The Philosopher's Cat

Lytton Strachey was an integral part of the Bloomsbury that helped define modernism in English literature. According to one  resource Yale maintains online , Strachey ....  from 1899 to 1905 ... attended Trinity College at Cambridge, where he met future Bloomsburians Clive Bell, E.M. Forster, Thoby Stephen, and Leonard Woolf. In 1902, he was elected to the Apostles , the secret Cambridge Conversazione Society through which he met G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell. With Moore’s emphasis on aesthetic experience and personal relations as intellectual support, Strachey promoted the homosexuality that thrived among the Apostles as part of a subversive personal creed.... In the five years after leaving Cambridge, Strachey lived with his family, ....It was in this period that he grew close to Virginia Stephen (later Virginia Woolf) and her sister Vanessa, proving a valuable support for the family after the death of their brother Thoby. In 1908, Strachey even proposed to Virginia, who w...

  February 28, 1865 Arthur Symons (February 28, 1865 to January 22, 1945), was a British poet, though he is perhaps remembered best for his literary history, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899). He is a haunting poet of the modern city, catching its dangerous, complex beauty in works that first introduced the imagery of the urban underworld into English poetry. (I think I wrote that last sentence.) We note the details Symons included in his letters, (Arthur Symons: selected letters, 1880-1935): It was a great pleasure to visit the shop of Leon Vanier [in the Latin Quarter], the "decadent" publisher, where we saw photographs of Verlaine, Villiers, etc, and bought some books and papers. Of course there was a cat in the establishment.. . Elsewhere Symons wrote this about his experiences: "Born under the influence of passionate and perverse stars, my life has been utterly unlike that of any man I have ever known."

  Paul Ricœur (February 27, 1913 to  May 20, 2005) was a French philosopher whose principles include a fidelity to man's experience and a rejection of the reductionistic. His masterpiece may be the three volume series,  Time and Narrative,  (1984-1988) which, one reviewer said, "knits together the Anglo analytic and Continental critical theories of history." Ricouer in  Time and Narrative , Volume 1, discusses various theoretical approaches to the differences between positivistic science and the work of the historian. He summarizes the ideas of Louis O. Mink, who suggests the results of the historian's work is a presentation of a various chronologies such that the reader can, get a total impression of events and their outcomes, with a glance which like a glance at a landscape takes in a variety of elements all at the same time.  Ricoeur objects to this presentation in which temporal succession is a vanished element, or vanishing, as "the smile of a Che...

  Samuel Pepys, the English diarist, was born on February 23, 1633. Not only were his diaries not meant for publication, they were written in a code so they could not even be stolen. A typical entry is like this: "About three o clock this morning I waked with the noise of the rain, having never in my life heard a more violent shower; and then the cat was locked in the chamber, and kept a great mewing, and leapt upon the bed, which made me I could not sleep for a great while." This was written of August 22, 1662.

Simone Simon, died in Paris on February 22, 2005. This actress portrayed the feminine lead in Cat People, the 1942 horror movie. This story of cat possession has been described as effectively scary, but her career in Hollywood did not thrive. She had earlier starred (1937) in a movie called "Love and Hisses," which apparently did NOT involve cats.

W. H. Auden was born on February 21, 1907. His cats were many, and we now highlight just this domestic scene regarding the father of his lover, Chester Kallman. Auden and the elder Kallman parted ways after the old man, deaf by then, accidentally banged a door. The door was not the one Auden was trying to coax a homeless kitten through, but the sound made the kitten run away. Auden lost his temper, and this incident seems to have been a major one in the annals of his in-laws. The way the story is told by one participant is that "it was just an alley cat."

  Ansel Adams was born on February 20, 1902. His famous landscapes are really inhuman, and it is hard to imagine a  cat  in them. Ina Coolbrith was a California poet, and in 1925 Adams took a picture of her and her cat Popcorn--a lucky fact for cat almanackists.

