Cyrus came to us from a former colleague of my wife’s. He was a black cat and we often tripped over him on the dark linoleum in the kitchen. In his younger days he had been known to creep up on his first owner, the colleague’s future husband, and drop on him suddenly from above, like a feline version of Cato, Inspector Clouseau’s manservant. When someone in the family developed an allergy, we agreed to adopt Cyrus; my wife flew down with him from Boston to Richmond, an experience that terrified him. Before our daughter was born I took a lot of afternoon naps, and Cyrus used to join me on the bed, sleeping alongside me with his paw placed gently over my wrist.
His successor, Darwin, was passed on to us by a friend who was moving to New Orleans after a divorce. She had inherited him from her father, who had adopted him from a shelter. There he had been known as Ty and was regarded by the staff as “standoffish” (a claim we found hard to believe). Like Tigger he was an orange cat. Swaggering and imperious when we first knew him, he became increasingly stiff and frail in his old age. But he retained his love of chicken, and of sitting in cardboard boxes, and still enjoyed eating the dog’s food, in front of the dog, with his three remaining teeth. He died the summer before last while we were in New England; our cat-sitter arrived one morning and found him lying dead in a sunbeam, having suffered a stroke or heart attack overnight.
These creatures lived with us for
years—in Tigger’s case, virtually his
entire life. All were indoor cats, so their
activities were on full view. Yet their
inner lives remain an enigma to us.
We loved them, but we do not know
whether they loved us in the same way,
or even liked us. We do not know how
they conceived of us. As caregivers
and protectors? As mobile can openers?
As larger, less competent cats?
We do not know what their thoughts
were like at all.
Such ignorance is unsettling. It is
more comforting to imagine that
cats are pretty much like us: smaller,
furrier humans. Vet techs are insistent
that our cats regard us as parents.
(“We’re going to give Mom some
medication for you.”) Doting owners
refer to their cats as “fur babies.” There
is a long history of representing cats
as quasi people. An Egyptian papyrus
from the second millennium BC
depicts a cat with a shepherd’s staff
herding geese. Medieval manuscripts
show cats playing musical instruments.
The success of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s
Cats suggests an apparently boundless
appetite for cats singing show tunes
about their expertise in human professions
(burglary, conjuring, piracy).
There is a large market for cozy mystery
novels with cat detectives.
Yet when the boundaries are blurred
too far, we become uneasy. Stage productions
of Cats merely gesture at
felinity, with leotards, fur, and garish
makeup. The result is campy, not
frightening, except perhaps to small
children. The 2019 film of the musical
tried to make its all- star cast more
catlike, using computer- generated imagery.
The process stranded the actors
in an uncanny valley, trapped between
two species like the monstrous hybrids
of Dr. Moreau. Audiences were creeped
out and the movie flopped. We want
to believe that cats are like us; we are
uncomfortably aware that they are not.
This tension is integral to the
art of Susan Herbert. Herbert, who
died in 2014, spent her career working
front- of- house jobs for the Royal
Shakespeare Company, the English
National Opera, and the Theatre Royal
in Bath. A cat owner herself, she began
at some point to depict cats in paintings.
Her formula is straightforward:
a famous work of art, with cats replacing
the human figures. The Très
Riches Heures of the Duke of Berry—
but with cats. David’s The Death of
Socrates—but with cats. Manet’s Le
Déjeuner sur l’herbe—with cats. A
number of her paintings were collected
in The Cats Gallery of Art in 1990,
and other volumes followed, including
Medieval Cats, Shakespeare Cats,
Opera Cats, and Movie Cats. A compendium,
Cats Galore, came out posthumously;
Cats Galore Encore! now offers
a second helping.
Herbert’s purpose, her sister tells
us in the preface, was “to amuse and
entertain,” and many of the paintings
do no more. But some rise, perhaps
accidentally, to real genius. The cat
version of Vermeer’s The Milkmaid is
a surrealist nightmare worthy of Max
Ernst. The rendering of Van Gogh’s
Self- Portrait with Bandaged Ear is no
less moving than the original. Often
her versions bring out a latent felinity
in the original. Once we have seen
the cat in the human we cannot quite
unsee it.
