Sherry Chandler

(I chose this shot because, if you look closely, you can see the locust blossoms surrounding Bertie’s head and reflected in the car.)

How a Cat Was Annoyed and a Poet Was Booted

A POET had a cat.
There is nothing odd in that—
  (I might make a little pun about the Mews!)
But what is really more
Remarkable, she wore
  A pair of pointed patent-leather shoes.
      And I doubt me greatly whether
          E'er you heard the like of that:
      Pointed shoes of patent-leather
              On a cat!	 

His time he used to pass
Writing sonnets, on the grass—
  (I might say something good on pen and sward!)
While the cat sat near at hand,
Trying hard to understand
  The poems he occasionally roared.
      (I myself possess a feline,
          But when poetry I roar
      He is sure to make a bee-line
              For the door.)	 

The poet, cent by cent,
All his patrimony spent—
  (I might tell how he went from verse to werse!)
Till the cat was sure she could,
By advising, do him good.
  So addressed him in a manner that was terse:
      "We are bound toward the scuppers,
          And the time has come to act,
      Or we'll both be on our uppers
              For a fact!"	  

On her boot she fixed her eye,
But the boot made no reply—
  (I might say: "Couldn't speak to save its sole!")
And the foolish bard, instead
Of responding, only read
  A verse that wasn't bad upon the whole.
      And it pleased the cat so greatly,
          Though she knew not what it meant,
      That I'll quote approximately
              How it went:—	  

"If I should live to be
The last leaf upon the tree"—
  (I might put in: "I think I'd just as leaf!")
"Let them smile, as I do now,
At the old forsaken bough"—
  Well, he'd plagiarized it bodily, in brief!
      But that cat of simple breeding
          Couldn't read the lines between,
      So she took it to a leading
              Magazine.	  

She was jarred and very sore
When they showed her to the door.
  (I might hit off the door that was a jar!)
To the spot she swift returned
Where the poet sighed and yearned,
  And she told him that he'd gone a little far.
      "Your performance with this rhyme has
          Made me absolutely sick,"
      She remarked. "I think the time has
              Come to kick!"	 

I could fill up half the page
With descriptions of her rage—
  (I might say that she went a bit too fur!)
When he smiled and murmured: "Shoo!"
"There is one thing I can do!"
  She answered with a wrathful kind of purr.
      "You may shoo me, and it suit you,
          But I feel my conscience bid
      Me, as tit for tat, to boot you!"
              (Which she did.)	  

The Moral of the plot
(Though I say it, as should not!)
  Is: An editor is difficult to suit.
But again there're other times
When the man who fashions rhymes
  Is a rascal, and a bully one to boot!	 

— Guy Wetmore Carryl, from Untermeyer, Louis. Modern American Poetry. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1919; Bartleby.com, 1999.

The lake is receding, the rain has stopped, though skies remain gray. And the gray stray stands its ground, much to the chagrin of our Black Bert. Bertie, who spent a winter under the house with Ursula the raccoon before he convinced us he was our cat, isn’t about to welcome another waif. I can’t get a good look at the other guy, but Bert has spent the winter nursing abscessed face wounds. He’s bleeding again this morning. Alas, his forays to protect the homestead aren’t moving the big tabby who likes the easy food at the raccoon feeding station.

Spring is official but no one has told the farm. More floods. Stoner got to 18.6 feet yesterday morning. Eighteen feet is flood stage. We’ve had 4.65 inches of rain this month, twice the average. Walking on the farm is more like wading, so much standing water. The grass is greening, but nothing is putting out leaves except the bush honeysuckle and the fence roses. Nothing much was stirring yesterday except our redwing blackbird, staking out his territory. He likes to pose dramatically in the very tippy top of the tree, but prefers you to admire him from a distance.

I give you the red-winged blackbird I saw in top of a tree on Wednesday evening.

For more on the species, I recommend All About Birds. This guy might be the envy of Eliot Spitzer (or perhaps not):

The Red-winged Blackbird is a highly polygynous species, with one male having up to 15 different females making nests in his territory. In some populations 90% of territorial males have more than one female. But, from one quarter to up to half of the young in “his” nests do not belong to the territorial male. Instead they have been sired by neighboring males.

