The Ballad of the Sad Café (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

Miss Amelia, dressed always in graceless men’s clothing, runs the village store and sells corn liquor from her own secret still in the woods. She had once married the town bad boy but indignantly threw him out when he tried to gain sexual favors from her as well as work. The humiliated bridegroom, Macy, reverted to his delinquent ways and ended up in the penitentiary.

Enter the stranger--a bedraggled, hunchbacked dwarf who claims kinship to Miss Amelia. To the amazement of townsfolk, Miss Amelia takes in the penniless Cousin Lymon and he becomes a permanent fixture in her household. Moreover, because the self-centered cousin likes company, Miss Amelia converts her store into a restaurant which soon becomes the center of village social life.

All goes well until the vengeful Macy gets out of prison and returns to plague Miss Amelia. Such is the irony of fate that Cousin Lymon is irresistibly drawn to the vindictive Macy. The miserable Miss Amelia starts to work out with a punching bag. What follows is one of the most bizarre versions in literature of the barroom fist fight, when Miss Amelia and Macy square off for the attentions of the treacherous Cousin Lymon.

This brilliantly original variation on archetypal legend continues McCuller’s meditations, begun in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, on the tragic and solitary nature of love. As Plato pointed out long ago, love exists in the mind of the lover, not in the beloved. The author suggests a more dismal observation, however, that if the beloved is incapable of returning the proffered affection, he tends to despise the lover.

Suggested Readings

McDowell, Margaret B. Carson McCullers. Boston: Twayne, 1980.

Phillips, Robert S. “Painful Love: Carson McCullers’ Parable.” Southwest Review 51 (Winter, 1966): 80-86.

Stebbins, Todd. “McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad Café.” The Explicator 46, no. 2 (Winter, 1988): 36-38.