by L A Vocelle
Didn’t make any special friends.
He played it cool with wide-eyed innocence.
Receiving gladly what the good Lord sends.
Forgot to give his Christmas present.
Black cat collar, nice and new.
Thought he’d make it through New Year.
I guess this song will have to do.
My old black cat…
Old black cat.
In Janet Jackson’s song Black Cat, the chorus sings lyrics threatening vengeance on a lost love: “Black cat, nine lives, short days, long nights, Livin on the edge not afraid to die, Heart beat real strong, but not, for long, Better watch your step, or you’re gonna die,..”
Year of the Cat by Al Stewart (1976) equates the cat once again to woman: “She’ll just tell you that she came in the year of the cat.” “Her eyes shine like the moon in the sea…”
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s opera Cats, based on the T.S. Eliot’s collection of poems, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, opened in the West End in 1981, and ran for 21 years in London, winning numerous awards.
Ever popular, the cat found its way into the more contemporary songs of Bob Dylan, David Bowie and many other famous artists. Johnny Cash’s Mean Eyed Cat can only make a cat lady smile:
“I give my woman half my money at the general store
I said, ‘Now buy a little groceries, and don't spend no more.’
But she gave ten dollars for a ten cent hat
And bought some store bought cat food for a mean eyed cat.”
CATS IN LITERATURE
The cat naturally came to the pages of 20th century literary works as the usual symbol of feminine sexuality, lust and desire. However, writers loved cats not because they could use them in their literary works as symbol and metaphor, but because they, just like the independent thinkers of the 17th 18th, and 19th centuries, admired the cat’s natural aloofness and haughty superiority. Long since glorified by the ancient Romans as the goddess of freedom, the cat could not be tamed, an attribute that writers chose to emulate.
The French writer Colette (1873-1953), (figure 9.12) who epitomized the bohemian lifestyle of the period by living with both female and male lovers, and writing scandalous novels, had a special love of cats. Her devotion to her pets caused her second husband to complain, “When I enter a room where you’re alone with animals, I feel I’m being indiscreet.” One of the French novelist’s books is even entitled La Chatte (Cat) and focuses on a love triangle between a man, woman and cat. Oddly enough it is the man who is in love with the cat and cannot give her up, summarized in brief from a 1936 New York Times Review:
“The Cat La Chatte is a French novel by Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette. Released in 1933, the book tells of a love triangle involving Camille Malmert, her husband Alain Amparat and his Chartreux cat Saha. Camille loves Alain, but Alain loves his cat, whom he has had from childhood, more than he could love any woman. The book mainly focuses on Alain and his refusal to grow up; his cat is the embodiment of his childhood.
In the story, Camille and Alain get married and temporarily move into one of Camille's friend's flats. Alain does not like this, as he is away from his childhood home and his cat. Eventually, Camille becomes so annoyed at Alain's obsession with the cat that she pushes Saha from the balcony of the flat, to what she hopes is her death. The cat survives and Alain, furious, leaves Camille to move back in with his mother and his cat.
Alain is rumored to be based upon Colette's own brother. Saha is based upon a Chartreux cat that Colette once owned called “la chatte”.
There is some writing in this novel which would be hard to match for delicacy and exactness, and there are dozens of delightful pictures of Saha. No one who is fond of cats can afford to miss the acquaintance of this one” (Wallace, 1936).
Another famous cat lover was the writer, poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau (1889-1963). Cocteau, a thorough cat enthusiast, founded a club in Paris called the “Cat Friends Club” Club des amis des chats that sponsored cat shows. He is also famous for the quote “I love cats because I enjoy my home: and little by little, they become its visible soul.”, as well as “A meow massages the heart.” Famous artists such as Léonard Tsugouharu Foujita, mentioned earlier, joined the club as well.
Figure 9.12. Colette and Cat, c. 1932, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.
Tove Jansson (1914-2001) was a Finish author and cat enthusiast. An excerpt from a chapter entitled Cat from The Summer Book recounts the story of a small kitten. “It was a tiny kitten when it came and could drink its milk only from a nipple. Fortunately, they still had Sophia’s baby bottle in the attic. In the beginning, the kitten slept in a tea cozy to keep warm but when it found its legs they let it sleep in the cottage in Sophia’s bed. It had its own pillow, next to hers. It was a gray fisherman’s cat and it grew fast. One day, it left the cottage and moved into the house, where it spent its nights under the bed in the box where they kept the dirty dishes. It had odd ideas of its own even then. Sophia carried the cat back to the cottage and tried as hard as she could to ingratiate herself, but the more love she gave it, the quicker it fled back to the dish box. When the box got too full, the cat would howl and someone would have to wash the dishes. Its name was Ma Petite, but they called it Moppy. ‘It’s funny about love,’ Sophia said, ‘The more you love someone, the less he likes you back.’ ‘That’s very true,’ Grandmother observed. ‘And so what do you do?’ ‘You go on loving,’ said Sophia threateningly. ‘You love harder and harder’ (Jansson, 2003).
