The man nodded. His impulse of confidence was over, he was settling back into his solid, swarthy reserve. But on the last gust of the storm he repeated moodily, “One is compelled to take decisions. It can be very painful.”
“Do not think so much of the past,” I urged him. “Think of the present.”
Thinking of the present, I recall the pair of them. For some time now cat flesh has fetched high prices in the Paris market. But I am sure of this: if anyone ate that Siamese cat, it was his master. And I am sure of another thing: that the cat, when he killed it, was still in good condition. It had not guttered into scabby starvation before the decision was attained and acted upon. Later in that day, it seems certain to me, the man must have got on his bicycle and ridden off, silent and catlike, but with a small, uncatlike weight against his thigh. Some evening or other that cat has been avenged—or will be. For he was that kind of man, and loved after that fashion.
| 1942 |
BOOKSTORE CAT
* * *
SUSAN SHEEHAN
The first time Andreas Brown, the owner of the Gotham Book Mart, laid eyes on his enormous orange tabby cat, it was chasing three smaller cats around his sister’s house in San Diego and pursuing an occasional seagull up and down her porch steps. “I had to have him,” Brown said the other day. “And so, about four years ago, when my sister moved, she agreed to send him to me by air.” The cat was flown non-stop from California to J.F.K. in a pet carrier in the cargo hold. His new owner met him at the airport and took him in a taxi to his new residence, on West Forty-seventh Street.
Frances Steloff, the founder of the Gotham Book Mart, from whom Brown bought the shop in 1967, always had cats, and left money to half a dozen animal organizations when she died, in 1989, at the age of a hundred and one. Her last three cats had literary names—Thornton (Wilder), Christopher (Morley), and Mitchell (Kennerley). Brown decided to call his huge new tomcat Pynchon.
When Pynchon came East, the Gotham was down to one cat—Mitchell, who died a few months later. The shop became a one-cat bookstore again. “He’s plenty to deal with,” Brown said.
Pynchon has the run of the five-floor building, which houses the shop, a gallery, storage space, and Brown’s apartment. He is the perfect bookstore cat. He purrs when customers pet him. He poses for photographs dressed in T-shirts or tuxedos designed for dogs, and wearing a graduation cap or a sombrero or whatever else the staff puts on him. He attends meetings of the James Joyce Society, which are held in the second-floor gallery.
Because Pynchon arrived in New York with no front claws, he became an indoor cat. His most notable outings since then were in the winter of 1999. Brown, egged on by his staff and proud of his wondrous green-eyed, pink-nosed acquisition, entered him in the domestic-house-pet division of the annual cat show at Madison Square Garden. As Brown recalls, “I put this very large cat into this very heavy carrier and had a devil of a time hailing cabs on freezing-cold mornings. Once we got to the show, Pynchon won several nice-looking ribbons, but he was marked down in a couple of rounds of judging for being too heavy. ‘Overweight for a cat is the death knell,’ one judge admonished. ‘He’ll get diabetes. True cat-lovers do not allow their cats to weigh as much as tiger cubs.’ This made me mad, because I’d dieted Pynchon down from his arrival weight of twenty-eight pounds plus to twenty-five pounds. Our mail scale is absolutely accurate. On one show day, Pynchon was freaked out by the hundreds of other cats he smelled and heard and saw. He managed to get out of his cage with his clawless front paws and took off in the Garden for parts unknown. He was eventually found hiding behind a velour drape, huddled against a wall. After a few days of schlepping Pynchon to and from the Garden, I said ‘Never again,’ so Pynchon’s days as a show cat are over.”
