What is “The Secret Lion” really about? Admittedly, the story can almost seem to be about nothing to some. Two kids find a smooth ball and get kicked off a golf course. Big whoop, right? Well, yeah, it is a big deal. In fact, one might say it is an allegory for the biggest deal in the history of literature. Because, at heart, “The Secret Lion” is really nothing more nor less than a recreation of the story of man’s fall from grace from the Garden of Eden.
The Garden of Eden in this case being a golf course. Or, more specifically, the golf course green. (We know it’s the green because the narrator uses the cup as a, well, cup-holder. Makes a lot of more sense than using it for putting a dimpled little ball in when you think about it. Then there’s that decidedly undimpled ball. That perfectly smooth ball. That perfect ball. That perfection. The secret of the lion is that he doesn’t exist. Literally and figuratively.
There is no lion in the “The Secret Lion.” That is a literal fact. But there is a lion in the “The Secret Lion.” Figuratively speaking. In the realm of metaphor, the titular beast is perfection. What happened to Adam and Eve? Not specifically, but on a grander level? They lose perfection. They are kicked out of the perfection of the Garden of Eden and become mortal beings in a world that is many thing, but—above all else—a place where perfection is not allowed.
Intuitively, the boys recognize this from an early age. As the narrator admits, “we had this perception about nature then, that nature is imperfect and that round things are perfect.” But, of course, round things are not really perfect except in the symbolic sense of geometrical perfection. By which is meant there asymmetry. A circle is perfect only in that it is perfectly symmetrical. Again—in the grander sense—a circle really is no more perfect than a square. Knock the symmetry of a square out of alignment and what you get? A rectangle. Which nobody ever said was perfect.
So a circle is not perfect in and of itself, but a completely smooth ball with no blemishes and no asymmetry to its outline…well, that’s different. The grinding ball is very different. Just how different? Well, consider the means by which it briefly enters the life of the boys:
“One Thursday we were walking along shouting this way, and the railroad, the Southern Pacific, which ran above and along the far side of the arroyo, had dropped a grinding ball down there, which was, we found out later, a cannonball thing used in mining. A bunch of them were put in a big vat which turned around and crushed ore. One had been dropped, or thrown…”
Read the paragraph again and try to gauge what the author might be getting at from the perspective of this found ball having a meaning beyond the literal. The train rides along high above the little ravine the boys play in. The grinding ball is found in a place where it should not be—where there never was once before or after—only as the result of having been dropped from above.
From above.
As if by nothing less than the hand of God. The grinding ball is perfect; it is no mere circular shape, but genuinely perfect. By which is meant it is free from imperfection. Flawless. Absolutely smooth. Even a baseball made of rawhide drawn as tightly as possible before stitching is not absolutely smooth. And that is the closest most kids ever get to a grinding ball. But this…this grinding ball. Perfect. As if dropped by the hand of God. It is—like the “heaven” of the golf course—something perfect which does not exist in the world. Which the boys intuitively know cannot—or at least should not—exist in the world. Recognizing this, they bury it. They bury it so good that they can never find it again. Like the golf course, it is a recognition of a paradise lost. The story at its heart is about the fact that perfection cannot exist in the world except under the one condition which we—in our imperfection—allow.
As myth.
Like the grinding ball and the golf course has become to the boys, “The Secret Lion” is a myth. A modern myth that may not be recognizable as such—where are the manly heroes and the beasts and the magic that we associated with myth? Those things exist in the story. In the form of two young boys, a grinding ball and its mysterious appearance and two golfers appearing out of the high weeds like serpents. Not to mention a lion that is both there and not there at the same time.
