The Big New Yorker Book of Cats Read online

  Copyright © 2013 by The New Yorker Magazine

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House Company.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  All pieces in this collection, except as noted, were originally published in The New Yorker. The publication dates are given at the end of each piece.

  Handwritten draft of “Myself with Cats” by Henri Cole. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Roald Dahl’s handwritten notes for “Edward the Conqueror” © RDNL.

  Reprinted by permission of The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre.

  Original draft manuscript of Ted Hughes’s “Esther’s Tomcat” taken from Lupercal, © Estate of Ted Hughes. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. and the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

  “Town of Cats” from 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami, copyright © 2011 by Haruki Murakami. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

  “The Case of Dimity Ann” by James Thurber, copyright © 1952 by Rosemary A. Thurber. Reprinted by permission of Rosemary A. Thurber and The Barbara Hogenson Agency. All rights reserved.

  James Thurber’s original draft manuscript of “The Case of Dimity Ann” (copyright © 1952 by Rosemary A. Thurber) is published by permission of the Rare Books & Manuscripts Library of the Ohio State University Libraries, Columbus, Ohio, home of the James Thurber Archive, Rosemary A. Thurber, and The Barbara Hogenson Agency. All rights reserved.

  Credits for illustrations appear on this page.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  The big New Yorker book of cats / foreword by Anthony Lane.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-679-64477-4

  eBook ISBN 978-0-679-64478-1

  1. Cats—Anecdotes. 2. Cats—Fiction. I. New Yorker (New York, N.Y.: 1925)

  SF445.5B546 2013

  636.8—dc23 2013013345

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

  www.atrandom.com

  Design by Susan Turner

  v3.1_r2

  (illustration credit col3.1)

  “I know a lot of people will say, ‘Oh, no—not another book about cats.’ ” (illustration credit col4.1)

