T. S. ELIOT'S AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL CATS
HENRY HART
T
^ ^ ELIOT worried about how readers would react to the
. k ^ . book he originally planned to call Mr. Eliot's Book of
Pollicle Dogs and Jellicle Cats as Recited to Him by the Man in
White Spats. After Faber & Faber announced a 1936 pubhcation
date, he considered demoting "the Man in White Spats"—a character based on his close friend and flatmate John Hayward—from
his position as "reciter." He also considered scrapping the balloon flight that was supposed to end the book with poet, narrator,
dogs, and cats ascending "Up up up past the Russell Hotel, / Up
up up to the Heaviside Layer" He had ended The Waste Land
with a similar chant to transcendence, repeating the word shantih
three times to emphasize his hope for "the peace that passeth
understanding," and in a few years he would conclude Four
Quartets with another image of blissful transcendence, declaring:
"All manner of things shall be well / when the tongues of flame
are in-folded / Into the crowned knot of fire / And the fire and
the rose are one." Even though he wrote his cat poems for his
godchildren and tlie children of friends (Tom Faber, Alison Tandy,
Susan Wolcott, Susanna Morley), he resisted the sort of uphfting
celebratory end that typified generic comedy, sentimental fiction,
and children's literature.
Pondering his narrative options, Eliot delayed publication of his
cat poems for three years,finallyreleasing tliem under the shorter
title Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats on October 5, 1939. He
featured the man in "white spats" in a poem entitled "Bustopher
Jones: the Cat About Town," which pokes fun at a dandyish glutton who frequents London's fashionable clubs in "impeccable"
attire. During the book's slow gestation he decided to abandon his
plan to focus on dogs, which had never exerted the same appeal
on his imagination as cats. The dogs that did appear had little
to recommend them. They were gullible simpletons, lower-class
British louts, or heathenish foreigners who disturbed the peace
by carousing and brawling in London's streets. Dogs represented
what he called in The Idea of a Christian Society (a coUection of
© 2012 by Henry Hart
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T. s. ELIOT'S AUTORIOGRAPHICAL CATS
lectures published several weeks after his cat poems) the "illiterate and uncritical mob . . . detached from tradition, alienated from
religion, and susceptible to mass suggestion." They were heathens
in need of enlightenment and discipline from the Ghristian cats.
Eliot may have decided to abandon the culminating balloon
ride "Up up up to the Heaviside Layer" (the ionized layer of the
atmosphere 50-90 miles above the earth) for the sake of autobiographical and historical realism. The looming crisis in Europe,
which he wrote about in essays during the 1930s, called for
worldly vigilance rather than sentimental flights, especially when
Nazi Germany invaded Poland and Britain declared war on September 1, 1939. On June 10, 1940, fascist Italy joined the war
against Britain and France.
Eliot did associate dogs with fascist aggressors for personal as
well as pohtical reasons. His wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, from
whom he had separated in 1933 after years of painful skirmishing,
had joined Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists on December 5,1934. During the years Eliot composed his cat poems (from
about 1932 to 1938), the histrionic Vivienne often dressed up in
a fascist uniform and aggressively pursued Eliot around London
with her feisty Yorkshire terrier, Polly. Having written to his friend
Ottohne Morrell in 1933 that he never wanted to see Vivienne
again since he regarded her as "morally . . . unpleasant as well as
physically indifferent" (as Ronald Schuchard reports), Eliot mustered all his cat-like skill to avoid her.
The first time Vivienne successfully tracked down Eliot after
their separation in September 1932 was deeply embarrassing
to the poet—and it involved her dog. On November 18, 1934,
wearing her fascist uniform and carrying Polly in her arms, she
confronted Eliot at a Sunday Times book fair on London's Lower
Regent Street. The disgruntled Ehot did his best to compose himself and dehver his lecture. According to Vivienne's biographer,
Garole Seymour-Jones, Vivienne and her dog virtually chased
Ehot off the stage: "As Ehot finished his talk to great applause,
Vivienne pushed her way up to the platform, and let the dog off
the lead. The terrier ran to Eliot, scampering around his feet and
jumping up at him. Vivienne, too, mounted the platform, and
stood beside Ehot, her hands on the table on which were piled
the poet's books. [She said:] . . . 'Will you come back with me?' 1
HENRY HART
381
cannot talk to you now,' replied Eliot, hurriedly signing the books
Vivienne had brought. He then left." Her hopes for reconcihation
dashed, Vivienne picked up her dog and left the book fair.
