Literary articles - Carson McCullers 2025

Cafes and community in three Carson Mccullers novels

Kenneth D. Chamlee Brevard College

Carson McCullers seldom uses the natural landscape as an important physical or symbolic setting in her fiction. Instead of the deltas, forests, and worn-out farms of her contemporaries Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor, McCullers prefers to place her stories in bedrooms, dining rooms, hospital and hotel rooms, bars, kitchens, and cafés. Although it would be inaccurate to say that Welty and O'Connor seldom interiorize settings, Louise Westling has noted that McCullers almost always does so.1 This tendency towards enclosure is further evidenced by the inwardness of characters like Biff Brannon, Frankie Addams, and Amelia Evans. Though many of her protagonists spend time in self-absorbed isolation, McCullers always emphasizes their search to belong, to find some context of community and love. Joseph Millichap says that in McCullers' fiction "the search for personal realization must necessarily be social because [man] must communicate with and love other human beings."2

One interior social setting that McCullers frequently employs in this search for self-realization is the café. In her most important novels, The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, The Member of the Wedding, and The Ballad of the Sad Café, McCullers uses cafés as centers of activity whose varied social atmospheres reflect the personalities apparent in their owners. While both owners and patrons are part of McCullers' parade of deformed and confused people seeking human connections, cafés ultimately provide a false sense of emotional security and fail to give characters the lasting acceptance and feeling of community they desire.

The cafés in these three novels typify their owners' interests and personalities and help demonstrate McCullers' tendency to populate her work with grotesques who are seeking to belong somewhere. In The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, for example, much of the action takes place in the New York Café. The role of the owner, Biff Brannon, is primarily one of observer, but Brannon's remark "I like freaks" shows that his interest in the varied characters who enter his café is distorted.3 Biff's position as a café manager is thus perfectly suited to his inclinations. "The enjoyment of a spectacle," he tells his wife Alice, "is something you have never known" (p. 12), and appropriately enough, Biff's sympathies as a spectator are directly proportional to the observed's deformity:

He had a special friendly feeling for sick people and cripples. Whenever somebody with a harelip or T.B. came into the place he would set him up to a beer. Or if the customer were a hunchback or a bad cripple, then it would be whiskey on the house. There was one fellow who had had his peter and his left leg blown off in a boiler explosion, and whenever he came to town there was a free pint waiting for him (p. 18).4

But Brannon's preoccupation with the unusual customers of the New York Café is not motivated solely by morbid curiosity. The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, in fact, does not contain as many physically deformed characters as some of McCullers' other fiction but instead shows Biff, according to Lawrence Graver, responding to "a wide range of emotional grotesques" for whom he "temper[s] the chill of analysis with the warmth of an intuitive compassion."5 Three of the other four main characters in the book—Jake Blount, John Singer, and Mick Kelly—appear regularly in the New York Café, and Brannon seems drawn to their plights. When Alice Brannon expresses dissatisfaction with her husband's tolerance for a "sponger" like Jake Blount, Biff accuses her of not having any "real kindness": "You don't ever see or notice anything important that goes on. You never watch and think and try to figure anything out. Maybe that's the biggest difference between you and me, after all" (pp. 11—12).

Brannon, however, does little besides intuit. Though he keeps the café open all night "to receive the world and its riddles," it is also "to stifle his loneliness."6 He is himself the most withdrawn of all the characters and is never able to engage any of the New York Café regulars on a level of genuine communication. To Blount he offers only charity and superfluous advice: "You ought to sober up. You need washing and your hair needs cutting" (p. 16). Toward Mick he feels a certain inexpressible tenderness but so mismanages his affection for her that she regards him with suspicion and hostility. Like the other main characters, Biff is drawn to Singer but unable to relate to him. Biff, for all of his good intentions, proves that the society of the New York Café and indeed that of The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter is one "not of communion," says Ihab Hassan, but one of "collective isolation."7 In Singer's room, for example, what passes for communication between the mute and the other main characters is actually individual misconception. Likewise, the New York Café is a hub of frustrated and non-productive activity, typified by a "feeling of estrangement" and "the mutual distrust between the men who were just awakened and those who were ending a long night" (p. 25). 8 Despite the opportunities for interaction it provides, the New York Café never becomes a place for any real human understanding because, in Joseph Millichap's words, "no communication can exist when each person creates only a self-centered and self-deluded view of the world around him."9

The Blue Moon Café of The Member of the Wedding has a somewhat different function from that of Biff Brannon's diner. Not a central site in the novel's action, only four scenes occur there, each involving the protagonist Frankie Addams. The Blue Moon is a combination bar and hotel, whose Portuguese owner, a minor character, has settled for a life without personal involvements. His indifference not only encourages altercations which bring the police but accounts for the lack of supervision which allows minors like Frankie to be served beer and led upstairs to rented rooms.