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  FOREWORD BY ANTHONY LANE

  FAT CATS

  DEATH OF A FAVORITE J. F. POWERS

  THE CASE OF DIMITY ANN JAMES THURBER

  DEFENCE OF CATS WOLCOTT GIBBS

  THE SMOKER DAVID SCHICKLER

  COLLOQUY WELDON KEES

  CAT STORY JAMAICA KINCAID

  THE WINESHOP CAT SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER

  BOOKSTORE CAT SUSAN SHEEHAN

  TOMCAT TED HUGHES

  FROM DIN-DIN THOMAS WHITESIDE

  PAUNCH PAUL MULDOON

  DEFECTION OF A FAVORITE J. F. POWERS

  ALLEY CATS

  THE CATS JOHN UPDIKE

  DAY AND AGE DANA GOODYEAR

  A CAT IN EVERY HOME KATHARINE T. KINKEAD

  CAT HOUSE MAEVE BRENNAN

  TOWN OF CATS HARUKI MURAKAMI

  CAT’S ROBO-CRADLE MARGARET ATWOOD

  LADY OF THE CATS WOLCOTT GIBBS AND E. F. KINKEAD

  ARMY CATS TOM SLEIGH

  CROUCHING TIGER, TREMBLING PENGUIN ROBERT SULLIVAN

  HOW TO MAKE A CAT TRAP E. B. WHITE

  THE CAT-SAVERS WALLACE WHITE

  A DULL, ORDINARY, NORMAL LIFE IN MANHATTAN BERNARD TAPER

  CAT GODDESSES ROBERT GRAVES

  CAT FANCIERS

  TIGER IN THE SNOW PETER MATTHIESSEN

  WHERE I LIVE AMY OZOLS

  INTERCAT HENDRIK HERTZBERG

  THE LAST MEOW BURKHARD BILGER

  PROPINQUITY ALASTAIR REID

  THE CATTERY HENRY S. F. COOPER

  THE LADY AND THE TIGERS SUSAN ORLEAN

  THE CLOISTER WILLIAM MATTHEWS

  CAT FANTASIA THOMAS BELLER

  CAT-SITTING JOHN BROOKS

  MYSELF WITH CATS HENRI COLE

  FROM CAT MAN GEORGE STEINER

  THE PET SALLY BENSON

  DOOR ROBERT PINSKY

  ON THE DEATH OF A CAT FRANZ WRIGHT

  ATTENTION: LOST CAT PATRICIA MARX

  LIVING ROOM LEOPARDS ARIEL LEVY

  CURIOUS CATS

  EDWARD THE CONQUEROR ROALD DAHL

  THE PAW OF A CAT KAY RYAN

  A CAT/A FUTURE KAY RYAN

  QUESTIONS ABOUT LANGUAGE—CATS VICKI HEARNE

  KITTEN IN A GRAVEYARD SELMA ROBINSON

  TOOTH AND CLAW T. CORAGHESSAN BOYLE

  WET THURSDAY WELDON KEES

  BLUEBELL REGAINED BRENDAN GILL

  KIKIMORA JEAN RHYS

  OLD WOMAN IVY LITVINOV

  ELECTRICAL STORM ELIZABETH BISHOP

  FROM GETTING THROUGH TO THE OTHERS EMILY HAHN

  GUARDIANS JOHN MONTAGUE

  CAT THERAPIST LOIS METZGER

  CAT ’N’ MOUSE STEVEN MILLHAUSER

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CONTRIBUTORS

  ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  “I can see it going even a little more feline.” (illustration credit toc.1)

  (illustration credit col5.1)

  FOREWORD

  * * *

  ANTHONY LANE

  To anyone entering the offices of The New Yorker for the first time, whether as a casual visitor or as an inmate facing a long sentence, the greatest surprise is not the dearth of raised voices, the hush where the live band ought to be, or the lack of a decently stocked bar. It is the want of a cat. I mean, look at the place. There are cubicles, closets, half-empty bookshelves, tops of filing cabinets, laptops, and laps that are crying out for a shorthair. Why the post has not been advertised, let alone filled, is hard to fathom. Ideal candidates should be sleek, seductive, quick of tongue, slow to wrath, and, above all, nonhuman. They should aim, wherever possible, to be as self-combing as most of the writers; expert groomers, in the editorial department, are on hand to unpick any remaining knots. Fur-balls, like dangling participles, are not welcome. Milk is in the fridge.

  Was catlessness always the case within the precincts of the magazine? Has there really never been a resident Smoky, Macavity, Buster, Vesper, Oedipuss, Esmé (loved but squalid), Anchorman, Adolf, Jones, or kohl-eyed Cleopatra? Must we believe that our in-house grammarian of fifty years, the late Miss Gould, was not shadowed by an Abyssinian, say, of flawless pedigree, by the name of Subordinate Claws? It seems inconceivable. He would surely have struck a pose behind her shoulder, on the nearest windowsill, and followed the silvery motions of her pencil, not unlike the white cat in The Tale of Peter Rabbit, who gazes at goldfish in a pond: “She sat very, very still, but now and then the tip of her tail twitched as if it were alive.” The precision of Beatrix Potter, here as elsewhere, points to the first rule of felinology: you need to learn to look at cats, down to the last whisker, every bit as closely as they look at you. To them, remember, nothing is lost in the dark.

  If anything unites the contributors to the present volume, varied as they are, it is this primary urge to bear true, if bewildered, witness. Few artists, for example, could be more distinct in tone and temper than Sempé and William Steig, and to pass from the latter’s portrait of the moggy as monster, striking us rigid with his all-knowing, shark-toothed grin, to the slim streak of placability unfurled along a bed, in Sempé’s rendering, is to rise, like Dante, from the nether depths toward beatitude. Yet neither image works without the other
, if we are to see cats steadily and see them whole—if we are to admit to ourselves that, however far our pets may be bred from the wild, sometimes to the verge of interior decoration, they are never quite bred enough. “Domesticated cat,” indeed, may be the very phrase at which Steig’s creature was laughing when he was trapped in art.

  The pursuit of such verities will lead you, eventually, to the most insane of creative feats: getting under the skin of a cat. This will never be anything but challenging, even if you wear motorcycle gauntlets and a knight’s visor, but it remains a quest to which many writers are lured. Perhaps they view it as a kind of scratching post—a ready-made, abrasive chance to sharpen their natural skills. Joyce, who liked to miss nothing, bent his ear to a very specific quandary, the spelling of a cat’s ululation, in the fourth chapter of Ulysses, and came up with the infinitesimal swell of “mkgnao” into “mrkgnao.” (Try both, out loud, but not after eating crackers, and see if you can tell them apart.) J. F. Powers explored further with “Death of a Favorite,” which was published in The New Yorker, in 1950, and later selected by John Updike for The Best American Short Stories of the Century, which is quite a pantheon. Our narrator is Fritz, the only quadruped in a household of Catholic priests; he falls foul of a couple of missionaries, newly arrived, whose mission, it turns out, is to hound the cat from his home. A sandal is wielded, and a crucifix; at the sight of it, Fritz admits, “an undeniable fear was rising in me,” and we sense a flicker of the old belief that cats are the proper companion of witches, or worse. We half expect the clergy to bring out the garlic. Yet who, in all faith, is the worst offender here? Is it Fritz, or could it be the nicely named Father Burner, already his sworn foe when the tale begins? The cat, mulling the matter over, has no doubt; as he says of the men of God, gathered around the dinner table, “There was something about my presence there, I thought, that brought out the beast in them—which is to say very nearly all that was in them.” Touché.