The author of The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler, started his writing career at age 44, and wrote letters as his cat Taki. “Come around sometime when your face is clean (he wrote to a friend) and we shall discuss the state of the world, the foolishness of humans, the prevalence of horsemeat, although we prefer the tenderloin side of a porterhouse, and our common difficulty in getting doors opened at the right time and meals served at more frequent intervals. I have got my staff up to five a day, but there is still room for improvement.” Chandler’s literary agent, H.N. Swanson, said that Chandler’s cat “knew more about him than anybody else.” Chandler was quoted as saying, “I said something which gave you to think I hated cats. But gad, sir, I am one of the most fanatical cat lovers in the business. If you hate them, I may learn to hate you.”
The American author, Truman Capote, (1924-1984) gave the nameless orange cat in his novel Breakfast at Tiffany’s a major role as a reflection of the main character, Holly. “(Holly) She was still hugging the cat. ‘Poor slob,’ she said, tickling his head, ‘poor slob without a name. It’s a little inconvenient, his not having a name. But I haven’t any right to give him one: He’ll have to wait until he belongs to somebody. We just sort of hooked up by the river one day, we don’t belong to each other. He’s an independent, and so am I. I don’t want to own anything until I know I’ve found a place where me and things belong together…If I could find a real-life place that made me feel like Tiffany’s, then I’d buy some furniture and give the cat a name” (Capote, 1958/1993).
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) one of the 20th century’s greatest poets, found the cat an inspiration for The Naming of Cats, a lengthy poem about the importance of cats’ names, which was the basis for the long running Broadway hit Cats previously mentioned. His book Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats might have been a tribute to Ezra Pound’s love of cats, as Pound was known by the nickname Old Possum.
THE NAMING OF CATS
The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn’t just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I’m mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.
First of all, there’s the name that the family use daily,
Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James,
Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey—
All of them sensible every-day names.
There are fancier names if you
think they sound sweeter,
Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames:
Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter—
But all of them sensible everyday names.
But I tell you, a cat needs a name that’s particular,
A name that’s peculiar, and more dignified,
Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular,
Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?
Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,
Such as Mukustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat,
Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum—
Names that never belong to more than one cat.
But above and beyond there’s still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover—
But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.
When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.
Best known for authoring The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was the first English language writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. In his children’s story The Cat that Walked by Himself, he describes a time when Man and Woman lived in caves and animals had not yet been tamed. The superior, independent Cat vows that he will always walk alone and go wherever, whenever, he pleases. Unlike the other animals that eventually let themselves be easily tamed, the cat makes a deal with the Woman that if she praises him three times, the cat will be able to come into the cave and warm himself by the fire and enjoy a drink of milk. She does so, and the cat is free to enjoy his new privileges without having been tamed; thus proving the intelligence and independence of the cat.
Cats played an important part in the short stories and novels of the American science fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). Lovecraft’s The Cats of Ulthar (1920) is a short story that focuses on the dreadful fate that befalls those who kill cats. A defenseless black kitten is stolen in the town by a couple who kill cats. The cat Menes then chants a curse that causes all the town’s cats to gather and attack and devour the couple in revenge. The town then passes a law against the killing of cats.
In the story Rats in the Walls (1924) the narrator moves to his ancestral home with his seven cats, but it is his black cat, Nigger-man, that becomes anxious, roving around the gothic house sniffing and scratching at the ancient walls. Once both narrator and cat find out the truth of the priory, the cat remains unfazed by the diabolical happenings, but his owner, on the other hand, goes mad.
In The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1943) the protagonist wanders the moon until he is saved by howling cats that take him back to earth.
“Carter now spoke with the leaders in the soft language of cats, and learned that his ancient friendship with the species was well known and often spoken of in the places where cats congregate. He had not been unmarked in Ulthar when he passed through, and the sleek old cats had remembered how he patted them after they had attended to the hungry Zoogs who looked evilly at a small black kitten. And they recalled, too, how he had welcomed the very little kitten who came to see him at the inn, and how he had given it a saucer of rich cream in the morning before he left. The grandfather of that very little kitten was the leader of the army now assembled, for he had seen the evil procession from a far hill and recognized the prisoner as a sworn friend of his kind on earth and in the land of dream.”
In the collection of short stories, Something About Cats, Lovecraft contends that the cat lover is devoid of the need for society by turning away from “pointless sociability and friendliness, or slavering devotion and obedience.” The cat lover is, like his cat companion, a ‘free soul’ (Lovecraft, 1949, pp. 4, 8).
The Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) equates himself with the cat in his poem The Cat and the Moon, and his lost love Maud Gonne with the moon. By using several opposites such as the cat’s black color and the moon’s whiteness, he metaphorically contrasts his feelings with Gonne’s. Minnaloushe was the cat of Maude Gonne’s daughter. There are 28 lines in the poem representative of the 28 phases of the moon.
THE CAT AND THE MOON
THE cat went here and there
And the moon spun round like a top,
And the nearest kin of the moon,
The creeping cat, looked up.
Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon,
For, wander and wail as he would,
The pure cold light in the sky
Troubled his animal blood.
Minnaloushe runs in the grass
Lifting his delicate feet.
Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance?
When two close kindred meet,
What better than call a dance?
Maybe the moon may learn,
Tired of that courtly fashion,
A new dance turn.
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
From moonlit place to place,
The sacred moon overhead
Has taken a new phase.
Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils
Will pass from change to change,
And that from round to crescent,
From crescent to round they range?
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
Alone, important and wise,
And lifts to the changing moon
His changing eyes (Yeats, 1912/2013, p. 53).
The masculine hunter, fisherman, bullfight enthusiast and 1954 Noble prize winner for literature, Ernest Hemingway, doted on his cats. After being given “Snowball” a white six-toed cat by a ship’s captain, Hemingway let nature take its course until by 1945 he had 23 felines. A whole tribe of polydactyl cats have inhabited his Key West, Florida estate ever since, and The Hemingway House and Museum still care for them today. The book Hemingway’s Cats: An Illustrated Biography, with a forward by his niece, provides some insight into his relationship with his cats. Uncle Willie, one of Hemingway’s cats was found after being hit by a car on February 22, 1953. Afterwards, Hemingway wrote a heartfelt letter to his close friend Gianfranco Ivancich.
Dear Gianfranco:
Just after I finished writing you and was putting the letter in the envelope Mary came down from the Torre and said, ‘Something terrible has happened to Willie.’ I went out and found Willie with both his right legs broken: one at the hip, the other below the knee. A car must have run over him or somebody hit him with a club. He had come all the way home on the two feet of one side. It was a multiple compound fracture with much dirt in the wound and fragments protruding. But he purred and seemed sure that I could fix it.
I had René get a bowl of milk for him and René held him and caressed him and Willie was drinking the milk while I shot him through the head. I don’t think he could have suffered and the nerves had been crushed so his legs had not begun to really hurt. Monstruo wished to shoot him for me, but I could not delegate the responsibility or leave a chance of Will knowing anybody was killing him…
Have had to shoot people but never anyone I knew and loved for eleven years. Nor anyone that purred with two broken legs (Brennen, 2006).
Norman Mailer said of William S. Burroughs that he was “The only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.” Penguin Books described him as “one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century.” Even so, the cranky Burroughs had a special affinity for his cats, and in his Last Words: 7/30/97 he wrote, “There is no final enough wisdom, experience –any fucking thing. No Holy Grail, No Final Satori, no solution. Just Conflict. Only thing that can resolve conflict is love, like I felt for Fletch and Ruski, Spooner, and Calico. Pure love.
What I feel for my cats past and present.”
In an interview with Victor Bockris, Burroughs responded to his question. “Do you think you’ve learned a lot from living with your cats?”
“Oh heavens! I’ve learned immeasurably. I’ve learned compassion. I remember when I was out at the stone house Ruski sort of attacked one of the kittens. I gave him a light slap and then he disappeared. He was so hurt. And I knew where he was. I went out into the barn and found him sulking there, picked him up and carried him back. Just the slightest slap like that. This is his human, his human had betrayed him. Oh heavens, yes, I’ve learned from my cats. They reflect you in a very deep way. They just opened up a whole area of compassion in me. I remember lying in my bed and weeping and weeping to think that a nuclear catastrophe would destroy them. I could see people driving by saying: “Kill your dogs and cat.” I spent hours just crying. Oh, my God. Then there is constantly the feeling that there could be some relationship between me and the cats and that I might have missed it. Some of this is in The Cat Inside. Some of it is so extreme that I couldn’t write. People think of me as being cold – some woman wrote that I could not admit any feeling at all. My God, I am so emotional that sometimes I can’t stand the intensity. Oh, my God. Then they ask me if I ever cry? I say, ‘Holy shit, probably two days ago.’ I’m very subject to these violent fits of weeping, for very good reason” (Bockris, 1996, pp. 247-248).
The Noble Prize winning author Doris Lessing was influenced by her deep relationships with cats. In An Old Woman and Her Cat (1972) the main character Hetty, poor, widowed and abandoned by her children, finds her only comfort in her faithful tomcat. Both outcasts of society, Hetty dies of exposure while trying to hide from the authorities that want to commit her to an old folk’s home. Her cat is caught and put to sleep. A neat society has disposed of its non-conformists. Lessing not only used cats in her fiction, but she also documented the lives of her own. On Cats (2002) consists of a collection of stories, Particularly Cats and Rufus the Survivor, and the memoir, The Old Age of El Magnifico wherein Lessing observes and offers her adept insights into the actions of her felines. Sometimes ruthless in her telling of the fates of unlucky cats, the book is likewise filled with emotion at their eternal beauty. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, she stated, “The cat I communicated with best was El Magnifico. He was such a clever cat. We used to have sessions when we tried to be on each other's level—” (Crossen, 2008).
