“Don't leave the cat there!” - Bleak House is alive

I mentioned a passage where Esther Summerson describes London as reflecting the sadness of her friend Ada by having “more funerals… than I had ever seen before.”  Bleak House must be among the most triumphant examples of the pathetic fallacy in literature, beginning with the extraordinary London fog in the first paragraph, the fog which has engulfed all of southeast England and is said to emanate from the law courts, and perhaps from one specific case, the one at the center, or just off of the center, of the novel.

The fog is not itself alive on that first page.  Or is it – “fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck”?  That is a malignant fog.  Aside from that, though, there are the gas lamps on the same page, the first real example of what I mean: “as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.”

The fog is left behind at the end of Chapter 5.  Three hundred pages later, back in London we have a “[w]intry morning” that “look[s] with dull eyes and sallow face” upon the city.  A couple of chapters later is a favorite of mine.  There are visitors at Sir Leicester’s country house, a series of dismal cousins, so the fires are roaring.  They “wink in the twilight on the frowning woods, sullen to see how trees are sacrificed.”  Bleak House temporarily becomes an eco-novel.  My real favorite is two pages later – same house, same fires: “Bedroom fires blaze brightly all over the house, raising ghosts of grim furniture on wall and ceiling.”  As a metaphor for shadows, this is outstanding, but in this novel the suggestion that even the furniture is imbued with a soul is not so far-fetched.

At least the crows are normally living creatures, so this is not so strange, in fact it is observed crow behavior:

The rooks, swinging in their lofty houses in the elm-tree avenue, seem to discuss the question of the occupancy of the carriage as it passes underneath, some agreeing that Sir Leicester and my Lady are come down, some arguing with malcontents who won't admit it, now all consenting to consider the question disposed of, now all breaking out again in violent debate, incited by one obstinate and drowsy bird who will persist in putting in a last contradictory croak. (Ch. 12)

But that solitary crow is an unusual specimen.  “Drowsy,” why drowsy I wonder.  This is part of the crow theme, attaching Lady Dedlock and her home to particularly crow-like lawyer, one of the novel’s villains.  And it is part of the larger bird theme.

Countered, all too briefly, by the cat theme, or at least by the junkman Krook’s terrifying cat.  Esther, attentive to London’s ugliness, notices “the sweeping out of shops, and the extraordinary creatures in rags, secretly groping among the swept out rubbish for pins and other refuse” (Ch. 5).  She is foreshadowing Little Jo, but only a few pages later the cat is introduced: “The cat leaped down and ripped at a bundle of rags with her tigerish claws, with a sound that it set my teeth on edge to hear.”  In a rag and bottle shop, this is not so odd, although given that a few pages earlier the bundle of rags was a person – well ,even this may not mean too much until we jump to Chapters 9 and 10, containing the death of the opium addict Nemo, where the repeated word is not “rags” but “ragged,” and as everyone else leaves the room:

“Don't leave the cat there!” says the surgeon; “that won't do!”  Mr. Krook therefore drives her out before him, and she goes furtively downstairs, winding her lithe tail and licking her lips. (Ch. 10)

Why won’t that do?  How does the surgeon know?  Who does that unnamed surgeon turn out to be anyways?  And is one of Miss Flite’s canaries named “Rags”? (Yes).

Now I think I know where I am going with this.

English poets and their English cats - also, a hare, and a tortoise

Thinking about literary animals, I have wandered into 18th century England, when the poets either had cats, or wrote about them, or both. Here's Thomas Gray, for example, writing about Horace Walpole's cat, Selima:

"Her conscious tail her joy declared;
The fair round face, the snowy beard,
The velvet of her paws,
Her coat, that with the tortoise vies,
Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes,
She saw; and purred applause."

That's from "Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat" (1748), and the cat is peering into a "tub of goldfishes" (hence the reflection), so you can see where this is going. The only phrase that looks to me like an original description of a cat is the "conscious tail"; otherwise, its just a catalogue description.

Christopher Smart does a lot better, in the justly famous "My Cat Jeoffry" section of Jubilate Agno (written 1759-63, published 1939):

"For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For is this done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself."

Then follow the ten steps of Jeoffrey's self-grooming, not so different from what a ethologist might write: "For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood. \ For fifthly he washes himself \ For Sixthly he rolls upon wash." Then there's the consummate description of a cat: "For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery." I find Smart's poetry very difficult, in general, but this is real observation.

I always assume that William Blake's "fearful symmetry" and so on in "The Tyger" is based as much on an actual housecat as on an imagined tiger, but I don't really know. Who else is there - oh yes, Samuel Johnson's Hodge, who "shall not be shot," but I don't know of a poem about Hodge.

William Cowper could hardly have kept a cat, since it might have endangered his prescious hares. In the third book of The Task (1785), after denouncing hunting, Cowper writes:

"Well, - at least one is safe. One sheltered hare
Has never heard the sanguinary yell
Of cruel man, exulting in her woes.
Innocent partner of my peaceful home,
Whom ten long years' experience of my care
Has made at last familiar, she has lost
Much of her vigilant instinctive dread,
Not needful here, beneath a roof like mine." (lines 334-341)

But there is not much real account of the hare in The Task, unlike in Cowper's "Epitaph on a Hare" (1783):

"His frisking was at evening hours,
For then he lost his fear;
But most before approaching showers,
Or when a storm drew near."

Well that's odd. There's another 18th century English critter who behaves similarly, Gilbert White's tortoise:

"No part of its behaviour ever struck me more than the extreme timidity it always expresses with regard to rain; for though it has a shell that would secure it against the wheel of a loaded cart, yet does it discover as much solicitude about rain as a lady dressed in all her best attire, shuffling away on the first sprinklings, and running its head up in a corner." (Letter XIII)

Now that's the kind of writing I like, the tortoise who behaves like a fine lady. I actually have not read White's The Natural History of Selborne (1789). I encountered the tortoise in an anthology, although I have no idea which, or of what (here?). White was a pioneering naturalist, a genuine scientist, so he falls into a different category than Gray and Cowper and so on. I think that's where I'll wander tomorrow.

Jiro Osaragi - a writer who loved cats

Two curiosities about Jiro Osaragi.

I mentioned yesterday that Osaragi was a sort of a French Japanese writer. His museum contains his enormous archive of French historical documents, with a particularly rich store of material about the Dreyfus affair.

It turns out that during the 1930s Osaragi wrote a historical novel set during the French Third Republic, about the Dreyfus affair. He wrote a novel about France as a way to criticize the Japanese military government while evading the censorship. After the war, Osaragi wrote two more novels set around the same time, one about the corruption scandal surrounding France’s attempt to build a Panama canal, the other about the 1870 Siege of Paris and the Paris Commune. I think that's it on the left.

I would love to read one of these novels.

Second curious fact about Jiro Osaragi: the man loved cats. At one point, when he moved to a larger house, he did not sell the old one, but gave it over to his eighteen cats. So he kept two households, one for himself, one for his cats.

The Jiro Osaragi Memorial Museum is full of, aside from his books and papers, his collection of cat-related stuff. Statues of cats, for example, including the waving cat figurines one sees at Chinese restaurants.

Also, paintings of cats. And books about cats. One of these is called Cats for Pleasure and Profit. The architectural details of the building, such as window frames, sometimes incorporate cat designs, although I could not get a good picture of any of them. No living cats, though.

Any cat lover visiting Yokohama would be a fool not to plunk down their 200 yen and see this museum.