The Pre- Raphaelites offer Herbert
some of her best material, perhaps because
they are already poised on the
thin line between art and kitsch. Her
masterpiece in this mode is a version
of William Holman Hunt’s The Awakening
Conscience. An orange tomcat,
in Victorian garb, paws at a tabby in a
white dress who rises from his lap, her
wide eyes fixed on something over the
viewer’s shoulder. (The female model
was Herbert’s own cat Polly, who figures
in a number of her paintings.)
In Hunt’s original the protagonist is
a fallen woman, seized with remorse at
her own moral ruin. What is irresistibly
comic here is the idea of a cat having a
conscience to awaken, or feeling a call
to higher things—higher, anyway, than
the kitchen counter. We know, more
or less, what Hunt’s ruined woman is
supposed to be seeing, but what vision
transfixes Herbert’s tabby? Birds out
the window? A dangling ribbon? Dust?
In 1894 Thomas Edison’s studio produced
a brief film of two cats boxing
with each other. (The performers
were supplied by a cat circus owned
by one Henry Welton.) Important evidence
of early motion pictures, this
twenty- second movie has another claim
to fame: it is arguably the first cute
cat video. As technology advances, cats
have continued to be early adoptees.
Among the first YouTube videos still
viewable is a thirty- second clip of a cat
named Pajamas batting at a dangling
toy while a song by Nick Drake plays in
the background. It was uploaded within
the site’s first month of operation in
2005, by someone known only as “steve.”
The mid- Aughts also saw the advent
of LOLcats: viral images of cats with
first- person captions, as featured on
the website I Can Has Cheezburger?
The site name illustrates the conceit
underlying the meme: that cats
can type but have not quite mastered
grammar or spelling. Cats have since
migrated with the rest of us to a series
of new venues, including Facebook,
Reddit, Instagram, and TikTok. Before
I shuttered it, my own Twitter feed
followed accounts called Cats of Yore
(vintage cat pictures), Black Metal Cats
(cats with baleful expressions), and
“cats being weird little guys” (pretty
much what it sounds like).
In The Internet Is for Cats, Jessica
Maddox reports on a three- year research
project ranging across various
social media platforms. Maddox
teaches media studies at the University
of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, and
she writes a dense academic English
sometimes barely distinguishable
from parody. (“The academic discipline
of cute studies identifies how
cuteness can be understood as both an
affect and set of aesthetics. . . .”) The
objects of her Internet safari are duly
problematized, theorized, and interrogated;
we are shown, relentlessly,
how things are “imbricated” in other
things. But her book’s major claim
is convincing: there is more to cat
(and other animal) pics than meets
the eye.
A popular New Yorker cartoon shows
a dog at a computer console explaining
to another dog that “on the Internet,
nobody knows you’re a dog.”
But there are no real animals on the
Internet. Dogs and cats have meaning
on it, yes, but only at one remove,
and only as a tool for human interaction.
As Maddox points out, “Pets. . .
do not post themselves.” The person
who types “awww” or “sooo cute!” in
response to a cat pic is not talking to
the cat but to the person who posted
the image, and to other commenters.
In an attention economy, cats and
other pets are cute capital. Adeptly
deployed, their images produce clicks,
likes, and follows. They form and maintain
bonds between users. In a society
shaped by the commodification of everything,
they may even generate real
money.
Some cats have become Internet celebrities.
One is Tardar Sauce, better
known as Grumpy Cat, whose adorably
grouchy visage was purely accidental,
the result of feline dwarfism
and an underbite. Another feline star,
Keyboard Cat, was recorded “playing”
a jaunty tune, her paws manipulated
by her owner from beneath a smock.
Viewers began pairing the video with
scenes of people falling down escalators
or suffering other mishaps,
often with the caption “Play him/her
off, Keyboard Cat.” In late 2021 a cat
named Jorts achieved fame in a Reddit
post that went viral. A coworker of the
poster had been spreading margarine
on the cat’s coat, allegedly to encourage
him to groom himself. For several
days the phrase “buttered Jorts” was
inescapable on social media.
