The Cat Who Came for Christmas (Cleveland Amory) Conclusion

The last two chapters; “His Foreign Policy,” referring to his modes of interaction with other species of animals, and “His Domestic Policy,” referring to his modes of interaction with people, both bring the focus mostly back on the story of Polar Bear and his first year as Mr. Amory’s pet/owner.  Cats are, of course, creatures of habit, and do not like anything that interrupts their routines.  Mr. Amory is, however, very involved in animal rescue activities and often needs to house a stray animal overnight, which interrupts the routine in a huge way, especially when the guest is a dog.  The tale of Bouncer, a large puppy invading the apartment – though a traumatic one for Polar Bear – is only the beginning of a series of guests which include other dogs, cats and even a pigeon.

But when it comes to people, anyone new is bad news.  This is another area in which the Cat and the Author differ: the author rather likes meeting and getting to know new people, is in fact rather partial to them:  ‘And why, may I ask, should I not be? After all, when you come right down to it, there is a great deal to be said for new people.  You can, to begin with, tell them all your old stories without worrying whether or not you have told them to them before, and you can also tell them, as long as you can remember the punch lines, your old jokes.’

We meet Benedict, the cat at the office of The Fund for Animals where Mr. Amory spends much of his time, who is one cat that loves new people.  ‘Benedict particularly likes making friends with people who do not like cats.  At one time we had a bookkeeper who admitted he was scared to death of them.  Benedict had apparently given some thought to the problem and had come up with a solution.  One day he watched, well hidden, while the man, seated in one of the offices and attempting to do his work, was at the same time nervously keeping a lookout for him.  Benedict outwaited him and, when the man eventually relaxed his vigil, he crept in from behind his chair, shot up and leapt into his lap.  He had apparently decided that the cure for the fear of cats was, like hiccups, a matter of a good surprise.’  And, of course, it worked.

Polar Bear didn’t mind so much when one of Cleveland’s chess playing friends came over to play chess.  ‘He saw some virtues in it such as the lack of noise associated with it… But there were also two things he did not like about chess.  One was what, to him, was the interminable length of it, the other the ridiculous seriousness with which people took it.’  As an ex-chess-tournament player myself, I can attest to both the lengthiness and the “ridiculous seriousness” of chess as demonstrated in the large halls and gatherings in which such tournaments take place!  ‘…he never could understand why everybody made such a fuss about a few little pieces being knocked to the floor…’

‘I am well aware that in most books about individual animals, the animal dies in the end.  I have never liked this – indeed that was one of the reasons why, even as a child, Black Beauty appealed to me so much.  It is true there was misery and suffering in the book.  But, in the end, Black Beauty has not died.  Neither, I am happy to say, has Polar Bear.’  In fact, the author went on to write more “Cat” books featuring Polar Bear, including The Cat and the Curmudgeon and The Best Cat Ever.  My copy of the present book, Cleveland Amory’s Compleat Cat contains all three books in the series, and yes, I will be reading the other two books before too long!

January’s book of the month:

“Garnethill,” by Denise Mina!

Amazon.com Review

Garnethill (the name of a bleak Glasgow suburb) won the John Creasey Memorial Award for Best First Crime Novel--the British equivalent of the Edgar. It's a book that crackles with mordant Scottish wit and throbs with the pain of badly treated mental illness, managing to be both truly frightening and immensely exhilarating at the same time. -- Dick Adler

From Publishers Weekly

From its opening pages, this winner of the 1998 John Creasey Memorial Award for best first crime novel pulls readers inexorably into the tortured world of sexual abuse victims and their struggle to survive as whole people. Eight months after spending almost half a year in a Glasgow psychiatric hospital devoted to treating sex abuse victims, Maureen O'Donnell is desperately trying to hold together her shattered life. Bored with her job at a theater ticket office and depressed because her affair with one of the hospital's doctors, Douglas Brady, is over, Maureen and a friend get drunk. The next morning Maureen finds Brady's body in her living room, his throat cut. With bloody footprints matching Maureen's slippers at the scene, Detective Chief Inspector Joe McEwan sets out to prove the woman's guilt … Maureen's valiant struggle to act sane in an insane world will leave readers seeing sex abuse victims in a new light. -- Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Week 1:  Chapters 1-8 

