The Ballad of the Sad Cafe

I read Carson McCullers' novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, this past year and it's memorable and brilliant for several weighty reasons. It is not a plot-driven thing. Though it mostly follows (and wonderfully draws) the main character, Mick, a young girl just coming into adolescence, it also chronicles the lives of the many others who swirl around her. McCullers writes in the traditions of other great southern writers, like William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. Her gift, I think, is in the portrayal of women, particularly young women. Which is not to say that she isn't adept at portraying other characters - in particular she is deft with children, or child-like personalities.

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, the feature story (a short novella actually) of a collection of seven stories, is a classic of southern writing, and a solid exemplar of McCullers at her best. In it Miss Amelia, a very strong and independent young woman, eschews the help of men and becomes a well-to-do "force of nature". She collects rent, makes and sells the best moonshine, and doctors the sick in the small town she "dominates" and cares about. In conventional southern style, the pleasant, if not a bit odd, rhythms of this life are immediately challenged by the arrival of a destitute misfit, a hunchback claiming to be a distant relative of Miss Amelia. To the shock of the community, she believes him and takes him. Thus begins both a time of wonder and awakening for Miss Amelia, but also triggers events that will lead to her inevitable decline.

(Continued (on July 26, 2010) after a night cap at Ted and Darlene's ...)

McCullers' stories are all about love and longing - for life, for the weak, for art, for music, for the body, for a lover. In "A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud," the closing story of this collection, the male main character speaks to a 12 year old boy, in an attempt, it appears, to save the boy the inevitability of misprised love. His argument turns on the following passage:


'And what do they fall in love with?' ...  'A woman. Is that correct son.' ... 
'They start at the wrong end of love. They begin at the climax. Can you wonder it is so miserable? Do you know how men should love? ... 
The boy sat small and listening and still. Slowly he shook his head. The man leaned closer and whispered: 'A tree. A rock. A cloud.' 


The southern writers have this sense of the immensity of nature, and our self-imposed alienation from it, in common. Faulkner, McCarthy, O'Connor, and McCullers fill their stories with this heady presence of  landscape: rain, heat, trees, flowers, ponds. There are characters that work around it and characters that struggle against it, but those characters who accept that they are merely, and most fully realized when they are, a part of this greater whole, those characters thrive, in the spiritual sense. They understand their place in human society. They appreciate their time in the world. They live naturally in their own skin, loving their own people, and caring for them when that is what's required.

I highly recommend this book of stories, as well as the novel: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

Rode 52 ks (to Emerson and back). Wind SW 17 ks. Avg 31.43 kph.