The Writing Life

by David Malouf

  Lawrence makes it difficult for the reader, as well as for himself, by speaking up too soon; by performing; working out his questions, his quarrels, in public. We too, in seeking out the best in him, have to choose between the ‘demon’ and the man.

  At his best, Lawrence, like Whitman, is one of the finest poets in the world. There is no poet, at his best, who gets closer to what he calls the ‘quick’ of things, or brings us closer with him; and when he is at ease with his own spirit, his own extraordinary energy, his rare demon, there is no poet we find it so easy to love. It is all here in these two hefty volumes: the muddle, but also the magic of the man’s greatness; the pathos, the wonderful coincidence of language and feeling; a sensibility almost too actively aware of the tension between singularity and oneness that is at the heart of being.

  Sydney Review of Books, 2013

  PERILOUS TENSION: THE YOUNG DESIRE IT

  THE YOUNG DESIRE IT was published in London in 1937 by Jonathan Cape. The author, Kenneth ‘Seaforth’ Mackenzie, was not quite twenty-four. He had begun the novel at seventeen. ‘Five weeks of solitude,’ he tells us in a dedicatory preface, ‘saw the making of the whole thing.’

  Like many first novels, The Young Desire It draws on the author’s own experience. Mackenzie grew up on an isolated property north of Perth, and until he entered Guildford Grammar at thirteen shared the company only of his mother, a younger sister and a few household servants. He was left to roam, barefoot and as he pleased, in the local countryside, whose changes of light and weather he seems to have taken, like his protagonist Charles Fox, as aspects of his own nature and feelings. This accounts for the intensity of the book’s nature writing, which is more disciplined than anything in Lawrence, who is clearly an influence, but also more inward and passionately lyrical. Charles Fox’s first encounter with society, in the close, intrusive and sometimes threatening form of a boys’ boarding school, accounts for his puzzled outsider’s view of his fellow students and teachers. What is not accounted for in so young a writer is the authority with which he tackles the book’s disturbing and potentially sensational material, and the assurance, in the rhythm and cadence of every sentence, of the writing. We recognise the phenomenon, but it is rare, in the precocious genius of Stephen Crane in The Red Badge of Courage, in the young Thomas Mann of Buddenbrooks, and the even younger Raymond Radiguet of Le Diable au Corps and Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel. Mackenzie and The Young Desire It are of their company.

  The novel has two points of focus.

  One is the school as a social institution: in this case an English-style, all-male boarding school in what is still, in the twenties, an outpost of empire; an establishment devoted to the making, through classical studies, music, sport, and very British notions of manliness and public service, of young men.

  The masters are imported Englishmen, the students for the most part country boys who have grown up close to the Australian bush and to Australian values and traditions. They are lively and well meaning enough, but from the masters’ point of view uncultivated, even when, like Charles Fox, they are also sensitive and talented. In the course of the book the whole order and ethos of the school is tested by the suicide of a wounded, yet highly effective and revered headmaster.

  It is worth recalling that at this time most boys of fourteen or fifteen were already out in the world earning a living. A good part of Charles Fox’s impatience to be done with school, and free, is a belief that he is being held back from life, though he also acknowledges that he knows little of what life is. He has till now been a kind of ‘wild child’ armed only with ‘a dangerous innocence’ and unaware of ‘the necessity for doing evil’. How he comes through – whether in fact he does come through – is the book’s other and major concern.

  On his first afternoon at the school he is sexually assaulted by a group of older boys, on the pretext of confirming that this pretty boy is not really a girl. What Charles discovers here, as a first line of defence, is a quality in himself, to this point unknown because unneeded, that will more and more become the keynote of his emerging character. This is resistance, which over time takes different forms in him, not all of them attractive. Resistance to others, and to events and influence; resistance to his own need for affection; a growing hardness that will protect him from being ‘interfered with’, and allow him the freedom – it is freedom of choice that the young so ardently desire – to be himself.

