The Philosopher's Cat

S. J. Perelman, the comic writer, was born on February 1, 1904. He is reputed to have loved his canaries more than his actual children. I do not know if this is a canard, but I do know he was funny. In his book "Eastward Ha" (1977) he mentions a cat named Magellan.  

  This day, January 31, 1903, was the birthdate of Tallulah Bankhead. She had cats, and they were cared for by a famous New York City veterinarian, Louis Camuti. He is the author of the book, "All My Patients Are Under The Bed." Though we would guess that Tallulah's cats were NOT hiding thusly.

Walter Savage Landor deserves to be better remembered. This Victorian writer died on January 30, 1924. Following is Landor's idea of what LaFontaine might have said, about cats: "When a cat flatters with his tongue he is not insincere: you may safely take it for a real kindness. He is loyal,... my word for him, he is loyal, (Observe too, if you please, no cat ever licks you when he wants anything from you ; so that there is nothing of baseness in such an act of adulation, if we must call it so. ...Cats ask plainly for what they want."

  January 29, 1939 is the birthday of the feminist philosopher, Germaine Greer. She is a brave lady and given to fresh thought, and litter. Greer had this to say about cat BOOKS. "If I were to make a cat book it would show the horribleness of cats, their cruelty, their jealousy,...their utter lack of fine feeling, their abominable sex life." I myself did not get the joke right off. Now I believe Greer would agree with me that one difference between cats and women is that cats would not take such comments personally.

  William Butler Yeats died on January 28, 1939. The end of an era, though not the end of the era of silly poetry. Yeats corresponded with the philosopher T. Sturges Moore and by way of some example, Yeat brought up the instance of John Ruskin, a Victorian art critic, throwing a cat out the window. Yeats wanted to know how exactly Ruskin determined this was a demon cat, how Ruskin could distinguish the cat he ejected, from an ordinary house cat. Yeats proves that there is beauty without truth.

  January 27, 1832 is the date Lewis Carroll was born. We might forget how largely cats figure in his work, and we glimpse in the excerpt below a vision of cats and Victorian domesticity, Alice has fallen into a rabbit hole and goes: Down, down, down. There was nothing else to do, so Alice soon began talking again. 'Dinah'll miss me very much tonight...I hope they'll remember her saucer of milk at tea-time. Dinah my dear, I wish you were here with me. There are no mice in the air, I'm afraid, but you might catch a bat, and that's very like a mouse you know. But do cats eat bats, I wonder? End of quote. The glimpse I mean is the emotional tenor of a certain domesticity.

January 26, 2003, was the last day of Hugh Trevor-Roper, the British historian. Most famous for his studies of German history, Trevor-Roper also wrote about English history and it is from an essay on Archbishop Laud that we find a lovely cat reference. Laud was the head of the Anglican church under Charles I, and wound up sacrificed, regretfully, to the rebellious parliament by the king. Before that end however, Laud had had a cat which was a gift from Lady Roe, who brought the cat from Greece.

  Dear, sad, Virginia Woolf was born on January 25, 1882. We find a cat in "A Room of One's Own." Here the author, mildly drunk, happily smoking, ensconced in a window seat, among friends, but not feeling the need to contribute conversation, remarks: If,,, there had been an ashtray handy...if things had been a little different than they were, one would not have seen...a cat without a tail. The sight of that abrupt and truncated animal paddling softly across the quadrangle, changed, by some fluke of the subconscious intelligence, the emotional light for me....Certainly as I watched the Manx cat pause in the middle of the lawn, as if it too questioned the universe...something seemed different. But ,,what was different, I asked myself, listening to the talk.

  Edith Wharton was born on January 24, 1862. This American novelist features a cat crime in her acclaimed story, Ethan Frome . This scene is 19th century New England, in a farmhouse, and I quote some of the drama: (Ethan says in reference to a broken piece,)  ..."the cat done it."...And Zeena says,  "I'd like to know how the cat got into my china closet...."Chasin' mice, I guess...there was a mouse round the kitchen all night." "Zeena emitted her small strange laugh.'I knew the cat was a smart cat...but I didn't know he was smart enough to pick up the pieces of my pickle-dish and lay 'em edge to edge on the very shelf he knocked 'em off of.'" Well you can get a copy of the book to find out the finish of this shelf hanger. You need to refresh your Edith Wharton anyway.

