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 it “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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The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  

A Sherlock Holmes short story

• Mystery, crime, detective, British Lit
• Published: 1904
• My edition: The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Volume II
• Annotated by: William S. Baring-Gould
• Setting: England; 1894

 

This is Holmes’ second case after Conan Doyle brought the detective back from the dead—the presumed dead that is. But that was all explained in "The Adventure of the Empty House".

 

In this caper, Holmes is brought in to solve a murder that has baffled police detective Stanley Hopkins. Baffled police is often, not always, how Holmes comes by his cases, but Detective Hopkins is a new foil.

 

The victim is the young male secretary to an aged and infirm professor who is writing his magnum opus. The young man has no enemies, nothing appears to have been stolen, and the professor and two domestics can offer irrefutable alibis for each other. The murder weapon is a sealing wax knife, suggesting a crime of passion, not the weapon one would employ in a premeditated attack. The only other clue at the scene is a pair of golden pince-nez.

 

Which of course is more than enough for Holmes to deduce a likely scenario that only wants a bit of testing.

 

Ho hum. I’m a bit more than half-way through the Holmes canon, and I’m growing a bit dubious. Perhaps a little bit of Sherlock is better than every bit. His skill of observation is impressive, but I find that his deductions are often too narrow. What he deduces is certainly plausible, but it is seldom the only possibility; yet, he’s rarely wrong.

 

Still his adventures are usually great fun: banter with Watson, snide commentary of the constabulary efforts, various idiosyncrasies, Watson’s love life, all mostly absent from this tale. Though “Ho hum” is a bit harsh. Perhaps “meh” is more in tune.

 

One quotable by Sherlock. When the detective arrives at 221B Baker Street, shortly before midnight, Holmes is excited by the probability of a caper and opines to Watson…

...all virtuous folk have been long in bed.
 

He can turn a phrase.

 

 

"The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez” is part of Return of Sherlock Holmes collection, though I read it from The Annotated Sherlock Holmes: a two-volume collection of all 60 cases (four novels and 56 short stories), which attempts to put all of Holmes’ cases into fictional chronological order. According to The Annotated collection, “The Adventure of the Pince-Nez” is Sherlock Holmes’ 33nd case.

 

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Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens (novel #263)

  

Every failure teaches a man something, if he will learn; and you are too sensible a man not to learn from this failure. ~ Daniel Doyce to Arthur Clennam

 

Indeed! There must have been a lot of learning going on in this slightly atypical Dickens story.

 

• Author: Charles Dickens
• Victorian lit, British lit
• First Published: 1857
• My edition: Project Gutenberg, free book (eBook)
• Setting: England, briefly in France and Italy, early 19th century
•  Also by this author (that I’ve read): Most of his novels and short stories. For a complete listing, see my Dickens page.

Of the title character, I always assumed Little Dorrit was a child. Dorrit, Amy Dorrit, is a young woman of 22, but she is so slight that she is sometimes mistaken for a child. To her friends and family she is Little Dorrit, a sobriquet she happily owns. Before she was born, Her father, William Dorrit, was confined to the Marshalsea, England’s notorious debtor prison. His family is allowed to live with him, though they may come and go. Little Dorrit, is born within the walls of the Marshalsea and her mother dies when she is a child. Tending to father and family, is the sum of her life’s story—a life she is contentedly suited to.

 

Atypical I said, though I am hard pressed to elucidate. I felt it more than I apprehended it. Dickens usually woos me to love some humble character and then breaks my heart when they suffer cruel injustice. The humble character, in this instance Little Dorrit, is the soul of virtue, kindness, humility, and love, but she isn’t miserable; I couldn’t quite pity her. The cruel injustice, so different in this case, comes from good fortune. William Dorrit experiences a reversal of fortunes. He and two other children want to forget their former shame. With it, they also forget Little Dorrit’s constancy and labors of love on their behalf. She is an embarrassment when she does not, in their eyes, rise to the family’s new social status. For this they cruelly berate her, and now—she is pitiable.

 

There are other reversals of fortune; in other directions, and other Dickens hallmarks: preposterous caricatures, a heinous villain, comic relief, a hopeless love story, and that signature oh, so satisfying justice in the end. This is the second Dickens novel in a row with a talking bird (part of the comic relief), though the talking parrot in Little Dorrit does not steal scenes as the Raven Grip did in Barnaby Rudge.

