Sherry Chandler

Mythical cats and cats in their cups

Photo by TR Williams

. . . he lay awake for a while with the cat lying on his duvet, purring like a mobile generator. He always thought a feline in the bedroom was appropriate, in a way. A cat was the Celtic equivalent to the dog Cerberus—the guardian at the entrance to the Underworld. Randy could watch over him as he slipped across the vulnerable threshold between waking and sleeping.

—Stephen Booth, Scared to Live (Bantam, 2008)

The domestic nature of the male

Baxter and Possum are looking gaunt and fragile this year, which grieves me. They are sixteen this year. They were magnificent playful creatures in their day.

The white specks on the driveway are locust blossoms.

On to the quote

He forked some duck-and-turkey Whiskas into a bowl for Randy, who rubbed himself briefly against Cooper’s legs. Though they had met each other only a few months before, the cat was very much a part of the scenery in Cooper’s new life—which went to prove that you didn’t need to work at a relationship for years and years, didn’t it?

“Where’s your friend, Randy?”

He called the other cat Mrs. Macavity, because she came and went so mysteriously. In fact, Cooper wasn’t sure where she really lived. Apart from a couple of months she spent in his conservatory, caring for the five rather scruffy black-and-white kittens she’d produced in her basket one morning, her presence was unpredictable. He thought she might have an entire list of homes she called on when she felt like it. A meal here today, next door tomorrow.

Once a new home had been found for all the kittens among her family, Mrs. Macavity had returned to her old ways. She was much more a free spirit than Randy, who didn’t wander far from his warm basket next to the boiler in the conservatory. He used the cat flap to do whatever he needed to do in the garden, weighed up the weather, and either lay for a while in the sun or came straight back to his basket. He was an animal with a fixed routine and firm ideas of what was his territory and what wasn’t. Cooper liked that. He thought there was something in that attitude that enabled a person to establish a home. [pp 173-174]

—Stephen Booth, Blind to the Bones (Random House, 2003)

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.

__________
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.

Smelly cat

IV

catpiss smell,
the pink bloom open:
I press a leaf
of the flowering currant
on the back of your hand
for the tight slow burn
of its sticky juice
to prime your skin,
and your veins to be crossed
criss-cross with leaf-veins.

— Seamus Heaney, “from Field Work” in Selected Poems 1966-1987 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990)

Cats and Goblins

from Goblin Market

Evening by evening
Among the brookside rushes,
Laura bowed her head to hear,
Lizzie veiled her blushes:
Crouching close together
In the cooling weather,
With clasping arms and cautioning lips,
With tingling cheeks and finger-tips.
“Lie close,” Laura said,
Pricking up her golden head:
We must not look at goblin men,
We must not buy their fruits:
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry thirsty roots?”
“Come buy,” call the goblins
Hobbling down the glen.
“O! cried Lizzie, Laura, Laura,
You should not peep at goblin men.”
Lizzie covered up her eyes
Covered close lest they should look;
Laura reared her glossy head,
And whispered like the restless brook:
“Look, Lizzie, look, Lizzie,
Down the glen tramp little men.
One hauls a basket,
One bears a plate,
One lugs a golden dish
Of many pounds’ weight.
How fair the vine must grow
Whose grapes are so luscious;
How warm the wind must blow
Through those fruit bushes.”
“No,” said Lizzie, “no, no, no;
Their offers should not charm us,
Their evil gifts would harm us.”
She thrust a dimpled finger
In each ear, shut eyes and ran:
Curious Laura chose to linger
Wondering at each merchant man.
One had a cat’s face,
One whisked a tail,
One tramped at a rat’s pace,
One crawled like a snail,
One like a wombat prowled obtuse and furry,
One like a ratel tumbled hurry-scurry.
Lizzie heard a voice like voice of doves
Cooing all together:
They sounded kind and full of loves
In the pleasant weather.

— Christina Rosetti. Read the whole poem here.

Houses

From Daniel Drake‘s Pioneer Life in Kentucky 1785-1800 (Henry Schuman, Inc., 1948):

Now fancy to yourself a log cabin of the size and form of Dove’s dining room — one story high — without a window — with a door opening to the south — with a half finished wooden chimney — with a roof on one side only — without any upper or lower floor — and fancy, still further, a man and two women stepping from sleeper to sleeper (poles lad down to support the floor, when [my father] should have time to split the puncheons), with two children — a brother & sister — sitting on the ground between them, as joyous as you ever saw . . . and you will have the picture which constitutes my first memory. [ p. 15]

. . .

The first event I can remember I have described in my letter to Harriet Echo. It occurred in the autumn or beginning of the winter of 1788 when I had entered my 4^th year. For the next 6 years my father continued to reside at the same place, in the original log cabin, which in due course of time acquired a roof, a puncheon floor belown and a clap board floor above, a small square window without glass, and a chimney, carried up with cats & clay to the height of the ridge pole. These cats & clay were pieces of small poles, well imbeded in mortar. The rifle, indespensable both for hunting & defense, lay on two pegs driven into one of the logs. The axe and a scythe (no Jerseyman emigrated without that implement) were kep at night under the bed as weapons of defense, in case the Indians should make an attack. On the morning the first duty was to ascend the ladder which always stood, leaning behind the door, to the loft and look through the cracks for Indians lest they might have planted themselves near the door, to rush in when the strong crossbar should be removed, and the heavy latch raised from its resting place. But no attack was ever made on his or any other of the five cabins which composed the station.[p. 24]

From Annette Kolodny’s The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630 – 1860 (UNC Press, 1984):

As late as 1859, for example, the forty-eight-year-old Nicolas Stott Shaw accompanied her children on a week-long trek “through a dense and often trackless forest,” nervously making her way from the railroad station in Grand Rapids to a waiting cabin about ten miles from present-day Big Rapids, Michigan. Sustained by the belief “that we were going to a farm . . . [with] some resemblance at least to the prosperous farms we had seen in New England,” Nicolas was shocked to discover at the end of her journey only “the four walls and the roof of a good-sized log-house, standing in a small cleared strip of the wilderness, its doors and windows represented by square holes, its floor also a thing of the future, its whole effect achingly forlorn and desolate.” To be sure, Nicolas Shaw and her children succeeded in making a home of the cabin some “one hundred miles from a railroad, forty miles from the nearest post-office, and half a dozen miles from any neighbors save Indians, wolves, and wildcats.” But in the first shock of recognition “that this was really the place father had prepared for us,” she could only bury her face in her hands, and in that way she sat for hours without moving or speaking.” Indeed, as her daughter would insist many years later, Nicolas’s “face never lost the deep lines those first hours of her pioneer life had cut upon it.” [pp. 229-230]

Winter blows in from the west

Yikes! I misspelled “revenant” but I’m not going to re-do the whole thing now.