  It was on January 23, 1943 that an article appeared in The London Times describing the exploits of Mourka, a cat who delivered messages across enemy lines in besieged Leningrad. This story is widely quoted, but seems fishy to me---anyway there is no doubt that the article appeared on this date.

  Howard Moss was the poetry editor of the New Yorker from 1948 to 1987. He won many awards for his poetry including a Pulitzer. Here is a quote from a poem entitled "Catnip and Dogwood:" A cat's quite different from a dog, And you name it differently too, A library cat might be Catalogue ... Dogs usually have humdrum names ... Cats eat catnip excitedly Get drunk and jump around, But a dog can sniff at a dogwood tree, ... Sit down, and never budge-- Howard Moss was born on January 22, 1922.

  January 21, 1924 is Benny Hill's birthday. I am not googling that. George Orwell died on January 21, 1950, and surely we will find cats in  Animal   Farm.  But, ack, no---and I quote: "It was soon noticed that whenever there was work to be done the cat could never be found."

An exceptionally beautiful actress died on January 20, 1993--Audrey Hepburn. Perhaps her most famous role was in Breakfast At Tiffanys . And certainly one of her most famous co-stars was Orangey, the tabby in Capote's classic.

  It is always appropriate to celebrate the birth of Edgar Allan Poe: he was born on January 19, 1809. The inventor of the detective novel was also the author of psychological horror stories, like "The Black Cat." By all accounts the pet cat he and his wife had was not the model for that fictional cat.

  January 18, 1975 is the day Chester Kallman died. This American poet and colleague of Auden, had every poetic skill--he only lacked a sense of the fragility of words. In his poem "The Only Child," his very urban childhood, and very urban cats are described: ... All boiling cabbage seemed suicidal. What leftovers have you to feed your cats? ... I have a small backyard For dropping garbage into, a cat's realm for survey; All theirs to rout for food: Each prowls wrapped in a unique savagery, each litters Its own Great Birnam Wood.

  The American South, the 1920's, an unwanted black child--Eartha Kitt's beauty and realism first arose in this milieu on January 17, 1927. Her obituary appreciation in the New York Times was headlined, "Forever Feline..." Ms. Kitt's association with the feline side goes beyond her Catwoman role on the Batman television series. She had the gritty determination of this wild creature to survive.

  Dian Fossey was one of a small group of unusual women who succeeded centuries of men wrecking wildlife with studious recordkeeping about wild animals. Fossey worked in Rwanda, and had fierce ideas against zoos and tourists who could transmit diseases to the gorillas she studied. Her fame has led to groups who opposed her ideas using her name to raise money. Fossey named the gorillas she studied and wrote about, and one of these gorillas was named "Tiger." January 16, 1932 is the date on which Fossey was born.

Mazo de la Roche was born on January 15, 1879. This Canadian novelist created a fictional geography based on Ontario, and featured prominently a house she called called Jalna. Her talents included describing cats---she wrote a haunting short story about a cat abandoned by summer vacationers. The author's own cats included Gigi, a honey colored cat raised from a kitten.

Lewis Carroll died on January 14, 1898. Carroll loved cats, as we can see in Alice's Adventures, but he was not always terribly observant of the feline world. Here is how the university mathematician describes some kittens in an Alice story--they are Kitty and Snowdrop, Dinah's kittens. Kitty, "you pulled Snowdrop away by the tail just as I had put down the saucer of milk before her." Fantasy must maintain some semblance of reality to succeed, and this instance rings false.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus, American actress and relation of the French Louis-Dreyfus family, said, to defend her reputation as a kind person: "I am kind to squirrels, when they are around I say, 'Get Out of here.' I don't throw things at them like other people." "Seinfeld" is interesting for, among other things, the light it sheds on attitudes to animals, as in the above quote. Julia was born on January 13, 1961.

Charles Perrault, a French writer, was born on January 12, in 1628. Perrault popularized the story of Puss-N-Boots. In 17th century France, a land in which the memories of the Renaissance witchcraft trials (and their attendant cruelty to cats) were still vivid to some, in this land and since,the popularity of this story--of a cat wearing boots and cleverly acquiring a fortune for its owner--needs an explanation. I don't have one: what is the appeal of this story, is it a coded account of Protestant triumph, or an account of capitalist values. Not sure, yet.