 

Did I mention two Dickens in a row? I just finished 700+ pages of Barnaby Rudge when The Classic Club Spin landed on this 1,000+ page story. And before the two Dickens novels I had the 800+ page Stephen King novel 11/22/63. I am ready for some lighter_­ fare—literally as in something lighter than a 3 pound book.

 

But I don’t mean to complain. All three were very good. For Little Dorrit…

 

I give it 4 out of 5 stars

 

 

 

This was title #31 of 50 for The Classics Club Challenge –Round IV, and my spin read for The Classics Club Spin #45

 

Have you read Little Dorrit? Did you find it atypical? Where do you rank it amongst Dickens’ novels?

 

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Never Sniff a Gift Fish by Patrick McManus

  

Author: Patrick F. McManus

Category: Short Stories, Humor

First Published: 1983

My edition: Owl Books 1984, paperback

Also by this author (that I’ve read): They Shoot Canoes Don’t They; A Fine and Pleasant Misery

 

Never Sniff a Gift Fish is the third collection of short stories by the greatest outdoorsman humorist of our time.

 

I don’t actually know that he’s the greatest. I was just practicing the art of Fibrication: a skill that McManus extolls in “The Fibricators”. McManus learned to fibricate as a child from the wily and crotchety mountain man Rancid Crabtree. According to McManus, Rancid had…

Devoted his whole life to mastery of the art of fibrication. Rancid was the Picasso of the fib. He could do little white fibs, big blue fibs, realistic fibs, impressionistic fibs, abstract fibs, surrealistic fibs, nonobjective fibs, and even pop fibs.

McManus learned well from the master. His short stories, always center around hunting, fishing, hiking, etc., and resonate with the outdoorsman. In most of his stories there is a “yes, something like that happened to me once” moment. But McManus’ adventures are retold with self-effacing drollery, irony, and exaggeration—in a word—fibrication.

 

Some of the tales are flashbacks to youth involving his pal Crazy Eddie Muldoon, or the sage Rancid Crabtree. Other stories are more contemporary with fishing and hunting buddy Retch Sweeny.

 

This collection includes gems such as: “Poof—No Eyebrows”, “Two-Man-Tent Fever”, “The Christmas Hatchet”, the title story “Never Sniff a Gift Fish”, the aforementioned “The Fibricators” and one of my favorites “The Bush Pilots”

 

Wherein, McManus describes a childhood adventure with Crazy Eddie Muldoon, when they built an airplane, and launched it from the roof of the Muldoon family barn. But in this story, he recalls an earlier ambition of being deep sea divers, again with homemade apparatus. Test Diver Patrick startles a nearby herd of cattle, as he emerges from a deep spot in the creek as a…

…streaming, slime-covered creature with an inverted milk pail on its head.

McManus notes that…

Oddly, the route of the cows’ departure was marked in later years by an unusually lush growth of grass. The wondrous vitality of the swatch of grass became something of a local mystery, as did the refusal of the cows to go anywhere near creek for two weeks afterward…

Not my normal fare, but a nice break in between two Dickens tomes. McManus never disappoints. Have you read this wonderful American humorist?

 

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Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens — novel #262

All good ends can be worked out by good means. Those that cannot, are bad; and may be counted so at once, and left alone. ~ Mr. Haredale in retort to the idea: “the end justifies the means”

The novel Barnaby Rudge is perhaps Dickens’ evidence supporting Mr. Haredale’s surmise. Though the mob of characters, literal mob, is as deluded about the virtue of their intended end as they are about their means.

 

• Full Title: Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty
• Author: Charles Dickens
• Genre: British lit, historical fiction
• First Published: 1841
• My edition: The Project Gutenberg, eBook, freebook
• Setting: London, England and surrounding countryside, 1775-1780
• Also by Dickens (that I’ve read): The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations

 

I seldom see this novel listed with the full title: Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of Eighty. That is the Gordon Riots of 1780: A week-long period of violence, arson, and looting in London, that was initially intended as protest against the Papist Act of 1778, which eased official discrimination against British Catholics. Lord George Gordon intended to introduce a petition repealing the Papist act while 40,000 or more supporters escorted him to parliament and to protest outside as he introduced the petition. But the crowd, soon became a mob, and lawlessness and destruction ensued. The ostensibly protestant throng, was according to Dickens…

...sprinkled doubtless here and there with honest zealots, but composed for the most part of the very scum and refuse of London, whose growth was fostered by bad criminal laws, bad prison regulations, and the worst conceivable police.