  Like the best of his peers, Powers is trusting the language to lead him to the borders of ontological wit. To “bring out the beast” in somebody is a cliché, rubbed smooth over time, but to have it uttered by a cat—that is to lend it new and jagged life. The author understands that to write like a cat is not to escape the human voice but to find a new angle from which to pronounce, with a lightly modulated hiss, upon the infinite gradations of human sin. He is hardly alone in this endeavor, either within or beyond the parish of the magazine. Saki’s “Tobermory,” first published in 1911, is still fêted for the social devastation that is wrought by its speaking cat, blessed with perfect syntax but no scruples, and, within the correspondence of Raymond Chandler (a tremendous trove of sly good sense), there is a letter that he wrote to a friend, in 1948, in the person of his Persian, Taki: “Come around sometime when your face is clean and we shall discuss the state of the world, the foolishness of humans, the prevalence of horsemeat, although we prefer the tenderloin side of a porterhouse, and our common difficulty in getting doors opened at the right time and meals served at more frequent intervals. I have got my staff up to five a day, but there is still room for improvement.”

  Note the low estimation of human beings, which seems, by definition, to go with the territory, whenever the animal viewpoint is adopted; its logical conclusion, never bettered for pure disgust, is the moment when Gulliver—safely returned to England, but schooled in a more delicate existence by his time among the Houyhnhnms—reels away from the stink of his own family. Cats would not make so bold a show of revulsion, yet we, as cat owners (a term that belongs to the theater of the absurd, as both parties are aware), are wearily mindful of the gambits by which superiority is vaunted: the courteous sniff that precedes the refusal of food; the glowering retreat to an aerie, in the opposite corner of the room; the turning of the tail. Dog lovers—and such beings do exist—derive much joy from their Dobermans, their quaking Chihuahuas, and everything in between, and we should not begrudge them that delight; to be ceaselessly gratified by one’s pet, however, and to find one’s love returned with interest, on all occasions, is bad education for the soul. Cat people, on the other hand, know what it is to be adored and then rejected, with no explanation, in the space of a single minute, with the purr switched off like an alarm clock. They know, like Powers’s priests, Father Burner included, that the world is a treacherous vale, undeserving of our trust, and that to be humbled, if only by a dish of untouched ham, is the beginning of wisdom. Blessed are the cat-mad, for they shall be driven up the wall.

  Some of them go straight to the top of the wall and stay there, with no inclination to jump down. Take Rita Ross. By 1938, when she was honored by a profile in the magazine, this formidable lady, born Marion Garcewich, had personally caught “two hundred tons of cats”—picture the fact-checkers working that one out—and delivered them to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and thus, effectively, to their deaths. Roaming the streets of New York in search of strays, crowned by a conical hat, and consumed by a reverent pity, she had, according to the authors, “nearly seventy thousand souls on her conscience.” Each man kills the thing he loves, Oscar Wilde wrote, but most men tend not to require a wire trap, cans of salmon, five burlap sacks, and a police whistle to put that tragic paradox into practice. Set beside the Augean labors of Miss Ross, the duty confronting the hero of John Updike’s “The Cats”—the extermination of a mere farmful, inherited on his mother’s death—seems no more than child’s play. He turns the problem over to professionals, although, with time on his hands, and in a country mood, he might have made use of the instructions that were issued to readers of The New Yorker by E. B. White, in “How to Make a Cat Trap.” This ends with dark talk of cyanide, and its stifling details are only just rescued from outright creepiness by a breath of fresh humor: “Screw one screw-eye into the top of the treadle half an inch from the right side and seventeen and one-half inches from the front end. Screw the second screw-eye into the piano for all I care.”

