He knew only that he was learning, as he had never learned before, the beauties of his own language and of that from which so much of it had grown.”Īs Charles daydreams of Margaret, so Penworth more and more longs for Charles. Of course, Penworth continues to mentor the boy, who “did not notice that Penworth’s hand more often touched his, or was liable to caress his head or his knee in moments when the air in the little white study was fierce and tense and attentive. When Charles returns to school, he carries the memory of that afternoon in his heart.Īs the academic year progresses, Mackenzie delicately evokes Charles’s sexual development, a new sense of his body, his embarrassing dreams. But then they begin to talk about their lives. The niece of an elderly couple living nearby, Margaret is initially frightened when the boy finally reveals himself. There he discovers that he isn’t alone and, unobserved, quietly watches a young girl who is also escaping the downpour. Caught by a thunderstorm, he runs to a copse of trees for shelter. Nonetheless, Penworth “was careful, rather for his own sake than for the sake of the boy, to prevent himself from showing any unnatural interest in him.”ĭuring the short Easter holiday, Charles returns home. “To him they were, and would always remain, crude, unchangeable young animals, who had never seen an English spring or an Oxford dusk they were looking forward, but he looked back, for ever.” Penworth plays Bach on the violin to calm his nerves, but also sometimes reads an elegant edition of Plato’s dangerously exciting “Phaedrus.” For even though the Englishman keeps a picture of a young woman on his dresser, he soon finds himself troubled by Charles.
A 25-year-old Oxford graduate, the complicated Penworth is also lonely, missing England desperately and feeling a mixture of contempt and pity for most of his students. That joy of learning is largely fostered by a sympathetic English and classics teacher. Moreover, he soon discovers that “the desire to know was coming to life like a fire in his heart. For Charles, though gentle-hearted and angelic in appearance, is tougher than he looks, and he defends himself pretty well against further onslaughts. Mackenzie painfully evokes the boy’s shame, but also his anger and resilience. A pretty boy, Charles is taunted, partly stripped and groped on his first day by a gang of older students. He was a visitor from the very real country of childhood, and from that innocent demesne in it which all others of his age there had left, long ago.” He feels utterly out of place: “Among the mass of boys there, he was in fact like a person from some remote land that had been civilized without sophistication. But now at 14, he is being sent, unhappily, to a prestigious private boarding school. It is the best novel I’ve read in a long, long time.Ĭharles Fox has spent his childhood with his widowed mother on a station in Australia, living a carefree, Edenic life. There’s nothing worldly or Gallic about Mackenzie’s beautiful - no other word will do - depiction of school life, loneliness and sexual yearning. In his excellent, though plot-spoiler-rich introduction to this Text Classics edition, David Malouf adds Raymond Radiguet’s “The Devil in the Flesh,” but mainly because its author was a comparably gifted prodigy (Radiguet died at 20). First published in Australia in 1937 when Kenneth Mackenzie was in his early 20s, “The Young Desire It” is a book to set beside James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” Alain-Fournier’s “The Lost Domain” and.
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