Sherry Chandler

A cat may stare at a [son of] King [MacLain]

In the foreground was a cat. In the deep grass she held a motionless and time-honored pose.

Her head was three-quarters turned toward them where they stood. It seemed to have womanly eyebrows. Her gaze came out of her face with the whole of animal comprehension; whether it was menace or alarm in the full-open eyes, her face made a burning-glass of looking. Her eyes seemed after so long a time to be holding her herself in their power. She crouched rigid with the devotion and intensity of her vision, and if she had caught fire there, still she could not, Eugene felt, have stirred out of the seizure. She would have been consumed twice over before she disregarded either what she was looking at or her own frenzy.

— Eudora Welty, from “Music from Spain”

According to James Shimkus in Aspects of King MacLain in Eurdora Welty’s The Golden Apples, a master’s thesis I found online, Eudora Welty had not originally considered “Music from Spain,” set in San Francisco, as part of The Golden Apples.

The story, whose protagonist was originally named Francis Dowdie, had several different titles, including “Dowdie’s Guilt,” “Guilt,” and “The Flower and the Rock,” the latter being the title under which Russell submitted the story to the New Yorker, Mademoiselle, Town and Country, Atlantic, Harper’s, Harper’s Bazaar, Tomorrow, and Partisan (Polk 62). “The Flower and the Rock” was rejected from all of the aforementioned magazines, but Welty expressed her faith in the story in a letter to Russell dated September 17, 1947: “Nobody has yet bought the S.F. story [“Music from Spain”], have they? That really makes me think less of editors (said the author)—I do think that a good story”

In the end, the story was eventually published in a limited, monograph edition in June 1948 by the Levee Press of Greenville, Mississippi. It was while she was typing a clean copy for the Levee Press edition that Welty decided the story belonged with the others in The Golden Apples

She communicated her discovery to Russell in a letter dated February 18, 1948: “I’d already typed solidly all day getting Music from S. ready for Levee (wrote the whole damn thing just about over—but really I think this time I got it right—and the key is, you’d never guess, the little man in it is from [Morgana] and who he is is one of the MacLain twins—don’t faint. Cleared everything up.).”

I neglected to mention in my tarradiddle on this subject last week that one reason why these stories are full of “caricatures” is that they are also full of avatars of various Greek gods and mythological figures. The collection is to a large extent a re-telling of these myths. So Morgana is, in some ways, a land as enchanted as the Forest of Arden, complete with rude mechanicals in the form of the African American characters. Shimkus points out that the name of the town may refer to the Fata Morgana.

The title of the collection may refer to William Butler Yeats’s “The Song of Wandering Aengus.” Aengus wanders in search of

The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun

And as I did point out last week, all the characters seeking to escape this fated place, to find their own version of the golden apples, find themselves tethered still to Morgana, Eugene MacLain, who physically escapes to San Francisco, perhaps most of all.

The message in the end may be that escape is not the right tactic, that the quest is inward not outward.

Eugene MacLain encounters two cats in his day-long (Bloomesque?) meander around San Francisco. One in a store window, and this one in the grass by the shore.

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My thanks to everybody for good wishes. I am not usually so public about my ills but then I don’t remember when I’ve been this sick. I’m mending but I fear not very coherent.

Cat with long hunter

Boone hunted turkeys as food, not to sell, and he also occasionally killed panthers and wolves. Panther skin was not readily marketable but had ceremonial value.  When Boone and other Boonesborough leaders parleyed with their Indian besiegers during the siege of Boonesborough in 1778, the Indians spread a panther skin on a log for the negotiators to sit on.

–Meredith Mason Brown, Frontiersman. Daniel Boone and the Making of America. LSU Press, 2008

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I am off to Wildacres for the week. Though I will have wi-fi, I will also have good friends and Blue Ridge scenery so posting will be light to non-existent.

Cat with Bard

From Seanchan the Bard and the King of the Cats:

There is an amusing legend preserved in Ossianic tradition of the encounter between Seanchan, the celebrated chief poet of Ireland, and the King of all the Cats, who dwelt in a cave near Clonmacnoise.

In ancient Ireland the men of learning were esteemed beyond all other classes; all the great ollaves and professors and poets held the very highest social position, and took precedence of the nobles, and ranked next to royalty.

. . .

Now Irusan [King of the Cats] heard these words in his cave, and he said to his daughter, Sharp-tooth: “Seanchan has satirized me, but I will be avenged.”

“Nay, father,” she said, “bring him here alive, that we may all take our revenge.”

“I shall go then and bring him,” said Irusan; “so send thy brothers after me.”