As a survivor of workplace abuse,
Jorts now tweets in support of organized
labor. But some of his colleagues
have embraced a more entrepreneurial
outlook. Keyboard Cat appeared in a
commercial for pistachios. Grumpy Cat
endorsed Friskies brand cat food and
Honey Nut Cheerios; Grumpy Cat merchandise
included T- shirts, mugs, two
books, a calendar, and a video game.
Her death in 2019 ended her career
as a spokesfeline, but not all celebrity
cats have been so constrained. The
original Keyboard Cat has had two replacements
so far, with six lives presumably
still to go.
Such success does not come without
effort; Grumpy Cat’s owner left her job
at Red Lobster to manage her cat’s career.
But most people who post their
pets are not so ambitious. They aim
merely to give pleasure to others and
to receive it in turn. As one of Maddox’s
informants explains, pet pictures
can serve as an antidote to doomscrolling:
“Like, ‘here’s a list of all the people
who died in Afghanistan this week, but
also, here’s a French bulldog all tucked
in for bed.’” “Having a rough day,” types
the beleaguered office worker. “Send
cat pics.” Strengthened by other people’s
fur babies, we can dive once more
into next year’s earnings projections
or the departmental outcomes assessment
document.
Should we see the joy experienced
by the sharing of pet pics as an act of
resistance, a small rebellion against a
neoliberal economy? Or is it a palliative
that keeps us from growing fractious
and discontented, like the mindfulness
programs so much in vogue with HR
departments? Perhaps both, suggests
Maddox. In any case, she cautions us
against trying to sever the cute cat
videos from the more toxic aspects
of the Internet; the two are inextricably
linked.
Despite her title, Maddox is not interested
exclusively, or even especially,
in cats. Cat pics for her are
merely a subcategory (though a sizable
one) of a larger class: pet pics or animal
images. Yet there are real distinctions
to be made here. The composer
Ned Rorem claimed that everything
in the world is either French or German.
Isaiah Berlin divided thinkers
into hedgehogs and foxes. Cats
likewise form half of a binary system
whose other half is constituted
by dogs.
Cats are not dogs, of course, any
more than night is day or a martini
is a glass of milk. Dogs, as a class, are
male, while all cats are female. Dogs
are American, cats European (though
in relation to each other Germans are
dogs and the French are cats). Football
is a dog sport (all that romping
and mud). Cats are baseball players—
meditative, motionless for long periods,
then springing suddenly into
action.
Cats are sensitive, precise, in love
with nuance; dogs strive untidily for
greatness. Some notable dogs: Picasso,
Gladstone, Beethoven. Their cat counterparts:
Klee, Disraeli, Ravel. Ezra
Pound was a dog, T. S. Eliot—naturally—
a cat. Tennyson was a cat too,
while Robert Brow ning was a dog—a
great, furry Newfoundland bounding
into the house after a walk and shaking
water all over everything, including
his wife’s indignant spaniel, Flush.
Hemingway posed as a dog, to himself
as well as others. But it was a cat who
wrote The Sun Also Rises and “Hills
Like White Elephants.”
That dog should be the opposite of
cat is neither natural nor universal.
The Greeks and Romans were familiar
enough with cats (though much of
their mousing was done by snakes and
weasels). But cats play almost no role
in the Greco- Roman imagination. And
Greek dogs, lacking an opposite number,
have quite a different significance,
being associated not with loyalty or
honesty but with faithlessness, servility,
and women.
For us, though, the divide is absolute.
Dogs embody our love of the
world, in all its richness and variety.
Cats represent the world’s indifference
to us. Dogs want to please us;
they come when called. Cats may recognize
their names but see no need to
answer to them. And why should they?
Cats don’t care.
“Why can’t a cat be taught to retrieve?”
asked Wittgenstein
in one of his Zettel. “Doesn’t it understand
what one wants? And what
constitutes understanding or failure
to understand here?” He is not the
only thinker to have been intrigued
by cats’ implacable otherness. In Feline
Philosophy John Gray looks at various
concepts—happiness, virtue, love,
death, the meaning of life—and subjects
them to a simple test: Would our
preoccupation with these things make
any sense to a cat?
