[In the following excerpt, Cook suggests that The Ballad of the Sad Café celebrates the capacity of love to transform a community and is an elegy to the ephemerality of such love.]

After working on drafts of The Member of the Wedding for two years, in the fall of 1943 Carson McCullers interrupted her work, took a trip to Saratoga Springs and in six weeks' time wrote what is now her best-known work, The Ballad of the Sad Café. Like McCullers's other novels, The Ballad of the Sad Café is the story of lonely people falling in love; but it is more than that. It is a celebration of the power of love itself and an elegy on its passing. It is, as the title indicates, a ballad, a short oral tale, transcribed into written prose, that in Frankie's words has a beginning and an end, a shape like a song—a song about love and its miraculous effect on a town and its inhabitants. Using such traditional ballad motifs as natural and supernatural signs, magic potions, and grotesque characters resembling birds and animals, McCullers tells the story of a strange and tragic love affair between a mannish giant of a woman, Miss Amelia Evans, and a hunchback dwarf, Cousin Lymon, that turns a small backwater town in Georgia into a stage of high, albeit bizarre, drama and romance. The extreme physical grotesquery of the story's characters, the remoteness of its setting—"the town .. . is like a place that is far off and estranged from all other places in the world"—and the quaint, almost childish story-telling language of the narrator, combine to remove the events of the tale from the realm of most of McCullers's fiction, the South in the 1930s and 1940s, to a mythic, timeless realm of elemental passion and violence. Love in this archetypal, fairy-tale world is not merely a matter of a private susceptibility or idiosyncrasy; rather it is shown to be a "stored up," almost magical power within all human beings, which if triggered by the right circumstances—and it is impossible to say what those circumstances will be—will effect a complete transformation of the lover and make itself dramatically felt in the world at large.

The miraculous power of love in The Ballad of the Sad Café to change people and places is implicit in its nostalgic, flashback structure. The novel begins with a brief description of the town as it is now, a dreary desolate place, "a place where there is absolutely nothing to do," and moves quickly back into the history of Miss Amelia's past love affair with the hunchback, Cousin Lymon. This love affair, now long since over, lasted six years and created in the duration Miss Amelia's wonderful café, which turned the town into an exciting, lively place where people came from miles around on a Saturday night to talk and have a good time. The love affair and the café both came to a disastrous end, however, when Miss Amelia's former husband, "a terrible character," returned to the town, caused ruin and then went on his way again. The Ballad concludes where it began, back in the present, the love affair long passed, the café boarded up, and the town so wearisome and dull that "the soul rots with boredom." Like a gold-rush town out West, the town in The Ballad now sits in the hot sun, abandoned and falling to ruin. Yet the very extensiveness of its dilapidation and the occasional appearance of a "terrible dim" face in the upstairs window of the boarded-up café suggest a past in which something extraordinary once happened—in which love, not gold, brought an intense if temporary life.

Though Miss Amelia's love for Cousin Lymon is the energizing force in The Ballad of the Sad Café their strange affair is only part of the larger story of the café itself. The café is the true subject of The Ballad, for it is in the café's miraculous growth and sudden destruction that we see the dramatic changes brought about by love—changes in the personality of Miss Amelia and of the town. The café is the creation of love, a rare external blossoming of love's inwardness tying the happiness of the community to the fate of private desire. But the café is also a measure of love's fragility. Its appearance marks the narrow limits within which love is possible. Its fall evokes again that tragic sense of loss encountered in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

The birth of the café comes suddenly and unexpectedly—the result of a surprise of encounter at midnight. Standing on her front porch late one summer evening, Miss Amelia and a number of the local mill workers see a misshapen, solitary figure coming down the road into town. As it slowly approaches they realize that it is not a lost calf, as they had at first supposed, but a hunchbacked dwarf carrying a lopsided suitcase. The hunchback moves haltingly toward the company on the porch and then introduces himself as Lymon Willis, cousin to Miss Amelia Evans. Miss Amelia has never claimed kin to anyone. Thus when the hunchback produces a faded-out photograph of "two pale, withered-up children" to back his claim, he gets only empty stares from everyone present. Miss Amelia stares too. But when the hunchback suddenly begins to cry, she takes two great strides across the porch and "gingerly with one long brown forefinger . . . touched the hump on his back." She then does something that shocks everyone present. She offers the hunchback a drink of free liquor out of her hip flask and invites him in for a meal and a bed.