Now when it was told to Seanchan that the King of the Cats was on his way to come and kill him, he was timorous, and besought Guaire and all the nobles to stand by and protect him. And before long a vibrating, impressive, impetuous sound was heard, like a raging tempest of fire in full blaze. And when the cat appeared he seemed to them of the size of a bullock; and this was his appearance–rapacious, panting, jagged-eared, snub-nosed, sharp-toothed, nimble, angry, vindictive, glare-eyed, terrible, sharp-clawed. Such was his similitude. But he passed on amongst them, not minding till he came to Seanchan; and him he seized by the arm and jerked him up on his back, and made off the way he came before any one could touch him; for he had no other object in view but to get hold of the poet.

Now Seanchan, being in evil plight, had recourse to flattery. “Oh, Irusan,” he exclaimed, “how truly splendid thou art, such running, such leaps, such strength, and such agility! But what evil have I done, oh, Irusan, son of Arusan? spare me, I entreat. I invoke the saints between thee and me, oh, great King of the Cats.”

But not a bit did the cat let go his hold for all this fine talk, but went straight on to Clonmacnoise where there was a forge; and St. Kieran happened to be there standing at the door.

“What!” exclaimed the saint; “is that the Chief Bard of Erin on the back of a cat? Has Guaire’s hospitality ended in this?” And he ran for a red-hot bar of iron that was in the furnace, and struck the cat on the side with it, so that the iron passed through him, and he fell down lifeless.

“Now my curse on the hand that gave that blow!” said the bard, when he got upon his feet.

“And wherefore?” asked St. Kieran.

“Because,” answered Seanchan, “I would rather Irusan had killed me, and eaten me every bit, that so I might bring disgrace on Guaire for the bad food he gave me; for it was all owing to his wretched dinners that I got into this plight.”

Thor and the giant’s gray cat

Bert and Peanut with the first catnip plant of spring.

From The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson, “Thor’s Adventures on his Journey to the Land of the Giants”

51. “‘I now see plainly,’ said Utgard-Loki, ‘that thou are not quite so stout as we thought thee, but wilt thou try any other feat, though, methinks, thou art not likely to bear any prize away with thee hence.’

“‘I will try another feat,’ replied Thor, ‘and I am sure such draughts as I have been drinking would not have been reckoned small among the �sir; but what new trial hast thou to propose?’

“‘We have a very, trifling game here,’ answered Ut-gard-Loki, ‘in which we exercise none but children. It consists in merely lifting my cat from the ground, nor should I have dared to mention such a feat to Asa-Thor if I had not already observed that thou art by no means what we took thee for.’

“As he finished speaking, a large grey cat sprung on the hall floor. Thor advancing put his hand under the cat’s belly, and did his utmost to raise him from the floor, but the cat bending his back had, notwithstanding all Thor’s efforts, only one of his feet lifted up, seeing which, Thor made no further attempt.

“‘This trial has turned out,’ said Utgard-Loki, ‘just as I imagined it would; the cat is large, but Thor is little in comparison to our men.’

. . .

54. “The next morning, at break of day, Thor and his companions dressed themselves and prepared for their departure. Utgard-Loki then came and ordered a table to be set for them, on which there was no lack either of victuals or drink. After the repast Utgard-Loki led them to the gate of the city, and, on parting, asked Thor how he thought his journey had turned out, and whether he had met with any men stronger than himself. Thor told him that he could not deny but that he had brought great shame on himself. ‘And what grieves me most,’ he added, ‘is that ye will call me a man of little worth.’

55. “‘Nay,’ said Utgard-Loki, ‘it behooves me to tell thee the truth now thou are out of the city which so long as I live, and have my way, thou shalt never re-enter. And by my troth, had I known beforehand that thou hadst so much strength in thee, and wouldst have brought me so near to a great mishap, I would not have suffered thee to enter this time. Know then that I have all along deceived thee by my illusions; . . . Thou didst perform a feat no less wonderful by lifting up the cat, and to tell thee the truth, when we saw that one of his paws was off the floor, we were all of us terror-stricken, for what thou tookest for a cat was
in reality the great Midgard serpent that encompassed the whole earth, and he was then barely long enough to inclose it between his head and tail, so high had thy hand raised him up towards heaven.

Considering how catnip-besotted Bert and Peanut are in the photo above, I should probably have included the passage in which Thor tries to drink the ocean dry, thinking it a horn of ale. But there’s no cat in that. so instead, I’ll show you the ensuing bar fight between Baxter and Bert, all brave in his cups.

And have a look at the Norwegian Forest Cat.

TR took these snaps.