At the beginning of the novel Frankie is a member of a real community— the kitchen family of Berenice and John Henry — but she does not cherish that familiar world any longer: "The name for what had happened to her Frankie did not know, but she could feel her squeezed heart beating against the table edge";10 "this was the summer that Frankie was sick and tired of being Frankie" (pp. 19— 2O).11 Her current growth spurt has caused her to project her eventual height to be over nine feet tall, which would make her as bizarre as something in the Chattahoochee Exposition Freak House. Struggling with the changes in her body and emotions, Frankie says "I wish I was somebody else except me" (p. 6). In her determination to break free, Frankie latches onto an impending change in the family structure, her brother Jarvis' marriage to Janice Evans, and imagines herself becoming an integral part of the union and escaping with the newlyweds to Alaska, Africa, Burma, and other exotic places. Her subsequent announcement of those intentions meets with disbelieving taunts from Berenice, so Frankie decides to share her plans with strangers while on a walking tour around the town, what she thinks will be her last look at the dreary city. Her decision not to return after the wedding also prompts a change in her self-identity; she is no longer the childish Frankie but the mature F. Jasmine.

The Blue Moon Café is an adult world from which Frankie has previously felt excluded ("a place for holiday soldiers and the grown and free" [p. 53]) but in which she now feels welcome; thus, it is the first place F. Jasmine chooses to reveal her plans. As Ihab Hassan notes, "the animating center of the novel, the unifying force in Frankie's character, is ...her wish to belong."12 Beneath the "blue neon lights" that make faces turn "pale green" (p. 53), F. Jasmine tells her story to the Blue Moon's owner and believes she is communicating with him because "it is far easier ... to convince strangers of the coming to pass of dearest wants than those in your own home kitchen" (p. 54). But she might as well be talking to the dead: "The Portuguese listened with his head cocked to one side, his dark eyes ringed with ash-gray circles, and now and then he wiped his damp veined deadwhite hands on his stained apron" (p. 54). When F. Jasmine is finished, the Portuguese does not speak, so she wanders out to tell others about her plans. She meets the red-headed soldier and returns with him to the Blue Moon, but she does not communicate any better with him than with the owner. Obviously misjudging her age, the dissolute soldier ignores F. Jasmine's prattle while occasionally dropping stale come-on lines— "I could of sworn I'd run into you some place before" (p. 67) —which F. Jasmine is too naive to recognize or understand. The most serious miscommunication, though, occurs when F. Jasmine returns to the Blue Moon that night for her "date" and, confused by the soldier's double talk, goes upstairs with him. Never fully understanding his intentions, she fights his sexual advances instinctively, knocks him out with a water pitcher, and flees.

The next night, after the disastrous wedding scene, Frances (as she now calls herself) is so embarrassed and hurt that she decides to run away and once again ends up at the Blue Moon. But the day's humiliation has left her drained and spiritless. Confronted by a policeman who is looking for her, she no longer sees the café as any avenue of escape or change: "What am I doing in here?" she repeated. For all at once she had forgotten, and she told the truth when she said finally, "I don't know" (p. 147). Before she goes home with her father, the Portuguese owner glances at her, "and there was in those eyes no feeling of connection" (p. 148). Though Frankie Addams initially feels the Blue Moon Café is a place where she can assert her new adult identity and make the human contacts she desires, it turns out to be a sterile place characterized by its ghostly, apathetic proprietor, a place where Frankie is more isolated in her adolescence than ever before.

The Ballad of the Sad Café is a strange love story in which the café and its unusual owner, Amelia Evans, are the central elements. Unlike the other two novels, The Ballad of the Sad Café focuses its attention on grotesques. Miss Amelia is a cross-eyed, masculine giantess who enjoys feeling her own muscles. Though Miss Amelia is the town's folk doctor and makes the best whiskey around, she is an exacting and cheerless business woman. Unlike Biff Brannon who keeps his café open out of curiosity and not for profit, Miss Amelia's relationship to the town is mercenary: "The only use [she] had for other people was to make money out of them."13