She and her Yorkshire terrier would resurface, however, in
"Of the AwefuU Battle of the Pekes and the PoUicles." Deploying humor to cope with the humiliations visited upon him by his
demonic wife, Eliot wrote: "But a terrible din is what PoUicles
hke, / For your Pollicle Dog is a Yorkshire tyke, / And his braw
Scottish cousins are snappers and biters, / And every dog-jack
of them notable fighters." The derogatory sounding "dog-jack,"
while suggesting a Jack Russell terrier, also evokes the image of
jack-booted fascists—the "notable fighters" with whom Vivienne
had cast her lot in the 1930s. Only "the Great Rumpuscat" (who is
aldn to "Ghrist the tiger" in "Gerontion") can restore order among
the canine combatants.
By all accounts Vivienne and Eliot construed their postmarriage
squabbles as a dog-Uke, or dog-and-cat-like, war. Soon after they
separated, Vivienne wrote in her diary: "This is the sternest fight
one delicate nerve-wrecked Englishwoman of 46 ever had to fight.
. . . It is just relentless warfare, me and Polly, and a few crippled
mercenaries, v the world." "The Ad-dressing of Gats," tlie poem
that Eliot placed at the end of the 1939 edition of his book, reiterates his contention that dogs are obsessive fighters and "undignified" louts. When unleashed they regress to their uncivilized ways.
Eliot had written about this sort of regression in his poem "Aunt
Helen" two decades earlier. When the aristocratic Helen dies,
the peaceful order of her household dies, too. Because "the dogs
were handsomely provided for" in Helen's will, the house goes to
the dogs. In the absence of her forceful civilizing presence, the
servants emulate the dogs, satisfying their appetites without any
regard for propriety: "The footman sat upon the dining-table /
Holding tlie second housemaid on his knees— / Who had always
been so careful while his mistress lived." Once the place for decorous meals, now the dining-table is the place for uninhibited sex.
Ehot makes it clear in Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats that
he is writing a series of fables in which cats play the dominant
roles in a world fluctuating precariously between order and anarchy. "The Ad-dressing of Cats," begins by underscoring the message Eliot intended his readers to take from his fables:
382
T. s. ELIOT'S AUTOBIOGRAPHIGAL GATS
You have now leamed enough to see
That Gats are much like you and me
And other people whom we find
Possessed of various types of mind.
For some are sane and some are mad
And some are good and some are bad.
While dogs appear to have unregenerate "simple soul[s]" and
undisciplined appetites that keep them bound to the secular
world, Eliot's cats have complex souls that allow for redemption.
Gats may at times act Uke hellish fiends, but they aspire to virtue
and in some cases attain sainthood. The cat that ends Practical
Cats embodies Eliot's transcendental ideals. He is not only one
of the redeemed; he is also a godly redeemer with whom Ehot
ritualisticaUy communes. Although he "Resents familiarity," he is
approachable and deserving of worship. He is "entitled to expect /
. . . evidences of respect" and "token[s] of esteem."
For years critics pooh-poohed Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats as if it were—in the words of the Eliot scholar Burton
Raffel—httle more than "pleasant, inoffensive and unremarkable"
light or nonsense verse. The few critics who have grappled with
the book have concentrated on stylistic or religious matters. Anne
Lambert argues in "Eliot's Naming of Gats" that the names were
based on elaborate puns (JelHcle cats were jelly-like or angelical;
Gumbie cats were gummy and stuck to one place). RusseU Kirk
in "Gats, EUot, and the Dance of Life" maintains that the poems
celebrate a ritualistic dance. Dorothy Lindemann also stresses the
rituahstic elements of the poems, reminding us that "Egyptians
revered a cat-headed goddess, Pasht [and] early Norsemen's goddess, Freya, goddess of love, travefled in a chariot drawn by two
cats." Marion Hodge, in her essay "The Sane, the Mad, the Good,
the Bad," also avers that Eliot's cat poems are fundamentally
religious: they trace a "quest for order" through a sinful world of
"crudity, cruelty, and violence." In one of the most acute essays,
Ehzabeth Sewell's "Lewis Garroll and T S. Ehot as Nonsense
Poets," the author draws correspondences between Eliot's "nonsense" techniques and those of Carroll and Edward Lear, but she
also points to the sense beneath the nonsense: Old Possum's Book
"is not a chance production, the master in a lighter mood. It is
HENRY HART
383
integral to the whole body of his work, and a key to his poetry
and his problem. Mr. EHot couches his own autobiography in
Nonsense terms." She states that Eliot's cats are images embodying his attitudes toward women. Cod, and the human body. But,
like Paul Douglass who also believes that "Eliot's cats . . . serve
as alter egos," she says nothing about how those images and alter
egos fit into Eliot's actual autobiography.
