Jean Stafford (1915-1979), though better known as a short story writer, also published three novels.

Her second, ‘The Mountain Lion’ appeared in 1947, not long before the collapse of her first, unhappily tempestuous marriage with the poet Robert Lowell (1917-1977).

Stafford herself had been born in Covina, California, the youngest of four children, later moving with her family to Boulder, Colorado. She was very close to her elder brother, Dick, who died in a motoring accident in 1944. Much of this autobiographical material is utilised in the novel.

It is a closely observed study of the lives of Molly and Ralph Fawcett, aged 8 and 10 respectively at the outset, over the ensuing six years.

Both are intelligent, intense, sensitive; both markedly different to, and alienated from, their widowed mother and elder sisters.

Initially, they too are living in Covina, drawn still closer together by their shared experience of scarlet fever, and their consequential nosebleeds.

But they come to spend their summers with their Uncle Claude, on his remote Colorado ranch. And when their mother takes their elder sisters on an extended world tour, they are packed off to the ranch for a year.

Gradually, however, they draw inexorably apart.

As Ralph enters adolescence he becomes sexually aware, but Molly remains asexual, intellectual, imagining herself ‘a long wooden box with a mind inside’.

On the way to Colorado, as they roar through a dark tunnel, their rift is sealed. Ralph urges Molly to ‘tell me all the dirty words you know’.

‘Ralph’s childhood and his sister’s expired at that moment of the train’s entrance into the surcharged valley. It was a paradox, for now they should be going into a tunnel with no end, now that they had heard the devil speak’

But Molly remains deeply ascetic. We watch her take a bath in a bathing suit, then binding her stomach so tightly it is painful, finally donning ‘her long-sleeved high-necked pajamas’ and home-made nightcap.

Shortly before the book’s climax, she adds her own name, alongside Ralph’s and Claude’s, to a long list of her ‘unforgivables’.

Both Uncle Claude and Ralph become obsessed with a rare mountain lion living on a nearby peak.

Ralph is struck by her beauty, calling her Goldilocks

‘because, running the way she had in the sunlight, she had been as blond as a movie star.’

But both are determined to kill the lion, preferring a dead trophy to the living creature.

As the story draws to a close, both shoot the lion simultaneously but, unknown to them, Molly has moved into the line of fire…

Stafford is a wonderful stylist, often displaying outstanding technique. To me, her prose seems both muscular and voluptuous, both vivid and precise. I can confidently recommend this book on those grounds alone.

But the story itself is also compelling. Perhaps the final quarter suffers a little in comparison with what went before, and perhaps the ending is just a tiny bit contrived.

Even so, this book is a minor masterpiece.

TD

September 2024