  February 19, 1902 is the birth date of Kay Boyle, an American writer and ex-patriot. She is remembered also for her political activism, in fact, it appears she was let go from her foreign correspondent position at the New Yorke r as a part of the black listing that characterized that period in American culture. Cats figure in her writing often, and she even wrote children's stories like  Pinky the Cat Who Liked to Sleep.  (1966).

  Emily Hahn died on February 18, 1997. Hahn was an adventurous American writer, when such junketing around was unusual. As a young adult she lived in China, and there had a Siamese cat named Jocasta. I am not sure of Jocasta's fate, during a revolutionary period, but Hahn would casually leave her children later, and perhaps her maternal instincts flowed a little shallow. She worked at her office at the New Yorker daily into her eighties.

Ronald Knox is a well known Roman Catholic who wrote on various, mainly religious, subjects. In a book of his sermons, we find this notice of cats and St. Philip. He says  "..Of all the saints none is so full of nature as St. Philip; that is why he shocks some people, that is why he attracted Goethe.He remained all his life very much of a schoolboy, loved to make himself look ridiculous by pulling the beard of the beadle,loved to make his fashionable penitents look ridiculous by carrying his cat through the streets. How much was it a calculated effect? Did he sometimes go out of his way to play the fool? ...It is hard to say..." In reference to Knox, it never seemed to occur to him that carrying a cat about could just be a way of demonstrating affection. Knox was born on February 17, 1888. He is best known perhaps for his book  Enthusiasm, a phenomenon of which he took a dim view. One suspects St. Philip was not so stern.

  The Scottish poet George MacBeth died on February 16, 1992. He was fond of ginger colored cats, but this was not an exclusive love. He edited:  The Book of Cats (1976) The Penguin Book of Animal Verse (1965) The Penguin Book of Sick Verse (1963) Victorian Verse: A Critical Anthology, (1986) and then there was his own poetry.

Art Spiegelman's birth date is February 15, 1948. In his art we see the significance of comics in modern culture. For our purposes here he certifies the continuance of the cat as a creature of brutality, in modern iconography. This reputation is unarguable based on the realities of the natural world. I refer of course to his Pulitzer winning book,  MAUS .  

  P. G. Wodehouse died on February 14, 1975. This author was much beloved by discriminating writers, such as Cleveland Amory. My confidence in Wodehouse as an animal lover, rests on Amory's description of him as such. Amory describes "The Story of Webster," as one of the classic cat stories. This is not my recollection but it has been years since I read that story. Another cat complicated plot by Wodehouse is one of the last he published: The Cat-Nappers, A Jeeves and Bertie Story.(1975) The cat in this story is the stable-mate of a race horse.

  Kim Novak was born on February 13, 1933. She starred in many movies, among them, "Bell Book and Candle." This comedy about modern witches featured a Siamese cat named Pyewacket. This cat name is actually one mentioned in the witchcraft trials of the Renaissance. No doubt the only authentic note in this undeservedly forgotten flick.

  On February 12, 1984, one of the 20th century's most discussed mysteries died. Anna Anderson Manahan lived her final days in Virginia. A reporter at her home noted he could smell cat urine. This lady believed she was Anastasia, one of Nicholas II's children. Regardless of how she came to make this assertion, I have no doubt she did believe it at the end. She died before DNA testing could verify that she was NOT a Romanoff.

  660 BC, February 11th is the legendary date of the founding of Japan. To celebrate let us quote from a diary of a member of the royal court, about a cat, written 15 hundred years after the founding of Japan, and a thousand years ago. This is from the  Sarashina Diary, a text from a few decades after 1009 AD. The name of the author we do not know. "Once, when I was sitting alone, ...[the cat] came and sat before me, and, stroking her head, I addressed her: "You are the first daughter of the Noble Adviser? I wish to let your father know of it." The cat watched my face and mewed, lengthening her voice. It may be my fancy, but as I was watching her she seemed no common cat. She seemed to understand my words, and I pity her."

