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