The Relationship Between Famous Writers & Their Cats
Writers Write is a resource for writers. We’ve put together a post on the relationship between famous writers and their cats.
Writers and cats have always shared a special bond. Alison Nastasi has written a book about the behind-the-scenes stories of Writers and Their Cats, which reminded me of my thoughts on the subject.
There is a long recorded history of the love writers have for their cats. In fact, there are so many writers who have adored cats that it’s difficult to ignore.
Canadian novelist and playwright Robertson Davies once wrote, “Authors like cats because they are such quiet, loveable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.”
Famous Cats
Cats are elegant, mysterious, and beautiful. They are also ruthless and selfish when they have to be. Many cats have inspired works of literature including Edgar Allan Poe’s Catterina, Cleveland Amory’s Polar Bear, and T.S. Eliot’s Jellylorum.If you Google authors and pets you will find a multitude of entries about cats. I think that authors love cats because cats are complicated creatures. Writers are used to trying to understand, and make sense of difficult things, and cats fit the bill.
Cats & Dogs
Dogs are simple creatures who love everyone. Cats do not. It is interesting to note that psychopaths prefer the company of dogs, as written about by Jon Ronson in The Psychopath Test. Psychopaths prefer obedient animals. Adolf Hitler is known to have despised cats. Cats, like writers, are wilful creatures, who don’t like to be controlled.Most authors are creative introverts and cats fit beautifully into an introvert’s world. As the American author, Andre Norton said, ‘Perhaps it is because cats do not live by human patterns, do not fit themselves into prescribed behaviour, that they are so united to creative people.’
Here is a list of famous authors who loved their cats:
- Aldous Huxley. Huxley was an English writer, best known for his dystopian novel, Brave New World. ‘If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is to keep a pair of cats.’
- Alexandre Dumas. Alexandre Dumas, the French author of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, owned three cats: Mysouff I, Mysouff II, and Le Docteur. Mysouff I knew exactly when Dumas would finish work and accompanied his master on walks to and from the office. Dumas said, “The cat, an aristocrat, merits our esteem, while the dog is only a scurvy type who got his position by low flatteries.”
Alice Walker. Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, says:
“My cat lived a very rough life before she arrived in my home. She has
one tooth that’s broken and another that’s kind of long on the other
side. She’s snaggletoothed. A stranger might look at her and say, ‘Oh,
she has imperfect teeth.’ But I look at her and see the absolute
perfection — the charming perfection — of her imperfection. It gives me
so much information about the kind of life she has had, and the kind of
soul she has probably fashioned.” Walker wrote about her relationship
with cats as an author who travels frequently in Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer’s Activism.- Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg wrote about cats: ‘I learned a world from each one whom I loved.’
- Anatole France. Jocasta and The Famished Cat was the first work of fiction by Anatole France, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature. “Until one has loved an animal, a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.”
- Andre Norton. Norton was an American writer of science fiction and fantasy, who also wrote works of historical fiction and contemporary fiction. She said: ‘Perhaps it is because cats do not live by human patterns, do not fit themselves into prescribed behavior, that they are so united to creative people.’
- Angela Carter. Cats featured prominently in Carter’s magical realist, picaresque tales. Comic and Curious Cats and Sea-Cat and Dragon King, her two children’s books, feature feline protagonists. Carter shared her pencil and crayon drawings of cats with friends.
Beverly Cleary.
The Newbery Medal–winning children’s author, cat-loving Cleary has
owned several cats over the decades, including one who begged for
attention while sitting on top of her typewriter keys. One of Cleary’s
most beloved books is Socks about the misadventures of a tabby cat.- Charles Baudelaire. Baudelaire wrote that cats were ‘seraphic’, as subtle and harmonious as angels. He also once complained in a letter that it was impossible to live with his mistress, Jeanne, who drove away his cat and brought in dogs. Quelle horreur!
- Charles Bukowski. Charles Bukowski had a one-eared tomcat named Butch Van Gogh Artaud Bukowski. He said: ‘Having a bunch of cats around is good. If you’re feeling bad, you just look at the cats, you’ll feel better, because they know that everything is, just as it is. There’s nothing to get excited about. They just know.’
- Charles Dickens. After Charles Dickens’ cat, Bob, died in 1862, he had Bob’s paw stuffed and attached to a letter opener, upon which, he had inscribed, “C.D. In Memory of Bob 1862.” He wrote: ‘What greater gift than the love of a cat?’
- Charles Dudley Warner. Calvin, a cat originally belonging to Harriet Beecher Stowe, went to live with Warner when Stowe moved. Warner became devoted to him.
- Chester Himes. Considered the father of the black American crime novel, Himes loved his cats, especially his Siamese called Griot who was named after the magicians in the courts of West African kings.
- Christina Rossetti. According to a biographer, her family visited France, and Rossetti’s favourite part of the vacation was not Notre Dame, not the Seine — but meeting a Persian cat in a hotel in Normandy.
- Cleveland Amory. Known for writing a series of popular books poking fun at the pretensions and customs of society, starting with The Proper Bostonians, he said: “As anyone who has ever been around a cat for any length of time well knows, cats have enormous patience with the limitations of the human kind.”
- Colette has also been described as ‘the original Cat Woman’, and had a lifelong love affair with cats. As she said: “There are no ordinary cats.” The French novelist, most famous for her novel Gigi, said “My cat does not talk as respectfully to me as I do to her.” One of her most beautiful quotes about cats is this: ‘I went to collect the few personal belongings which…I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.’
Doris Lessing. Lessing
became fascinated by cats at a young age, when she came across the
semi-feral felines on the African farm where she grew up. As an adult,
she had many cats, notably the awkwardly majestic El Magnifico. “If a
fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a
diagram and pattern of subtle air.” Other Lessing cat-centric books
include Particularly Cats and Particularly Cats and Rufus the Survivor. [............................]
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The Relationship Between Famous Writers & Their Cats ...
ΔΙΑΒΑΣΤΕ ΕΠΙΣΗΣ
“Μια γάτα έχει απόλυτη συναισθηματική ειλικρίνεια: τα ανθρώπινα όντα, για τον έναν ή τον άλλο λόγο, μπορεί να κρύβουν τα συναισθήματά τους, αλλά μια γάτα δεν τα κρύβει”.
Read more at: https://parallaximag.gr/life/10-agapimenoi-syngrafeis-kai-idiaiteri-schesi-tous-me-tis-gatesΈρνεστ Χέμινγουεϊ “Μια γάτα έχει απόλυτη συναισθηματική ειλικρίνεια: τα ανθρώπινα όντα, για τον έναν ή τον άλλο λόγο, μπορεί να κρύβουν τα συναισθήματά τους, αλλά μια γάτα δεν τα κρύβει”.
Read more at: https://parallaximag.gr/life/10-agapimenoi-syngrafeis-kai-idiaiteri-schesi-tous-me-tis-gates
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