David Austin Shilts

5/20/2016

ENGL 475

Prof. Matt Brown

Lymon's Leap: The Mechanics Behind the Only Magical Moment in The Ballad of the Sad Cafe

The Ballad of the Sad Caf is a tightly constructed short story. Its plot is so blown up and

focused that its small movements become the action; every minor description, every alteration to a

power dynamic ends up doing something large for Carson McCullers 30-page book. Under such

circumstances, then, the mechanics of the novellas climax are especially worth scrutiny.

When Miss Amelia and Marvin Macy finally come together to fight, something larger than their

differences is being settled. Their similar but contrasting modes of living and of loving have evolved

into rhetorical propositions, and McCullers has America evaluate those propositions though Cousin

Lymons eventual interference. As such, his mode of interference is important for understanding the

novella as a whole it is the texts way of saying, And this is how we feel about everything thats

been said so far. So when Lymon flies an impossible twelve feet through the air as though he had

grown hawk wings (McCullers 29), the text is making the claim that whatever judgment Lymon

represents is wholly unfair.

The Ballads manifesto on love makes it clear that the characters various infatuations are the

storys central tool.

[L]ove is a joint experience between two persons but the fact that it is a joint experience does
not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involvedOften the beloved is only a
stimulus for all the stored-up love which has remained quiet within the love for a long time
hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary
thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him
suffer. So a lovermust house his love as best he can; he must create for himself a whole
inward world a world intense and strange, complete in himself. (McCullers 11)

And the dynamics of the loves of the three central characters reflect this. Lymon loves Marvin Macy,
who loves Miss Amelia, who loves Lymon. In each case the love is unrequited, the beloved the lover of

the next unrequiting beloved. Marvin Macys and Miss Amelias brief marriage results in the

destruction of whatever inward world Marvin Macy created for himself in the two-year run-up to his

proposal Miss Amelias independent ways prevent her from accepting a love that demands something

of her, that attempts to strip bare whatever attractive qualities Marvin Macy sees in her. Not that Miss

Amelias independence precludes her from ceding any of herself to love; she begins wearing a dark

dress (McCullers 10) in place of her overalls because she is losing herself to Lymon. Here, though, her

position is as the lover. She is fine with participating in love only as long as she is not submitting to

anyone.

Which is where the emotional energy of the fight comes from. Both Marvin Macy and Miss

Amelia have very similar approaches to operating in society. Miss Amelia live[s] her life alone,

making her way through an independent industry, prospering, by all things which could be made by

the hand (McCullers 2). She lives a life beholden to other people only insofar as other people are

needed to provide for her. Marvin Macy needed to bow and scrape to no one and always got just what

he wanted (McCullers 12). Neither can submit to either without losing something fundamental.

Macy's love of Miss Amelia, then, necessitates a fight of some kind. Before the time when he

loved Miss Amelia it could be questioned if such a person had within him a heart and soul, (McCullers

12). Making himself into a marriageable man has made this maintenance of his previous persona

ridiculous, and after Miss Amelia responds by selling his gifts, kicking him out, and invalidating his

hard efforts at reform, Marvin Macys only recourse is to regroup and then attempt to take back

whatever claim on absolute independence he had before. Miss Amelias only option is to prepare for

that.

Miss Amelias defense is for more than her independence, though. For her, Cousin Lymon is

also on the line. Marvin Macys return piques Lymons interest. Lymon

is [the] type of person who has a quality about him that sets him apart from other and more
 ordinary human beings. Such a person has an instinct which is usually only found in small
children, an instinct to establish immediate and vital contact between himself and all things in
the world. (McCullers 9)

and Marvin Macys swagger is immediately interesting to him. That he sets about following Macy

around town is intensely disruptive to Miss Amelia, who has by this point rearranged her life such that

it rotates around Lymons presence. Macy, who once threatened to take what is vital to Amelia through

marriage, is threatening also to take away what is newly vital to her through violence.

Stated another way: two characters who are representative of a certain kind of American

Roarkianism are locked in an impasse which is the result of love outside the bounds of that

Roarkianism. They both spent the majority of their lives cultivating a sense of self which could exist

without any true friendships or spiritual contact, and from outside eyes they both appear to be

incredibly successful at it. Both then become lovers Macy of Amelia, Amelia of Lymon and use

their stored-up love to create powerful new inward worlds which destabilize this success. Ballad of

the Sad Caf is suggesting that the forces which drive love are incompatible with the forces that drive

success. Ambition, prudence, and the self-starting awareness of the entrepreneur require an ownership

of the self that is antithetical to the want of a lover.