Pynchon’s years on Forty-seventh Street are also coming to an end. The Gotham Book Mart is in the middle of a block dominated by the diamond and jewelry trade and the building is therefore considered more valuable than a similar one a block or two away. Brown owns air rights to the building, and has put it up for sale for $7.9 million. Brown reckons he can sell books in a bigger but less expensive building, without air rights, somewhere in the general vicinity. He figures Pynchon will easily adapt to his next home. “He’ll still have the whole staff to anticipate his needs six days a week,” he said. “I’ll still leave the radio above my desk tuned to classical music for him every evening when I go out for dinner. And he’ll still greet our customers, many of whom come in just to visit him. This cat is tall, like his namesake, but he is no recluse.”
| 2002 |
TOMCAT
Daylong this tomcat lies stretched flat
As an old rough mat—no mouth and no eyes.
Continual wars and wives are what
Have tattered his ears and battered his head.
Like a bundle of old rope and iron,
Sleeps till blue dusk. Then reappear
His eyes, green as ringstones; he yawns wide red,
Fangs fine as a lady’s needle, and bright.
A tomcat sprang at a mounted knight,
Locked round his neck like a trap of hooks
While the knight rode fighting its clawing and bite.
After hundreds of years the stain’s there
On the stone where he fell, dead of the tom;
That was at Barnborough. The tomcat still
Grallochs odd dogs on the quiet,
Will take the head clean off your simple pullet,
Is unkillable. From the dog’s fury,
From gunshot fired point-blank, he brings
His skin whole, and whole
From owlish moons of bekittenings
Among ash cans. He leaps and lightly
Walks upon sleep, his mind on the moon.
Nightly, over the round world of men,
Over the roofs, go his eyes and outcry.
—TED HUGHES | 1960 |
from DIN-DIN
* * *
THOMAS WHITESIDE
In a way comparable, perhaps, to that by which in reading the newspapers and watching the TV news I rather suddenly became aware of the word “Sunbelt” and the portent of the increasing population shift thereto, I have become aware lately in my television viewing of the prevalence of pet-food commercials on the home screen. Hardly before I realized what was happening, it seemed that I couldn’t turn on my set without being confronted by pet-food ads. Now that I have become acutely conscious of the pet-food commercials on the air, it seems to me almost as though dogs and cats and their eating preferences are beginning to take over television, with human beings and human activities slowly falling back to a humbler place in the scheme of things.
In fact, if one concentrates on the content of the pet-food commercials it can easily appear that human beings are on the way out in the Darwinian sense, too. In the pet-food commercials, the pets are increasingly shown addressing the viewer directly on their own behalf and without human prompting. The animals are also shown talking together and engaging in all sorts of other behavior usually considered exclusively human. Thus, in one pet-food commercial a cat answers a ringing telephone by tipping the receiver off its cradle with a paw. A representative of the local supermarket is on the line, and the cat orders up dinner by saying “Meow” into the mouthpiece. The supermarket man recognizes immediately that the cat is ordering a cat food called Meow Mix. In a similar commercial, a cat is singing its order for Meow Mix:
I want tuna,
I want liver,
I want chicken,
Please deliver.
Commercials for Purina Dog Chow show dogs responding to on-the-air interviews on the subject of dog dinners. One of the dogs, a poodle, when queried on its taste preferences, observes, in a bowwow voice, “I think Dog Chow’s richer flavor is definitely richer.” Another dog says, when pressed for comment, “Dog Chow’s heavy on nutrition, man!” And yet another exclaims, “Uh, the new, richer flavor—superb!” Dogs are shown manifesting their approbation in o
ther human ways, too. In a commercial for a Ralston Purina dog food called Dinner Mix, an m.c.’s voice asks an assembly of dogs grouped as an audience four tiers deep how they feel about dry dog food, and the dogs promptly raise their right paws and say, “Uh huh, yeah,” to show their approval. And when the same dogs are asked about Dinner Mix they all clap their paws together in a round of enthusiastic applause. In commercials for Purina Cat Chow, a succession of cats move their paws in dancing rhythm to an accompanying tune and are heard singing, in chorus, the words “Chow! Chow! Chow!” Presumably, they not only sing but also read music. In some of the pet-food commercials, the animals are represented as being quite literate. For example, the opening shot of a commercial for Cadillac canned dog food shows a dog wearing glasses and quietly reading a book before it is interrupted by a call to a dinner of Cadillac.