Miss Amelia has never been one to offer free food and lodging to anyone. Since her father died when she was nineteen, she has lived alone spurning all company. Except for a short, disastrous marriage soon after her father's death, she has especially avoided the company of men. A tall, dark masculine woman "with bones and muscles like a man," who wears swamp boots all day long, Miss Amelia through hard work and cutthroat business practices has become the richest person in town. She carpenters, runs a still in the swamp, and makes a handsome profit in her feed store. She is also a fine doctor, but if a woman comes to her with a "female complaint," she only rubs her swamp boots together in an embarrassed way and turns her away. Except for the doctoring, which she does free, Miss Amelia has nothing to do with people whom she cannot make a profit out of. Certainly she has never "invited anyone to eat with her unless she was planning to trick them in some way, or make money out of them." Taking in an itinerant hunchback thus makes no sense to the townspeople, who begin to think she plans to murder him for something he has in his suitcase. The real reason, as it soon becomes obvious, is more mysterious. She has fallen in love with him.

The café begins three days after Miss Amelia offers Cousin Lymon bed and board. That Saturday evening a selfappointed delegation visits Miss Amelia's store to find out what has happened to the hunchback. But instead of discovering a murder victim, they find Cousin Lymon alive and thriving and Miss Amelia strangely changed. The crowd of men are at first surprised, then fascinated—fascinated especially by Cousin Lymon, who, after looking at each of them carefully, struts over to a full sack of guano, sits down, and begins to talk. What he says is mostly nonsense: lies, bragging, and idle gossip, but there gradually comes over the gawking group as they stand awkwardly around an unusual feeling, like "an air of intimacy in the room and a vague festivity."

The hunchback is partly the cause of this feeling. He has what the narrator describes as "an instinct which is usually found only in small children, an instinct to establish immediate and vital contact between himself and all things in the world." He is "extremely sociable." But Miss Amelia also contributes to the odd sociable feeling in the air. She is behaving in an extraordinary fashion. Instead of staring at the company until they become uncomfortable and leave her premises, she seems to accept them. She even goes back into the kitchen and brings out glasses to serve liquor in the store. (Before she had only sold it secretly by the bottle in her dark backyard.) She then opens up two boxes of crackers "so that they were there hospitably on the counter and anyone who wished could take one free."

Such is the start of the café. For the next six years it grows steadily. Miss Amelia begins cooking catfish dinners for fifteen cents a plate. Cousin Lymon entertains. The café quickly becomes the "warm center point of the town," "the only place of pleasure for miles around."

The growth of the café is rapid and astonishing—the more astonishing in that it obviously reflects the profound changes that have occurred in Miss Amelia's personality. Miss Amelia has become sociable. She acts pleasantly to people, and occasionally she and Cousin Lymon go out on the weekends—to a funeral or a revival meeting.

She starts looking after her appearance, and, though she still wears overalls and swamp boots during the week, on Sundays she puts on a red dress. She even moderates her tough business practices and is "not so quick to cheat her fellow man." Above all she continues to idolize Cousin Lymon. Stingy and mean all her life, she can refuse him nothing. It is for him alone that she has turned her feed store into a café. The café is her most elaborate gesture of affection.

But the growth of the café also reflects a new feeling among the townspeople. A change of heart in a town's most powerful citizen has its inevitable effect on everybody else around. Everyone seems more sociable, and the café becomes the place for general gossip and excitement. Just as Miss Amelia finds in her love for Cousin Lymon an interest in life beyond making money, the people of the town find in the society of the café a "freedom and illicit gladness" that makes them forget their dull work in the factory and their grinding poverty. At the café the people enjoy themselves as social human beings. Instinctively they act with a "certain gaiety and grace of behavior," taking pride in the fellowship the café offers as well as in "the satisfactions of the belly."