  Queen Victoria of England, and thereabouts, married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg, on February 10, 1840. She was in love with the Prince--quite Victorian really. Perhaps you wonder, among a household, even then, famous for its dogs, if there were cats in the palace. There was at least one, probably more, and I know this because Victoria sat for a portrait holding a white Persian cat.

  Amy Lowell was born on February 9, 1874. She was descended from the historically significant Lowell family, and this fact may have prompted Amy to write the introduction to a book called Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan. Published in 1920, the introduction Amy wrote tells us that the author of the following excerpt was born in 1009 AD and that we do not know the author's name. I am quoting at length this episode involving a cat in an aristocratic household, in Japan, a thousand years ago. "Once in the Rice-Sprout month, when I was up late reading a romance, I heard a cat mewing with a long- drawn-out cry. I turned, wondering, and saw a very lovely cat. "Whence does it come?" I asked. "Sh," said my sister, " do not tell anybody. It is a darling cat and we will keep it." The cat was very sociable and lay beside us. Some one might be looking for her [we thought], so we kept her secretly. She kept herself aloof from the vulgar servants, always s...

  John Ruskin, the Victorian art critic, has described some hallucinations he experienced during an illness and these provide a glimpse into the Victorian imagination: In his words: During my first illness of wild delirium...the voice of the fowls was an inexpressible terror to me. [He describes being naked and waiting for the devil, all night, in one of his hallucinatory states. As dawn comes he is happy to think the worst is over and nothing bad has happened]...As I put forth my hand toward the window a large black cat sprang forth from behind the mirror. Persuaded that the foul fiend was here at last, in his own person, though in so insignificant a form, I darted at it, as the best thing to do in the critical circumstances, and grappled with it with both my hands and gathering all the strength that was in me, I flung it... against the floor. A dull thud--nothing more. No malignant spector arose, which I pantingly looked for--nothing happened. I had triumphed...

  Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812. It is easy to believe that the man who wrote so sympathetically of the plight of England's poor was fond of cats. One of these, Williamina, insisted on carrying her kittens out of the kitchen and into Dicken's study. One of Williamina's kittens was deaf, and Dickens singled that one out for special treatment, naming it Master's Cat. Or so the story goes.

  Lord Aberconway died on February 6, 2003. Most people have probably forgotten that, during the 1960's, he fought to exclude seeing-eye dogs from the Chelsea Flower Shows. What one likes to recall about him is that his mother wrote a book, published in 1949, and titled: "The Dictionary of Cat Lovers."

  It was on February 5, 1972, that we lost Marianne Moore. Her poem "Silence," about house guests who do not need to be entertained, contains a nice picture of a cat, and I excerpt: ... "Superior people never ... have to be shown ... the glass flowers at Harvard. Self-reliant like the cat -  that takes its prey to privacy, the mouse's limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth- they sometimes enjoy solitude, ...

  It was on this date, February 4, 1965, that T. S. Eliot died. He is regarded as one of  the great poets in the English language. His widow Valerie, with whom he spent his last years, lived a wealthy woman later, thanks to the proceeds from the "Cats" production, based on some of his poetry.

  The birthdate of Nathan Lane is February 3, 1956. He was in the movie The Great Mouse Hunt . His co-stars included sixty-five (65) mice, and one reads that most of the mice went home with the cast after shooting. It is enough to make a cat purr.

  This article from the New York Times , February 2, 1902 is a charming vignette, which allows us a glimpse into Victorian taste and how much it has (or has not) changed: "A Brooklyn woman is fitting up her sleeping room with two of her fads for decoration, cats and pansies. She has the walls of the room covered with pictures of both and felines of all breeds..., and even some as low in the scheme of art as chocolate cats are to be found. Now the woman's friends are promising themselves great fun in deluging her with all manner of pottery cats and there are a sufficient number of grotesque specimens in the market to make her room a horrible nightmare if she stands by her purposes of keeping all the felines in the house in it." Well I said charming, I did not say well-written.