After the arrival of Lymon Willis, the prissy hunchback dwarf with the tenuous claim to kinship to Miss Amelia, the novella depicts the gradual evolution of Miss Amelia's establishment from "a store that carried mostly feed, guano, and staples such as meal and snuff" (p. 4) to "a proper café, open every evening from six until twelve o'clock" (p. 24). At first Miss Amelia simply begins serving liquor inside (instead of selling it out the back door), but she later provides "fried catfish suppers at fifteen cents a plate" (p. 24) and exchanges barrels and sacks for tables and chairs. This progression from store to café is not because of any sympathy on Miss Amelia's part for the miserable inhabitants of her town, but solely, as the narrator explains, because of her love for Cousin Lymon who, like Biff Brannon, takes "a passionate delight in spectacles" (p. 25). To help allay his fears of nighttime and death, she allows the store to expand into a community attraction. The café is merely a by-product of Miss Amelia's love for the hunchback, and the townspeople are the lucky beneficiaries. There, away from their drab homes, which are reminders of "the cheapness of human life," people come and mingle and buy anything from a serving of food and liquor to a penny glass of "Cherry Juice" (p. 55). A sense of personal pride fills each cafégoer because "for a few hours at least, the deep bitter knowing that you are not worth much in this world could be laid low" (p. 55). According to Lawrence Graver, the café is "the symbol of the ability of human affection to create intimacy and delight where only barrenness existed before."14

Despite the "communal warmth" which Amelia's café projects,15 it is not a center of genuine communication any more than the New York or Blue Moon cafés. Though Amelia dotes on Cousin Lymon and spoils him, they have no meaningful dialogue:

Their approach to any conversation was altogether different. Miss Amelia always kept to the broad, rambling generalities of the matter ... while Cousin Lymon would interrupt her suddenly to pick up, magpie fashion, some detail ... (p. 36).

Most significant, of course, is the distance apparent in their love relationship: Amelia as the lover is generous and spoiling while Lymon is a selfish and indifferent beloved. As the narrator says, the fact that love "is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved" (p. 26).

Marvin Macy, the third party in this odd love triangle, is a murderous débaucher who, briefly transformed by love, once wed Miss Amelia but was unable to get her to consummate the relationship during their disastrous ten-day marriage. Still not communicating even after his return from prison, Macy and Amelia do little more than exchange childish taunts like "Bust a gut!" while they "doubled their fists, squared up, and glared at each other" (p. 62). When Lymon throws his attention on Marvin Macy, a fight between Amelia and her ex-husband seems inevitable. Even in this battle, though, communication is crossed up: the two are not struggling for a common prize. While Amelia is fighting for the return of her beloved, Macy does not really care about Lymon and has used him as a means to spite Amelia. His real wish is for a vengeful domination, to subdue her physically in a brawl since he was unable to do so sexually in their marriage bed.

The townspeople who frequent Amelia's café are not communicating in any meaningful way either: a crowd watches each evening's belligerent posturing but remains mute before and after the climactic battle. The fight itself is not announced but is known by signs that are understood instinctively. Even so, such silent recognition of foreshadowing is hardly an overt act of communication. Nothing in the townspeople allows them to reach Miss Amelia or to make much effort to do so. More importantly, they seem incapable of relating even to each other without the artifice of someone else's establishment or whiskey. Lymon and Macy's "wrecking the café," says Ihab Hassan, is "wrecking the town really, and wrecking Amelia."16 Wayne Dodd believes the café is an ordered and sculptured altruism which illuminates and orders the chance meetings of isolated individuals, which makes possible whatever degree of communication can be effected. But the world, like the painting of the café, is only partially finished, and there can be only incomplete unity and understanding, even when all are assembled in the café.17

More withdrawn and isolated after losing Lymon to Macy, Amelia stifles interest in the café by overcharging, inexplicably raising the price of everything to one dollar. Over the next three years, Amelia allows the café to wither, and when it dies, the town dies as well. Amelia retreats inside the building where she remains with her "secret gaze of grief" (p. 4). Ironically, though Amelia's café is the only one of the three establishments examined here in which any semblance of fellowship goes on, even temporarily, it is the only one that closes. The New York and Blue Moon cafés continue to operate as places inappropriate to genuine human sympathy.