(First post, 1-9-15)

Week 2:  Chapters 9-20
Week 3:  Chapters 21-27
Week 4:  Chapters 28-38

 

The Cat Who Came for Christmas (Cleveland Amory) Chapters 7-8

The book continues to divide its content between the story of the adoption of Polar Bear – the story we came to the book for – and sporadic essay-like asides related-to and not-so-specifically-related to cats.  That continues to be okay with me because the asides are pretty interesting in themselves.  But it still smacks just a little of bait-and-switch tactics to get us to read something we otherwise might have given a pass.

The story of the author’s trip to Hollywood is justified here by the fact that he took Polar Bear with him.  We learn a lot vicariously about the dos and don’ts of traveling with a cat – mainly, don’t – and wade through a lot of rather shameless name-dropping on the author’s part.  It is pointed out that in traveling with a cat, introductions are unpredictable: ‘The fact is that most cats, most of the time, have already met everybody they care to meet.’  Different hotels have widely varying rules on pets, but the author noticed that at the time of writing, the trend was toward banning them and he hoped the trend would someday be reversed: ‘A possible sign is the success of the Anderson House, a hotel in Washaba, near Minneapolis, where not only are cats welcome but, if you have not brought yours and are homesick for him, the hotel maintains fifteen of them in a barracks dormitory with their names over their rooms, from which you can select a companion to share your room for the night.’  Okay, that’s a little weird.

The opportunity arises to show how well the author knew Cary Grant, when he invited the actor to see Polar Bear in the hotel room to escape autograph seekers:  ‘Cary never gave autographs, but his turn-downs of requests for them were such studies in charm that I often thought they served as come-ons even to people who knew they wouldn’t actually get one.  In any case, this proved itself on this occasion – and, as usual, Cary was up to the challenge.  To one woman who gushed, “My friends will never believe I met you unless...” Cary gently interrupted, “You mean you have friends like that?  You really shouldn’t.”  To a man who began, “I hate to bother you, but…” Cary’s interruption was firmer.  “Don’t ever,” he advised, “do anything you hate.”  And finally to a third man, who started, “My wife will kill me…” Cary was also admonitory.  “Tsk, tsk,” he smiled.  “You really shouldn’t have that kind of a relationship – it’s too dangerous.’”

Returning to Polar Bear – remember?  The Cat Who Came for Christmas?  Amory talks about cats getting sick and having to attempt forcing a pill down Polar Bear’s throat.  ‘Polar Bear and I were, from the beginning, two very different individuals when we were sick.  When I am sick, I want attention.  I want it now, and I want it around the clock … He wanted to be alone and he wanted to be completely alone.’  (That second one is me!  The first is my wife…) ‘…the very last thing he wanted was a pill.  When it came to pills, Polar Bear was not only a Christian Scientist, he wrote the book…”

The story of the author’s trip to the arctic to foil a baby seal clubbing event is tied in to the book because one of the other activists suggested that he bring Polar Bear along as their good luck charm on their ice-breaking ship.  Right.  Even Amory saw the problem with this.  The Canadian government had fought to keep the seal clubbing viable, and had laws about interference from activists:  ‘…Canada’s so-called “Seal Protection” Act had decreed that nothing, ship or person could come within half a nautical mile of the sealhunt unless engaged in the killing.  It was surely remarkable seal protection.’  Indeed. 

Next Week: Chapters 9-10 (Conclusion)

January’s book of the month:

“Garnethill,” by Denise Mina!