The effect of Cousin Lymon's arrival in town is thus little short of miraculous. The hard-hearted Miss Amelia has fallen in love. A café has been started where there was once a feed store. An inert, boring town has been brought to life. Miss Amelia's feed store turned café symbolizes a profound shift in values that has occurred within the community. Following the example of the all-powerful Miss Amelia, the people have become less concerned with matters of economic and practical necessity and more concerned with matters of larger social interest. They have begun to talk to each other and to find each other interesting. More importantly, they have begun to take pride in the fact that there is more to their lives than mere survival. "It was not only the warmth, the decorations, and the brightness that made the café what it was. There is a deeper reason why the café was so precious to this town. And this deeper reason has to do with a certain pride that had not hitherto been known in these parts." That certain pride is the pride in knowing that as human beings they have a special value above and beyond what can be measured in financial terms. It is a pride that makes them act with dignity and finds expression in social ceremony:

The people in the town were . . . proud when sitting at the tables in the café. They washed before coming to Miss Amelia's and scraped their feet very politely on the threshold as they entered the café. There, for a few hours at least, the deep bitter knowing that you are not worth much in the world could be laid low.

Oliver Evans has described the townspeople in The Ballad of the Sad Café as "a symbol of suspicion" and "among the least sympathetic of Mrs. McCullers's characters" [The Ballad of Carson McCullers: A Biography, 1966]. They are, I think, more complicated than that. To be sure, many of them are gossips and heartily enjoy the spectacle of someone being done in "by some scandalous and terrible means." But they can be generous as well: "people in this town will as often as not be kindly if they have a chance." For the most part they welcome the happy change that has come over Miss Amelia, and they hope her good influence on the town will continue. As the ballad-narrator McCullers asks us to think of them "as a whole"; and, as a whole, it is obvious from their activity in the café, that they can behave with unexpected dignity and grace. Like Miss Amelia herself, they show a more human side to their personalities than had hitherto been seen. The café has revealed their own and Miss Amelia's better self.

But the café is doomed. It is doomed by the mysterious force that brought it into being, by the perverse powers of love. In the final reckoning the love felt by Miss Amelia for Cousin Lymon is an unbalanced, disorderly love, containing in its single-minded intensity the seeds of its own destruction. Like the love felt by Singer for Antonapoulos, the love Miss Amelia feels for Cousin Lymon is a possessive, irrational, nonreciprocal love and therefore tragic and doomed. At one point in The Ballad of the Sad Café, the narrator provides an extended, prophetic definition of the love felt by Miss Amelia a definition which doubles as a death warrant for the café and the town:

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. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world—a world intense and strange, complete in himself. . . .

Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. .. . A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.

It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. 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. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.

This description of love is the best-known, most frequently quoted passage from Mrs. McCullers's oeuvre. In a more realistic mode of fiction, such a forthright explanation of love's secrets might have the effect of making love appear mechanical or obvious. In The Ballad, however, it retains the mystery and force of a magic formula.

At the heart of love's mystery, as expressed in this passage, is the blunt, cruel fact that love is a private rather than a mutual experience. The lover, instead of breaking out of his isolation and sharing his experiences with the beloved, creates a charged, illusory world of his own, "a world, intense, and strange, complete in himself," a world in which he blindly idolizes the beloved. One thinks of Mick, Jake Blount, and Dr. Copeland turning Singer into a "chimerical" god and friend, of Frankie turning her brother's wedding into a wedding of her own, and of Berenice turning three of her husbands into replicas of the dead Ludy Freeman. McCullers further emphasizes the absolute separateness of the lover and the beloved, in this passage, by describing the beloved as a mere "stimulus" for the "stored-up love" within the lover. Like a chemical catalyst, the beloved merely precipitates a reaction that was all ready to go off and that runs its course without involving or changing his own interests and needs. There is, in fact, no apparent relation between the personality and appearance of the beloved and the nature of the love experienced: "the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself."

The final paragraph of this description is in many ways the most interesting one. Certainly, it has the most dire implications for the future of the café: "The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved." The beloved's fear and hatred of the lover injects a new destructive element into Mrs. McCullers's love relationships. In her other novels the beloved is either indifferent to, or, at worst, mildly irritated by the lover. Singer misunderstands his visitors and thinks some of them "half crazy," but he does not hate or fear them. Private Williams ignores Captain Penderton; it is doubtful that he even suspects he is beloved. And Janice and Jarvis evidently have no idea that Frankie wants to be part of the marriage. But the love possessing Miss Amelia is a love to excite fear. It is an elementary force, too mysterious, too demanding, even too savage, to ignore or shrug off with indifference. Like the love described in the following two stanzas from W. H. Auden's poem, "The More Loving One," it is a love to inspire dread:

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Unable to return love, the beloved fears love's unknown powers. He fears "with the best of reasons" that the lover will strip him of his individuality, will possess him. It is partly for this reason that Cousin Lymon eventually turns on "the more loving" Miss Amelia and helps destroy the café.

