The Big New Yorker Book of Cats Read online

  This raises a tricky humanitarian point: what are we to do with the heathen—the haters and slanderers of the cat? They can’t be put to sleep, or caged for more than a couple of days, or even neutered without a written agreement. The best course, on reflection, is to slink away from them. Chandler again: “I have never liked anyone who disliked cats, because I’ve always found an element of acute selfishness in their dispositions.” A smart move, that—to charge the anti-cat brigade with precisely the same vice that its members claim to detect in the average cat. (There is no average cat. That is their first mistake.) I call them Boswells, after a celebrated passage in his Life of Johnson on the theme of Hodge, the beloved cat for whom the good Doctor used to buy oysters:

  I recollect him one day scrambling up Dr. Johnson’s breast, apparently with much satisfaction, while my friend smiling and half-whistling, rubbed down his back, and pulled him by the tail; and when I observed he was a fine cat, saying, “Why yes, Sir, but I have had cats whom I liked better than this;” and then as if perceiving Hodge to be out of countenance, adding, “but he is a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed.”

  Boswell misses the point. There is no “as if” about it. Hodge was put out, less by having his tail pulled, as if he were a church bell, than because he had just heard himself described as inferior to his predecessors. A libelous gibe. Any self-respecting cat—in brief, any cat—would be mortified, not to mention incredulous, at the suggestion that he or she might not be rated top dog. The reason that Boswell writes “as if” is that, as he has already confessed, “I am, unluckily, one of those who have an antipathy to a cat.” His manly regret is laudable, but still; not liking Hodge, he is incapable of grasping what Hodgeness means, and what subtle plays of feeling can be discerned on Hodge’s countenance. Serious cat people, like first-rate art critics, are chivvied by passion into perspicacity. Believing is seeing.

  And who are cat people? Can they be recognized on the street, or cradled securely in one’s arms? In the film Cat People, made in 1942 and again forty years later, the heroine—played first by Simone Simon, then by Nastassja Kinski—was physically transformed from woman into cat. The prospect of Nastassja Kinski appearing through one’s catflap and mewing for cream sounds more of a privilege than a hardship, but it came with a twist; after sex, she turned into a panther. Again, not an insuperable problem, except that, come breakfast time, panthers need more than Friskies. In regular tests, for example, Kinski showed a preference for tender morsels of man. There are worse ways to go.

  Such hybridization is rare, but, as with Miss Ross and Mr. Kendell, extreme legend speaks to a downbeat desire. Poets realize this, adept as they are at padding back and forth between warmed homeliness and a more adventurous truth. I was once informed, in my salad days, that no woman should go to bed with a man who doesn’t like cats—a maxim that I have pondered ever since, mostly at night, and one that poets, past and present, do nothing to discredit. Baudelaire, the high priest of the Kinskite tendency, is so eager to entwine the feline and the female that at moments, to be honest, he can’t see the cat for the sex. Even if you have no French, feel the rub of this: “Et que ma main s’enivre du plaisir / De palper ton corps électrique …” If I were a suburban, middle-aged tabby of fixed abode (and I am), those lines would leave me with the squirming, bashful conviction that, somewhere along the line, between kittenhood and fireside, I missed out.

  Things cool down a touch in the poems reprinted here. Robert Pinsky, in “Door,” addresses his cat as “darling” and hails her as “fellow-mortal,” which is an unarguable fact, though she might not wish to be reminded of it. One of the more declarative poems is “Propinquity,” by Alastair Reid, who writes, “Cats fall on their feet” (another cliché pounced on and revived), and then, more provocative still, “Part of us is cat.” But which part? The nerve ends, the back of the ears, the throat? Orson Welles, who could count himself fortunate not to have been tranquilized, snared, and borne off to Six Flags Wild Safari, thought that the crossover was all to do with the universal dread of lost face. In his words, “If spiritually you’re part of the cat family, you can’t bear to be laughed at. You have to pretend when you fall down that you really wanted to be down there just to see what’s under the sofa.” That is beautifully noticed, and, if you follow it through, you come to the place where cats and people, despite the chasm between their genetic strands, do indeed knot and knit together: a shared, super-tangled string ball of pride, shame, avarice, lust, and less deadly stirrings—the mature decision to do nothing, or the sudden urge to go nuts.

  Maybe that is the cause, in the end, of the cat-free New Yorker offices. We presume that we could always hire a mousing assistant along the lines of the one who squats, placidly curled, at the center of Velázquez’s The Weavers, a still point amid the panoply of yarn-spinning and mythological reference. She—and it has to be a she, no question—is both a complement to the array of womenfolk and a mild, amused rebuke to their busy toils. But we would probably inherit no such thing. We would be far more likely to get one of the humongous crossbreeds that spring up, from time to time, to grace the covers of the magazine: the Steinberg Sphinx, say, of 1996, whose air of enigma is so radioactively strong that innocent employees in the surrounding area, freaked out beyond repair, would resign before the close of the first day. As for the Ronald Searle cat, from the winter of 1988, who squats, perfectly content, with googly eyes, licking a multicolored ice cream in a blizzard: Help. However you approach him—and it has to be a him, no question—you will reel away in bafflement, inspecting your own sanity for damage. Why ice cream? How can he be hot? Could the scoops be made from flavored snow? And what about those tiny triangles of teeth, showing through his indecipherable smile: would he be offended if we called them canines? Like I say: Help.

