Adam Lindsay Gordon shot himself in 1870; Barcroft Boake hanged himself in 1892; Charmian Clift suicided in 1969. Kenneth Mackenzie drowned in mysterious circumstances in Tallong Creek near Goulburn in 1955.
“Though the young desire it, they cannot use” the freedom to choose “but must be forced into the decision of choice by good or evil circumstances …” Michael Paul’s ‘The Anatomy of Failure’
The Young Desire It
© 1937 The Text Publishing Company
David Malouf is Australia’s best novelist in my opinion so, contrary to my usual practice, I read his Introduction to The Young Desire It prior to plunging into the work itself. I regret having done so. Kenneth Mackenzie’s protagonist, Charles, spends his childhood at home running free and at one with nature but in adolescence is suddenly brought up hard against human society and its institutions.
Malouf notes that the novel has two points of focus – the first being that social order in the world out there is forever under challenge and the second that in becoming socialised via an institution Charles has to develop a protective outer shell which does not sit comfortably with his child of nature sensibility. According to Malouf, Mackenzie’s emphasis on this second point of focus, “the interior view” or “inner life” was misunderstood by the novel’s critics. The Young Desire It, that is to say, is Australia’s earliest modernist novel, predating The Aunt’s Story by a decade. Malouf goes on to connect the dots of Mackenzie’s modernism, contrasting Charles’ inner-life at home with his inner-life in the institution.
Had I started from scratch and left Malouf’s high calibre Introduction aside for the time being, I’d have more readily picked up on what everyone to date seems to have glossed over: the significance of Mackenzie’s having drawn attention to a paragraph in Michael Paul’s The Anatomy of Failure. I sought to obtain a copy of that book because The Young Desire It strikes me as essentially a philosophical work dealing with the time-honoured freewill and determinism conundrum; the only other philosophical fiction dealing with that was Broken Signs (published in 2003). Michael Paul’s The Anatomy of Failure does not exist. Douglas Stewart says Kenneth Mackenzie admitted to inventing the paragraph. For the author, then, the quoted paragraph is key; and is for me.