But the riots are really just the historical backdrop to Dickens’ human drama. There are not one, but two beautiful maidens. Dolly Varden is the daughter of an honest and brave locksmith and a zealously protestant mother. She is not a bad soul, but rather vain and immature. Her friend Emma Haredale is the orphaned ward of her Catholic uncle Mr. Geoffrey Haredale. Both girls have multiple admirers, villains and true hearts. Dolly is too foolish to recognize hers; Emma is kept from hers by a bitter family rivalry. Both will be caught up in the dangerous events of the riots.

 

And of course, there is Barnaby Rudge: physically an adult, but intellectually a child. If you’ve read any Dickens you already know that Barnaby has a heart of gold. But he is dangerously suggestible and turns out as a champion of the rioting mob.

 

There are many other characters, all perfect Dickens’ caricatures: villains, cowards, heroes,
innocents, fops, and buffoons. But there is only one more that I will mention. Barnaby has a loyal pet raven, Grip. Grip can speak many phrases: "I’m a devil, I’m a devil, I’m a devil"; "never say die"; and "put the kettle on, we’ll all have tea". But Grip seems to comprehend the meaning of his phrases more than most talking birds who simply mimic human speech. Grip, in Barnaby Rudge, is modeled after Dickens’ own pet Raven named Grip. In fact, Dickens had Grip I, Grip II, and Grip III. And Barnaby's Grip, or was it Dickens' Grip? was the inspiration for Edgar Alan Poe’s famous poem, The Raven.

 

Barnaby Rudge is a thought provoking and unsettling depiction of how quickly righteous causes can be corrupted. It provides a sharp contrast between personal integrity and mob rule. It is nonetheless, one of Dickens less popular novels. I can see that. I found it captivating, and educational (more on that in a moment), but it just didn’t quite break my heart and then miraculously mend it. Maybe I’m just too familiar with Dickens’ trope.

 

My rating 4/5 stars

 

 

Title #30 of 50 for The Classics Club Challenge – Round IV

Title #12 of 15 for The Complete Dickens novels

 

I had never heard of the Gordon Riots, so this novel taught me of something I was ignorant. But although the riots are without a doubt historical, most of Dickens’ narrative is embellishment. I know of the riots now, but would need much more study to know about them.

 

I’ve only two Dickens novels left: Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend. My favorite remains A Tale of Two Cites. Second is too close to call between David Copperfield and Bleak House. What is your favorite Dickens? What did you think of Barnaby Rudge?

 

I really want a pet raven now! 

 

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Classics Club Spin #45

UPDATE 

 

It is time for the 45th edition of the Classics Club Spin – List 20 books from my Classics Club “to be read” list, and post it to my blog by Sunday, August 16, 2026; the mods will then pick a random number, and I have until October 4 to read the corresponding book. 

 

And I just so happen to have exactly 20 books left on my current classic club list.

And the winner is #18, Little Dorrit which will make two Dickens in a row for me. I haven't even written my review of Barnaby Rudge yet.

My spin list: 

 

1. Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu

2. The Ballad of the Sad Café by Carson McCullers

3. The Godfather by Mario Puzo

4. Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis

5. 2001: A Space Odyssey Arthur C. Clarke

6. A Coffin for Dimitrios by Eric Ambler

7. Grendel by John Gardner

8. Tess of d’Ubervilles by Thomas Hardy

9. A Spy in the House of Love by Anaïs Nin

10. The Long Winter (Little House #6) by Laura Ingalls Wilder

11. The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov

12. Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

13. Post Office by Charles Bukowski

14. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens

15. The Deer Slayer by James Fenimore Cooper

16. The Silver Sword (Escape from Warsaw) by Ian Serrallier

17. Cool Hand Luke by Don Pearce

18. Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens

19. The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov

20. Casino Royale by Ian Fleming

 

I’d most like one of the three Sci-Fi classics by Clarke or Asimov. I don’t want Dickens, because I’m currently reading Barnaby Rudge. I love Dickens, but I don’t want him back to back.

 

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