My whole psyche was shaped by those years—first living with women only, then living entirely separated from anything womanly, and with my unfortunate appearance and the fact that I had a boy's soprano singing voice and was Chapel soloist (another cause of disgusting molestation)… All these long-drawn-out circumstances conditioned me mentally, emotionally and—I don't doubt—sexually.

It is true that Charles Fox at the end of
The Young
Desire It
is no longer so innocently open and attractive as he was at the beginning. We may even see in him the makings of a man whose course of life is to be ‘difficult'. The last glimpse we get of him is not quite optimistic.

Seen through Mawley's eyes when he returns to school for his second and final year, Charles seems easier with the world, or so Mawley thinks. Mawley does not know that in another of his secret places Charles and Margaret, with ‘the air stretched to a perilous tension, ready to split and shatter, ready with the whole world to burst into flame', have consummated their love, not as errant, under-aged children but ‘by the blind volition of their own single will'. They have also parted and may not meet again.

Mawley is puzzled by Charles's anxiety over the letter that is waiting for him and, when it turns out to be from Penworth, by his indifference. In the book's closing sentence the melancholy, as Mawley sees it, of the late-summer afternoon, is translated to Charles: ‘Mawley, on looking up, observed that instead of unpacking he had remained sitting on the edge of his bed, his face expressionless like that of one who thinks steadfastly of something past and irrevocable, upon which great happiness had once depended.'

There is sadness here, and a poignant sense of loss, but none of the anger and aggrieved self-pity of the Lindsay letter.

The Young Desire It
is a miracle, not least in that its wholeness, its freshness and clarity, seem magically untouched by the damage that casts such a shadow over Mackenzie's later years. Among Australian novels it is unique and very nearly perfect, a hymn to youth, to life, to sexual freedom and moral independence, written in full awareness—and this is a second miracle—of the cost, both to others and to oneself.

The Young Desire It

TO
W. G. C.

It is now opportune for me to thank you publicly for this book, which is really yours. It was written because you suggested it, and also because you made it possible for me to give all my mind and all my time to the difficult task of writing prose. If it has virtues, I claim them, as I must claim its faults; but its actual existence is greatly due to your kindness.

I had already told you that, though this story of Charles Fox is broadly true, the names and characters were, of course, all strictly invented by myself during those five weeks of solitude which saw the making of the whole thing. So we are not doing anyone an unkindness in setting down much that is—or should I say
was
?—true. If you do read this book, and like it, I shall feel doubly assured in offering it to you in friendship, and in gratitude.

Kenneth ‘Seaforth' Mackenzie

‘To be free to choose is not enough. Though the young desire it, they cannot use that freedom, but must be forced into the decision of choice by good or evil circumstances which while they can perceive them they cannot control…'

Michael Paul,
The Anatomy of Failure

When he was fourteen, Charles Fox was a smouldering, red-headed fellow, a friend of nobody, slow but tenacious in his tempers, rather proud and not without courage. Most noticeable, perhaps, was that gentleness of which in a year his fellows at the school had removed the outward sign, and a dangerous, angelic innocence which, among them, quickly set him apart, not upon pedestals, but as one of that very contemptible social order, of those who see no necessity for doing evil.

Innocence appears to be as tempting to the gods as it is to sub-Olympians; like the perfect and unbroken face of a pool to one who has a stone in his hand, tempting in its complete freedom from the splash and ripple of character, and as immaculate as a mirror. Charles met the mortals and the immortals in his fifteenth year. It must have exasperated both to observe that nothing could teach him to deceive, to hide his feelings, and to want to hurt. He had already grown close to the earth, and his innocence, apparently angelic, was earthly and fruitful, not easily to be corrupted.

In the late afternoon of a day in February, that hottest of Australian summer months, when a brutal sun stood bronze above the river flats which you may see from the dormitory windows of Chatterton, Charles came to the School with his mother, walking from the railway station to the gates by a private path across a burnt, untidy field, overhung with Cape lilacs that still drooped, dusty and melancholy, in the late heat of afternoon.

It was February, with three more months of summer yet to come. The private path at each step breathed up a soft orange dust that hid the polish of his shoes. Across a road at the farther side of the burnt field the dark old wood of the School gates threatened him. He was afraid. In the lower part of his belly fear kicked and pulsed like a child in the womb, ready to be born; but it was fear of a disorderly kind, born of ignorance. He knew nothing of what life was like for a boarder at a reputable Public School with a name for sportsmanship, gentlemanliness, manliness and the classics. Nor did he know that the experience of it would be coloured by his own round head of reddish, curling hair, his red lips, his green eyes turning hazel, and an innocence which his mind reflected in his face.

His fear, disorderly and ignorant, found an outlet simply in regret for that life which had run its course and was now, as he walked beside his mother on the dusty path, coming quietly to its end. His mother herself symbolized it. A world where he had been left alone, happily free from the understanding and the companionship of any mind or heart; free and unscrutinized, with the greater part of each day given over to his own decision, in a world peopled and filled by himself in an infinite variety of disguise. That world had been chucked to the devil by a useful and necessary maternal decision, in which he had no part.

The preparations for his entry into the high life of the reputable School (governed by the Board of the Council of Churches, rich and very holy) interested him enough to lend him a little courage when he was not alone. Freedom had gone suddenly; he did more things at the request of other people than he had ever done, it seemed, in his life. There was a visit to the city, where he was measured for new clothes by a powerful Scot, lame and charming, who turned him round and about as if he were a piece of furniture, and made his mother smile at him as though, now for the first time, they shared some trivial secret. For a week afterwards the names and appearances of a dozen city shops remained in his mind, together with a growing uneasiness of self-concern, which invaded his body like a disease, and made nightmares of his dreams. He began to pay the penalty of his own sensitiveness, and was often miserable. He had always been of an excitable temperament, liable to sudden emotional excesses; and now, on that short, endless walk from the station to the dark, sweltering School gates, the unpleasant excitement did a final triumphant battle with his defiance, and a lot of tears gathered in his eyes. Fruits of that victory. He began to press them away quietly with his knuckles, trembling and white.