As representations go, probably the most sophisticated inhabitant of the world of pet-food commercials is the cat Morris, which appears in the commercials for 9-Lives cat food. This cat is shown as being a choosy sort, especially in its eating preferences, and, through a human voice-over, is given to uttering its thoughts in a sort of interior monologue, mostly on the subject of cat food. The screen personality of Morris is one of advanced finickiness, displayed particularly in scenes in which the cat turns disdainfully away from the prospect of eating common cat food when its mistress (the audience sees only a pair of legs) cries coaxingly, “Din-din time!” The cat Morris also expresses its disdain of various attempts by its owner to entertain it—for example, by giving it an elaborate cat box—in a world-weary voice that I, for one, consider a bit fruity. In the commercials, Morris is stirred from boredom by an offer of 9-Lives, which it eats avidly, but after finishing the stuff the cat is shown as reverting to an attitude of languid archness. Not only is this cat represented as having a human character but it has even been endowed, it seems, with traces of some underlying psychic complex, manifested by a generally put-upon air and a little peevishness where the ladies are concerned. That’s humanization with a vengeance. In aural effect, the disdain of Morris is dramatically offset, in the pet-food commercials, by the voice of a talking cat in a commercial for Cadillac cat food. This cat, as it keeps dipping a paw into an open can of Cadillac cat food and then eating from its paw, is represented as being of an unmistakably sexy female makeup, and is shown as saying, in a coy, whispery voice of gold-diggy seductiveness, “Oh, can’t wait to get my paws into a can of Cadillac.”
Of all classes of fussy eaters, innately ordained or externally conditioned, no others stand out in the world of pets in finicky potential like cats. That cats occasionally spurn food put in front of them is well known, and the combination of this characteristic and the permissiveness of most cat owners toward their charges has provided opportunities of bonanzalike proportions for the pet-food industry. Cat-food advertising is a bit different in some of its assumptions from dog-food advertising. In contrast to dogs, which indiscriminately offer affection to their owners, cats maintain an air of independence, cannot or will not be trained as dogs are, offer affection in sparing and on-and-off fashion, and need very little encouragement to be transformed into spoiled household darlings. Just as, for their own instinctive reasons, they sometimes choose to drink from a rank water supply rather than from a fresh one (cats are said to be partly of desert origin, and this may have something to do with such behavior), they often pass up particular kinds of food, sometimes for a few days, without harm. This natural stop-and-start pattern of eating is, of course, a heaven-sent gift to the pet-food merchandisers. As a result of it, cat owners are now subjected to a torrent of brand-name food offerings, all guaranteed to arouse a cat’s appetite, no matter what the animal’s inclination of the day might be. For all their supposed waywardness of appetite, cats can easily become fixed on a very narrow range of foods, or even on one particular food, such as fish, almost to the point of addiction. Consequently, the alchemists in the cat-food boiler rooms and their allies on Madison Avenue never rest in their rivalry to take advantage of this phenomenon, as well as of their own notions of the psychic frailties that “she,” the cat-food buyer and feeder, may possess. (Unfortunately for some of the cats that, as a result of all the ad campaigns aimed at owners, are being fed exclusively certain brands of cat food, quite a few of these products happen to be high in mineral content—mostly calcium and phosphorus. This high mineral content is suspected by some veterinarians of exacerbating an existing tendency among cats, especially neutered males, to develop urinary sand, stones, and other obstructions. One specialized brand of cat food, Science Diet, which is prepared with a very low mineral content, is never touted in television commercials, and is not available in supermarkets, but only in pet shops, as a preventive diet for cats that might develop urinary problems.)
