The Golden Fleece

by Muriel Spark

  She was never exactly an ailourophobe but she grew to prefer human society to that of cats. At parties, she was gifted with the art of disappearing to nowhere from time to time. She was also greatly endowed with ESP. She would sit on my manuscripts if what I had written was any good, but if she stepped over the notebooks with her fastidious pads, I knew there was something wrong with the stuff. She came when called, but not invariably. Her sympathy, when she chose to exert it, was original and profound. She would brood comically over my wrongs, and, on occasions of rejoicing she quickly caught the spirit of the thing, sometimes taking a silly turn, leaping high, and landing with four legs outspread like a wonky new-born lamb. There was no end to Bluebell’s virtues.

  At the age of four she contracted a mysterious illness. She bore with numerous veterinary surgeons and many injections. Her eyes grew larger and her manners more delicate than ever. One day the vet said, ‘We’ll have to put her to sleep.’ I said, ‘You mean you want to put her to death.’ The vet said, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t put it that way.’ I said, ‘You mean you want to kill my cat.’ Next morning at nine o’clock the doorbell screamed. I clung to Bluebell, for I knew the Gestapo had come. They were sent up. In came the hired assassins, carrying between them a metal box, Bluebell’s gas-chamber. The men asked me to leave the room. I said I wanted to stay with Bluebell. One of the men said, ‘Sometimes they struggle.’ I was then put out of the room, and was called back about four minutes later. The cat’s body was lying stretched out on the table, longer than I had ever seen it before; the eyes were upturned, wildly staring, glazed amber. The men took Bluebell’s carcass by the hind legs, dumped it in a sack and took it away.

  Never again. Some friends tried to give me another cat. ‘Enough,’ I said. ‘Never again.’

  [1964]

  All God’s Creatures

  The patriarch of Genesis, Noah – did he exist? If he didn’t, someone else away back in the mists of time, equally imaginative, invented him, knowing that in any natural disaster from which the human race must be rescued, animals, too, must necessarily be saved. Noah and his family understood this dependency on other living creatures when they devised the ark and its immemorial zoo.

  I have always been moved by the story of how, after the Flood, God sets a rainbow in the sky: ‘This is the token of the covenant which I have established between me and all flesh that is upon the earth.’

  It is not only in the Judeo-Christian religions that this imperative sense of oneness with the rest of creation is manifest. We know by ancient mythologies how former civilisations revered natural life. Birds, rivers, trees, fish and animals were frequently deified; and they did not poison their gods.

  I have been induced to meditate on our own homely animals by the fact that the hunting sportsmen of Italy, where I live, find it acceptable to spread deadly portions of poison over our gardens and fields, on our walls and hedgerows, in order to kill our domestic cats and dogs. With sickening regularity they succeed in their aim. They say our animals spoil their game, although hardly any game is left to hunt in these recent years. Foxes are rare, but they are used as an excuse for bereaving practically every household of their faithful and beloved dogs, their lively, affectionate cats. I have been in Italy since 1968. In the country-side I know no-one whomsoever who has not lost an animal, generally more, to an average of three. I have lost five dogs and a number of cats through poison. I have already written of this grim experience and here I will only repeat that to watch helplessly while an animal agonises in poisoned death-throes is to encounter evil at first hand.

  ***

  I dislike the word ‘pets’. To me, it just doesn’t suit the beasts with their special built-in instincts and intelligences, their intricate physical formations and in general the dignity and infinite care with which they appear to have been made. To me, dogs are dogs and cats are cats, and I call them by the name which seems most appealing and appropriate to me.

  […]

  It often happens in countries like Italy where dogs are abandoned by owners who find them and their needs a nuisance, that they take to the hills and join wolf packs. Dogs and wolves mate. The wolf is in fact the early ancestor of the dog. It is believed that in primitive times the more adventurous wolves would approach the camp-fires of human beings, snatching the scraps and bones of a meal. In return, gradually, the wolf would make itself useful by warning of danger with its quick hearing. The dog thus came into being as a domestic follower, with smaller teeth than the wolf, and various mutated features. The wolf attaches itself faithfully to the chief of the pack; its descendant, the dog, adheres with the utmost devotion to its human owner.