The answer, mostly, is no. Rejecting
ideas of moral goodness that go back
to the Greeks, Gray throws in his lot
with the Taoist concept of te (“acting
as you must”) and Spinoza’s idea of
conatus (“the tendency of living things
to preserve and enhance their activity
in the world”). By these definitions,
to live a good life is not to achieve
(moral) virtue but to realize one’s particular
nature.
Gray uses several real cats as touchstones.
One is a Siamese named Mèo.
Adopted as a hungry, flea- ridden kitten
during the Vietnam War by an
American journalist, he lived in the
Da Nang press compound, a Saigon
hotel, a house in Connecticut, a Manhattan
brownstone, and a flat in London.
He survived being hit by a car and
coming down with pneumonia, as well
as six months of British quarantine:
“Throughout the smoke and wind of
history, Mèo lived his fierce, joyous life.
Torn from his home by human madness,
he flourished wherever he found
himself.” It is this flourishing—flourishing
as a cat—that for Gray constitutes
Mèo’s success.
Mèo, like all cats, had no moral
sense. Cats aren’t preoccupied with
being good, only with being cats. They
are incapable of empathy, altruism,
pity, or kindness, and likewise incapable
of cruelty or sadism. They are
beyond good and evil. Cats don’t know
that they will die, though they may
sense the approach of death when it
comes. They do not search for meaning
in their lives.
Cats refute continuously the claim
that the unexamined life is not worth
living, by living it. They are both Stoics
and Epicureans: they live in accordance
with nature and they seek to
maximize pleasure. But they do this
without reading treatises or attending
lectures. Nor do they share the defensive
outlook and rejection of the
world common to both schools. That
cats have no use for philosophy is an
indictment, for Gray, not of cats, but
of philosophy: “Posing as a cure, philosophy
is a symptom of the disorder
it pretends to remedy.”
If cats have the answer—that there
is no answer, for there is no question—
it follows that the best philosophers
will be the most catlike. A cautionary
example here is Pascal, who lived an
anxious life trying to overcome his
dread of death through faith and reason.
Not a cat person, Pascal. Gray’s
sympathies lie rather with Montaigne
and Samuel Johnson, who recognize
the futility of human striving and urge
us to take life as it comes. Not surprisingly,
both were cat owners.
Gray’s chapter on cats and love begins
with some fictional cats in works
by Colette, Patricia Highsmith, and
the Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki.
All three writers present the
relationship between man and cat as
a complete and satisfying one, in contrast
with the messes people make of
their involvement with other humans.
“In love, more than anywhere else,”
says Gray, “human beings are ruled
by self- deception. When cats love, on
the other hand, it is not in order to
fool themselves.”
A real- life story along these lines
involves Gattino, chronicled by Mary
Gaitskill in her essay “Lost Cat.”
Gaitskill adopted Gattino as a skinny
kitten in Italy and brought him back to
the US. There, not long after arrival,
he went missing. Gaitskill hunted for
Gattino, put up posters, and even consulted
psychics. On several occasions
she felt she was receiving mental messages
from him: “I’m scared”; “I’m
lonely.” There was a possible sighting
at a nearby university, but the
search came up empty. Gattino was
never found, and it seems likely that
he fell victim to a bobcat or coyote.
His last message to Gaitskill was as
simple as his earlier ones: “I’m dying.
Goodbye.”
This is, one might have thought, a
sad story. But Gray thinks otherwise.
Gattino’s life was short, but it “was
not sad in the way human lives can
be sad.” His end may have been gruesome,
but he and Gaitskill enjoyed a
pure and uncomplicated love, one that
contrasted strikingly with the troubled
relationship Gaitskill had with
her father.
Gray clearly wants to see Gattino’s
life as meaningful. Gattino, he insists,
“was not a loser.” But if Gattino’s life
had meaning, it seems to have been
primarily for Gaitskill (and Gray). Like
Maddox’s, Gray’s book is, in the end,
about humans. The cats he discusses,
real or fictional, are vehicles for us to
think about ourselves. Cats themselves
have no philosophy, feline or otherwise.
