qq定时发消息‘The Young Desire It,’ by Kenneth Mackenzie
First published in Australia in 1937 when Kenneth Mackenzie was in his early 20s, 凤山村的孩子“The Young Desire It” is a book to t beside James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” Alain-Fournier’s 封泥“The Lost Domain” and . .自悼 . well, I don’t know what el. 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 becau its author was a comparably gifted prodigy (Radiguet died at 20). There’s nothing worldly or Gallic about Mackenzie’s beautiful — no other word will do — depiction of school life, loneliness and xual yearning. It is the best novel I’ve read in a long, long time.
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Charles Fox has spent his childhood with his widowed mother on a station in Australia, living a carefree, Edenic life. But now at 14, he is being nt, unhappily, to a prestigious private boarding school. 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. 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.”
Things begin badly at the school. A pretty boy, Charles is taunted, partly stripped and groped on his first day by a gang of older students. Mackenzie painfully evokes the boy’s shame, but also his anger and resilience. For Charles, though gentle-hearted and angelic in appearance, is tougher than he looks, and he defends himlf pretty well against further onslaughts. Moreover, he soon discovers that “the desire to know was coming to life like a fire in his heart. He wanted to learn.”
That joy of learning is largely fostered by a sympathetic English and classics teacher. 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. “To him they were, and would always remain, crude, unchangeable young animals, who had never en 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 dresr, he soon finds himlf troubled by Charles. Nonetheless, Penworth “was careful, rather for his own sake
than for the sake of the boy, to prevent himlf from showing any unnatural interest in him.”
During the short Easter holiday, Charles returns home. One day, he ts out to pick mushrooms. Caught by a thunderstorm, he runs to a cop of trees for shelter. There he discovers that he isn’t alone and, unobrved, quietly watches a young girl who is also escaping the downpour. The niece of an elderly couple living nearby, Margaret is initially frightened when the boy finally reveals himlf. But then they begin to talk about their lives. Nothing happens; everything happens.
When Charles returns to school, he carries the memory of that afternoon in his heart.
As the academic year progress, Mackenzie delicately evokes Charles’s xual development, a new n of his body, his embarrassing dreams. Of cour, 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 ten and attentive. He knew only that he was learning, a
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s he had never learned before, the beauties of his own language and of that from which so much of it had grown.”
As Charles daydreams of Margaret, so Penworth more and more longs for Charles. This quiet evocation of the teacher’s growing desire is tenderly, non-judgmentally delineated. In many ways, Penworth is the most complex, the most anguished character in the book — unless it is the school’s elderly, physically suffering headmaster. The model of a humane educator, he alerts Charles’s friend Mawley to love’s dangers:
一抽烟就打嗝房地产营销策划公司“Once, when I was young, someone said to me in reproof for some thoughtlessness, ‘You must learn how easy it is to hurt tho you love . . . ’ Then, I believed that; afterward I found that it was not true, for it is easiest to hurt tho who love you — tho you yourlf 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. Everything you do will have tremendous meaning for them.”