It is noteworthy, then, that Marvin Macys mastery of the self doesnt quite lend itself to

traditional successfulness in the way that Miss Amelias does in fact, it seems that he is far less his

own master than Amelia is. The loom fixer has a career, makes good wages and has a gold

watch, (McCullers 12) but that is about all that can be said of his industriousness. Where Miss Amelia

is the doctor, shopkeep, moonshiner, carpenter, miller, and banker for the city, and is the richest

woman for miles around, (McCullers 2) Marvin Macy is something of a low-life. He is obviously

attracted to the actualization of his traits that he sees in Miss Amelia (and it is truly her character which

he is attracted to: he wanted her solely out of love [McCullers 12]), and through this the text reveals

that Macy sees a deficit in himself. If love is a strip[ping] away, then Marvin Macy married Miss

Amelia to take her diligence for himself.

 The distinction is established to make a point about Lymons character. Lymon sees the two

similar characters, is uninterested in his lover, and is infatuated by the less industrious man. This is

because Lymon is attracted to the appearances of things more than by their interior quality. He

entertains the cafs guests with storytelling; Miss Amelia regularly takes him to see picture shows

and cockfights because he takes a passionate delight in spectacle. This passion runs deep- Lymons

fear of death/the night show that he is a man either incapable or else incredibly uncomfortable

acknowledging his own mortality. Better to dwell on happy things.

So when he chooses Marvin Macy over Miss Amelia, it is because he has fallen in love with the

one who is better at appearing to be his own master. When he first returns from the penitentiary, Macy

loafed about the mill, looking in at the windows, and on Sundays he dressed in his red shirt and

paraded up and down the road with his guitar (McCullers 22). Hanging out at a place of work to be

seen not working and then brightly parading ones idleness are about as powerful as statements on the

matter can be: This is a man who is disinterested in being self-sufficient as much as he is interested in

being known as self-sufficient.

This is useful within the novella's semiotic system because Cousin Lymon's fascination is a

generalized American fascination. This is why he arrives in the way he does an intruder into a small

and static town. The movement here is so purposeless that both before and after Lymon's presence there

is absolutely nothing to do (McCullers 30, see also 2). It is a town like a place that is far off and

estranged from all other places in the world (McCullers 2); it isn't located particularly anywhere, and

the only places that it definitively isn't are Cheehaw, where the picture show and cockfights are, and

Society City. The town lacks something which all other exampled cities possess: fascination. So when

Lymon shows up, traveling (McCullers 4) from anywhere at all, he is as an arbiter of everything

which the town is not.

Lyman loving Macy over Amelia is thus the outside world loving the appearance of its

conditions for success over their unattractive actuality. America is in love with is fascinated by what
it looks like to be self-sufficient.

Macy, too, is more physically attractive than Miss Amelia. He is described as the handsomest

man in the region being six feet one inch tall, hard muscled, and with slow gray eyes and curly hair.

His beauty made him the beloved of many females in the region (McCullers 12). Amelia is a

haggard woman, cross-eyed and gangly (McCullers 2, 12). The contrast furthers the distinction

between exterior and interior that Ballad focuses so heavily on. An interesting-because-he-looks-

capable Marvin Macy is only made more capable-looking by being attractive; an unconcerned-with-

looking-capable Miss Amelia who is also unattractive appears that much less capable.

All of this the novel's physics of love, its contrasts between Marvin Macy and Miss Amelia,

Cousin Lymon's mediation of America's fascination with their characters comes to a head and is

justified by the story's climax.

Going into the fight, the town unanimously supports Miss Amelia:

Marvin Macy had the advantage in slyness of movement, and in toughness of chest. In fact from
the outward point of view the odds were altogether in his favor. Yet almost everybody in the
town was betting on Miss Amelia; scarcely a person would put up money on Marvin Macy. The
town remembered the great fight between Miss Amelia and a Fork Falls lawyer who had tried to
cheat her. He had been a huge strapping fellow, but he was left three-quarters dead when she
had finished with him. And it was not only her talent as a boxer that had impressed everyone
she could demoralize her enemy by making terrifying faces and fierce noises, so that even the
spectators were sometimes cowed. She was brave, she practiced carefully, and in this case she
was clearly in the right. So people had confidence in her, and they waited. (McCullers 26)

Although on paper Macy seems like the better bet, Miss Amelia has exampled skill. In fact, the town is

not so much impressed as intimated by her, and this combined with her recent ascent as the source of a

happy social life have created a situation where they are willing to suspend their better judgment. Such

a suspension is important because it indicates that the things working against Miss Amelia her

ugliness, her masculinity, and her basic anti-social tendencies can be muted if the people have a

strong enough reason to believe in her. The meritocratic system which she actually excels in and which

Marvin Macy better appears to excel in has the capacity to see her as better than him if it has
overwhelming reason to.