Watch at YouTube.

The first time I saw a cartoon of of George Herriman’s was in my High School American Lit. text. It had a few of his illustrations from the 1927-40 Don Marquis book collections of Archie and Mehitabel. The one I recall best was Mehitabel floating in the Nile in half a watermelon rind, bragging “I was Cleopatra once,” trying to show Archie up for his claim to have been a vers libre poet in an earlier incarnation. She looked a lot like Krazy Kat, which is fitting since the Kat was of indeterminate sex, changing at his/her creator’s whim. It was decades later before I could find reprints of Herriman’s greatest creation. The entire set of his Sunday pages has now been collected in a series of books, first in the early 90s by Eclipse Comics for 1916-24 strips and recently by Fantagraphics for 1925-1944 when the strip was cancelled after the death of the creator. W.R. Hearst decided that no one could equal Herriman’s genius so the strip did not continue with a ghostwriter, a first for a syndicated cartoon. Fantagraphics will go back and re-issue the earlier volumes in coming years.

* * * * * * *

Krazy Kat was never a popular success and owed its survival to the undying admiration of William Randolf Hurst. It spent a large part of its run on the Art and Theatre pages of his papers so the bulk of its Sunday pages are in black and white. It takes a lot of effort to read many of the strips since Herriman loved funny spellings, puns, Latinate inflated diction, Spanish, French, and even a bit of Greek, not to mention Yat, the argot of his native New Orleans. It was set in Kokonino Co. Arizona and featured a lot of Navaho-influenced rug and pottery designs and local topography flitting about the background. It is very like an Ode on an American Urn. It is sometimes even harder to interpret what the strips might “mean”. He was often at his best when he let the action of the strip tell the story–he spent a lot of time watching his L.A. friends make silent comedies. But he could wax lyrical and mock-epical without missing a beat.

* * * * * * *

In a typical stript Ignatz plans to throw a brick at the Kat’s head–whether he is annoyed by his optimism/joy in nature/music/ or if he saw a perceived threat/or for revenge or just because the mouse felt “evil”. Krazy Kat always experiences the coup as an act of love–a billet-doux, a transport of ecstasy, a mind-altering moment (a brick of hashish? mara huana?-she is a wistful widow resident of Kokonino Co.) or an epiphany of religious intensity. Staid Offisa Bullpup, with his billy-club, strives to prevent the assault and often locks Ignatz in jail whether or not any unlawful transaction has transpired. Much of the genius of the strip lies in endlessly clever variations of this plot. In an early strip Ignatz believes he has finally succeeded in drowning the Kat and he begins to grieve inconsolably, bawling his eyes out while he sits on a stone; but Krazy Katfish [in his debut performance] and Ignatz’ muskrat cousin have saved the Kat and shown him how to get back to dry land, so when Krazy pops out of the hollow tree behind him, Ignatz picks up his “cushion” and….

* * * * * * *

What gives the strip its enduring value is the unflinching view it gives of the contradictory nature of human relationships. Love and hate are inextricably bound in all friendships, marriages, families. It is Krazy who first notices that the Mouse family has been visited by Joe Stork and he sets out to get a stroller; he barrels it into Ignatz standing on a brick and Ignatz continues rolling along to his house where his long-suffering wife is charmed by hhe hubby’s “thoughtfulness”. I. takes the three babies to Kelly’s brickyard to start their “education” immediately.

Catullus in one short lyric marvels that he loves and hates all at once even though he can’t explain why. Kat and Mouse are asleep in an early daily strip, heads propped on a log. After Krazy wakes and chastely kisses a snoozing Ignatz on his forehead, the Mouse dreams of cupids and angels. There’s nary a brickbat in sight.

Sunday, February 8, 1976

After another day entirely alone in the bleak cold, some sort of breakthrough that has been coming since Christmas happened. I think it had to. I wept torrents of tears—even the cat got up and came and looked down at me (I was in bed by nine), while Tamas licked my eyes frantically. But animals are not enough. I am simply too isolated and starved.

