The Philosopher's Cat

  Google is changing details and I am not sure how to accommodate them.  To ensure you see my posts, I will leave my address here for you, for the next short while: marsha.brown@alumni.emory.edu

  Nancy Mitford died on June 30, 1973. One of the formidable Mitford sisters, she kept cats; here she says in a letter to Lady Redesdale: "Old animals are so much nicer. I love my cat now, but it took about 8 years."   Odd sentiment really. This was in 1959, and we don't know if this was Minet she was talking about, a cat Diana had brought her.

Katherine Hepburn died on June 29, 2003. One of her most famous films, "Bringing up Baby," features her as a society figure who has a tame wild cat. I really need to find the New Yorker article from decades ago that profiled this trend of making jungle animals into pets. 

June 28, 1712 is the birthdate of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Judging from his "Confessions" he had a cat. Quoting: "How eagerly I ran every morning at sunrise to breathe the perfumed air of the peristyle. What delicious cafe au lait I took there with my Therese. My cat and dog kept us company This retinue alone would have been enough for my whole life I should never have experienced a moment's weariness I was in an earthly paradise I lived there in the same state of innocence and enjoyed the same happiness." Rousseau is interesting, he inaugurated a new confessional personal style of literature. The Queen of France read his books, though others would later blame Rousseau for the revolution. We think of him as modern, but few recall that he dropped the children of his mistresses off at an orphanage. Still, how very French the above quote sounds.

  Wanda Gag died on June 27, 1946. She translated the Grimm brothers fairy tales, and wrote herself children's stories, such as "Millions of Cats" which was a ground-breaking work in 1928. Gag's book which she illustrated also, was the first picture book which did not have a picture on one page, and the text on the facing page. Gag used the entire two page spread for one large illustration, which carried the story.

Madagascar declared its independence from France on June 26, 1960. Madagascar is still the home of mysterious animals, as it was in the late 19th century, when a lemur was entered as a cat in one of the first cat shows in Europe. It was only after the show finished that anyone perceived  that one of the cats was in fact, a lemur.

John Ciardi's commonplace book is does not have a lot of cat quotes. We know though this poet, born on June 24, 1916, was a cat fan because of his poem "My Cat, Mrs. Lick-A-Chin"  The descriptive details here reveal a close observer of cat behavior---the poem describes how his cat "can't ever make up her mind whether she wants to go out or come in!"

Giambattista Vico, the Italian philosopher, was born on June 23, 1668. He may not have understood the extent to which the philosophy of history was a religious construct, but he knew he was engaging in an original work when he devised his view of the movement of history: Vico envisioned history moving in circles, but these circles change at each revolution so that the repetition is not precise. There is a totally unsubstantiated rumor the idea for these circles came to Vico after watching a cat play with a piece of string.

  Julian Hawthorne, born on June 22, 1846, did not inherit his father's intellect, but he did apparently inherit his sensibility. This heir of Nathaniel Hawthorne would ask in his fiction: Why do you consider the tiger more bloodthirsty than yourself? After all the tiger only kills to eat.

 wsw McEwan, Ian Russell   https://doi.org/10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.U25596 Published online:  01 December 2007 This version:  01 December 2019 Previous version CBE 2000; FRSL Born   21 June 1948 ;  s  of late Major (retd) David McEwan and Rose Lilian Violet Moore;  m 1982, Penny Allen (marr. diss. 1995); two  s  two  d ;  m  1997, Annalena McAfee author Education Woolverstone Hall Sch.; Univ. of Sussex (BA Hons Eng. Lit.); Univ. of East Anglia (MA Eng. Lit.) Career Began writing, 1970. Hon. Member: Amer. Acad. of Arts and Scis, 1996; Amer. Acad. of Arts and Letters, 2006. FRSL 1982; FRSA. Hon. DLitt Sussex, 1989; Hon. DLit London, 1998; Hon. LittD: E Anglia, 1993; UCL, 2008; Hull, 2009. Shakespeare Prize, FVS Foundn, Hamburg, 1999.  Films:  The Ploughman’s Lunch, 1983; Last Day of Summer, 1984; Soursweet, 1988; The Innocent, 1993; The Good Son, 1994 Publications First Love, Last Rites, 1975 (filmed, 1997); In...

