Monday 19 November 2018

The Ballad of the Sad Café, Carson McCullers, 1951

The Ballad of the Sad Café by Carson McCullers is a masterpiece of American Gothic writing. Published in 1951, the novella is set in a small town in the American south and populated by the bizarre, freaky, rural, ill-educated, violent and often lonely and bored characters that populate many of the novels and films that represent this tradition. In the case of Ballad, essentially a story of failed couplings, an impossible love triangle drives the action: Miss Amelia is the fierce, disagreeable giantess who is opaque of heart and in love with Cousin Lymon. Lymon Willis is a self-indulgent hunchback of indeterminate age, in possession of an inconstant heart and mad not for Amelia, but for Marvin Macy. Marvin is Miss Amelia’s spurned husband, “evil” by all accounts, and determined to take revenge on his wife for her rejection of his love. Love triangles are not uncommon in art, even when the characters are as unlikely as these three: a giantess, a hunchback, and a killer. But the nature of the love that each of these three offers and the reaction of the beloved to that love are quite unique and complex. In the case of Amelia, she marries reformed lothario and thug Marvin for reasons she doesn’t understand, and she resists his advances for ten nights, after which Marvin disappears only to return a decade later, a hardened criminal, bent on destroying Amelia. Amelia in time falls in love with Cousin Lymon, “spoils him to a point beyond reason”, ignores his “mischief making”, his rumour mongering, his masochistic attraction to Amelia’s enemy Marvin, and worst of all, his inconstant heart. Amelia is a woman troubadour, loving her beloved from afar, with a love that is chaste and turned on its head: her beloved is not good or fine or deserving of her care. What is the nature of this love? Cousin Lymon’s ears begin to twitch when he sets eyes on Marvin for the first time (Lymon is like a bat or a living gargoyle, ugly but attuned to his physical reaction to Marvin). He suffers abuse at Marvin's hands and foils Miss Amelia’s attempts to rid the town of Marvin's disruptive presence. Cousin Lymon’s love may well be homosexual, a latent sort, perhaps, chaste, and certainly unrequited but he is dogged in his pursuit of Marvin. Marvin Macey, the third factor in this bizarre sexual triangulation is cruel, abusive and feared by young girls in the community. His desire for the conspicuously hard and masculine Miss Amelia, his unexpected gift (he transfers his property to Miss Amelia, an act of selflessness, perhaps even a sign of self-emasculation), are all strange and inexplicable: he is a heterosexual man who loves a woman who is like a man who cannot consummate her marriage. Carson McCullers is the ideal person to write of the complexities of human sexualty, herself having had a fraught relationship with both men and women. The southern gothic atmosphere, the narrator, herself invested in the history of the town and the peculiar personalities that played out the life and death of the Sad Café has made for an unforgettable novella.


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