They’re just cats.
Cats have often made good companions
for intellectuals—“amis
de la science,” Baudelaire called them
in “Les Chats.” The Latin textual critic
D.R. Shackleton Bailey dedicated his
seven- volume edition of Cicero’s Letters
to Atticus to his white cat, Donum,
whom he called “more intelligent than
most people I have encountered.” (Feline
Philology is a book that remains
to be written.) But the relationship
has not always been a happy one. Descartes
once threw a cat out a window
to satisfy himself that animals lacked
consciousness.
Gray also tells us of the nineteenthcentury
neurologist Paolo Mantegazza,
who studied the physiology of pain by
torturing cats in a device he called
“the tormentor.” When not abusing
animals, Mantegazza was a futuristic
novelist, a scientific racist, a cocaine
enthusiast, and a progressive deputy
in the Italian parliament. But animal
cruelty bridges partisan divides. As a
Harvard medical student, the future
Republican Senate majority leader Bill
Frist adopted cats from Boston- area
animal shelters, whisked them off to
the lab, and dissected them, to provide
data for experiments on cardiac
muscles. He had the grace to express
some regret about this later.
Man’s inhumanity to cats is a central
theme of the Czech writer Bohumil
Hrabal’s brief memoir Autíčko, first
published in 1986 and now translated
into English as All My Cats. Hrabal was
long known to English readers (if at
all) as the author of Closely Watched
Trains, the basis for the 1966 film by
Jiří Menzel. But recent years have seen
a flurry of new or newly republished
translations, including I Served the
King of England, Dancing Lessons for
the Advanced in Age, and The Gentle
Barbarian.
Like Susan Herbert, Hrabal found
his form and stuck with it. In a typical
Hrabal novel, a speaker of low or
marginal social status retails, in a
sprawling monologue, memories of a
picaresque career. The content is often
bawdy, the tone generally comic. Hrabal
referred to this trademark style as
pábení—rambling or palavering.
All My Cats is recognizably pábení,
but with some differences. For one
thing, the palaverist is Hrabal himself.
The book also lacks the nostalgic,
happy- go- lucky tone of other Hrabalian
productions. Brief as it is, it makes
for grim reading.
The action takes place at the Hrabals’
weekend house at Kersko, an
hour’s drive from Prague (though Hrabal
often takes the bus). At the beginning
of the book the property is home
to five cats. During the week they fend
for themselves; on weekends the Hrabals
arrive to feed them. The weekly
reunion is joyful, but each return to
Prague fills Hrabal with guilt:
In every available chink in the
fence there would be a cat’s head
poking out, five little cats’ heads
in all, following my departure and
longing for what could not be altered,
longing for me to return so
we could all be together in the snug
little room by the warm stove.
The cat population fluctuates. One of
the tomcats, Renda, is adopted by a
stranger, a woman from the city who
arrives one day and carries him off before
Hrabal can protest. The woman’s
son returns the cat some months later
in an emaciated state; unhappy in his
new situation, he has stopped eating.
A pregnant tabby shows up and has
kittens. So does Blackie, Hrabal’s favorite
of the original quintet. “What
are we going to do with all those
cats?” asks Hrabal’s wife in desperation.
Eventually Hrabal kills six of the
ten kittens, putting them in a mailbag
and beating them to death. The killing
weighs on his mind, though the
two mothers seem unperturbed by
the disappearance of their offspring;
indeed, they treat Hrabal with even
more affection. Then Blackie comes
down with a fever. Hrabal holds her
down as she writhes and spits, and
finds he has broken her neck.
Renda the tomcat vanishes for good
sometime after his return, perhaps
hit by a car or killed by hunters. He
appears to Hrabal in early morning
visions and reproaches him. Another
tabby appears and has two kittens. One
is adopted by a woman in Prague. The
Hrabals keep the other, naming her
Autíčko (little car) after their Renault.
Then Autíčko becomes pregnant. So
does her mother, again. (At no point
does it seem to have occurred to anyone
to have the cats spayed.) Now
there are ten more kittens and once
more the refrain: “What are we going
to do with all those cats?” Five, happily,
are adopted by various neighbors. The
two mothers quarrel with each other
and reconcile, but then turn their aggression
on their own offspring and
on Hrabal. When both become pregnant
yet again, it is time, once more,
to bring out the mailbag.