(illustration credit 5.2)
It is out of the great clash of merchandising forces aimed at “her” that the success of the “gourmet” cat foods and the triumph of the 9-Lives canned cat food arose. Through its ad campaign featuring the cat Morris, 9-Lives raised its sales from fifteen million dollars in 1965 to about a hundred million dollars in 1975. Morris was thought up by the people at the Leo Burnett advertising agency, in Chicago, out of whose bottle of ideas have popped in the past such corporate-identity genies as the Jolly Green Giant and Charlie the Tuna. An account man I talked with at the Leo Burnett agency a while ago emphasized that, in spite of the finicky-eater reputation of cats, “as a matter of fact, you can get a cat to eat, consistently, anything he loves.” He went on, “That talks to the most important thing—palatability. So you provide the pet owners with foods that the cat will eat regularly. Morris is clearly positioned as a finicky cat—the most finicky cat, who will be satisfied by 9-Lives.” On the average, a six-and-a-half-ounce can of 9-Lives costs twenty-five to twenty-seven cents, which is nearly twice the cost of a canned cat food not in the gourmet class. If a cat eats two such cans a day, there goes half a dollar or so, and if a cat becomes strung out on 9-Lives or some other gourmet cat food, it does its bit for the profitability of the industry. To judge from the way the pet-food merchandisers talk, paying out all this money also exerts a certain benign influence on that “feeling of guilt—[that you’re not] doing the very best thing” which the admen see as plaguing the women who buy the cat food and feed the cats. One pet-food adman in New York remarked to me, “Part of the whole mystique on the part of those women is the underlying thought ‘Look at all the trouble I’m going through.’ ” Is guilt the name of the game?
However “she” may be viewing the great variety of choices and flavors of pet foods on the long stretches of shelves in the supermarkets, and however vast the trouble and money involved in replacing table scraps with gourmet offerings, the manufacturers see, above all, a highly profitable market that is advancing beyond its initial boom stage and is now in a stage of relative consolidation. At such a stage, the big gains to be exploited lie in the proliferation of brands and the seizure of particular shares of the existing market. Thus, all the delicious gravies and gourmet meals. A pet-food-company executive I spoke with not long ago remarked of the gourmet warfare currently being waged, “It’s very much like the detergent business at the stage of competition where they had to come in with all the blue dots and the green dots.”
| 1976 |
PAUNCH
Barefoot, in burgundy shorts and a salmon-pink
T-shirt, I pad across the deck
and sink
into one of four old Adirondack
chairs that themselves slump into themselves. There’s a flare
from the citronella bucket
as, there,
our eight-week-old stray kitten, Pyewackett,
ventures across what might have seemed a great divide
between her and me, had she not
now begun to nag and needle
and knead
my paunch for milk. The bucket fills with human fat.
The chair takes a d
im view through a knothole.
—PAUL MULDOON | 1996 |
DEFECTION OF A FAVORITE
Fiction
* * *
J. F. POWERS
I was waiting in the lobby, sitting in a fairly clean overshoe, out of the draft and near a radiator, dozing, when the monthly meeting of the ushers ended and the men began to drift up from the church basement. Once a meeting got under way, the majority of the ushers, as well as Father Malt, their old pastor, liked to wind it up and break for the rectory, for pinochle and beer. Father Malt, seeing me, called “Fritz!” and I came, crossing in front of Mr. Cormack, the new man, who muttered “Bad luck!” and blessed himself. I hadn’t thought much about him before, but this little action suggested to me that his eyes were failing or that he was paranoidal, for, though a black cat, I have a redeeming band of white at my throat.
While I waited for the ushers to put their hats and coats on, I thought I saw their souls reflected in their mufflers, in those warm, unauthentic plaids and soiled white rayons and nylons, a few with fringe work, some worn as chokers in the nifty, or haute-California, manner, and some tucked in between coat and vest in a way that may be native to our part of Minnesota.
Father Malt and I went out the door together. Going barefooted, as nature intended, I was warned of the old ice beneath the new-fallen snow. Father Malt, however, in shoes and overshoes, walked blindly, and slipped and fell.
The Big New Yorker Book of Cats Page 9
