Puss in books

I was a bookworm. While the neighborhood kids played kickball in the driveway, you could have found me either wedged behind the sofa in the living room or outside perched in the tree house with a book in my hand. As a kid, my favorite books were biographies (I loved the “Landmark” series), fantasies, my favorites being the Victorian fantasy novels of Edith Nesbit and the more modern Tales of Magic by Edgar Eager (both series are unjustly forgotten) plus any novel that introduced me to a time and culture not my own.

I still love to read. Most evenings you can find me on the living room sofa, book in my hand with Chloe perched on the sofa arm and Annie stretched out on the back. Sometimes I even read to them until they get tired of watching a fat middle-aged woman sitting motionless and leap off the sofa to enjoy a more exciting sight like the fish bowl or birds in the maple tree outside. Here are some of the works I know featuring cats as characters.

Not surprising, cats are often portrayed as carousers. We’ve all seen cartoons of Garfield on the fence, singing to a lady love. He’s only the most recent of a long line of amorous kitties. Kater Murr is the tom cat hero of remarkably modern novel by German author E.T.A. Hoffman containing tales and observations by a free-thinking cat. Critic Alex Ross wrote about the novel in the New Yorker (1972), “If the phantasmagoric 'Kater Murr' were published tomorrow as the work of a young Brooklyn hipster, it might be hailed as a tour de force of postmodern fiction." Kater Murr is a direct progenitor of another free-thinking tom cat, Behemoth, who carouses riotously through the Bulgavov’s satirical Russian masterpiece, The Master and Margarita (1940). I remember reading this one summer when I was in college and being sucked into this dark, fantastic world. Another free-thinking, very raunchy tom is Robert Crumb’s Fritz the Cat (1959) which was made into the first x-rated animated feature film in 1972. But not all the carousing kitties are toms. Jane and I shared a love for the poems written by Don Marquis in the twenties.  Archy and Mehitabel describes in verse the friendship of a soulful cockroach and his slightly slutty friend, the alley cat Mehitabel. Mehitabel reminds me a lot of Jane in her last years as she navigated between the twin shoals of poverty and mental illness with resourcefulness, wit and grace.

When Chloe first moved in with me, in an attempt to treat the skin condition which made both our lives miserable, I visited a homeopathic vet since conventional medicine hadn’t helped. “I really don’t know much about cats,” I told Sid, my vet friend. “I know you have cats. Would you say she’s, well, a normal specimen?”

I’d say, frankly, that she’s a kitty from another planet,” Sid replied. There seem to be a lot of those. Another genre that is remarkably rich in cats is science fiction. Robert Heinlein, D.J. McHale, Andre Norton, and Roger Zalazny have all written sci-fi in which cats play major roles. Science fiction writer Ursula LeGuin has written a charming children’s series called The Catwings about- what else? - winged cats and Erin Hunter has written a wonderful children’s fantasy adventure series, The Warriors, told from the feline point of view. Carbonel by Barbara Sleigh is a series similar to Harry Potter with a magical world set in England.

Perhaps cats play a major role in mystery series because of their legendary curiosity. Lillian Jackson Braun, Rita Mae Brown, and Carole Nelson Douglas and Shirley Rousseau Murphy all have written mystery series in which cats solve crimes.  While not detectives, cats play major roles as companions in the mysteries of Nevada Barr, Elizabeth Peters, and Kathy Reichs. More unusual is the Felidae series, a German mystery series by Turkish-born writer Akif Pirinicci, which is can be read as an allegory about Nazi Germany. These are complex, disturbing, multi-layered books full of ethical ambiguity.

So what’s my favorite cat book? It’s neither science fiction nor a mystery, but it does feature a free-thinking tom. It’s The Fur Person, by May Sarton.

In addition to fiction, there is lots of poetry featuring cats. In addition T. S. Eliot’s Old Possums Book of Practical Cats, the anthology that formed the basis for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical, poems about cats have been written by such luminaries as Matthew Arnold, Robert Bly, Chaucer, Wordsworth and W.B. Yeats.
Perhaps the best poem ever written about a cat it Christopher Smart’s “For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffrey,” an excerpt of a longer work, Jubilate Agno. Too long to print here, here’s a link: http://42opus.com/v4n2/mycatjeoffry

Here's my favoite cat poem for the moment, an adaptation by Daniel Ladinsky, of a poem written by Tukaram (c.1608-1649, India):

LANDLOCKED IN FUR

I was meditating with my cat the other day

and all of a sudden she shouted,

"What happened?"

I knew exactly what she meant, but encouraged

her to say more--feeling that if she got it all out on the table

she would sleep better that night.

So I responded, "Tell me more, dear,"

and she soulfully meowed,

"Well, I was mingled with the sky and now look-- 

I am landlocked in fur."

To this I said, "I know exactly what 

you mean."

What to say about conversation

between

mystics?