The Shy & the Lonely

THE BALLAD OF THE SAD CAFE (791 pp.) --Carson McCullers--Houghton Mifilin ($5).

Carson McCullers published her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, at 23, and it was an immediate success. Novelist McCullers herself made good copy. She was a round-faced Georgia girl with bangs, who worked at her writing between 4 and 8 a.m., before going off to a daytime clerical job (she had lost one job when caught reading Proust). On top of that, the critics decided that her book, a somber, wide-eyed look at small-town Southern life, was really first-rate.

Carson McCullers was no flash in the pan. A year later, in. 1941, came another novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye. It was an exercise in the gothic tale, Southern style, and was crammed with pathology, but the pathology was handled with restraint and taste. In 1946 she published her third novel, The Member of the Wedding, a winsome remembrance of adolescence that later became a hit Broadway show.

Now, at 34, Mrs. McCullers has the pleasure of seeing a fat volume of her collected works: the three novels, six middling stories, and a superb novelette that serves as a title piece, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. Taken together, the 791 pages pretty well establish Novelist McCullers as one of the top dozen among contemporary U.S. writers.

Enter the Hunchback. The title story has a standard McCullers theme: love and loneliness in a Southern town. Miss Amelia is 30, solitary and well-to-do with the profits of her store (feed, guano, meal and moonshine whisky). Once she had been married--for ten days; but she had driven her husband off with her powerful fists and rasping tongue. But one day a little hunchback with a soft, sassy face comes to town and announces that he is Miss Amelia's kin. To everybody's surprise, she takes him in, and a big change takes place in Miss Amelia. On Sundays she lays aside her overalls and swamp boots and spruces up in a red dress. Her store becomes a little cafe, with hunchback Cousin Lymon hopping about spreading merriment with his malicious tongue, while Miss Amelia smiles happily.

Her joy cracks when her long-forgotten husband, Marvin Macy, comes back. A lazy, flashy lout, he quickly has Cousin Lymon following him like a puppy. A showdown has to come, and it does: Miss Amelia fights Marvin Macy with her fists, is on the way to winning when, at the last minute, Cousin Lymon leaps in like a demon, on Macy's side. Then the two men leave, after wrecking Miss Amelia's piano, her cabinet of curios and her still.

Ribbon of Sympathy. This fable of love betrayed is told with quietness and simplicity. As in all of Novelist McCullers' work, there streaks through it a ribbon of sympathy for the shy and the lonely, the eccentrics who wait on the margins of life for a touch of love.

Her writing is part of the American tradition of mooning, the tradition represented by Sherwood Anderson, Thomas Wolfe, Eugene O'Neill sometimes, and, at his rare best, William Saroyan. She can be soft and soupy, but at top form, as in The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, Carson McCullers has sharp sight, warm tenderness.

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