The Ballad of the Sad Cafe by Carson McCullers

Carson McCullers was an American novelist who was born in Georgia in 1917 and died in New York in 1967. Her work is often described as Southern Gothic and many of her stories have been adapted for stage and screen. She suffered ill health throughout her life, having contracted rheumatic fever at 15, which left her with heart disease. She died of a brain haemorrhage at the age of 50.

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Ted:

I had previously read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter [ published 1940] by this American novelist which was a brilliant description of lonely outsiders in small town southern USA. 

The first time I read The Ballad of the Sad Café, which is a novella, I found the main characters weird and unlikable: from the mannish, monosyllabic Miss Amelia, the mysterious dwarfish hunchback Cousin Lymon to the repellent, criminal, ex-husband Marvin Marcy. In the second reading it was easier to suspend realism and see the story as a parable which examines the relationship between the lover and the beloved. There is the triangular relationship between the main protagonists where Miss Amelia loves cousin Lymon who loves Marvin Macy, who used to love [but now hates] Miss Amelia. The story moves towards a classic battle between Miss Amelia and Macy for the dwarf and just as Miss Amelia is about to triumph Cousin Lymon leaps on her back like a small animal turning the tide in Macy’s favour. There follows the sudden departure of the hunchback and Macey which leaves Amelia heartbroken and leads to a breakdown of community life in the town. The concluding event which takes place three miles from the desolate town is the sombre and joyful singing of a chain-gang [The Twelve Mortal Men]. This unified group appears to be a metaphor for hope in all the despair.

Mc Culler’s stories are layered and the ending can be left uncertain; A Domestic Dilemma is the devastating description of alcoholism in a young wife and the impact on her family. Her husband’s dilemma is between doing the best thing for his two children and his remaining love for his beautiful wife. Whilst she slept he watched his wife for the last time….!

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The Poetry of Amy Clampitt

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20th century poetry, American poets, Amy Clampitt, Dancers Exercising, Syrinx, Women Poets

Amy Clampitt (1920 – 1994)

Amy Clampitt was brought up in New Providence, Iowa. She wrote poetry in high school, but then turned to writing fiction instead. She graduated from Grinnell College, and from that time on lived mainly in New York City. To support herself, she worked as a secretary at the Oxford University Press, a reference librarian at the Audubon Society, and a freelance editor.

When she was in her forties, she returned to writing poetry. Her first poem was published by The New Yorker in 1978. In 1983, at the age of sixty-three, she published her first full-length collection, The Kingfisher. She died in September 1994. Her obituary described her work as dense, ornate and allusive.

Ted

This is a flowing, visual, almost cinematic poem. The use of enjambment slowly moves the reader down to the next line, and the next, echoing the dancer’s movement which is compared to feathery floating snowflakes. The dancers appear to be a metaphor for the conversation between the two onlookers. It is an obscure poem where time and memory appear to be suspended by the movement [‘All process and no arrival’] which the poet feels is a happier state. 

Dancers Exercising.  By Amy Clampitt

Frame within frame, the evolving conversation   

is dancelike, as though two could play   

at improvising snowflakes’

six-feather-vaned evanescence,

no two ever alike. All process

and no arrival: the happier we are,

the less there is for memory to take hold of,   

or—memory being so largely a predilection   

for the exceptional—come to a halt   

in front of. But finding, one evening   

on a street not quite familiar,

inside a gated

November-sodden garden, a building   

of uncertain provenance,

peering into whose vestibule we were   

arrested—a frame within a frame,   

a lozenge of impeccable clarity—

by the reflection, no, not

of our two selves, but of

dancers exercising in a mirror,

at the center

of that clarity, what we saw

was not stillness

but movement: the perfection

of memory consisting, it would seem,   

in the never-to-be-completed.

We saw them mirroring themselves,   

never guessing the vestibule

that defined them, frame within frame,   

contained two other mirrors.

Christine A

Gerard Manley Hopkins is cited as a major influence. Clampitt can be over-elaborate in her choice of vocabulary leaving the reader reaching for their dictionary but that does not detract from the beauty of the poem which first attracted me to her work. “Syrinx”. The opening lines take us straight to the matter in hand – how birdsong is produced in a most memorable way.

Explanatory notes on the Poetry Foundation website define the word “syrinx” as not only  the mythical reed-pipes of Pan, but also the branched tubules in a bird’s throat with vibratory openings that create the possibility for birdsong. 

Syrinx. By Amy Clampitt

Like the foghorn that’s all lung,

the wind chime that’s all percussion,

like the wind itself, that’s merely air

in a terrible fret, without so much

as a finger to articulate

what ails it, the aeolian

syrinx, that reed

in the throat of a bird,

when it comes to the shaping of

what we call consonants, is

too imprecise for consensus

about what it even seems to

be saying: is it o-ka-lee

or con-ka-ree, is it really jug jug,

is it cuckoo for that matter?–

much less whether a bird’s call

means anything in

particular, or at all.

Syntax comes last, there can be

no doubt of it: came last,

can be thought of (is

thought of by some) as a

higher form of expression:

is, in extremity, first to

be jettisoned: as the diva

onstage, all soaring

pectoral breathwork,

takes off, pure vowel

breaking free of the dry,

the merely fricative

husk of the particular, rises

past saying anything, any

more than the wind in

the trees, waves breaking,

or Homer’s gibbering

Thespesiae iache:

those last-chance vestiges

above the threshold, the all-

but dispossessed of breath.

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

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book blog, book club, Richmond upon Thames book club

The Maltese Falcon is a detective story by American writer Dashiell Hammett and was first published in 1930. This was Ted’s choice for our September novel.

Ted:

The author worked for a time as a private detective for Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency and his experiences laid the foundation for his writing career. From the late 1920’s he became the master of detective fiction in America. This novel was adapted for film four times. The third and best-known version, The Maltese Falcon [1941] starring Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor, is considered a film noir classic.

Private eye Sam Spade and his partner Miles Archer are approached by the beautiful Miss Wonderly to follow a man, Floyd Thursby, who allegedly ran off with her younger sister. The two accept the assignment because the money is good, but Spade suspects that her innocent demeanour is a façade and that she looks like trouble. That night detective Tom Polhaus informs Spade that Archer has been shot and killed whilst tailing Thursby. Later that night Thursby is also killed and Spade becomes a suspect. What follows is a complex plot involving several unsavoury characters like arch-villain Casper Gutman and creepy Joel Cairo, more murders, and all in the pursuit of a priceless statuette of a bird, the Maltese Falcon.

I liked the direct, understated, hardboiled writing style. The killer is finally revealed to be master liar and trickster Brigid O’Shaughnessy [ Miss Wonderly] who has been lying to Spade and everyone else to cover up her true scheme. Despite being lovers, Spade is quite ruthless about doing the right thing and hands her over to the police with all the incriminating evidence. There are some great one-liners: ‘I hope to Christ they don’t hang you, precious, by that sweet neck.’ He slid his hands up to caress her throat. ‘If they hang you I will always remember you!’

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Christine A:

I’m glad I’ve read The Maltese Falcon having heard it so often referred to as a classic. (How much of its reputation is bound up with the John Huston film starring Humphrey Bogart as the protagonist is difficult to say.) This is the first piece of Hardboiled fiction I have attempted and I found it heavy going. In 2021, it’s sobering to think that such a gratuitously violent, misogynistic book has a following. The blunt unvarnished style suits the content but makes for an effortful read. Maybe this is a case for watching a film of the book rather than reading the book itself (what a subversive thought!).

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