The Ballad of the Sad Café
Something I am and always have been a sucker for is the masquerading of cliché as poetry. So it has been a bad age to be born in, this Internet era, where the representatives of the entire, hitherto voiceless English-speaking world blindside with the regional commonplaces of pedestrian conversation which I, not knowing any better, mistake for the verbal wit and native intelligence of a thousand Alfie Doolittles. You know how it is. The way Betjeman’s poorest performances are just twee recitations of the more charming of English village names (always with the hyphenated suffix -on-the-Wold or -by-the-Sea) which trick us into thinking we’re reading a poem when really we’re just looking at a verbal atlas, or how the pyrotechnic jargon of American sports commentators disguises the same stale cluster of clichés that we’re already accustomed to. Doesn’t matter how, I fall for it kit and caboodle, schmaltzy lyrics to Disney songs, the high quavering of televangelists, Take Me Out To The Ball Game, nothing suffices to hammer home to me the message that unfamiliarity is not the same as originality and originality is certainly not the same as sincerity. So when I read in his book “Shooting the Actor” that Simon Callow had directed a movie called “The Ballad of the Sad Café” I remembered the title with suspicion, suspicion that what I took to be touchingly simple would actually turn out to be as tortuously overwrought as any episode of “Falcon Crest”. For I had never read or even heard of Carson McCullers before, and it would have come as news to me that “The Ballad of the Sad Café” has been written by anyone at all anyway, so you can see the bind I was in.
Sweet serendipity! When you take reading seriously enough all element of surprise goes out the window as you structure and prioritise like Burgess Meredith in “The Twilight Zone”: this pile for August, this pile for May, this pile for October! And, yes, there is satisfaction in seeing the tidy staircase of books disappearing off into the intellectual giantness of one’s future. But you forget what it’s like to like something by accident; how things were in the beginning, before you knew anything, when every volume was stumbled privately upon, and every sentence as secret as The Neverending Story. Which is all to say that one day I noticed that now familiar title on an aged orange spine.
You know the old stylistic trick in crappy sci-fi or horror movies of filling in the gap between one scene and another with the title card “New York. 10 years later.” or something? Like most idiocies it harms you, even if you’re aware of how stupid it is, because it innures you into thinking of Time as just another plot device, a way of explaining the switch from X to Y, a beeping red digital timer of forced urgency. You forget that Time is not really like that, that for all our linguistic conceits about spending it or saving it or wasting it Time is just something that happens and goes on happening. “Sad Café” is full of these little interludes in which nothing happens but that Time Passes, except that in a strange and lovely way they are not so much like interludes as mainstays, as if a play were not the performance itself but the bits in between, the invisible stagehands, the switching scene, the falling lights and curtain. It’s not the stately ermine sweep of Time’s Majestic Procession in a Russian epic, or Time the Destroyer kicking the fuck out of Ozymandias, but Time so shy, so gentle, that it hardly dares to make the grass grow, that we scarcely even notice it until it’s gone.
And I could tell you the story, but what would be the point? It could be any story happening to anyone anywhere, except that like every story it happens there, and then, to them, and nothing like it will ever happen again.
“The Napoleon of Notting Hill” ends after a war, in a place in which there was total darkness for hours, and also for hours total silence. Through this darkness, two voices contend whether it was all worth it, all this human strife and suffering over something so tiny and insignificant. What, after all, would have been the difference to the world if Notting Hill had never existed?
“The same that would have happened to the world and all the starry systems if an apple-tree grew six apples instead of seven; something would have been eternally lost.”