Carson McCullers’ novella The Ballad of the Sad Cafe was first published in the magazine Harper’s Bazaar in 1943, then collected in a 1951 book that also collected McCullers’ other novels as well. Currently, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe is most often collected with six of McCullers’ short stories.
The Ballad of the Sad Cafe tells the story of Miss Amelia, who opens a cafe in her small Southern town. The opening of the novella describes the bleak setting: “The town itself is dreary...the town is lonesome, sad, and like a place that is far off and estranged from all other places in the world.” (3)
Miss Amelia is a fascinating character. She is perhaps the wealthiest person in the small town, and something of an outcast and loner. “She was a dark, tall woman with bones and muscles like a man. Her hair was cut short and brushed back from the forehead...There were those who would have courted her, but Miss Amelia cared nothing for the love of men and was a solitary person.” (4) As we can see from this excerpt, Miss Amelia is described as subverting the gender expectations of her time. Are we meant to interpret Miss Amelia as a queer character? I’m not sure, since we’re not given any clues that Miss Amelia is attracted to women.
Everything changes in Miss Amelia’s life when a hunchback named Lymon Willis comes to town, claiming he’s a distant relative of hers. To the surprise of all, she welcomes Lymon in and lets him live in her house. She also turns her store into a cafe, and Miss Amelia becomes a most unlikely hostess.
I read The Ballad of the Sad Cafe in high school, for a class on Short Novels, and I really enjoyed it at the time. One of the passages that has always stayed with me are four paragraphs about 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. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries...Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many.” (25-6) That idea has always fascinated me, that couples are comprised of a lover and a beloved. I’m not sure how accurate I find that idea to be in practice, but it’s a very interesting thesis.
The conflict in the novel occurs when Marvin Macy returns to town after serving time in prison. He was briefly married to Miss Amelia, but suffice it to say, their marriage was a disaster.
I enjoyed The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, but I have some notes on it. It’s told by a third-person omniscient narrator, and the narrative voice is very intrusive. I’m not sure if the narrative voice needed to be so intrusive—it feels very different from the third-person narrative voice in McCullers’ novels The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding.
The Ballad of the Sad Cafe was adapted as a play by Edward Albee in 1963, and I can understand why someone would want to adapt it to a different medium, as there is so much in the novella that goes unsaid, or could be expanded upon.
The six short stories are a mixed bag, as short stories usually are. The first story, “Wunderkind” was my favorite, and it was McCullers’ first published short story, written when she was just seventeen years old. It shows a young writer effectively harnessing her talents. “The Sojourner” was effective, and it reminded me a lot of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work—McCullers must have read Fitzgerald’s short story “Babylon Revisited.” The final short story in the book, “A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud,” felt like a pastiche of Thomas Wolfe’s style. Even the title was reminiscent of Wolfe’s often-repeated phrase “A stone, a leaf, a door,” which he used in his debut novel Look Homeward, Angel. Perhaps the story was meant as an affectionate tribute from one Southern writer to another.
I’d recommend The Ballad of the Sad Cafe; it’s a story that will stick with you long after you finish reading it.
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