The Mountain Lion

I read this novel yesterday. The Mountain Lion, written by Jean Stafford, a woman who had a difficult life (surprise), a situation not helped by being married for a time to poet Robert Lowell.

The Mountain Lion is rich, dense, evocative and dark. Children are at its center, but so are children at the center of Lord of the Flies and A High Wind in Jamaica. So that tells you something.

What is it? It’s hard to say. I will tell you that if you decide to read it, don’t read Stafford’s “Author’s Note” that’s published at the beginning of the NYRB edition first. It will, as we say, spoil the ending, although it doesn’t take long to discern, simply from the tone, that even if the specifics are yet to be discovered, the ending will be grim.

Briefly:

Eight-year-old Molly and her ten-year-old brother Ralph are inseparable, in league with each other against the stodgy and stupid routines of school and daily life; against their prim mother and prissy older sisters; against the world of authority and perhaps the world itself. One summer they are sent from the genteel Los Angeles suburb that is their home to backcountry Colorado, where their uncle Claude has a ranch. There the children encounter an enchanting new world—savage, direct, beautiful, untamed—to which, over the next few years, they will return regularly, enjoying a delicious double life. And yet at the same time this other sphere, about which they are both so passionate, threatens to come between their passionate attachment to each other. Molly dreams of growing up to be a writer, yet clings ever more fiercely to the special world of childhood. Ralph for his part feels the growing challenge, and appeal, of impending manhood. Youth and innocence are hurtling toward a devastating end.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the relationship between art and life, reading so many nineteenth and twentieth-century authors for school, reading them fairly closely and unpacking their lives in tandem For The Sake of Education – it’s hard to avoid it here, as well. The children in The Mountain Lion grow up where Stafford was born and grew up, and spend their summers and that final year in the state where she went to college. Stafford was quite close to her brother, who died in a car accident while serving in Europe in 1944. All the exterior and, I am assuming, interior details seem true. And Molly, the misanthropic, unpleasant writer-to-be, fits well in the tradition of the unnamed 12-year old girl in O’Connor’s “Temple of the Holy Ghost” and Harriet of, naturally, Harriet the Spy: sharp, sardonic, mildly malevolent observers of human nature, creations of those who knew them best, from the inside.

Yes, this is a coming-of-age story, but a very strange and dark one. But as unusual and elevated as the experiences are they still ring true to me, as accurate, if heightened.

It seems to me that The Mountain Lion is, in part, about the richness and the dangers of a child’s inner world as that child struggles to understand the outer world, most importantly, the behavior and expectations of adults. The dangers arise mostly because hardly a soul in this tale actually listens to the children or bothers with them. They were, after all, children, and one of them – Molly – is strange and a little frightening. Why listen? After all, they’ll grow up soon enough and all confusions will be straightened out, all yearnings and desires understood and directed properly, all illusions dissipated in the face of real life.

There’s more. A key aspect of the novel is the closeness of the siblings, which then is dramatically sundered, not so much by action, but by words – just words – but words that speak of mysteries that needn’t threaten, but in this context of silence and absolute division between these children’s inner lives and the lives of the adults around them – do.

I’m reading more Stafford tonight – some of her stories. Her life was…challenging, and included the marriage to Lowell, injuries sustained in a car accident in which he was driving, being a witness to a suicide (by gun) when she was in college….and so on.

Henry James said that a primary quality of good fiction was the experience of “felt life” on the reader’s part. How many ways is that accomplished? Innumerable, but central to it is detail rather than abstraction and assertion. I would say that with The Mountain Lion, I felt as if I were experiencing a Real Thing – but that’s not because the central characters felt real – the children themselves didn’t live as realistically as some of the secondary characters, and less so as they aged through the story. But it was more because in the reading, I had a conviction that I was indeed living in a reality – remembered, shaken apart, mourned, desired – not so much out there – but in there – in Jean Stafford’s searching, sorting, seeing mind:

When they had gone a hundred steps, they could see the palm trees that marked the boundary of their land. On this last stretch, Molly always thought for some reason of Redondo Beach where they went for a few weeks at the end of the summer. Looking up into the blank blue sky, she could feel that she was barefoot in the hot sand, hunting starfish and sand dollars, hearing the cries of the frightened ladies to their wading children who petulantly cried back that the waves were not high. The thought of the beach made her restlessly nostalgic and sometimes made her whimper, because she always remembered a feeling of queer and somehow pleasant horror when once a gull had winked at her and she had seen that his lower eyelid moved and not the upper one. But today she did not cry: Ralph was too gay, she knew, to comfort her and that was the only pleasure in crying, to be embraced by him and breathe in his acrid smell of leather braces and serge and to feel, shuddering, the touch of his warty hands on her face. It was always possible for her to will herself not to think sadly of the beach but to think instead of her dead father, of whom she had no memories but only the knowledge that he was up in the sky with Jesus and would miraculously recognize her when she came to heaven even though she had not been born when he died. This was the most thrilling thought she ever had and it had made her almost delirious ever since the day she and Ralph agreed not to die until he was ninety-nine and she was ninety-seven so that when they got up there they would look much older than their father who had died at the age of thirty-six.