  So it is, as this well-fed book stretches out in languor, that the array of feline opposites starts to emerge. Cats must be destroyed; cats should be saved. Cats are like us; no, cats are not of this world. Cats can be savored for their fellowship, then eaten for their flesh: that, at any rate, was the alarming formula arrived at by Sylvia Townsend Warner, one of whose fictions ushered in a sinuous Siamese tom, with “dusky paws,” that wreathed itself around the shoulders of a Parisian wine merchant, and later became his dinner. Mind you, the setting was Paris in 1942, when anything edible, or, frankly, catchable, was fair game. Next comes the cartoonists’ dialectic—the cats who infest our tenement rooms like mice played off against the cats, often of noble embonpoint, who sit in offices, behind desks, and scare the lower orders. (“You fed me tuna and cleaned my litter box, Harris, and I’m not going to forget it.”) Cats exist in these pages, as they do throughout our lives, both as obsessively singular—one ill-fated, hard-up couple from Wilmington, Delaware, pay fifteen thousand dollars to provide their ailing, adored, asthmatic pet with kidney dialysis and a transplant—and as a barely controllable mass, doomed to proliferate forever, like poison ivy or biographies of Napoleon. Above all, for every cat who is liked, accepted, or worshipped from afar, there is another who peers into our eyes—those hopeless orbs, superfluous at night—and spies only horror, indifference, and fear.

  Needless to say, you get synthesis. Emotions merge. I myself have two Bengals, of whom I am fond, plus the marks on my wrists to prove it—deep, diagonal scars that could easily suggest, to casual acquaintances, that I am attempting suicide, without much success, on a weekly basis. The cats are joined, in the household, by two poodles, and if you are one of those old squares who think that two plus two equals four, forget it. Try four cubed. Not all of them were acquired with my foreknowledge, still less my consent, and the results are on display, day in, night out. One Bengal would like to partition the other into a million little pieces of Bengal; the first poodle secretly likes the other poodle but hides
this fact with bass growls of wounded disdain; the second poodle loves everything that moves, including German shepherds in the street and falling oven mitts, but cowers beneath repeated demonstrations that not everything loves him back; and so on. Envy, hurt, territorial fervor, uranium-tipped malice, and a neediness so profound that it can never be measured, let alone assuaged, combine to grant us much entertainment, fitful panic, but no peace. You think North and South Korea could explode? Come round to my place and see what a real flashpoint looks like. Imagine not just a North and a South but a West and an East Korea, too, with me at the nexus, armed only with a sachet of Intense Beauty. (That, God preserve me, is the name of the cat food. The dogs like it.)

  Even to someone in my predicament, this book has the answer. Most contributors report, as faithfully as can be, from the front line where the genus Felis collides—and, if we are dumb enough to kid ourselves, colludes—with Homo sapiens. Why settle for the petting zoo of our homes, though, when there are genuine zoos to explore? And how can I complain about my angry puss, no larger than a leg of lamb, when Panthera tigris tigris, the Bengal tiger, is on the prowl? This fellow is best seen, preferably from a distance, as a director’s cut of my cats. Extended features include sunset-colored fur, an average male weight of around five hundred pounds, and, one presumes, the ability to resolve the issue of a tiresome poodle by treating it as a pretzel. Habitats include India, Bangladesh, Nepal, the heavenly kingdom of Bhutan, and Jackson, New Jersey. This cat is hep, and he’s here. And he’s not alone. Susan Orlean, in a probing chronicle of 2002, explained a familiar problem:

  You know how it is—you start with one tiger, then you get another and another, then a few are born and a few die, and you start to lose track of details like exactly how many tigers you actually have.

  Tell me about it. That is my favorite sentence in the book, because its trademark shrug, laced with a light sigh, feels true not just to The New Yorker but to the whole eternal folderol of choosing to keep a cat. We do know how it is. We are not fundamentally different from Rita Ross, or from Joan Byron-Marasek, who oversaw the Bengals of Jackson at Six Flags Wild Safari, except that we are not so pungently fragranced, and our lives are less possessed by what we own. The lengthy portrait of Robert Lothar Kendell, by Katharine T. Kinkead, that ran in The New Yorker in 1951 depicted a gentleman whose industry, devotion, and entrepreneurial drive would have marked him out in any given business; it just so happens that, because he was the president of the American Feline Society, his business was the well-being of cats. If that increased their chances of widespread deification, so much the better. No kingdom could be more heavenly. History has forgotten the initiative Cats for Europe, as devised by Mr. Kendell, but it was a munificent scheme—“a plan to send a million American cats to the Marshall Plan countries to rid them of rats.” They would be airlifted over in groups of seventeen hundred, “five cats per crate.” Hmm. Whether they were to be parachuted into Holland by moonlight, or bravely spilled onto the beaches of Normandy from landing craft, was a vital secret that both the author and her subject, in their prudence, kept to themselves. Nor do we learn which spoilsport vetoed Cats for Europe in the end. Probably some covert rat fan. Or a schmuck with a Peke.