The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories by Carson McCullers

This hulking woman is anything but ladylike, and yet she inhabits the story as the woman to please and to love in a town devoid of anything resembling romance or culture.

It is hard to find someone to like in the novella, with the protagonist, Miss Amelia Evans, being a cross between Dickens’s Miss Havisham and Faulkner’s Benjy Compson. Having read The Ballad of the Sad Cafe in high school, I remember thinking that the novella was weird and not my cup of tea, but going back and revisiting the story now, I saw all the nuances my teenage mind missed, but perhaps it was best that I did not realize at the time the darkness that permeated the story, or maybe I understood it but reacted to it by purposely ignoring the ugly truths of the fragile humanity it depicted. When she died much too soon of a brain hemorrhage, she left behind a staggeringly haunting, beautiful, and powerful literary legacy. One can look at her picture and see an infinite sadness in her face, sort of an external manifestation of all the twisted characters and strange stories she had brimming inside her.

If you look into the rather brief life of McCullers (1917-1967), you will see she came from the South, studied piano, spent time in New York City, had a troubled relationship with her spouse, battled alcoholism, tried to commit suicide, and was basically unhealthy for most of her days. The characters who inhabit her stories are an assortment of freaks, geeks, and lost souls that shake one to the core, and the worlds she creates are ones out of the foggy depths of nightmares. Well, after reading The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Stories by Carson McCullers, I would imagine he would want to have an entire bottle on hand, preferably strong Sour Mash. I once had an English professor who told our undergraduate class that it was best to sip strong whiskey while reading anything written by William Faulkner.

The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories by Carson McCullers