Book Review: The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford

Spoiler alert: in this all-but-forgotten

masterwork, Jean Stafford—who was once

widely regarded as the leading novelist

of her generation, and who wrote

this perverse, short,

lyrical novel, her second, during

the flailing failings

of her marriage to my hero

Robert Lowell—kills

Molly, her child-alter ego,

a girl too unloved and unloving

to survive puberty, too

pure and awful—like Stafford, who died

pickled and childish three

decades later after winning

the Pulitzer with her devastating,

hurtfully compassionate Collected

Stories—for this or any other world,

especially the necessarily

allegorical one of fiction.

I am broken now, hopeless; hope

is proved by this book to be

a contrivance. I have just

read the last pages in which

Molly’s brother, Ralph—who,

to live, cannot love

either, has no spare love—shoots

her, aiming for the wild mountain

lion whose stuffed corpse

was to be the triumph

of his new manhood. I don’t

hate Ralph—how can I, a boy,

mistaken, like me? And can I hate

Molly, who so needed Ralph

and everyone, still young enough to savor

the bittersweet of her anger?

What about Stafford, who hurt

herself, all our selves, with

this ending, her classic tragedy, writing,

decades later, Poor old

Molly! I loved her dearly

and I hope she rests in peace.

Fuck insight and analysis:

my heart is shot. Why

did she have to die? Why does

anyone? Why do you, do I?

Because of what Ralph was

feeling just before he accidentally

slaughtered the future? This book

must have ravaged the already

sleepless poet Gregory Orr,

who shot his brother, too, and

suffers that endless error

in poetry and prose. And because Molly

refused everything, she stood between

Ralph and tomorrow. But he grew, he

changed. Confused? Read

the book. In novels

people die because of what they feel.

In life, people die when

their bodies conk out,

exhausted machines that living

expends. And what

happens when people feel

their feelings in life?

Nothing? Anything? Brenda,

dear Brenda, my love, nothing

happens, I’m afraid. I’m sorry. And afraid.

A small breeze born in the heart

gently bends a blade of grass

and no one hears a word.

No one reads Stafford anymore—I asked

on Facebook. Stafford died, her

legacy gently dispatched

into the low air. O, life

is terrible, literature

ridiculous. Stafford’s prose,

teeming and rich as loam,

could take Famous Franzen’s

for a walk, feed it biscuits.

But who cares? Who remembers?

O, to have been Jean Stafford,

in the past I idealize, when the world

was less self-conscious, less

precise. I could be

dead already, warmish

beneath a blanket of dust. Joyful

are the faded, the once-greats

whose afterlives slipped out

a hole in posterity’s pocket:

they are loved poignantly by

a needy few. O, to be kept

cozy in the bosoms of those

desperate and proud, forgotten

for all the good I do. Love

is sunlight streaming unevenly

through the canopy of leaves

overhead. We can only grow

in the brighter patches below, fading

where light is thin. Molly,

we are with you, nowhere and gone.

Mostly we are forgotten, too.