For Eliot love was the central "key to his poetry and his [central] problem." His other preoccupations with personal identity,
historical origins, spiritual journeys, and the good life arose—like
Baudelaire's fleurs du mal—from his tortured love Hfe. As in
the Creek myths that he knew so well, Eros was an original and
originating god; Eros hurt Eliot into poetry by plunging him into
Chaos and the Abyss. If love was a prime mover and muse, it
was also a crucifier that spurred Eliot to clamber for redemption.
Meditating on his romantic agonies in "Little Cidding," which
he began writing two years after publishing Old Possum's Book
of Practical Cats, he asks: "Who then devised the torment?" His
answer is characteristically simple and allusive:
. . . Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
Profane love, in other words, is both creator and destroyer. It
"wove" the tormenting shirt that only a divine power could remove.
The "shirt of flame" derived from a Creek myth tliat hinted at
the romantic troubles EUot referred to in his cat poems. In the
myth Hercules, while resting from a battle, watches the centaur
Nessus carry his wife, Deianeira, across the river Euenos and
sexually assault her. The scene is similar to the central one in "The
Fire Sermon" from The Waste Land in which another character
from Creek mythology, Tiresias, watches the "young man carbuncular" sexually "assault" the typist (a woman modeled on Vivienne,
who typed manuscripts for EUot and his mentor Bertrand RusseU,
with whom she had an affair). Hercules, however, does not stand
by and passively bear witness Uke Tiresias or EUot: he shoots a
384
T. s. ELIOT'S AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL CATS
poisoned arrow into the centaur's breast. As the rapacious Nessus
dies, he tells Deianeira that his blood is a powerful aphrodisiac
that will preserve her husband's love for her Convinced of this,
she smears the noxious blood on a shirt. When Hercules puts on
the shirt, the blood burns him and drives him mad. Deianeira,
realizing her treachery, kills herself. According to some accounts,
Hercules instructs his comrades to build a funeral p}Te, and he
plunges into the flames to reheve his agony. Ultimately his soul
rises to Mount Olympus, where the gods, including Hera—the
jealous woman responsible for much of his torment—welcome
him.
In "Little Gidding" Eliot assumes the persona of Hercules and
confronts "the choice of pyre or pyre." He can suffer in the flames
of erotic love or transcend them by embracing a holier love. "We
only live, only suspire / Gonsumed by either fire or fire," he says.
In "The Love Song of St. Sebastian," written around 1910, Eliot
strikes a similar sacrificial pose, although here he wears "a shirt of
hair," flogs himself before his beloved, and ends his bloody sadomasochistic "hour on hour of prayer / And torture and delight" by
strangling the woman he supposedly loves. The poem ends with
a murder fantasy reminiscent of Browning's dramatic monologue
"Porphyria's Lover" Eliot's St. Sebastian proclaims: "You would
love me because I should have strangled you / And because of my
infamy; / And I should love you the more because I had mangled
you." Eliot's personae typically suffer through purgatorial fires of
love as they struggle to redirect their erotic energies from profane
women, whom they crave and loathe, to divine women modeled
on Emily Hale—the woman Eliot fell in love with as a student
in Boston and contemplated marrying. What is surprising about
Eliot's romantic personae is the frequency with which they are
based on Hercules—the impulsive and often blundering strongman one might not immediately associate with the shy, well-mannered, unathletic Eliot, whose physical prowess was constrained
for much of his life by the truss he wore for his congenital hernias.
In Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats the Herculean strongman destroyed by love is Growldger His romantic crisis occurs by
another river—the Thames rather than the Euenos. Growltiger
exhibits what Eliot calls in another river scene at the end of The
Waste Land: "The awful daring of a moment's surrender / Which
HENRY HART
385
an age of prudence can never retract." Like Hercules, whose
periodic spells of madness inspired ancient doctors to name the
disease epilepsy after him (herakleia nosos, morbus herculeus),
Growltiger has lost his senses (he "had no eye or ear"). Blinded
by love and lust, he pursues Lady Griddlebone, a cat whose name
implies she will griddle or burn her lover's bones with an "intolerable shirt of flame." Eliot mentions the moon here several times,
just as he does in "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" (another poem
depicting female cats as highly erotic femme fatales), to confirm
that Growltiger has been driven to lunacy by his romantic infatuation. "Growltiger was disposed to show his sentimental side,"
Eliot remarks; and by doing so he disposes of his Herculean pose
as the "Bravo Gat" and "Terror of the Thames." The moment the
dominant cat lets down his guard and opens himself to love, in
Ehot's view, he is doomed: "Growltiger had no eye or ear for aught
but Griddlebone, / And the Lady seemed enraptured by his manly
baritone, / Disposed to relaxation, and awaiting no surprise— / But
the moonlight shone reflected from a hundred bright blue eyes."