Despite the apparent failure of cafés as places of authentic communion, Carson McCullers does not employ them as symbols of despair. While none of the characters in The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, The Member of the Wedding, and The Ballad of the Sad Café achieve lasting connections, an attitude of hope and possibility is somehow present in the three cafés. Though her characters rarely, or never, achieve the "genuine dialogue" which is essential for a "genuine com-munity,"18 McCullers does not leave readers "without a solution to the problem of human loneliness."19 Biff Brannon may be an ineffectual friend, but his sympathy for unfortunates is "an affirmation of the author's belief that man in all conditions merits dignified treat-ment."20 Unable to explain his keeping the café open all night, Biff does so because of a momentary insight: "For in a swift radiance of illumination he saw a glimpse of human struggle and of valor. . .. And of those who labor and of those who— one word—love" {Hunter, p. 306). Though Biff is not fully cognizant of his reason, he seems to have "an intuitive apprehension of the nobility as well as tragic futility of man's life."21

Cafés are an important aspect in McCullers' depiction of the ambivalent struggle of living.22 This common social setting does not always foster sociability, but the potential is there, and sometimes, as in Biff's case, a transient understanding occurs. Amelia Evans' store is transformed by love into a thriving communal gathering place, but when the love is lost (or torn away), the café fails and is closed. Perhaps it is only by chance, McCullers is saying, that characters and café owners find truth, a moment of pure love, a sudden illumination and, like Frankie, feel that someone or something is "the we of me." [But] no matter how evanescent the instant, the experience brings a sense of warmth and togetherness that ...gives the heart a brief respite from aloneness.23

If characters free to come and go from cafés and boarding house rooms would realize that their inwardness conflicts with their desperate need to be together, then their mumbled private conversations could blend like the voices of the Twelve Mortal Men of the chain gang in The Ballad of the Sad Café, blend into a song emanating not from depressing interiors, "but from the earth itself, or the wide sky" (P- 71).

Notes

1Louise Westling, Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1985), p. 6.

2Joseph R. Millichap, "The Realistic Structure of The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter," TCL, 17 (1971), 17.

3Carson McCullers, The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter (New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 11. Subsequent references, noted parenthetically, are to this edition.

4Brannon's interest in freaks is narcissistic. "You're one yourself," his wife Alice tells him (p. 11), since Brannon is loathe to touch himself below the waist and washes himself there only "twice during the season" (p. 26). Further sexual peculiarities are exhibited later, after Alice's death, when Biff wears her clothes and her perfume and admits "by nature all people are of both sexes" (p. 112).

5Lawrence Graver, Carson McCullers, Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers 84 (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1969), p. 13.

6David Madden, "The Paradox of the Need for Privacy and the Need for Understanding in Carson McCullers' The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter," L&P, 17 (1967), 133.

7Ihab H. Hassan, "Carson McCullers: The Alchemy of Love and Aesthetics of Pain," MFS, 5 (1960), 317.

8David Madden notes that since The Heart is A Lonely Hunter is set in a Georgia

town, the name New York Café itself "emphasizes the alienation of its patrons from

the immediate environment" (p. 131).

'Millichap, p. 16.

'"Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding (New York: Bantam, 1986),

p. 4. Subsequent references, noted parenthetically, are to this edition.

"If cafés typify the failure of community in McCullers' novels, kitchens are often the centers of social warmth, frequently presided over by Faulknerian black matriarchs. Both Portia in The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter and Berenice in The Member of the Wedding fulfill nurturing, mother-like roles to Mick Kelly and Frankie Addams, respectively. Even Amelia Evans in The Ballad of the Sad Café shows such tendencies, charitably feeding Cousin Lymon in her kitchen on the night of his arrival.

12Hassan, p. 321.

"Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories (New York: Bantam, 1986), p. 5. Subsequent references, noted parenthetically, are to this edition.

"Graver, p. 31.

"Westling, p. 124.

1,sHassan, p. 325.

17Wayne D. Dodd, "The Development of Theme through Symbol in the Novels

of Carson McCullers," GaR, 17 (1963), 211.

18Chester E. Eisinger, "Carson McCullers and the Failure of Dialogue," Fiction

of the Forties (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1963), p. 244.

"Jane Hart, "Carson McCullers—Pilgrim of Loneliness," GaR, 11 (1957), 58.

20Louise Y. Gossett, "Dispossessed Love: Carson McCullers," Violence in Recent

Southern Fiction (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1965), p. 168.

2'Dodd, p. 212.

22Another example of this struggle can be found in McCullers' short story "A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud" from the collection The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories. An unnamed, all-night café is operated by Leo, "a bitter and stingy man" who gives a running, cynical commentary on the conversation between an old traveler and a young paperboy. The old man explains to the boy how to love: start with inanimate objects and progress to male-female relationships. The reason love fails so often, he says, is because we start with the most difficult kind. Leo, a self-proclaimed "critic of craziness," for some reason cannot abide the overheard discussion and at one point screams "Shut up! Shut up!" But when pressed by the youth for an explanation of the old man's behavior, Leo will not say the man is crazy and remains stubbornly silent.

23Hart, p. 58.