  According to their size and structure, and their hereditary training, dogs hunt, guard, herd, guide the blind, sniff out people buried under the snow of an avalanche or the rubble of an earthquake as we see so often on television. At the frontiers they sniff out cocaine, heroin and other dire drugs that are being smuggled in.

  Dogs can be very comical and amusing if left to their own spontaneity, but to me, dogs that have been taught fancy tricks, either at home or, in the extreme case, for the circus, are really in a pathetic plight. I particularly abhor performing animals. There is nothing more insulting to our glorious world-creation than to make a great elephant stand on a tiny box; this is something that positively makes me ill. I won’t frequent a circus where they make use of animals. It makes me positively choke with indignation to see a tiger jumping through a fiery hoop. I think I would rather watch the tiger eat the trainer.

  How far from the stifling and sordid circus ring is William Blake’s vision of the mighty beast:

  Tyger! tyger! burning bright

  In the forest of the night,

  What immortal hand or eye

  Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

  […]

  What the hammer? What the chain?

  In what furnace was thy brain?

  What the anvil? What dread grasp

  Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

  ***

  The domestic dog in all the varieties that we know was probably bred as such by our primitive ancestors. Many zoologists claim that some artificial selection of animals that were finer-toothed, smaller-framed, more manageable than the wolf must have taken place in the first eras of civilisation.

  The dog was then apparently received with enthusiasm all over the world. Primitive tribes in America had no need to be introduced to the dog. There flourished a very wolf-like breed, the stout husky, reined in as it is to provide human transport by hauling sledges across the frozen tundra.

  If you keep a dog it is a good thing to buy a dog-book which provides information about its maintenance and health. There is no need to take the dog to the vet for simple advice. Dogs thrive on preventive inoculations which only the vet can measure and prescribe according to the type of animal, but generally the dog will ‘tell’ you itself if it is ailing. Unlike cats and horses, dogs are extremely anxious to communicate. Horses like to feel secure, to know where they stand with human beings, and cats, splendidly, couldn’t care less. But with dogs you get to know what they are thinking.

  Tales of canine heroism and self-sacrifice abound in literature. What I think is so remarkable about these stories is that we can so very easily believe them. We don’t have to stretch our imagination or suspend our capacity for belief, to recognise, for instance, the adventures of Lassie. Those movies could almost be documentaries. Lassie does just what any dog might do in the service of the people it loves.

  ***

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog, Flush, was the subject of one of her eloquent poems. Flush had kept watch by her bedside throughout a long illness and would not be coaxed or commanded away from her room so long as she remained in bed. Both Emily and Anne Brontë had faithful dogs which they adored. After their death, Charlotte Brontë described Emily’s dog Keeper visiting her room every morning, and Flossie, Anne’s spaniel, looking about for her in vain. Sir Walter Scott’s Maida followed
him everywhere and lay constantly at his feet while he sat writing his novels far into the night. Henry James had a series of dogs. One of the sadnesses of keeping a dog is that one usually outlives them. In the garden of Lamb House, Rye, where Henry James spent his latter years, there is a small dog cemetery where his animal friends are buried. It is a shock to part with a much-loved animal, however old it is, however expected the death. I remember many years ago when Gore Vidal and his friend Howard Austen lost their blind old dog through an accident, they were so upset that they took a trip round the world to help them get over their distress.

  In Homer’s Odyssey, when Ulysses returns from his long years of travel, he notices a poor dying dog on a rubbish heap. The dog, on hearing his voice, pricks up his ears. He is Argus, the favourite hunting hound of Ulysses in their young days.