McCullers uses this long passage on the nature of love to introduce Marvin Macy, Miss Amelia's former husband. Marvin Macy's early marriage to Miss Amelia and his return to town are thus to be seen as a working out of lover's contradictions as stated in this elaborate definition. Marvin Macy is the wronged lover and the avenger of love's imbalance. He is the one most responsible for the eventual destruction of the café.

When Miss Amelia was nineteen years old, Marvin Macy had fallen hopelessly and unaccountably in love with her. At that time he was the handsomest and most dangerous man in town. His reputation "was as bad if not worse than that of any young man in the county." But falling in love had "reversed the character of Marvin Macy," just as it was to reverse Miss Amelia's character years later. He changed from being a brutal no-good, who, among other things, "carried about with him the dried and salted ear of a man he had killed in a razor fight," to a perfectly behaved gentleman: "He was good to his brother and foster mother. . . . saved his wages and learned thrift. . . . He attended church and was present at all religious meetings." But he changed to no avail. "The lover and the beloved come from different countries," and though Miss Amelia married him, she did so only to reject him. During the ten days of their "scandalous" marriage, she managed to bilk her husband of all his property without letting him come near her. She then threw him out of her house. Disgraced and desperate, Marvin Macy had left town and shortly afterward was arrested and sentenced to prison in Atlanta for robbing three filling stations and an A&P store in Society City. He had evidently reverted to his old self. Miss Amelia could not have been happier. "Deeply gratified," she sold all the gifts he had given her and cut up his Klansman's robe to cover her tobacco plants.

This "grotesque affair" between Marvin Macy and Miss Amelia reveals a more menacing side to love than that evidenced by the "warm" café; a side, moreover, that cannot stay hidden forever. Housed with Marvin Macy in his Atlanta cell were those darker mysteries of love, which no one in the town was able to forget: "The thought of him trapped in his cell in the penitentiary, was like a troubling undertone beneath the happy love of Miss Amelia and the gaiety of the café." Thus it is no surprise that when Marvin Macy returns home after his release, "not a living soul in all the town was glad to see him"—not a living soul, that is, except Cousin Lymon.

The moment Cousin Lymon catches sight of Marvin Macy strolling idly through town with his tin suitcase, he too falls in love. Before he has been only the "beloved." Like a petted and fawned-over child, he has cried for and got everything he wanted from the foolishly indulgent Miss Amelia. But with Marvin Macy's arrival, Cousin Lymon becomes the lover. As passionate and devoted in his own way as Miss Amelia has been in hers and Marvin Macy had been in his, Cousin Lymon will not let Marvin Macy out of his sight. Whining plaintively, waiting patiently and wiggling his ears (his most enticing gesture of affection), Cousin Lymon follows the handsome ex-convict about as a dog follows its master. When Macy ignores him or treats him rudely, as he often does, Cousin Lymon would then "perch himself on the bannister of the front porch much as a sick bird huddles on a telephone wire, and grieve publicly." Cousin Lymon becomes in effect Marvin Macy's slave, and Macy uses him for his own revenge on Miss Amelia. He encourages Cousin Lymon to sass and ridicule his former wife, and sometimes to please Macy, Cousin Lymon would cross his eyes as Miss Amelia's were crossed and strut around imitating her gestures in a manner that was "so terrible that even the silliest customer of the café . . . did not laugh." Marvin Macy also got Cousin Lymon to serve him free meals at the café, and eventually he moved in on both of them, forcing Miss Amelia out of her own bedroom just as she had forced him out years before.

Marvin Macy's return thus brings the fortunes of love full circle. The wronged husband returns to steal his wife's lover. Miss Amelia, caught between her love for Cousin Lymon and her hatred for Marvin Macy, can only grit her teeth and glare at her husband "in a wild and crooked way." The love that had saved her now traps her. She dares not throw out Macy for fear of losing Cousin Lymon, and the thought of the house silent and empty again is more than she can bear: "Once you have lived with another, it is a great torture to have to live alone. The silence of a firelit room when suddenly the clock stops ticking, the nervous shadows in an empty house—it is better to take in your mortal enemy than face the terror of living alone." She has never been so vulnerable. The comforts of love have opened up depths of terror she could hardly have suspected before. Love's tragic formula is working itself out.