Sartre's birthday was June 21, 1905. In a letter to Simone de Beauvoir he describes his new cat, not the color of it, but that it was fat, and noble. An anecdote recounts that a friend of theirs would put a huge portion of meat in front of their cat, and tell it: "Mull that one over."

  Peter Gay the social historian was born on June 20, 1923. In his book, The Bourgeois Experience, he relates this vignette of Victorian England: at the Crystal Palace Exhibition there was a sculpture called "The Lion In Love." By a sculptor named Geefs, the sculpture showed a young lady trimming the claws of a lion. Interesting twist on the old story of man removing a thorn from a lion's paw.

Richard Lockridge died on June 19, 1982. He and his wife Frances authored a number of popular mysteries in the middle of the 20th century. The stories featured a couple called The Norths and their Siamese cats. Richard's autobiography, published shortly before his death, is titled: One Lady, Two Cats .

The British poet, Geoffrey Hill, was born on June 18, 1932. His poetry is more likely to refer to hip cats, than rosehips and cats. Hill though puts cats in a modern setting with lines like:  Ruin smell of cats urine with a small gin. Develop the anagram - care to go psychic? The lines above are from the collection titled "Speech! Speech! Poems"

M. C. Escher, noted graphics artist, was born on June 17, 1898. We are familiar with so many of Escher's images, and they have a common quality: the drawings come alive and point inward to Escher's unique self reflective linearscape, where the line itself is the creative means and end. The drawing named "White Cat" though, is quite different. The linear precision is typical Escher, but the emphasis is on the object itself, and a fidelity to the image of cat. The "White Cat" indeed in its thingness seems to burst the bounds of the page, quite the opposite of the Escher feats where the line turns on itself with maze like perplexities.

  June 16, 1963 is the death date for John Cowper Powys, the Welsh author of long novels that most now have to struggle to get through. An example is Wolf Solent (1929.) But in his day he was considered a leading literary light. He kept cats. He felt guilty over one cat, Sintran, getting run over, and over Mees, whom he had put down when returning to England. His cat Yeo was a Manx.

  Amy Clampitt, the American poet, was born on June 15, 1920. Like so many artists she had roots in the middle west and fled to New York. Her poetry has won her a Guggenheim, and a MacArthur award. But according to her friends, Clampitt does not discuss her successes. She talks about stuff like a rare flower she spotted, or a stray cat she rescued.

  June 14, 1936 is the day G. K. Chesterton died. This Christian apologist and popular writer (He originated he Father Brown detective stories) uses cats to make an interesting point in one of his essays: There are things in this world of which I can say seriously that I love them but I do not like them. Cats are the first things that occur to me as examples of this principle. Cats are so beautiful that a creature from another star might fall in love with them, and so incalculable that he might kill them...For myself I admire cats as I admire catkins, those little fluffy things that hang on trees...They are both pretty and both declare the glory of god...I love all the cats in the street as St. Francis loved all the birds in the wood...Not so much, of course, but then I am not a saint...To me, unfortunately perhaps (for I speak merely of an individual taste,) the cat is a wild animal. A cat is nature personified. Like Nature it is so mysterious that one cannot quite repose even in ...

  Yeats was born on June 13, 1865. His poem, "The Cat and the Moon," is justly anthologized, but today we are looking at some comments about cats that Yeats collected from Irish country folks, and wrote up in his "The Celtic Twilight". This passage gives us a sense of the world Irish cats inhabited. He has heard the hedgehog —'grainne oge,' he calls him-* grunting like a Christian,' and is certain that he steals apples by rolling about under an apple tree until there is an apple sticking to every quill. He is certain too that the cats, of whom there are many in the woods, have a language of their own-some kind of old Irish. He says,Cats were serpents, and they were made into cats at the time of some great change in the world. Enchanted. That is why they are hard to kill, and why it is dangerous to meddle with them. If you annoy a cat it might claw or bite you in a way that would put poison in you, and that would be the serpent's tooth.' Sometimes...