  I have often seen the beneficial effect of a domestic dog on the remaining member of a bereaved couple. The comfort of such an animal at such a time is enormous. And the very fact of the dog’s needing to be cared for is a sort of grip on sanity.

  From the earliest records of visual art, animals have been prominent. Those wonderful creatures of the hunt painted and engraved on the walls of the Lascaux and other caves are vital proof of how greatly our ancestors esteemed them over fifteen thousand years ago. Cows, bulls, oxen, bison, horses and reindeer are among the depicted treasures. From x-ray pictures of the hand-prints on these walls it seems evident that these animal pictures were a source of ardent pilgrimage among the primitives. To them, their animals were life itself.

  And nearer our times, but still long ago, the fascinating historic tapestry of Bayeux depicting the Norman Conquest of England is decidedly humanised by the supporting dogs, horses and cattle. They are wonderfully arranged to give movement and a sort of gloating victorious buoyancy to the various episodes and scenes the tapestry portrays.

  Strangely, there is nothing like an animal in a figurative painting to humanise the work. In the London National Gallery’s Jan Arnolfini and his Wife, by Jan Van Eyck, the fifteenth-century Flemish painter, for instance, we see husband and wife touching hands modestly and formally; but it would all be a little too stiff were it not for a congenial little dog in the foreground; it is in fact the dog that humanises and imbues the scene with intimate loving contentment.

  And also, in the famous painting of Velázquez, Las Meniñas in the Prado Museum, Madrid, the huge strong brown hound in the foreground provides a serene, still, contrast to the mercurial energy of a variety of people who are trying to persuade the Spanish princess to stand still for her portrait.

  ***

  Cats in the home are quite different, although after some initial hesitation, the domestic dogs and cats generally get along together fairly well. In fact, cats are not very keen on each other after the kittens have grown up. They like themselves and their comfort, which frequently includes and coincides with the satisfaction of their owner.

  The cat is a much older race than the dog, going back, some say, seven million years. It would seem that our domestic cat is a diminutive mutation from the tiger and the lynx of the jungle.

  Cats were revered by the Egyptians. On Cleopatra’s state visit to Rome she brought a considerable following of her court cats, most of them no doubt forebears of Rome’s prodigious feline population. Cats were gods in Egypt. They were often mummified and sometimes mice were mummified and entombed with the cats to keep them well-fed on their metaphorical journey to the next world.

  Cats have been known in literature and in literary biographies, as the inspirational muse of the writer. Personally, I always choose to have a cat in the room when I write. They are so agile when they move, thanks to their abundance of elastic muscles. Their grace is inimitable. For creative work, cats are excellent to contemplate when they are in repose.

  Poems and stories about cats abound. Christopher Smart, Baudelaire, Kipling, T.S. Eliot, Stevie Smith among many others were all cat-admirers.

  Smart’s poem (of the eighteenth century) is often quoted:

  For I will consider my Cat Jeoffrey.

  For he is the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him.

  For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.

  For is this done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.

  I feel it to be a pity that T.S. Eliot did not live to see his famous Practical Cats performed as a world-stirring musical. It was probably the last thing he would have envisaged. But the musical should not be allowed to eclipse its grand original in verses such as:

  Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer were a very notorious couple of cats.

  As knockabout clowns, quick-change comedians, tight-rope walkers and acrobats

  They had an extensive reputation. They made their home in Victoria Grove –

  That was merely their centre of operation, for they were incurably given to rove.

  They were very well known in Cornwall Gardens, in Launceston Place and in Kensington Square –

  They had really a little more reputation than a couple of cats can very well bear.

  Cats are affectionate when it suits their convenience. They like to snuggle up to their human owners in winter, and wander off in summer. They have an uncanny sense of time and so are very punctual for meals. A house cat should be castrated or spayed if it is allowed to wander. They can otherwise have as many as twenty kittens a year and the male cat will spray a very strong-smelling advertisement for a female; all of which is not hygienic for ourselves nor manageable. But to be unsexed, for the cat, does not impair their sense of fun or their capacity for enjoyment; on the contrary, the fixed male cat does not often get injured in fights; he lives longer and seldom gets lost.

