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.
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 cars 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.