  Perhaps we need to rethink the assumption, deep-rooted but far from well grounded, that writers and cats are a good mix. Sure, Mark Twain had cats, such as Sour Mash and Blatherskite, and, up at the more louche and loping end of American literature, in the life and work of Poe, Kerouac, William Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, Edward Gorey, and Stephen King, you are never that far from the patter of ominous paws; whether a cat that has been reared on a diet of neat Burroughs would find a niche at The New Yorker, however, is open to debate. We aim at the scrutable, the translucent, the undrugged, and the verified; whether we even get close is not for us to say, but such aspirations find no echo in the bosom of the cat. The cat sneers at clarity and career plans, and even its major stratagems can be dropped upon a whim; my earliest cat, an Ulster Protestant of uncertain parentage and violent sectarian opinions, would cheerfully wait nine hours in the airing cupboard in the hope that my sister would pass by, on the way to her evening bath, with bare—ergo attackable—toes, yet even that grim design could be shelved if the smell of smoked cheese, say, were brought into the equation.

  How could such a beast hold court, let alone sway, in the civilized halls of The New Yorker? We tend to think ahead, sometimes to issues many months away; a cat, conversely, will identify the one sheet of paper that needs to be corrected and dispatched in the next twenty minutes and park his ass on it, no more shiftable than a Buddha. To put the matter at its bleakest: you cannot fact-check a cat. Many people have tried, some of them fluent in Persian or Burmese, but all have fallen short. In contrast to the magazine, and to this capacious book, cats are unreadable, and happy to remain so. Unlike writers, and related pests, they cannot be controlled. Others abide our question; they are free. All we can do is call them from the back porch, listen for their mkgnao, or, alternatively, their mrkgnao, and offer our services gratis, just for the hell of it, and the mystery, and the fun. Who knows? It could be that our cats, no less cherished and misunderstood than life itself, may wind up as our best epitaph. As Weldon Kees, who is represented twice within these pages, wrote in “The Cats,” a wondrous, late-period poem that somehow slipped the embrace of The New Yorker, leaped down, and stole away:

  The car
s go by in a bluish light.

  At six o’clock the cats run out

  When we come home from work

  To greet us, crying, dancing,

  After the long day.

  (illustration credit col6.1)

  (illustration credit p01.1)

  DEATH OF A FAVORITE

  Fiction

  * * *

  J. F. POWERS

  I had spent most of the afternoon mousing—a matter of sport with me and certainly not of diet—in the sunburnt fields that begin at our back door and continue hundreds of miles into the Dakotas. I gradually gave up the idea of hunting, the grasshoppers convincing me that there was no percentage in stealth. Even to doze was difficult, under such conditions, but I must have managed it. At least I was late coming to dinner, and so my introduction to the two missionaries took place at table. They were surprised, as most visitors are, to see me take the chair at Father Malt’s right.

  Father Malt, breaking off the conversation (if it could be called that), was his usual dear old self. “Fathers,” he said, “meet Fritz.”

  I gave the newcomers the first good look that invariably tells me whether or not a person cares for cats. The mean old buck in charge of the team did not like me, I could see, and would bear watching. The other one obviously did like me, but he did not appear to be long enough from the seminary to matter. I felt that I had broken something less than even here.

  “My assistant,” said Father Malt, meaning me, and thus unconsciously dealing out our fat friend at the other end of the table. Poor Burner! There was a time when, thinking of him, as I did now, as the enemy, I could have convinced myself I meant something else. But he is the enemy, and I was right from the beginning, when it could only have been instinct that told me how much he hated me even while trying (in his fashion!) to be friendly. (I believe his prejudice to be acquired rather than congenital, and very likely, at this stage, confined to me, not to cats as a class—there is that in his favor. I intend to be fair about this if it kills me.)

  My observations of humanity incline me to believe that one of us—Burner or I—must ultimately prevail over the other. For myself, I should not fear if this were a battle to be won on the solid ground of Father Malt’s affections. But the old man grows older, the grave beckons to him ahead, and with Burner pushing him from behind, how long can he last? Which is to say: How long can I last? Unfortunately, it is naked power that counts most in any rectory, and as things stand now, I am safe only so long as Father Malt retains it here. Could I—this impossible thought is often with me now—could I effect a reconciliation and alliance with Father Burner? Impossible! Yes, doubtless. But the question better asked is: How impossible? (Lord knows I would not inflict this line of reasoning upon myself if I did not hold with the rumors that Father Burner will be the one to succeed to the pastorate.) For I do like it here. It is not at all in my nature to forgive and forget, certainly not as regards Father Burner, but it is in my nature to come to terms (much as nations do) when necessary, and in this solution there need not be a drop of good will. No dog can make that statement, or take the consequences, which I understand are most serious, in the world to come. Shifts and ententes. There is something fatal about the vocation of favorite, but it is the only one that suits me, and, all things considered—to dig I am not able, to beg I am ashamed—the rewards are adequate.