  Several moments of revelation mark the course of Charles’ adolescent progress, some of them so deeply interiorised and undramatic as to appear, by conventional novelistic standards, unrealised: a common complaint against The Young Desire It is that it is a book in which, as Douglas Stewart puts it, ‘nothing happens’.

  Another way of putting it would be to suggest that Mackenzie, in a quite revolutionary way for an Australian writer in the late thirties, is doing all he can to preserve his narrative from any whiff of the ‘fictitious’, and himself from any temptation to the fabrications of ‘plot’. What interests him is not what happens in the world of events but what happens in Charles Fox’s erotically charged sensory world, where he is confronted at every turn with situations for which he has no precedent. It is Mackenzie’s determination to stick with the interior view, and the bewilderments of young Charles Fox, that make The Young Desire It perhaps the earliest novel in Australia to deal with the inner life in a consistently modernist way. Patrick White’s The Aunt’s Story is still a decade off.

  The most significant of Charles Fox’s discoveries is his meeting, on his first vacation, with the schoolgirl Margaret.

  Essential to this is that it happens on Charles’ home ground. The mystery of the occasion is bound up with the secret, half-underground quality of the place, with its low-hanging pine branches, damp pine needles, misty rain. The fact that it is grounded in the boy’s sensuous inner world means he can take for granted that what is so shatteringly ‘final’ for him is equally so for the girl, and it is this that makes ‘impossible’ for Charles the next significant moment of the book, when, back at school, Penworth, the young classics master he has formed a bond with, kisses him.

  Charles has suffered a fainting fit in the school gym at the sight of his friend Mawley’s twisted ankle. When he comes to he is in Penworth’s room, on Penworth’s bed, with Penworth sitting on the bed beside him, clasping his feet in his ‘broad hands’. Confused by this but not yet anxious, he allows himself to be drawn into a discussion of his dreams, then confesses his ignorance, beyond the crude schoolboy facts, of what such dreams might mean, and of all sexual matters. The kiss that follows turns the boy’s confusion to alarm.

  He is in no danger, he knows that. This is a proposal, not an assault, and anything beyond this is to him an ‘impossibility’ – he has already had his revelation with Margaret; it is final and of another kind. What concerns him now is how he should act so that his response, while clearly a rejection, will allow him to retain Penworth’s affectionate interest, and Penworth his self-esteem.

  The man is gently reassuring: ‘It’s all right, dear lad … Don’t be frightened – I shan’t hurt you … Were you frightened of – something that might have happened?’

  But it is the boy who shows the greater care. ‘I may not know it all, but even if I am so young,’ he tells Penworth, ‘I do know that you’re unhappy; and if I could help I would.’ 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 judgement.

  On Charles’ 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, afte
r 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 among 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’ 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’ 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: the 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’ classmate Mawley. We never quite enter into Mawley’s consciousness as we do Charles’ – 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. 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 the 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.

  What Mawley does not know is 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 blind volition of their own single will’. They have also parted and may not meet again.

  Mawley is puzzled by Charles’ 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 remaine
d 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 its second miracle – of the cost, both to others and to oneself.

  Introduction to The Young Desire It, Text, 2013

  LES MURRAY: LUNCH AND COUNTER LUNCH

  LES MURRAY IS PERHAPS the most naturally gifted poet of his generation in Australia, and Lunch and Counter Lunch, his fourth collection, contains some of his best work to date. Why, one wonders, have reviewers been unwilling to engage with the book on the serious terms it so obviously demands?

  It is a work of astonishing dexterity and scope. The verbal inventiveness seems almost unlimited and one is reminded of late Auden in the poet’s capacity to talk about almost anything and make it sizzle and twang. Murray never falls into easy attitudes and never gives shape to a ‘received idea’. We are aware on every page of the freshness and originality of his insights, whether he is evoking landscape:

  Out here, the trees

  grow cooly under the earth

  and the bush is branches

  or making delicate observations about people.

  we are leaving the parts where Please and Excuse Me are said

  the man up front of me