I HAVE venerated cats since early childhood. For more than two decades, Walter the Beirut Puss and now Spike the Irish Moggy, have enriched my life. There are people and possessions I could live without. But a cat is indispensable.
Rosita Boland remains a cherished friend and colleague. But I could not allow her attack on the feline species (Irishwoman’s Diary, June 14th) to go unanswered.
Reading it here in Washington, I relived the disappointment – not to say sense of betrayal – that I felt years ago, when on a pilgrimage to Edith Wharton’s home in Lenox Massachusetts, I discovered that the novelist regarded cats as “snakes in fur”.
I cannot say why reading a book is more pleasurable with a cat sitting in teapot mode at one’s side, or why I sleep better with Spike curled up at the foot of the bed, but it is so.
I understand why the ancient Egyptians worshipped cats, and why medieval man burned them as witches. Something in cats surpasses their status as household pets; they are a mystery that eludes us. Victor Hugo wrote that “God invented the cat to give man the pleasure of petting a tiger.” Every day, Spike makes me laugh. Some readers may recall his traumatic move from Paris, 10 months ago. On the day our furniture was finally delivered, Spike purred triumphantly from the top of the sofa and rolled on his back on the living room carpet.
Now we enjoy watching the sparrows, orioles, cardinals and doves that cavort in the ginko and magnolia trees surrounding our third-floor terrace in Georgetown. The pastime has its perils; when birds land on the balustrade, Spike’s haunches quiver as he prepares to leap. I clap and scream to break his launch into the void.
When I work, I recall the 8th-century Irish monk who hunted words while his cat, Pangur Ban, hunted mice. The mouse in our apartment is attached to my computer, and Spike has an unfortunate habit of walking on the keyboard and obscuring the screen, just when I’m most desperately seeking the right phrase.
Consider, how much felines have given to art and literature. Foujita and Steinlen immortalised them on canvas. Colette pampered cats in her Palais Royal apartment. Ernest Hemingway kept 30 of them. Irène Némirovsky's posthumous masterpiece, Suite Française, contains a jewel of a chapter in which Albert, the pet cat of bourgeois Parisian refugees, goes hunting on a warm night in German-occupied France.
Baudelaire's The Cat, as translated by Ulick O'Connor, explains how humans identify with felines: "He returns my gaze, careless what I discover/And what do I find there, I find myself." Like me, Spike loves the feather duvet and fireside in winter. But like me, he's chronically restless. We zig-zag between boundless energy and exhaustion, and we share the journalist's most important characteristic, curiosity.
Last week, I attended a Bloomsday celebration at the home of the Irish Ambassador, Michael Collins, and his wife Marie. Actors from the Irish arts group Solas Nua read excerpts from Ulysses. I love the passage where Leopold Bloom prepares breakfast for Molly. "I never saw such a stupid pussens as the pussens," Bloom says. "Silly cat. You silly cat," I tell Spike several times daily.
The Joycean professor Declan Kiberd understood the meaning of Bloom's encounter with the pussens. "The cat already offers an anti-dote to a puffed-up, self-important humanity," Kiberd writes in Ulysses and Us.Bloom's ability to empathise with the cat is one of his most human, if not, indeed "godlike" qualities, says Kiberd.
Years ago, Zeinab, my Arabic teacher in Beirut, glanced at her Siamese cat Feyrouz, who liked to sit in on my lessons. "Sometimes, you'd almost think they were thinking," Zeinab said. "Of coursethey are thinking!" I blurted out. I never doubted it for a moment.
“They call them stupid,” Joyce wrote of cats. “They understand what we say better than we understand them.” If I was sad or discouraged, my previous cat, Walter, would sit quietly nearby. Perhaps it’s his gender (Walter, despite her name, was female), but Spike is a good-time cat who has no patience for brooding. When I’m cheerful, his eyes light up. He performs celebratory leaps, makes a gurgling sound from the throat, and runs to the toy basket in the hope of a game of mousing.
My favourite T-shirt bears a cat face drawn by Jean Cocteau, and the words " Club des amis des chats". It's true we cat-lovers recognise one another, exchange news of our moggies. Back in Paris, my relations with a stern administrator at the Élysée Palace improved after I ran into her in the pet food section of La Grande Épicerie one Saturday morning.
I don’t discriminate against non cat-lovers, though I must admit I had second thoughts about a recent visitor whom Spike hissed at. Tactful friends greet Spike with respect on arrival. Nothing so elaborate as, “Hail Majesté”; “Hello Spike” is sufficient.