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.
Craig Morgan Teicher, "Book Review: The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford" from The Trembling Answers. Copyright © 2017 by Craig Morgan Teicher. Reprinted by permission of BOA Editions, Ltd., www.boaeditions.org.
Source: The Trembling Answers (BOA Editions, Ltd., www.boaeditions.org, 2017)