There exists a long, passionate, and somewhat batty tradition of writerly appreciation for feline ways, its entries cropping up among the serious work of many otherwise serious people. In The Informed Air (New Directions, 2014), a new collection of Muriel Spark's criticism and occasional prose, Spark joins the chorus with a paean to her own cat, Bluebell. Spark is known for her novels, not her nonfiction. Yet in this volume's frequently short and sometimes oddball selections, drawn from the full arc of her career, Spark's precision and wit are much on display. "Ailourophilia," too, is funny—but not only that. The love of a cat, it turns out, is itself a serious subject.
If I were not a Christian I would worship the Cat. The ancient Egyptians did so with much success. But at least it seems evident to me that the domestic cat is the aristocrat of the animal kingdom, occupying a place of quality in the Great Chain of Being second only to our aspiring, agitated and ever-evolving selves.
The dog is known to possess a higher degree of intelligence than the cat. Cat addicts are inclined to challenge this fact. But I think the higher intelligence, as we commonly mean it, must be conceded to the dog, and the highest to ourselves. We need our intelligence more than we need anything, and so, for its purposes, does the dog. But with cats, as with all true aristocrats, intelligence is not the main thing; they do not need brains, since they have felicity.
Dogs are easily enslaved; they willingly regard their masters as gods and spend their lives proving their obedience, usefulness and devotion. Cats prove nothing—they are above all that. They don’t even catch a mouse unless it suits them to do so. No cat will pledge itself for life to its human provider, nor in any way sell its deep, sweet soul. When it forms an attachment, it is by way of gracious concession mixed with convenience. Very aristocratic. When a cat voluntarily disappears from home, it is not from want of intelligence or sense of its whereabouts, it is merely because the whim has seized it to look for something less boring elsewhere.
And, like aristocrats, they do not need stately homes. Whereas the bourgeois dog needs a kennel or a fireside in order to be a somebody, even the sleek alley cat retains the incomprehensible importance of its catness, and is silent unless tormented or raped to the fine point of anguish.
I cannot speak highly enough of the cat, its casual freedom of spirit, its aloof anarchism and its marvelous beauty. The Greeks, observing its fearful symmetry in motion, called the cat ailouros—a wave of the sea. Nothing restores the soul so much as the contemplation of a cat. In repose, it is like a lotus leaf. Its contentment is mystical; anatomists have still not discovered what or where the cat’s purr-box is.
To my mind, the flower and consummation of the species was my late cat, Bluebell, short of whose perfection every other cat in history and literature inevitably falls.
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Bluebell was given to me when she was a kitten. Her origins were of no particular account. She was partly blue-Persian, of exquisite miniature build. Her fur was fluffy and curiously luminous; but not too long, not bushy, like the fur of a vulgar Ritzy Persian. On the lawn, before rain or in the early morning, she shone with a blue, unearthly light, while her eyes took on the vivid green of the grass. Curled on a chair indoors, she glowed mulberry-colored. She always seemed to radiate from her small body some inward, spiritual color. When she sat in the window on sunny days, her eyes were pure amber as they stared intently at outer space. I am sure she saw objects in space that I could not see.
I never got used to Bluebell’s loveliness. When I woke in the morning to see her sitting, a sheer Act of Praise, on my dressing-table, securely waiting for some life to happen, I would gaze at her with awe and with awe.
She was never exactly an ailourophobe but she grew to prefer human society to that of cats. At parties, she was gifted with the art of disappearing to nowhere from time to time. She was also greatly endowed with ESP. She would sit on my manuscripts if what I had written was any good, but if she stepped over the notebooks with her fastidious pads, I knew there was something wrong with the stuff. She came when called, but not invariably. Her sympathy, when she chose to exert it, was original and profound. She would brood comically over my wrongs, and, on occasions of rejoicing she quickly caught the spirit of the thing, sometimes taking a silly turn, leaping high, and landing with four legs outspread like a wonky new-born lamb. There was no end to Bluebell’s virtues.
At the age of four she contracted a mysterious illness. She bore with numerous veterinary surgeons and many injections. Her eyes grew larger and her manners more delicate than ever. One day the vet said, “We’ll have to put her to sleep.” I said, “You mean you want to put her to death.” The vet said, “Oh, I wouldn’t put it that way.” I said, “You mean you want to kill my cat.” Next morning at nine o’clock the doorbell screamed. I clung to Bluebell, for I knew the Gestapo had come. They were sent up. In came the hired assassins, carrying between them a metal box, Bluebell’s gas-chamber. The men asked me to leave the room. I said I wanted to stay with Bluebell. One of the men said, “Sometimes they struggle.” I was then put out of the room, and was called back about four minutes later. The cat’s body was lying stretched out on the table, longer than I had ever seen it before; the eyes were upturned, wildly staring, glazed amber. The men took Bluebell’s carcass by the hind legs, dumped it in a sack and took it away.
Never again. Some friends tried to give me another cat. “Enough,” I said. “Never again.”
From The Informed Air, published by New Directions.
