The Ballad of the Sad Café by Carson McCullers — novel #264

  

It was not a common thing to have an unknown hunchback walk to the store at midnight and then sit down and cry.

• Author: Carson McCullers
• Southern Gothic, American Lit, Novella
• First Published: in Harper's Bazaar 1943; in book form in 1951
• My edition: Mariner Books, 1979 (eBook)
• Setting: Small mill town, Southern U.S.A. probably 1930s
• Also by this author (that I’ve read): The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, The Member of the Wedding 

 

You might infer from the title and my opening hook that this novella involves a hunchback, and a café. Indeed, there are really only four characters: Lymon the hunchback; Miss Amelia his second step-cousin or something and owner of the café; Marvin Macy, Miss Amelia’s husband; and the fourth—the café.

 

I think it was the town that was sad, before there was a café. It was previously a store operated by Miss Amelia, selling among other things her own bootleg whiskey. If not a leading citizen of the unnamed town she is its dominant character. She is tall, rich from suing people, cross-eyed, stoic, and fiercely independent. She had a brief disastrous marriage to town troublemaker Marvin Macy, but he left, more precisely was pushed away by Miss Amelia and ended up in prison. It was a sad, sleepy place until Cousin Lymon strolls into town late one night, professes to be a distant relative of Miss Amelia, and sits down and cries. Surprisingly, Miss Amelia takes him into her home, and the two form a bond. In fact, Miss Amelia loves him.

When she watched him her face had a bright, soft look, and when she spoke his name there lingered in her voice the undertone of love.

But, the author offers a memorable discourse on love that leaves the reader apprehensive of the happy ending. I’ll come back to that.

 

Happily, Lymon’s arrival inspires the advent of the Café, which becomes the town’s center point, a place of comfort and contentment. 

For the atmosphere of a proper café implies these qualities: fellowship, the satisfactions of the belly, and a certain gaiety and grace of behavior.

All is good, until Marvin returns. He makes no attempt on his conjugal rights, nor claims on Miss Amelia’s money, but the tension is rising. The town, and the reader sense a showdown coming.

 

Like most of McCullers’ writing, this story is character driven, but there’s still a plot. I believe it has to do with those famous few paragraphs about love, or on the unequal nature of love.

First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons—but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved.

And…

The beloved fears and hates the lover…

There’s much more of course, and I understand that some find it poignant. I can’t say I agree, nor that I like it much.

 

But that didn’t stop me from liking this novella. I disdain cliché or I’d call tit “hauntingly beautiful”; fairly certain someone already has. It is southern gothic after all. McCullers’ writing is definitely beautiful and evoking sympathy. I felt for all the characters, even Marvin. There’s no happy ending. In fact it ends with a chain gang on the outskirts of town, singing a melancholy tune—a sad ballad even.

The music will swell until at last it seems that the sound does not come from the twelve men on the gang, but from the earth itself, or the wide sky. It is music that causes the heart to broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy and fright.

My rating 4 out of 5 stars

 

This is title #32 of 50 for The Classics Club Challenge – Round IV

 

This review is only for the novella. The Ballad of the Sad Cafe is also the title of a book of collected stories by McCullers: Ballad plus six short stores. I will read and review the short stories separately.

 

 

As an alternative to McCullers’ definition of love, I offer the following. I like this much better.

 

1 Corinthians 13:

⁴ Love is patient, love is kind, it is not jealous; love does not brag, it is not arrogant. ⁵ It does not act disgracefully, it does not seek its own benefit; it is not provoked, does not keep an account of a wrong suffered, ⁶ it does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; ⁷ it keeps every confidence, it believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. (NASB)

 

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