false 4 1 false false Thu Oct 30 13:08:44 -0700 2008 Sun Nov 02 02:42:48 -0800 2008 The Sojourner. And to celebrate, those are the only stories I’ll talk about here except to say that one of the problems I found with the other stories was that they lacked a real sense of place.

McCullers's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter has been one of the most remarkable books I’ve read all year – perhaps it will become one of my favourite American novels ever. A bit early to tell just yet. I know, that is a big statement, but I have thought back on it repeatedly since reading it and I’ve found myself reminded of it repeatedly in unexpected ways. Perhaps the idea we are so achingly close to seeing a Black American president of the US has been one of the catalysts reminding me of that book – but on other, simpler, more human scales I find instances in my own life bringing it back to me time and again. It is a remarkably beautiful book of a complexity and subtlety that is hard to credit to someone of McCullers’ age when she wrote it.

She was only in her early thirties when she wrote the long short story or short novella, The Ballad of the Sad Café. I have a horrible sense that anything I will say about this story will spoil it for you if you intend to read it – and I think you should intend to read it. Bitter is a lovely word to describe this story – I mean, that back of mouth taste that lingers long after the food that caused it is gone. Bitter, sad and all too human.

I’ve never been to the United States and so it is axiomatic that I’ve never been to the Southern States either. Yet, this has such a strong evocation of the world that I imagine must have been that world that I feel I know it almost intimately. I can smell it, I can hear its twang and feel the warmth of its long summer nights.

Even so, this is not simply a book about capturing the atmosphere of the South, no matter how successfully this has been done – nonetheless, as I said before, when McCullers does do this she does something remarkably special and important. This story is also a treatise on the nature of love.

She takes an idea from Of Human Bondage (another of those life altering novels I’ve read this year) and plays with it. The idea is that in any relationship there is one who loves and another who is loved. This played out in a remarkable love triangle in this story. The phrase ‘love is blind’ comes to mind – but all the better to highlight the themes at work here. Love is not only blind, but inscrutable with as much power to destroy as to create – love is both Vishnu and Shiva.

This is a fable, many of the elements to this story are amusingly larger than life – one character is even able to wiggle his ears in a fascinating way – but the story itself is quite confronting in what it has to say about the nature of love. So, before I say too much and spoil this for you, I had better stop. Although, before I do stop I should say that it is terribly interesting that this story is not told from the perspective of any of the major characters, but from the perspective of one of the town’s people. This is told from the perspective of someone who does not know ‘the whole truth’ and this adds wonderfully to a story where one’s sympathies are constantly under attack – even though we tend to come down on the side of Miss Amelia right to the end. And now I really do need to shut up before I say something you really will regret…

The Ballad of the Sad Café is by far the longest story in the collection – in comparison the other story I liked so very much was only around 12 pages long - The Sojourner. A simple story really, about a man returning to Europe after attending the funeral of his father and spotting his ex-wife walking down the street in front of him and, on a whim, deciding to contact her. I had expected this to be a story of recriminations, and in a sense it was – but not of the kind I had expected. I guess it stands in contrast to the title story in that, if anything, the ‘lesson’ of this story is that there is never too much love in one’s life and the real loss one has in life is the lost opportunities we accumulate too readily where we miss the chance to show how much we really do love.

Much of this – these lessons – is only hinted at in the story. They are shown in gentle acts of kindness and the lessons are shown to have been learnt in much the same way.

Many of the other stories in this collection were more ‘stories’ – and they were not as good as a consequence – but these two stories were special.

What is also interesting is that in so many of these stories – and note that I’ve also considered them less than successful, but not solely for this reason – the narrator or the main character from whom we witness the action of the story – is almost invariably male. The only story here told from the perspective of a female character was Wunderkind and that was written when McCullers was 17 years old.

Now, I’m not saying woman can’t write convincingly from a male perspective, (how hard can it be to write from the perspective of someone who thinks about sex every 15 minutes?) but in some of the stories I felt seeing the story from the woman’s perspective may have been a much more interesting vantage point.

I'm going to end with a quote from Sad Café that could have come straight from Of Human Bondage: --

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 loved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is for ever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.
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