Amazon.com Review

Garnethill (the name of a bleak Glasgow suburb) won the John Creasey Memorial Award for Best First Crime Novel--the British equivalent of the Edgar. It's a book that crackles with mordant Scottish wit and throbs with the pain of badly treated mental illness, managing to be both truly frightening and immensely exhilarating at the same time. -- Dick Adler

From Publishers Weekly

From its opening pages, this winner of the 1998 John Creasey Memorial Award for best first crime novel pulls readers inexorably into the tortured world of sexual abuse victims and their struggle to survive as whole people. Eight months after spending almost half a year in a Glasgow psychiatric hospital devoted to treating sex abuse victims, Maureen O'Donnell is desperately trying to hold together her shattered life. Bored with her job at a theater ticket office and depressed because her affair with one of the hospital's doctors, Douglas Brady, is over, Maureen and a friend get drunk. The next morning Maureen finds Brady's body in her living room, his throat cut. With bloody footprints matching Maureen's slippers at the scene, Detective Chief Inspector Joe McEwan sets out to prove the woman's guilt … Maureen's valiant struggle to act sane in an insane world will leave readers seeing sex abuse victims in a new light. -- Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Week 1:  Chapters 1-8 

(First post, 1-9-15)

Week 2:  Chapters 9-20
Week 3:  Chapters 21-27
Week 4:  Chapters 28-38

 

 

 

The Cat Who Came for Christmas (Cleveland Amory) Chapters 4-6

This section of the book takes a sharp right turn in an unexpected direction.  The large majority of the content of these three chapters is given over to a sort of extended general essay on cats, departing from the story about the author’s acquisition of a pet on Christmas Eve.  I can see this being a disappointment for some readers, especially young readers who expected a continuation of the antics of the cat.  At first, I was a little put off by it myself, but the exposition is intriguing enough that found myself enjoying it, albeit it in a different way than I had expected.

After a short discussion about how cats are creatures of habit and like to follow strict routines, there is a section on the myth that cats hate water.  Large cats, in particular actually love it.  An anecdote about a friend of the author who owned a pair of tigers and also had a swimming pool says, ‘Normally the tigers just went into the water any old way, but as time went on and they observed John diving off the board, they too would get up on the board and do their version of John’s swan dive. . .  Small cats too are not averse to water . . .’ His own cat did not ‘actively dislike water.  He just disliked vertical water . . . If it was to be in large quantities, then he firmly insisted on his water being horizontal.’

Next is an exploration of cats as laboratory animals.  The cat ‘has the terrible bad luck of having a brain which, for all its small size, is not only, save for the ape, the most highly developed on the evolutionary scale, it is also the one most like the human brain.’  I had not heard this before.  I once saw a poster featuring the cartoon cat, Garfield, with the quote, “The Cat – Nature’s Most Perfect Creature.”  I hadn’t realized that this was predated by Leonardo Da Vinci calling the cat “Nature’s Masterpiece.”  This was Mr. Amory’s favorite cat-related quote, though he continues, ‘It hardly seemed necessary to go further . . .  But the fact was I soon found others which would become favorites too.  One was from, curiously, our own country’s preeminent humorist.  “If,” Mark Twain said, “man could be crossed with a cat, it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.”’

Finally we come to the problem of choosing a name for the cat.  An entire chapter (out of the ten total chapters of the book) is devoted to this.  Once again, the writing here is full of fascination factoids and anecdotes, but this reader still had that feeling of tension that comes with having the actual story being “put on hold.”  ‘The naming of a cat, like marriage to a person, was obviously not to be undertaken or entered into lightly.  On the contrary, it was, as T. S. Eliot, who wrote a whole poem about it, noted, “a difficult matter”’ which is the adopted name of this chapter.  A portion of the poem is included at the end of the chapter and is a large part of the inspiration for the Broadway musical named “Cats.” (Oh, and the cat’s eventual name? - Polar Bear.)

