The Young Desire It Read Free

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.

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