The final event of the novel is a terrific fight between Miss Amelia and Marvin Macy. The fight follows a period filled with strange portents: sudden changes in the weather, erratic behavior from Miss Amelia, a growing intensity in the conversation of Cousin Lymon, and the smell of "a secret meanness" that comes off Marvin Macy. Everywhere in the ballad world there are "signs too plain to be overlooked," signs that make the fate of Miss Amelia's love and the café a matter of apocalyptic importance.

The fight takes place on Ground Hog Day. It is a day in which "there was every sign." The ground hog, according to a report from Cousin Lymon, had seen his shadow, meaning bad weather ahead, and at noon a hawk with a bloody breast had circled twice around the property of Miss Amelia. That evening at seven, "a number of mingled possibilities," Miss Amelia and Marvin Macy enter the crowded café, greased and ready for battle. The fight lasts half an hour. After an exchange of blows Miss Amelia grabs Marvin Macy around the waist, bends him slowly backward to the floor, and goes for his throat. Suddenly, Cousin Lymon, who has been perched on the café counter, springs twelve feet through the air, lands on Miss Amelia's back and clutches at her neck "with his clawed little fingers." After that Marvin Macy easily wins: "because of the hunchback the fight was won by Marvin Macy." Helped by Cousin Lymon, Marvin Macy spends the rest of the night wrecking the place. They broke the piano, "carved terrible words on the café tables," poured syrup over the kitchen floor and went out in the swamp and destroyed Miss Amelia's still. The two then leave town together never to be heard from again.

The café thus comes to its end, a victim to the forces that created it. Its flourishing had always been temporary and problematical, occurring in that uncertain period between love's initial creativity and its inevitable failure. It was only a matter of time before the imbalance of passion that destroyed Marvin Macy's marriage would wreck the café as well. It had happened before; it would happen again. The "signs . . . were too plain to be overlooked."

The events leading up to and following the fight in the café run a dramatic course encountered before in McCullers's novels. It may be described as one of rising hope leading to a sharp, violent confrontation with reality, followed by disillusionment and despair—the pattern of the interrupted fantasy or daydream, of emotional intoxication plummeting into emotional withdrawal. The arrival of Marvin Macy, the uncertain behavior of Miss Amelia, the increasing restlessness of the townspeople, and the myriad signs, all combine to create a charged atmosphere, an "atmosphere of imminent explosion," to use David Madden's characterization of all McCullers's fiction, that threatens to break down the fragile structure of relationships making life in the town so intense and interesting [see Madden, "Transfixed among the Self-inflicted Ruins: Carson McCullers's The Mortgaged Heart" Southern Literary Journal 5 (Fall 1972)]. The fight, like the death of Singer, the shooting of Private Williams, and Frankie's "wrecked" wedding, brings the long-expected and feared return to boredom and isolation.

Only now it is an isolation made the more unbearable by the loss of past hope. Miss Amelia goes into immediate decline. She becomes "thin as old maids are thin when they grow crazy," and her eyes which had always been crossed, "slowly day by day . . . were more crossed, and it was as though they sought each other out to exchange a little glance of grief and lonely recognition." The café is boarded up and now "leans so far to the right that it is . . . only a question of time when it will collapse completely." The town has become oppressively, hopelessly dull:

There is absolutely nothing to do in the town. Walk around the mill pond, stand kicking at a rotten stump, figure out what you can do with the old wagon wheel by the side of the road near the church. The soul rots with boredom. You might as well do down to the Forks Falls highway and listen to the chain gang.

Without love the town is thus left in a state of living death. Miss Amelia's passion may have been unhealthy, possessive, and unbalanced, but it was a temporary salvation from isolation and the boredom of being alone. For better or for worse, it brought people together, gave them something to talk about, and established new relations among them. And it seems that any relationship between people, even one that turns to jealousy and hate, is better than no relationship at all—or one based on the mechanical necessities of money and work. Early in the novel the narrator describes the wonderful whiskey that Miss Amelia made in her still. When drunk, the whiskey acted on the heart in the way fire acted on a piece of paper written on in lemon juice—it revealed its secret message: "Things that have gone unnoticed, thoughts that have been harbored far back in the dark mind are suddenly recognized and comprehended." Love is shown to work in a similar fashion. It too acts as a magic potion, awakening hidden feelings and revealing people to each other as people—not things or blank pieces of paper. What is revealed is not always pleasant: "a love [could be] both violent and debased." It could and did result in jealousy, anger, and violence. But it also brought people out of their solitude, intensified their experiences, and filled their lives with what Robert Frost has called "the shocks and changes that keep us sane" ["On Looking up by Chance at the Constellations"]. It made life complicated, but it made it interesting as well.