On January 11, 1928, the leading Victorian writer, Thomas Hardy, died. Hardy's view of a deterministic universe is part of his tragic view, and we can see his genius in this excerpt from his poem "Last Words to a Dumb Friend," which concerns the death of his cat: "... Strange it is this speechless thing, Subject to our mastering ... His existence ruled by ours, Should--by crossing at a breath. Into safe and shielded death ... Loom as largened to the sense ... Of the Imperturbable. ... And this home which scarcely took Impress from his little look, by his faring to the Dim, Grows all eloquent of him. ..." The executors of Thomas Hardy burned his letters and notebooks after HIS death.

John Held, the cartoonist whose New Yorker drawings defined the 1920s in America, shared the determination of this decade to avert its eyes from serious questions. In his book,"The Flesh is Weak," 1931, we find the following kind of humor, developing the conceit of love-birds: Then we went to love-making, and soon she laid two nice white eggs and set to hatch a family. We were very happy until one night a cat got her. Held was born on January 10, 1889.

The fame of Katherine Mansfield rests on a few short stories, and is secure. Her letters often mentioned her cat Wingley, whom she raised from a kitten. Friends took care of Wingley after Mansfield's death, on January 9th, 1923, at Gurdjieff's school.

Alfred Russel Wallace, this gentle cofounder of the theory of evolution, was born on January 8, 1823. In his work we find, germane to this blog, discussions of whether the cats could have spread from India to Indonesia by swimming, or whether common fauna like these carnivores indicate these land groups were once geographically closer.

Charles Addams, whose Addams family characters made his cartoons famous, used to squire Jacqueline Kennedy around, in her widowhood. No doubt he left his ankle encircling felines home at the haunted manse on these jaunts. His birthday was January 7, 1912.

It was on January 6, 1849 that Hartley Coleridge, the son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, died. His father was famous for discussing birds, but his son was not famous for poetry. Hartley has a reputation today as a biogrpaher and critic. His poem about his cat is touching, though, for the light it sheds on the difficulties of having a father of a towering literary reputation. I quote at some length: Nellie, methinks, 'twixt thee and me There is a kind of sympathy; And could we interchange our nature- If I were cat, thou human creature-- I should, like thee, be no great mouser, And thou, like me, no great composer. ... And yet thou canst upon the rug lie, ... As if thou were not lean or ugly ... The world would just the same go round If I were hanged and thou wert drowned; There is one difference, 'tis true; THou dost not know it, and I do. This is graceful, and Montaigne's conceit about seeing things from a cat's viewpoint is given in Coleridge's verse, a modern and sad

  Our search for the perfect cat quotation takes us to Umberto Eco's treatise--The Search for the Perfect Language (1995). Since Umberto Eco was born on January 5, 1932, today we will quote his example of the difference between the purely analytical (which I think means relying on books) and the extra-linguistic. "'A tiger is a feline animal' would be analytical, so uniquely depending on our rigorously organized dictionary competence (which is exclusively linguistic) while 'tigers are man-eaters' would depend on our extra-linguistical world knowledge."

  It was on January 4, 1705 that the Countess D'Aulnoys, a French noblewoman, died. She gave us term fairytale-- conte de fee , and wrote some herself, including a fairy tale in which a walnut opens to reveal---a white cat.  C'est charmante .

J. R. R. Tolkien, is not well known for his cat digressions, but his poem, "Cat," is quotable, and so I do, in part: The fat cat on the mat may seem to dream of nice mice or cream; but he free, maybe walks...where... his kin...feasted on beasts and tender men. Hope I haven't ruined the Anglo Saxon rhythms with my excisions. We see a similar shifting in scale to what occurs with the characters in his more famous writing. Tolkien was born on January 3, 1892, and grew up to be an Anglo Saxon scholar.  

  Sidnie Manton, an award winning zoologist, also bred cats. This English scientist taught at King's College; her husband was the Keeper of Zoology at The British Museum. The author of "The Arthropoda: Habits, Function, and Evolution," (1977), also wrote "Colourpoints, Himalayan, and Longhair Cats," (1971). Sidnie Manton died on January 2, 1979.