And, in yet another reference to Mark Twain, there is the anecdote of one of the kittens of his famous feline companion, Tammany, and its domination of Twain’s pool table: ‘It was the habit of the kitten to hole up in a corner pocket, thus adding, by her blockade, a new dimension to any game.  To this tactic she added a second with her habit of not always, but occasionally, when the mood struck, swiping out with her paw and redirecting a ball headed toward the other corner pocket.  In these cases, Twain recalled, house rules called not for any condemnation of the kitten but merely for putting  the ball back as closely as possible to the original position and reshooting the shot.’  Ha!  That’s my kind of billiards!

 

 

Next Week:  Chapters 7-8

Week 4:  Chapters 9-10

The Cat Who Came for Christmas (Cleveland Amory) Chapters 1-3

‘To anyone who has ever been owned by a cat . . .’ is the first phrase of this story: a telling phrase that can be completed in thousands of ways, many of which are explored in this book.  This humorous look at one man’s views on cat psychology keeps bringing to my mind Mark Twain’s lighter works – a real treat for this reader!  Cleveland Amory is sharing observations that are more or less common among cat lovers; not trying for originality so much as universality; but taking the ideas perhaps a little deeper than most of us, and phrasing them so eloquently as to tempt us to stop and admire the prose.  He’s one of those writers that students trying to learn the craft of writing might want to study in detail.  Bravo!

‘For an animal person, an animal-less home is no home at all.’  Looking back on the periods of my own life when I didn’t have a pet in the home for an extended time, this resonates with me.  Personally, I would take it a step further and apply it specifically to cats.  I have often had to “make do” with dogs, and I love them dearly, but the hole in my life created by not having a companion cat is like a missing tooth; something you could get used to, but never quite comfortable with.

The personification of cats – this one Who Came for Christmas in particular – is elevated to a fine art here.  ‘. . . he spoke.  “Aeiou,” he said.  “Ow, yourself,” I replied; “Merry Christmas.”  I reminded him that he was supposed to say, “Meow.”  “Aeiou,” he repeated.  Obviously, he was not very good at consonants, but he was terrific at vowels.’  He even borrows from the great Aldous Huxley: ‘“My young friend,” I said, “if you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is to keep a pair of cats.”’  ‘“The tail in cats,” Mr. Huxley declared, “is the principal organ of emotional expression.”  The author also counselled his student not only to watch his cats “living from day to day” but also to do more than this – “to mark, learn and inwardly digest the lessons about human nature which they teach.”’  I’ve often wondered how differently humans would have evolved psychologically if we had never kept pets.  I have to think we learned valuable lessons from dogs and horses especially and perhaps, more subtly, from cats.  Would we even have survived as a species without the positive personality traits learned from these wonderful beings?  Somehow, I doubt it.

‘As anyone who has ever been around a cat for any length of time well knows, cats have enormous patience with the limitations of the human mind.’ . . . ‘They sense that it is absolutely essential for them to seize every opportunity for education and correction.  Otherwise, as befitting our slothful natures, we will slip back immediately into our most incorrigible old habits.  Their job in this regard something, I’m told, like a wife’s.’   (Another beautiful “Mark Twain” moment!)  This leads to a comparison of “dog people” and “cat people” – in particular the idea that women are usually more drawn to cats and men to dogs.  He had long held this as a general theory, ‘But, all of about twenty-four hours after I had had my cat, I was suddenly not so sure.’  (That many famous male authors favored cats is well documented.)

Chapter Three ends with the most thorough cat-personification yet, in which the author essentially gives us both sides of the conversation between he and the cat about whether he can “train” the cat to “Come” to him on command.  Right.  I’m reminded of a Facebook meme in which a German Shepherd and a medium-sized black cat are looking out a glass-pane French door.  The dog is thinking, “The Master’s home!! Yay!!” and the cat is thinking, “You’re late, slave!”

Next Week:  Chapters 4-6

Week 3:  Chapters 7-8
Week 4:  Chapters 9-10