  “We go through Chicago all the time,” said the boss missionary, who seemed to be returning to a point he had reached when I entered. I knew Father Malt would be off that evening for a convention in Chicago. The missionaries, who would fill in for him and conduct a forty hours’ devotion on the side, belonged to an order just getting started in the diocese and were anxious to make a good impression. For the present, at least, as a kind of special introductory offer, they could be had dirt-cheap. Thanks to them, pastors who’d never been able to get away had got a taste of Florida last winter.

  “How would you feel if the mouse did that to you?” (illustration credit 1.2)

  “Sometimes we stay over in Chicago,” bubbled the young missionary. He was like a rookie ballplayer who hasn’t made many road trips.

  “We’ve got a house there,” said the first, whose name in religion, as they say, was—so help me—Philbert. Later, Father Burner would get around it by calling him by his surname. Father Malt was the sort who wouldn’t see anything funny about “Philbert,” but it would be too much to expect him to remember such a name.

  “What kind of a house?” asked Father Malt. He held up his hearing aid and waited for clarification.

  Father Philbert replied in a shout, “The Order owns a house there!”

  Father Malt fingered his hearing aid.

  Father Burner sought to interpret for Father Philbert. “I think, Father, he wants to know what it’s made out of.”

  “Red brick—it’s red brick,” bellowed Father Philbert.

  “My house is red brick,” said Father Malt.

  “I noticed that,” said Father Philbert.

  Father Malt shoved the hearing aid at him.

  “I know it,” said Father Philbert, shouting again.

  Father Malt nodded and fed me a morsel of fish. Even for a Friday, it wasn’t much of a meal. I would not have been sorry to see this housekeeper go.

  “All right, all right,” said Father Burner to the figure lurking behind the door and waiting for him, always the last one, to finish. “She stands and looks in at you through the crack,” he beefed. “Makes you feel like a condemned man.” The housekeeper came into the room, and he addressed the young missionary (Burner was a great one for questioning the young): “Ever read any books by this fella Koestler, Father?”

  “The Jesuit?” the young one asked.

  “Hell, no, he’s some kind of a writer. I know the man you mean, though. Spells his name different. Wrote a book—apologetics.”

  “That’s the one. Very—”

  “Dull.”

  “Well …”

  “This other fella’s not bad. He’s a writer who’s ahead of his time—about fifteen minutes. Good on jails and concentration camps. You’d think he was born in one if you ever read his books.” Father Burner regarded the young missionary with absolute indifference. “But you didn’t.”

  “No. Is he a Catholic?” inquired the young one.

  “He’s an Austrian or something.”

  “Oh.”

  The housekeeper removed the plates and passed the dessert around. When she came to Father Burner, he asked her privately, “What is it?”

  “Pudding,” she said, not whispering, as he would have liked.

  “Bread pudding?” Now he was threatening her.

  “Yes, Father.”

  Father Burner shuddered and announced to everybody, “No dessert for me.” When the housekeeper had retired into the kitchen, he said, “Sometimes I think he got her from a hospital and sometimes, Father, I think she came from one of your fine institutions”—this to the young missionary.

  Father Philbert, however, was the one to see the joke, and he laughed.

  “My God,” said Father Burner, growing bolder. “I’ll never forget the time I stayed at your house in Louisville. If I hadn’t been there for just a day—for the Derby, in fact—I’d have gone to Rome about it. I think I’ve had better meals here.”

  At the other end of the table, Father Malt, who could not have heard a word, suddenly blinked and smiled; the missionaries looked to him for some comment, in vain.

  “He doesn’t hear me,” said Father Burner. “Besides, I think he’s listening to the news.”

  “I didn’t realize it was a radio too,” said the young missionary.

  “Oh, hell, yes.”

  “I think he’s pulling your leg,” said Father Philbert.

  “Well, I thought so,” said the young missionary ruefully.

  “It’s an idea,” said Father Burner. Then in earnest to Father Philbert, whom he’d really been working around to all the time—the young one was decidedly
not his type—“You the one drivin’ that new Olds, Father?”

  “It’s not mine, Father,” said Father Philbert with a meekness that would have been hard to take if he’d meant it. Father Burner understood him perfectly, however, and I thought they were two persons who would get to know each other a lot better.

  “Nice job. They say it compares with the Cad in power. What do you call that color—oxford or clerical gray?”

  “I really couldn’t say, Father. It’s my brother’s. He’s a layman in Minneapolis—St. Stephen’s parish. He loaned it to me for this little trip.”