Hrabal feels the weight of his murders
ever more keenly. He visits a
faith healer but finds no comfort. An
encounter with a disturbed neighbor
opens his eyes to the cats’ slaughter
of songbirds, but the relief is shortlived.
Then Hrabal and his wife are
nearly killed in a car accident, an experience
that he mysteriously interprets
as absolution for his sins. He returns,
redeemed, to the three remaining tomcats,
whose offspring will be someone
else’s problem.
To call Hrabal a cat lover feels actively
misdescriptive—like referring to
William S. Burroughs as a recreational
drug user. On Hrabal’s side, at least,
the relationship seems almost entirely
toxic. The cats represent for him an
enormous burden of responsibility,
anxiety, and guilt. At one point he compares
his murder of the two pregnant
cats to the 1950 execution of the Czech
politician Milada Horáková by the Communist
regime “merely because she had
opinions that were deemed unsuitable.”
The comparison seems far- fetched—
bizarre, even. Yet as the book proceeds,
the killing of the cats is asked to carry
even heavier symbolic weight:
It was as if I had lived through all
those wars, as if I had taken part in
the massacre at My Lai, the massacre
in Lebanon, as if I had been
through everything I read about
in a book called A Century of War
Photography
.
The final item undercuts the hyperbole
without quite deactivating it. Hrabal
ironically calls himself “the king
of Czech comedians,” but the comedy
here is bleak indeed.
That Hrabal’s cats have some larger
meaning seems clear, but it is harder
to say what that meaning is. If pressed,
I might say that they represent the
world: our efforts as humans to cope
with it, the claims it makes upon us,
the violence we find ourselves visiting
upon it merely by living in it. But
perhaps the point is rather our own
grandiose need, as humans, to impose
a false significance on the world. The
cats, after all, are just cats.
One of the chapters in Hugh Kenner’s
The Pound Era analyzes a
short poem by William Carlos Williams:
As the cat
climbed over
the top of
the jamcloset
first the right
forefoot
carefully
then the hind
stepped down
into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot
As Kenner showed, the poem’s effect
relies on syntactic suspension. “As”
in line 1 opens a door that is not shut
until the final word. Our inkling that
“forefoot” in the sixth line might be
the subject is not confirmed until the
eighth. Nothing in what precedes allows
us to anticipate the final “flowerpot.”
But if we cannot predict at any
given moment what word will come
next, that is our problem. The sentence,
like the cat, knows exactly where
it’s going. As Kenner writes, “We can
no more imagine what it is like to be
a cat than we can imagine what it is
like to be a sentence.”
The best descriptions of cats show
this blend of mystery and attention.
In the year 889 the Japanese emperor
Uda described the cat given him by his
imperial predecessor:
My cat is a foot and a half in length
and about six inches in height.
When he curls up he is very small,
looking like a black millet berry. . .
The pupils of his eyes sparkle,
dazzlingly bright like shiny needles
flashing with light, while the
points of his ears stick straight
up, unwaveringly, looking like the
bowl of a spoon.
(translated by Judith N.
Rabinovitch and Akira Minegishi)
There is fancy here, but also an exactness
of observation that Williams
would have recognized. It is with a
similar mix of precision and wonder
that the eighteenth- century English
poet Christopher Smart considers his
cat Jeoffry:
For then he leaps up to catch the
musk, which is the blessing of
God upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work
it in.
For having done duty and received
blessing he begins to consider
himself.
For this he performs in ten
degrees. . . .
Some of the terms Smart uses are puzzling:
“musk,” “prank.” The former may
be a geranium or a kind of fruit; “upon
prank” means playfully. But even their
obscurity inadvertently adds to the
effect—words of a cat language, perhaps,
in which we are still unpracticed.