When the fight commences, they turn out to be much more evenly matched than empiricism or

hope would have predicted. They begin by exchanging blows to the head, establishing equality of

footing. The Simon Callow theatrical production of Ballad, limited in many ways by its running length,

casting, and directorial choices, explains the emotional energy of this whole scene by way of a two

second shot of Macy's reaction immediately following the two-way punch:

(Callow)

Diverging from the short story, but fittingly, Macy is briefly shocked and confused to find that Amelia

and he are on the same level. This is a fine directorial decision because it clarifies the dynamic between

the two. Through their marriage and specifically through the scene where an embarrassed Macy goes

to the next town to buy Amelia presents to get her to sleep with him the text establishes that he

doesn't recognize her claim to independence, and Callow reminds his audience of this through the

reaction shot.

Certainly, though, this flash of emotion is still present as an undercurrent in the novella. The

two are fighting for their right to be recognized as the champion of the meritocracy, and the double

punch is the first moment where Macy considers that Amelia might actually deserve that recognition.

After perhaps half an hour of back-and-forth blows, the fight shifts from a boxing match to a

wrestling match. The text notes here that [w]restling is the natural way of fighting in this country as
boxing is too quick and requires too much concentration (McCullers 28). This comment is again

characterizing Amelia as a person not quite of the type Americans glorify. Amelia has a talent as a

boxer; she is a concentrated thinker, while the public is interested only in success by those with a more

natural mode of approaching conflict. Never mind that both ways of fighting might lead one to

victory.

And even when competing in a way not her own, Amelia outdoes her opponent. [I]n these

moments of terrible effort, it was Miss Amelia who was the stronger. Marvin Macy was greased and

slippery, tricky to grasp, but she was stronger. In what plays out as a scene of sexual domination,

Amelia goes on to bend Macy over backward, straddle him, and choke him against the sonic

backdrop of just their deep hoarse breaths (McCullers 28).

At which point Lymon makes his impossible leap. The text makes a point to render the thing as

a miracle: what took place has been a mystery ever since; The whole town was there to testify what

happened, but there were those who doubted their own eyesight (McCullers 29). The 12 foot leap by a

little person from the counter to Miss Amelia is impossible. And this impossibility is rhetorically

essential to the thematic currents of the story. The societal space which Amelia and Macy are

competing for should not be a contest at all. In every substantial way, Amelia outperforms Macy. She is

more industrious, more independent, and a stronger fighter. Macy only feels wronged because he

correctly perceives that he projects a better image than her, and Lymon only loves Macy because he

projects a better image than her. After Lymon makes his leap and Amelia is defeated, the town is

extremely quick to return to its old ways. It is as if they were holding Amelia's new ways new ways

which inarguably improved their own lives at arms length, always slightly disbelieving it, aware that

this was not how things should be.

In essence, then, the impossibility of Lymon's leap is a statement about the impossibility of

escaping the country's body politics. Yes, there are philosophically non-bankrupt underpinnings to these

body politics a successful person should be independent and industrious but the real effect of
holding onto those underpinnings is to create a social structure where anyone who does not appear to

be independent, industrious person stands no chance of earning society's love. This is Carson

McCuller's great maneuver in The Ballad of the Sad Caf: to show how this process isn't the result of

any grand collective failing, just the end result of millions of people unintentionally loving and loving

out of weakness in a way they have no control over.

So when Simon Callow's film places Cousin Lymon on top of a raised cupboard some 15 feet in

the air, it loses perhaps the story's most important aspect. It becomes more filmable, yes, if only

because a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon miraculous leap in an otherwise realistic movie is hard to

take seriously. But the story's justifying moment is left out; the film ends without clarifying why it

began.
 Works Cited

McCullers, Carson. The Ballad of the Sad Caf. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1957, 2005.

Reproduced electronically at en8848.com

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. Dir. Simon Callow. Perf. Keith Carrdine. Merchant Ivory Productions,

1991. Film.