The cat people
George Gale
The Book of Cats Edited by George MacBeth and Martin Booth (Secker and Warburg £8.50)
The Illustrated Cat Jean-Claude Suares and Setmour Chwast (Omnibus Press £3.95)
Throughout my adult life I have been irritated by the widespread presumption among clever people that it is intellectually altogether more superior to like cats than to like dogs. Myself, I think that liking animals excessively, or even at all, is pretty daft unless the animal in question is a useful companion. Cats are useless and uncompanionable—and this is often held by cat-lovers to establish the feline superiority over the canine. The very fact that the cat is incapable of demonstrating affection is asserted to be in its favour. The cat demands to have its back scratched: how superior, the rubric runs, does this prove the cat to be, for I, its owner, do not disdain to scratch its back!
It becomes immediately clear, at this point, why clever men make fools of themselves with their cats. They like to think of themselves as no man's fool, independentspirited, accepting hospitality but not repaying it, beholden to none. Their cats are the images of what they would like themselves to be; or, rather, their cats' attitude is the attitude they would like to put forward. The love of cats is self-love: but it is the love of a self which has been idealised. Cat-lovers do not like themselves, or the rest of humanity, much; but they like themselves more than the rest, and they may well be infatuated With themselves, in a way that is possible With someone you don't actually like. They see in their cats an idealised version of what they like to fancy themselves to be. What, of course, they are doing is imposing upon their cats some very human qualities; and it is their incorrigible anthropomorphisings Which are the cat-lovers' and the catadmirers' most readily identifiable characteristic. They despise dogs and dog-lovers because dogs are often useful, and because dogs show signs of returning the affection bestowed upon them. The ingratitude of toe cat is regarded as its supreme virtue. Catlovers presume that gratitude is demeaning.
Confronted by cats, many otherwise intelligent men become extremely silly: they never seem to realise that their admiration for what they choose to regard as the cat's unsentimental and unaffectionate nature is itself grossly sentimental and fond. They even go so far as to invest the cat with wisdom, divining that a superior intelligence lies behind those big, beautiful, oh yes, and 'sphinx-like' eyes. I do not think that anything much at all happens inside a cat's head. When it hunts, which a cat does beautifully and efficiently but with no particular cruelty, it does so instinctively. When a pampered cat has no need to hunt, its instincts and its muscles wither, it gets fat and it goes utterly somnolent, stirring itself only to have its back scratched whenever it feels randy. There is much sexuality about cats, which may be why so many bachelors like them. But intelligence, and 'wisdom'? They used to say that in one of the laboratories in Cambridge there was a secret basement where they kept a cat's head, or at least its brain, alive, by plugging its arteries and veins into a blood-recharging pump. I have always liked to think of that cat's head : all wired up and, we were supposed to believe, admiringly, grinning. If a man's head grinned in such a situation, we would rightly consider him to be a bloody fool; but when the cat is supposed to grin, then ah, we are invited to exclaim, what ineffable wisdom!
When so many clever men make fools of themselves in private over their cats, it is to be expected that a good number of them will be eager also to make fools of themselves publicly. More rubbish has been written by otherwise intelligent men on the subject of cats than on any other, and George MacBeth and Martin Booth have edited a book to prove so. Even Louis MacNeice; Incorrigible, uncommitted, They leavened the long flat hours of my childhood, Subtle, the opposite of dogs, And, unlike dogs, capable Of flirting, falling, and yawning anywhere, Like women who want no contract But going their own way Make the way of their lovers lighter.
This is typical of the tripe clever people write when they write about cats. Take W. B. Yeats: Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils Will pass from change to change, And that from round to crescent, From crescent to round they range ? Minnaloushe creeps through the grass Alone, important and wise, And lifts to the changing moon His changing eyes.
Or what about this, from Roy Fuller ? Rising at dawn to pee he tells us, he thought he saw his dead cat. He goes on: The unique character of the dead Is the source of our sense of mourning and loss; So, back in bed, I avoided calling up What I know is intact in my mind, your life, Entirely possessed as it was by my care. Such quotations as these—and they are taken almost at random from MacBeth and Booth's anthology—display, to my mind, a lack of a senseof proportion; the language is not appropriate to its subject, but is too highflown. One suspects that a great deal—too much—self-indulgence is on unwitting display, particularly with the twentieth-century cat celebrants. They ordered things better in the eighteenth, as in Gray's 'Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes': What female heart can gold despize? What Cat's averse to fish ?
he asks, with less fatuous rhetoric than Yeats, and concludes a piece far funnier and more observant than, say, Eliot's Macavity with the splendid ringing words: From hence, ye Beauties, undeceiv'd, Know, one false step is ne'er retrieved, And be with caution bold.
Not all that tempts your wand'ring eyes And heedless hearts, is lawful prize; Nor all that glisters, gold.
A great deal that glisters is not gold in The Book of Cats—but this is the view of one who would never dream of having a cat except to keep mice down. Cat-lovers will no doubt love the book, which is very well put together, and which manages a very fine association of words and illustrations. Given that cat-lovers lack a sense of proportion, the editors of The Book of Cats have produced a charming, if undiscerning book, which will delight cat-lovers, and, I dare say, confirm them in their peculiarity.
Much the same can be said of The Illustrated Cat. Cats are undoubtedly beautiful animals, whether moving or in repose, and both these books contain reproductions of some marvellous cat paintings and drawings. It is odd how so many artists have made their cats look frightening. The cat obviously arouses deep fears in many people, much as do spiders, rats and mice. The fear of dogs and wolves is, I imagine, less common. Cats are frequently portrayed as sinister, foreboding creatures. It is a shock, then, to come across a photograph of a cat in the middle of many artists' impressions. The photograph at once restores us to the chocolate box world, which is the only world cat-lovers have made their cats fit for.
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