Smart’s lines come from his fragmentary
poem Jubilate Agno (Rejoice
in the Lamb), which the poet wrote in
an asylum. After a seizure of some sort
in 1755, he had begun praying loudly in
public and demanding that others join
him. He was eventually committed to
a series of institutions—though never,
mercifully, to Bedlam itself. We know
nothing of Jeoffry beyond the seventyfour
lines that Smart devotes to him.
Undaunted by this lack of information,
Oliver Soden has now written
Jeoffry’s biography. His acknowledged
model is Flush, Virginia Woolf’s life of
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker
spaniel. In his narrative we follow Jeoffry
from his birth in the cupboard of
a Covent Garden bordello to his years
with Smart, first in the asylum and
then in hired lodgings, and finally to a
sedate old age with a widow in Devon.
The perils of such an undertaking
are many. The potential for cringe is
always present, yet the book is never
cutesy or twee. One might fear that
the pet’s biography will be merely an
excuse to write about its owner. And
we do learn a certain amount about
Smart; Soden at one point apologizes
for putting Jeoffry aside “just for a
page or two” to introduce “a major
supporting player.” But he gives full
measure to his actual protagonist.
Some famous figures make cameo
appearances, always from a cat’seye
view: David Garrick appears as a
green- gloved hand attached to a “rich
and resonant” voice, the elderly Handel
as “two milky eyes. . . , vague and
unseeing beneath a large and trembling
wig.” Dr. Johnson visits his friend
Smart in the asylum (“I’d as lief pray
with Kit Smart as anyone else,” Boswell
records him saying), and Jeoffry
later has a brief but memorable meeting
with Johnson’s cat Hodge. Alas, our
hero was born too late to encounter
Horace Walpole’s tabby Selima, who
drowned in a goldfish bowl and was
mourned in a poem by Thomas Gray.
In compensation, Soden lets Jeoffry
live to a ripe old age. He survives
Smart by several years, long enough
to be petted at vaguely by the infant
Coleridge.
Unsurprisingly, the years with Smart
are the heart of the book. The asylum
period is an imprisonment for Jeoffry
too. Used to the sounds and smells of
London, he is now confined by a wiretopped
wall to Smart’s room and tiny
garden. We watch with him as Smart
is force- fed his “medicine” and herded
out naked into the rain with other patients,
in lieu of bathing. Soden movingly
imagines Smart’s mental illness
as experienced by Jeoffry:
To Jeoffry, the man smelled of
fear. . . . Around Smart stretched
something that was not there,
but which Jeoffry could see all the
same: an absence of light, like a
silk blanket that was not black
but blank, that was not dark but
vacuous, empty of meaning, devoid
of sense. . . . On some days
the blanket and its jabs sent
Smart mad, and on other days
it sent him still, and sometime
Jeoffry could see that it wasn’t
there at all. Jeoffry knew it for what
it was, but what it was he could
not say.
Whether this catches a cat’s experience,
who can know? But at least it
takes seriously the gulf between cats
and ourselves.
Even attuned observers cannot resist
attributing human behavior to
cats, if only playfully. Smart believed
Jeoffry to be “the servant of the living
God duly and daily serving him”
after his feline fashion. Emperor
Uda notes that his cat has a preference
for Taoist- style health practices
and “instinctively follows the
‘five- bird’ regimen.” Joyce’s Leopold
Bloom idly wonders whether cats keep
kosher.
In the end, though, we are better
off asking nothing of cats but
that they be cats. In the ninth century
an anonymous Irish scholar observes
his pet, Pangur Ban, hunting
mice while his master toils over a
manuscript:
So in peace our tasks we ply
Pangur Ban, my cat, and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.
(translated by Robin Flower)
And sometimes, if we are respectful
and attentive, we may be rewarded
with real communion. Emperor Uda
records one such moment:
I once said to the cat, “You possess
the forces of yin and yang
and have a body that is the way it
should be. I suspect that in your
heart you may even know all about
me!” The cat heaved a sigh, raised
his head, and stared fixedly at my
face, seeming so choked with emotion,
his heart so full of feeling,
that he could not say a thing in
reply.
Uda abdicated in 897, after a ten- year
reign, in favor of his eldest son, and
spent the last three decades of his life
as a Buddhist priest. What became of
the cat we do not know. .
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
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