…

I hesitate to offer invitations far ahead, because what if I was at work on a poem suddenly? I feel I have to keep the channels uncluttered—that is my first responsibility.

…

When I am depressed I realize very well that everything I do, such as tending the flowers, talking to the animals, walking with them, is a kind of wall against woe. A substitute, for what? For one person who would focus this beautiful world for me . . . and I think that that will not happen again. I[n] some ways I do not want it to happen. I am beginning a new phase. Perhaps one must always be ready for the inner world to open again. Perhaps one has to dare that. This morning I feel better for having let the woe in, for admitting what I have tried for weeks to refuse to admit—loneliness like starvation.

—May Sarton, The House by the Sea (Norton, 1977)

I had intended to post this quotation from May Sarton last Friday when it actually was February 8, but never having had a good relationship with the calendar, I forgot. Turns out, it’s more appropriate to this week when Kentucky has been hit with lots of snow and ice.

Today a thaw is beginning and the ground is covered with rotting, melting snow. Not a lovely day but the mood is more cheery among the cats. Bertie, half pictured above because he won’t hold still long enough for close-ups, has finally got to go out for a romp, after several days of halting on the doorstep. He got the boo-boo protecting the homestead from an interloping tabby.

Possum finds a warm place to sleep.

But his thoughts were interrupted by the entrance of a girl of around nine or ten, who set about looking under the chair opposite. Then she made quite a production out of rising from her near-prone position, ignoring his presence, and getting down to look under the sofa.

“What are you doing?” Melrose decided to be direct.

“I’m looking for my cat. He’s a ginger cat.”

“There are plenty of charming surfaces for him to lie on. Why would he shove himself under a chair or a sofa?”

Still on her stomach, she said, “I don’t know. I’m not a cat. His name’s Horace.”

— Martha Grimes, The Stargazey (Henry Holt, 1998)

Black cat descends from the top of the house, when she thinks it is time to get up, and sits on the floor looking at me. Sometimes I become conscious of the insistent stare of her yellow eyes. She gets up on the bed. Grey cat softly growls. But black cat … knows her rights and is not afraid. She goes across the foot of the bed, and up the other side, near the wall, ignoring the grey cat. She sits, waiting. Grey cat and black cat exchange long green and yellow stares. Then, if I don’t get up, black cat jumps neatly, right over me, and on to the floor. There she looks to see if the gesture has wakened me. If it hasn’t, she does it again. And again. Grey cat, then, contemptuous of black cat’s lack of subtlety, shows her how things should be done: she crouches to pat my face. Black cat, however, cannot learn the finesse of gray cat: she is impatient of it. She does not know how to pat a face into laughter, or how to bite, gently, mockingly. She knows that if she jumps over me often enough, I will wake up and feed her…

—from Doris Lessing, Particularly Cats …and Rufus (Knopf, 1991)

Our black tom cat, seen above, uses this stare to get his wishes. I have waked up in the morning and stumbled out to the bathroom, only to glimpse him through the window, sitting patiently on the driveway, staring at the door. And it works. I open the door and let him in for breakfast after his night’s wandering.

Grey cat … strolls around the bed at night, choosing her favoured place, not under the sheet now, or on my shoulder, or on my shoulder, but in the angle behind the knees, or against the curve of the feet. Grey cat licks my face, delicately, looks briefly out of the window at the night, acknowledging tree, moon, stars, winds, or the amours of other cats from which she is now infinitely removed, then settles down. In the morning, when she wishes me to wake, she crouches on my chest and pats my face with her paw. Or, if I am on my side, she crouches looking into my face. Soft, soft touches with her paw. I open my eyes, say I don’t want to wake. I close my eyes. Cat gently pats my eyelids. Cat licks my nose. Cat starts purring, two inches from my face. Cat, then, as I lie pretending to be asleep, delicately bites my nose. I laugh and sit up. At which she bounds off my bed and streaks downstairs—to have the back door opened if it is winter, to be fed if it is summer.

— from Doris Lessing, Particularly Cats …and Rufus (Knopf, 1991)