  I have often envied the cat its ability to purr when I want to express supreme contentment. It is a beautiful sound. But quite recently I read in an edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica that ‘purring manifests itself in extremes of both pain and pleasure’. I find this surprising, and indeed, I don’t remember any time when a cat of mine purred in pain. I wonder if other cat owners have had any such experience?

  Purring is mysterious. It has no connection with the cat’s vocal cords. Nobody, in fact, quite knows where the cat’s purr-box is situated.

  In case a cat has kittens, it is useless to prepare a basket or box for this purpose, for the very fact that you have done so precludes the acceptance of your plan. Cats make their own arrangements. They prefer the top shelves of wardrobes which they arrive at by clawing their way up your clothes. Their births are not very messy, however, as the mother scrupulously recycles the placenta.

  With cats, as with dogs, a cat-book is helpful after the initial inoculations have been administered.

  ***

  Throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance the civilised worlds of Byzantium and Europe expressed their love for animals and their symbolic feeling for the beasts of the earth, known by their ancestors as ‘The Great Chain of Being’. This Chain pronounced a remarkably knowing ecological system. Insects depended on plants, birds and fish on insect life, mammals on the existence of everything under the sea and in the air. We know now that these early nature lovers were very far advanced in ecology.

  There was a religious fervour in their feeling for animals. The great mosaics of Istanbul and Ravenna are the best examples. In Ravenna, too, at the Archbishopric Museum, is a famous animal pulpit covered with tiers of marble-carvings; sheep, goats, birds and fish, with an inscription reminding us that God created them. I wonder if sermons to that effect were ever preached from that pulpit? I have yet to hear a sermon in any church of any denomination reminding us of our duties towards animals who partake of the gift of life along with us, and who ennoble us with their coexistence on the earth.

  It is in Ravenna that the earliest mosaics are preserved, in temple after temple, in museums, presbyteries, baptisteries and churches. The animal kingdom is always there, superbly executed, quietly waiting in
its impervious stone for succeeding generations of worshippers. Religion and nature were closely co-ordinated between the sixth and sixteenth centuries. These mosaics make it easier for us to penetrate the minds of those early Christians who apparently thought and felt in symbols.

  The seventh-century Basilica of S. Vitale contains magnificent animal portraits in ceramics: a bullock, symbol of St Luke, a sixth-century eagle; a lion, the symbol of St Mark. Lambs symbolise Christ, and elsewhere in the treasure-box of Ravenna’s mosaics, lambs represent the Apostles. Doves, standing for peace, abound in all depicted allegories.

  Portraits of animals are to be found in all ancient cultures. In the British Museum we find the owl of the goddess of wisdom, Athena, in 440 BC. In the Louvre of Paris an Egyptian sculpture of 685 BC shows a small King Taharqa in bronze making a humble offering of wine to a large golden god-falcon.

  A painting of St Francis, the notable patron of the animal creation, is also in the Louvre. (This is a formal version of the marvellous mural in the upper church of St Francis at Assisi.) It has a gold background. A congregation of swallows* are lined up in front of the Saint who preaches gratitude for the divine providence that feeds them.

  We come back to the promise that God made after the Flood, that rainbow in the sky pledging God’s solidarity with every living thing. Centuries later, in the biblical Book of Job there is an even more prominent intervention of God in the context of animal creation.

  Job has undergone a great many losses and personal sufferings. He has been warned by a series of friends, ‘the comforters’, that he must have done some wrong to deserve his fate. ‘No,’ says Job, ‘I haven’t done anything wrong in God’s sight.’ It is not till God answers Job out of a whirlwind that the hero of that magnificent poem is finally comforted. God takes Job’s mind right out of himself; he speaks proudly of his own creation, the special features of nature, and finally his animals in all their respective glories: