The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford, Review

Faber, £9.99

REVIEW BY NEIL MACKAY

TWISTED, damaged love, and explosive violence. The themes of Jean Stafford’s unhappy life have soaked into the pages of her novel The Mountain Lion.

Stafford was married to Robert Lowell, a god of American poetry. Their relationship was dark. A friend called their time together “tormented and tormenting”. Stafford was left badly injured – disfigured for the rest of her life – following a car crash with Lowell at the wheel.

She won the Pulitzer Prize for her collected works in 1970, but today, is all but forgotten. We can thank the publishing house Faber for bringing Stafford back to public attention. The Mountain Lion, from 1947, is the latest in Faber’s superb series resurrecting long lost gems. That the book stands far above almost any other literary work currently on bookstore shelves is a rebuke to the current state of Western fiction.

The Mountain Lion is the dark twin of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Lee’s book, while it paints a disturbing portrait of small-town racism, idolises childhood and adolescence. Stafford snatches away the sugar-coating and candy-wrapping and shows what those years between 12 and 16 are really like: a maelstrom of confusion, shifting identity, turbulent sexuality, rage, towering ego, guilt and loneliness.

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Both novels are set around the same time – the early 1930s. Stafford’s book, though, is the better social history. You’ll find yourself stopping every few pages to research some now arcane term Stafford has dropped into her narrative: “ammonia cokes” (a soft drink laced with chemicals), “Hutchinson’s teeth” (a sign of congenital syphilis), and forgotten cultural flotsam and jetsam like Elsie Dinsmore (a character in a series of children’s books).

Some may be troubled by the casual racism displayed by Stafford’s characters. The bigotry, though, is a mark of the times she’s exploring with her pen-turned-scalpel.

We begin with two strange, sickly children, brother and sister Ralph and Molly. Their father is dead; their mother and older sisters twee, prissy idiots. They despise the phoney adult world. Shades of Ralph and Molly would later appear in JD Salinger’s Holden Caufield. The only adult they admire is their grandfather, a Colorado rancher.

Ralph is lonely. He often wonders “if anyone in the world were thinking of him”. The pair have an almost unhealthy bond. Molly burns herself with acid when Ralph says he won’t marry her.

They live in their own world, with Molly absorbed in books, the only possessions more important to her than Ralph.

Yet while Ralph is strange and moody, there’s something terrifying about Molly. She “doesn’t believe in happiness”. When she’s angry, she drowns mice, “rejoicing brutishly”. But if Molly despises the world, it’s because she despises herself. “I know I’m ugly,” she says. “I know everybody hates me. I wish I were dead.”

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And we think mental health problems for the young are something new?

After their grandfather’s death, their mother sends Ralph and Molly to live with their uncle Claude on his ranch, while she travels the world with their older sisters. Love is a facade in the book: something said but never not meant.

With the children now in Colorado, the book descends deeper into darkness as we go from childhood to adolescence.

Molly becomes increasingly withdrawn and odd. Ralph, his sexuality awakening, begins to fantasise about his older sisters, Leah and Rachel.

Molly’s rage at the world grows as she intuits Ralph’s shift toward adulthood. Ralph becomes a bundle of fizzing hormones, listening to jazz and thinking of young dancers together, the music “suffused with summer heat and moistness”.

Confused, with no adult to confide in, Ralph’s lust turns inward into self-hate. He’s disgusted at his desire. “His own masculinity was, in its articulation, so ugly.” He sublimates this unsettling change into hunting and killing animals.

Sex and death walk hand-in-hand throughout the novel in the most disturbing fashion.

Molly, however, sits above all this for Ralph. She is his “last foothold”. Molly “alone did not urge him to corruption”. She is “sexless” – a thought which mirrors Molly’s own deathly, dissociative image of herself as “a long wooden box with a mind inside”.

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Molly, however, sees Ralph changing. He’s becoming a man – part of the adult world. That disgusts her. Molly’s primary emotion is hate. She has the capacity to hate people from “before she was born”. The horror for Molly is that she hates herself more than anyone else. It was her “desire”, we’re told, “to have tuberculosis”.

The pair begin drifting apart on their uncle’s ranch. Molly isolates herself, and Ralph tries to find some path to masculinity by observing the rather feckless Claude, a man who seems lost himself and sexually isolated.

Both Claude and Ralph are obsessed with shooting a mountain lion roaming near the ranch.

As thoughts of the hunt become more intense, Ralph’s rage and sexuality curdle together around this symbol of proving his manhood. Ralph wants to kill the mountain lion “because he loves her”.

The mountain lion is nicknamed Goldilocks. It’s not without consequence that Molly thinks “if only she had yellow hair she would be an entirely different person”.

In its final stages, the book becomes suffocating, the melding of sexual desire and simmering anger a pressure cooker.

There are echoes of Tennessee Williams – whose play A Streetcar Named Desire premiered the same year The Mountain Lion was published. Williams couldn’t stop picking at the scab of rotten secrets lying at the heart of broken families: secrets that must spill into the open, often in catastrophic and brutal ways.

The final turning point for Ralph and Molly comes in just one sentence – a brief moment which breaks their profound bond and turns Molly into Ralph’s implacable enemy. On a train, Ralph becomes lost in sexual fantasies of women passengers and says to Molly: “Tell me all the dirty words you know.”

Ralph has now crossed firmly into the world of adults, and as a result driven “a rivet of hate into Molly’s heart”.

We are now on the downward slide for Molly and Ralph. Unquestionably, some terrible act will now take place. When it does, just moments before the book’s conclusion, it will shock you from your seat.

In the end, only ruin awaits Ralph and Molly, for Stafford’s lesson is this: adulthood, with all its profound loss of innocence, is death itself.