The Ballad of the Sad Café does not end, however, with the death of Miss Amelia's love, the vanishing of Cousin Lymon, and the boarding up of the café. In an epilogue entitled "The Twelve Mortal Men," McCullers adds a coda or envoy to her ballad, which, as Ihab Hassan has suggested, speaks out its hidden refrain [Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel, 1961]. It is, in fact, a description of the chain gang singing in chorus on the Forks Falls highway, a chorus, which, like The Ballad itself, celebrates a sad joy springing out of boredom, pain, and death:

All day there is the sound of the picks striking into the clay earth, hard sunlight, the smell of sweat. And everyday there is music. One dark voice will start a phrase, half-sung, and like a question. And after a moment another voice will join in, soon the whole gang will be singing. The voices are dark in the golden glare, the music intricately blended, both somber and joyful. 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. Then slowly the music will sink down until at last there remains one lonely voice, then a great hoarse breath, the sun, the sound of the picks in the silence.

And what kind of gang is this that can make music? Just twelve mortal men, seven of them black and five of them white boys from this county. Just twelve mortal men who are together.

Here again we see McCullers using music to express the underlying message of her story. Trapped in the cruelest and most hopeless of physical conditions, the prisoners display an elemental capacity for joy that transcends and changes, if only for a moment, the miserable conditions of their lives. Like the café, which takes form amidst the white dust of the dreary, bored town, the music "intricately blended, both somber and joyful," rises from the chain gang at their endless labor—a joy apart, celebrating the fact that they are men together. The beauty of their song, that quality "that causes the heart to broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy and fright," is the more intense and upsetting for the extraordinary pain and despair out of which it grows. We are moved by the contradictions in this scene just as we are moved by the contradiction of a giantess falling in love with a hunchback dwarf. The Ballad of the Sad Café is, in fact, Carson McCullers's most daring excursion into the contradictory and the grotesque. It is composed of material so disparate; comic, ugly, drab, and bizarre, as seemingly to defy harmonious organization into art. Yet the strangeness of the mixture is undoubtedly what makes The Ballad so startlingly, hauntingly beautiful. Like the watch chain Miss Amelia gives to Cousin Lymon, that she has had decorated with her own kidney stones, like the table in the café decorated with "a bouquet of swamp lilies in a Coca-Cola bottle," The Ballad and its envoy reveal through all the surface contradictions and incongruities a deeper beauty of shared human feeling, of people who are together.

Oliver Evans has written that "The Ballad of the Sad Café must be among the saddest stories in any language—not merely on the surface level of narrative . . . but also, and far more importantly (because it makes a generalization about mankind), on the level of parable." But if Mr. Evans means by the parable of the story the inevitable failure of love, The Ballad of the Sad Café is not unusual in its parable; rather it is typical of many of the great love stories in Western literature, typical in that such love as Miss Amelia feels for Cousin Lymon can never be fulfilled, can never last, that its end is always woe or, at best, a sweet sadness and never a permanent satisfaction. The love experienced by Miss Amelia resembles in some ways the kind of love we find in fairy tales and folklore, a magical love that might attract a princess to a frog or a beautiful girl to a beast. But it also resembles the love found in ancient romances, the love described by Denis de Rougemont in Love in the Western World, that brings an "exquisite anguish," that heightens life's feelings against its "mechanical boredom," that denies terrestial bliss for spiritual transcendence. Such love is too intense and too fragile to survive into an ordinary present and must therefore be recollected nostalgically from the legendary past. "The happiness of lovers," de Rougemont writes:

stirs our feelings only on account of the unhappiness which lies in wait for it. We must feel that life is imperiled, and also feel the hostile realities that drive happiness away into some beyond. What moves us is not its presence, but its nostalgia and recollection. Presence is inexpressible and has no perceptible duration; it can only be a moment of grace—

And the love described in The Ballad of the Sad Café did have its moment of grace—a sustained moment, that for a period of six years actually transformed the dreary town and its "mechanical boredom" into a place of excitement and heightened life. It may be that The Ballad of the Sad Café is less sad than Carson McCullers's other stories. The café was not, after all, like Singer's friendship with Antonapoulos or Frankie's dream of joining the wedding, an illusion. It was, for a time, anyway, a miraculous if temporary reality.

