326
PARTISAN REVIEW
tion,
plus
emotional intent, which her style admirably brings together.
Thus she
is
able to convey very clearly, in the facile, free-shifting gait
of some passages, the remorseless inconstancy of a child's mind--easily
distracted, easily consoled. Moreover, she is able to maintain an all
but unbearable atmosphere of calamity throughout the book by these
linguistic means-quite apart from the children's dialogue and the actual
events, themselves incredibly violent. So unremittingly does she bring
pressure through the language itself, through the narrative tension which
mounts and mounts as the degree of circumspection lessens, through
the speech-figures which grow more and more importunate, closer-spaced
and clamoring as the book proceeds, that the climax, when the train
plunges into the tunnel and Ralph and Molly "hear the devil speak,"
really seems the answer to an intolerable need. And the catastrophe
which follows-a cliche in terms of the plot-is urged and justified over
and over by these same subjective means, till at last it comes as a relief,
the only possible ending to such outrage.
Finally, Miss Stafford
knows
and demonstrates that she knows, at
what seems to me the highest level of all, where the interior and exterior
realities combine to tell a truth about the self. That
The Mountain Lion
may have a sexual interpretation is clear; it is also possible to see it as
a parable of the spirit's growth: self-mutilation self-redemption. What
matters more is that the symbolic structure here is a manageable one
and one organic to the material; here the truth told is at once the
product and the principle of the children's experience, and of their
sensibilities as well.
In an extraordinary series of poetic devices through the last pages of
her book, Miss Stafford uses color imagery to show-by literal descriptive
detail, by verbal nuance, by symbolic implication, each modulating the
others and being itself modulated-the evolving nature of self-awareness.
It is
gold
like dreams of jewels and treasure,
topaz-yellow
like the eyes
and body of desire,
yellow
like time stopped at appalled confrontation,
and
evil, yellow
like the twilight after pain sets in. These images-in
their proper setting-are a concentrate not only of
The Mountain Lion's
theme, but of its method and its success: they are simple, consistent,
and inexorable; their color is, and has always been, a sign of worth.
CATHARINE CARVER
KAFKA'S COLLECTED WORKS
FRANZ KAFKA: GESAMMELTE ScHRIFTEN.
Herausgegebe1z von Max Brod.
Band I: Erziihulungen und Kleine Prosa; Band II: Amerika; Band III:
Der Prozess; Band IV: Das Schloss; Band V: Beschreibung eines
Kampfes. Schocken Books.
$15.00.
S
CHOCKEN BooKs and Max Brod are to
be
congratulated on this
superb new German edition of Kafka's collected works. The five
volumes now at hand comprise the three novels and the complete short
