- From: The Australian
- August 17, 2013
Kate Mackenzie at home with her grandfather's manuscripts. Picture: Sam Mooy Source: TheAustralian
KENNETH "Seaforth" Mackenzie was just 17 years old when he began his prize-winning novel The Young Desire It.
It was the early 1930s and Mackenzie had not long emerged from three years as a boarder at the elite Guildford Grammar School in Perth.He turned back to that time for his story of bastardisation, sexual awakening, and erotic attraction between a student and teacher at a boys' boarding school. The novel was a sensation when it was published in London in 1937 and won the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, but has been out of print for many years.
Now, on the eve of its republication, The Weekend Australian has discovered new material that confirms how much Mackenzie used his school years for a story that writer David Malouf calls a "very nearly perfect" novel.Mackenzie always said the story was "broadly true". But letters and an essay that have been long forgotten in the school's archives show how closely his psychological and emotional states in those troubled years formed his work.
The essay, written in 1929, raises the themes of love, life and meaning that Mackenzie tackles in the novel through his alter ego, Charles Fox.
Michael Heyward, head of Text Publishing, which is re-releasing the book next week, yesterday said it was "extraordinary and very moving for the trace elements of fiction to be so visible".
More at The Australian
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