I stumbled across Carson McCullers in our local French library one day, it was one of the titles on the very few shelves dedicated to books written in English. Back then, I realised my reading had exposed me to very little American fiction. I was keen to try a slim classic, even though it was a title I was unfamiliar with. The book was Reflections of a Golden Eye (1941), I remember that it was a strange, uncomfortable tale, full of dread, I knew nothing of the world it inhabited and felt incurious about that environment or its people.

I am wary of authors/books esteemed as classics, to then often encounter impenetrable language, however I came across McCullers again recently at an English book sale, this slim novella with its enticing title, which made me think of the indie cult-film Baghdad Cafe (1987) and the timeless classic soundtrack, Javetta Steele’s ‘Calling You’.

Another Sad Town Enlivened by a Café

So I read this out of curiosity and perhaps a misplaced nostalgia for another sad café, but had low expectations. It was absolutely riveting and so different to the memory of what I had read previously. I loved it!

The opening paragraph describes this lonesome, isolated town where nothing much happens and the climate is harsh. The building/house upon which the story is centred is no longer lively, boarded up and leaning to the point of almost collapse. It appears to have been half painted at one time.

On the second floor there is one window that is not boarded; sometimes in the late afternoon when the heat is at its worst a hand will slowly open the shutter and a face will look down on the town.

A Thumbnail Sketch Encapsulates All

In these first two pages, it is as if McCullers has launched a tasty morsel of bait on a fishing line. Everything that is to come is somehow referenced in these first couple of pages and it leaves the reader with an intriguing curiosity to know what has come about to have left this place and these people abandoned once again, from the liveliness we are sure to soon read about. For no café starts out being sad.

The owner of the place was Miss Amelia Evans. But the person most responsible for the success and gaiety of the place was a hunchback called Cousin Lymon. One other person had a part in the story of this café – he was the former husband of Miss Amelia, a terrible character who returned to the town after a long term in the penitentiary, caused ruin, and then went on his way again.

The characters are crafted with intriguing detail, they are each a little extraordinary in their own way and they act in unpredictable ways. Just like the residents of the town who come to Miss Amelia’s trade store, which eventually becomes a café, the reader too will wonder about the attraction and connection that exists between each of the characters. We come to know the characters by their habits and behaviours, but the thing that binds two characters together in their destinies becomes the mystery of the novella.

Miss Amelia was rich. In addition to the store she operated a still three miles back in the swamp, and ran out the best liquor in the county. She was a dark, tall woman with bones and muscles like a man. Her hair was cut short and brushed back from the forehead, and there was about her sunburned face a tense, haggard quality. She might have been a handsome woman if, even then, she was not slightly cross-eyed. There were those who would have courted her, but Miss Amelia cared nothing for the love of men and was a solitary person. Her marriage had been unlike any other marriage ever contracted in this county – it was a strange and dangerous marriage, lasting only for ten days, that left the whole town wondering and shocked. Except for this queer marriage Miss Amelia had lived her life alone. Often she spent whole nights back in her shed in the swamp, dressed in overalls and gum-boots, silently guarding the low fire of the still.

Insights Into Humanity

In between sketching out her unique characters and narrating the arrival of the two men in her life, McCullers presents the town members often as a group, the “they” voice, the ‘group-think’.

Some eight or ten men had convened on the porch of Miss Amelia’s store. They were silent and were indeed just waiting about.They themselves did not know what they were waiting for, but it was this: in times of tension, when some great action is impending, men gather and wait in this way. And after a time there will come a moment when all together they will act in unison, not from thought or from the will of any one man, but as though their instincts had merged together so that the decision belongs to no single one of them, but to the group as a whole. At such a time, no individual hesitates.

No gesture is without meaning, no look is innocent, no moment recounted is without meaning. A stranger arrives and the café is born.

To Be Loved or Beloved

The author occasionally interjects into the narrative, setting the story line up in advance, providing so-called explanations for some of their behaviour, as if giving the reader clues to the underlying mystery of the interconnection of its three main characters. One of those explanations is on the difference between the lover and the beloved.

…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 the curt truth is that, in a deep, secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many.

The story builds to its tense conclusion and is both compelling and contemplative all the way to the end.

It begins and ends with the one thing that never seems to change, that signifies both life and repression, the sound of first one, rising to twelve men singing, wearing black and white prison suits, working on the distant Fork Falls highway.

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.

I loved imagining these larger than life characters, discovering the way they were interconnected and drawn to each other’s weakness, thereby exposing something about themselves. And figuring out the triangle of love, desire and revenge that existed between them, the inevitability of what will pass.

Author, Carson McCullers

Born Lula Carson Smith in Colombus, Carson McCullers (1917-1967) was an American novelist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, and poet. Her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, explores the spiritual isolation of misfits and outcasts in a small town of the Southern United States. Her other novels have similar themes and most are set in the Deep South.

She wrote five novels, two plays, twenty short stories, more than two dozen nonfiction pieces, a book of children’s verse, a small number of poems, and an unfinished autobiography.

Carson McCullers is considered to be among the most significant American writers of the twentieth century. She is best known for her novels The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1951), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), and The Member of the Wedding (1946). At least four of her works have been made into films.