The Ballad of the Sad Café was reprinted along with Mrs. McCullers's first three novels and six short stories in the spring of 1951. The book, which was essentially a collected edition of Mrs. McCullers's works, going under the title of The Ballad of the Sad Café, proved to be a milestone in the history of Carson McCullers's critical reputation. Critics, who had previously been uneasy about the bizarre, or what they called the "gothic," quality of her work, began to see that the oddities and incongruities in her fiction served a more legitimate artistic purpose than the creation of sensational effects. The extraordinary achievement of The Ballad of the Sad Café forced them to realize the truth of what Carson McCullers had written some ten years earlier in her essay, "The Russian Realists and Southern Literature"—that the strange and the incongruous can be extremely helpful in exposing irrational and inexplicable patterns in all human behavior, that the grotesque can serve the purposes of a more exact moral and psychological realism in art. By abjuring moral judgment and exaggerating rather than resolving contradictions in human experience, the writer, according to McCullers, could reveal the hidden abnormalities in "normal" life. Russian writers had been doing this for some time, and as she noted, it was a technique prevalent in the best of recent Southern literature, especially in the fiction of William Faulkner:

The technique briefly is this: a bold and outwardly callous juxtaposition of the tragic with the humourous, the immense with the trivial, the sacred with the bawdy, the whole soul of man with a materialistic detail.

It is, as I suggested before, a technique that predominates throughout The Ballad of the Sad Café, not only in the obvious area of characterization and plot, an amazon falling in love with a dwarf, but in the homely and shocking details that contribute so much to the tragic, comic, haunting tone of the book. One thinks of Miss Amelia's pathetic, almost freakish, white face appearing in the upstairs window of the café "with two gray crossed eyes which are turned inward so sharply that they seem to be exchanging with each other one long and secret gaze of grief," of Marvin Macy carrying round with him "the dried and salted ear of a man he had killed in a razor fight," of Cousin Lymon riding through the swamp on Miss Amelia's broad back holding to her ears for balance, and of those nights when the café was lively with jokes and gossip while outside "in the darkness a woman sang in a high wild voice and the tune had no start and no finish and was made up of only three notes which went on and on and on."

Persuaded by "the bold, outwardly callous, juxtaposition[s]" found in The Ballad of the Sad Café, critics began to reconsider all of Carson McCullers's novels, most of them concluding, in the words of the reviewer from Commonweal, that "'the gothic' label misses the point," that the grotesque and the abnormal in her fiction point not to the exceptional bu t the universal:

Behind the strange and horrible in her world there are played out the most somber tragedies of the human spirit; her mutes, her hunchbacks, speak of complexities and frustrations which are so native to man that they can only be recognized, perhaps in the shock which comes from seeing them dressed in the robes of the grotesque. They pass us on the street everyday, but we only notice them when they drag a foot as they go by [William P. Clancy, Commonweal (15 June 1951)].

V. S. Pritchett said much the same thing as this Commonweal reviewer when in The New Statesman he praised Carson McCullers for "a courageous imagination . . . bold enough to consider the terrible in human nature without loss of nerve, calm dignity or love [The New Statesman (2 August 1952)]. The source of this courage and love, which sought no reconciliation between the comic and the tragic, the beautiful and the horrible, is not, however, to be found in any sophisticated theories about human behavior, but rather in what Carson McCullers herself has called (again in "The Russian Realists and Southern Literature") an almost naive acceptance of the facts of life, a humility before experience, a refusal to judge. Perhaps she stated it most succinctly in The Ballad of the Sad Café when she wrote:

Well, all this happened a long time ago, and it is the story of Miss Amelia's marriage. The town laughed a long time over this grotesque affair. But though the outward facts of this love are indeed sad and ridiculous, it must be remembered that the real story was that which took place in the soul of the lover himself. So who but God can be the final judge of this or any other love?