truepenny | Championing T. S. Eliot and Old Possum

So somehow this morning I got "Macavity" from Cats stuck in my head. Don't ask me how, because I haven't the faintest clue. But that got me to thinking about Cats and the time that Mirrorthaw and I, for reasons which now escape me, watched it on PBS.

It's a beautiful show, I don't deny it, but I think it does a terrible disservice to Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, for a number of reasons. One is the hideously catchy nature of ALW's melodies; once you've heard them, you can't unhear them, and so when rereading OPBoPC I have to violently and deliberately read the poetry against the jingle of the music. (I've splinched an infinitive; you know I mean business now.) If you must commit this atrocity upon poetry, MUST you do it to T. S. Eliot?

The second reason is the indefensible interpolation of whatserface the Glamour Cat. She ain't kosher, and "Memory" is the song from Cats that people are most likely to know and remember and therefore associate that schmaltzy swooping sentimentality with OPBoPC. Which is whimsical, clever, and cat-obsessed, but really not sentimental at all. [papersky reminds me that "Memory" itself defiles, debases, and practically defenestrates Eliot's poetry, being an abomination upon "Rhapsody on a Windy Night." Also, as I remembered subsequently thereunto, "Preludes." --Ed.]

Third, it is painfully obvious from watching the production that ALW and company COMPLETELY MISSED THE FREAKING JOKE about Mr. Mistoffelees. "And not long ago this phenomenal Cat / Produced seven kittens right out of a hat!": it's always been perfectly clear to me that the point here is that in fact, Mr. Mistoffelees turned out to be Madame Mistoffelees--a common conjuring trick among felines (another example is Morris-the-Cat in Margaret Mahy's The Catalogue of the Universe). Making Mr. Mistoffelees into a literal conjuror destroys the point about him/her being a cat.

Which leads me to my final point, which is the reason above all others that I cannot stand Cats. It's very clear, reading OPBoPC, that it is a book not just about cats, but about the relationship between cats and humans. That's why I adore Edward Gorey's illustrations, because his gentle, bemused, mannered people are the perfect complement to his round, satisfied, secretive cats. These are poems about people observing cats and cats observing back. "Bustopher Jones," as a random example, has to be spoken by a clubman: "And we're all of us proud to be nodded or bowed to / By Bustopher Jones in white spats." That's funny and touching and keenly observed if the speaker is a human. It's mutually ego-stroking twaddle when the speaker is another cat. By making the songs be sung by cats about each other--by conflating cats and humans--ALW destroys the thing that makes the book both beautiful and uniquely itself.

So I'm speaking up for Old Possum.

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WORKS CITED
Eliot, T. S. Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. 1939. Illus. Edward Gorey. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1982.