June 12, 1892 is the birthdate of Djuna Barnes, an American expatriate and writer. In her stories cats figure, as in this metaphor: "So softly, little dusty footfalls, like a cat, a small, profound cat" Barnes grew up in a Bohemian household and herself figured largely in the Bohemian Paris of the 20s and 30s. Her novel Nightwood is considered a cult classic, and T. S. Eliot wrote an introduction for it.

Mrs. Humphrey Ward, the popular Victorian novelist was born on June 11, 1851. Cats figure in a minor fashion in most of her novels. She describes in her Recollections , how as a child, her family nursed a sick cat.

Pierre Loti, a French writer, died on June 10th, 1923. His fondness for cats was widely publicized, partly because he wrote a book about them: The Lives of Two Cats, published in English in 1902. This volume tells the story of Pussy White and Pussy Gray, and their happy lives in a literary household.

  Dickens died on June 9, 1870. Genius is inexplicable and intriguing. An attention to details has been called an aspect of genius. We notice in a letter Dickens wrote in 1867, describing a rough Atlantic crossing as he begins a reading tour, that he finds time to notice a white cat on the ship with him. This cat belonged to American Southerners who had fled to Europe after the end of their Civil War. Now the family returns, bringing their cat, home.

Frank Lloyd Wright was born on June 8, 1867. The story is told by Meryle Seacrest that his last wife, Olgivanna, became hysterical about cats and would not be around them, because somehow Olgivanna connected her own daughter's death (in an automobile accident) with cats.

  Elizabeth Bowen, ( June 7, 1899 to February 22, 1973) was  born into the Anglo-Irish class in County Cork. She was a novelist whose work reflects the intellectual world of the 1930s. Her short story, "The Cat Jumps," is about a couple who insist on buying a house which was the scene of a murder. Amidst the Freudian explanations of action, we have a suspenseful story with of course, a rational ending.

  Thomas Mann the German novelist, was born on June 6, 1875. His novel, Joseph the Provider , (1943) gives us a glimpse of the novelist's imagination. He relates that the Egyptians used cat fat, applied to the lids of food containers, to deter mice. Mann was, at time he wrote the Joseph tetralogy, already the winner of a Nobel, for his earlier novel,  Buddenbrooks .

Eleanor Farjeon died on June 5, 1965. This British writer seems best known for her cat story, "Spooner," about a cat and a ghost terrier, but she also wrote a whole book, "Golden Coney," (1943) about her own two cats.

  It may seem irrelevant to cats to notice that on June 4, 1850, self deodorizing fertilizer was patented in England. Still--it fits in with a theory I am working on that modernity is characterized by the increasing elimination of smells, and that, in this connection, the enormous publicity about spaying and neutering cats and dogs, is not for population control, as they say, but actually to eliminate smells. Hey, it is just a theory.

June 3, 1941 was the wedding date for Irving Wallace and Sylvia Kahn. Their children included David Wallechinsky and Amy Wallace who, in the Book of Lists, would include  the 9 longest journeys cats took, on their own, to return to their owners. The list starts with Sugar, who traveled to her owners new home by herself, a 1500 mile trip, and (this with a bad hip,) Their list ends with Muddy Water White, who traveled 450 miles, to catch up with his owner, after having escaped during a trip.

Thomas Hardy was born on June 2, in 1840. He is not famous as a cat lover, but he was one.  In fact Hardy wrote much better poetry about cats, than his lines below which we copy: ... The steps are a blanched slope Up which with feeble hope  A black cat comes, wide-eyed and thin; And we take him in. The above is from his poem, 'Snow in the Suburbs.'