A xenophobic nationahst who has battled many "cats of foreign
name and race," Growltiger is attacked by a "fierce Mongohan
horde" and forced to walk the plank. If he hopes for the sort of
sea change or baptismal transformation that Phlebas, the drowned
Phoenician sailor, enjoyed in The Waste Land, Growltiger is sorely
disappointed. There is no indication that he is born again or grows
pearls in his eyes after his "death by water" in the Thames.
Ehot's "awful daring of a moment's surrender" also occurred
on the Thames River and in a boat. While taking a break from
his philosophy studies at Merton Gollege in March 1915, he
met Vivienne in a punt on the section of the Thames that flows
through Oxford. According to Ehot's biographer Lyndall Gordon,
"Vivienne's excitable, eager nature, her quick fire, stirred in Ehot
a hope that she might supply the defining experience he needed.
Marriage was Ehot's one memorable act of self-surrender and perhaps served as a compensation for the self-surrender he had failed
to achieve during his rehgious crisis [shortly before in Paris]."
Ehot had known Vivienne for only three months when he decided
to elope with her on June 26, 1915, and marry her at the Hampstead Registry Office. The marriage was surprisingly precipitous
and unconventional for the cautious man so devoted to careful
386
T. s. ELIOT'S AUTORIOGRAPHIGAL GATS
deliberation and traditional ceremonies. Even the parents of the
newlyweds were not informed of the marriage until after the fact.
Vivienne's many physical and psychological ailments, combined
with Eliot's nervous temperament, doomed the marriage from
the start. Exacerbating their difficulties was Vivienne's affeir with
Russell, which began during the late summer of 1915 when Eliot
returned to the U.S. to explain to his parents his decision to marry
and remain in England rather than teach philosophy at Harvard,
which is what his parents wanted him to do. Russell's biographer
Ray Monk has speculated that the affair lasted from 1915 to January 1918. Reflecting on his first year of marriage in a letter to his
brother Henry, Eliot said it was "the most awful nightmare of
anxiety that the mind of man could conceive." Later in hfe Eliot
admitted that The Waste Land was a direct expression of his disastrous marriage, which was punctuated by nervous breakdowns and
threats of suicide. In 1927 his marital troubles drove him to seek
refuge in the Anglo-Gatholic church. His spiritual director. Father
Underhill, who heard his first confession the next year, advised
him to separate from Vivienne, which he finally did in 1933. By
1938 Vivienne's behavior had become so erratic that her brother
Maurice and Eliot committed her to Northumberland House, a
mental hospital.
Eliot's parents and grandparents first impressed upon him a
Ghristian vision of the world as a pflgrim's progress away from
the wounds of profane love and toward the redemptive aspects
of sacred love. His parents also encouraged him to dramatize this
progress through a series of cat portraits. Eliot's father, a practical man who served as president of St. Louis's Hydraulic Press
Brick Gompany, spent much of his free time drawing cats. During the 1930s, as Eliot reflected on his family's roots in England
and America, he sought to affirm closer ties with his father by
adding to the family album of cats. Through his feline persona he
acknowledged another family inheritance: the tendency to view
sex as a wound or a sin in need of redemption. His paternal grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, a Unitarian minister related to
one of the Puritans who tried Salem's witches, had laid down the
ethical standards that so hampered Ehot's love life. "The standard
of conduct," Eliot once said, "was that which my grandfather had
set: our moral judgments, our decisions between duty and self-
HENRY HART
387
indulgence, were taken as if, like Moses, he had brought down
the tables of the Law, any deviation from which would be sinful."
Eliot's mother and father did their best to ingrain those "tables of
the Law" in their son's conscience. As one biographer put it: "The
prohibition upon pleasure was a lesson Eliot learnt young, and he
said that it left him 'permanently scarred.' Sex was equated wdth
sin, his father in this instance joining with his mother to reinforce
the lesson of the 'nastiness' of sexual intercourse. Syphilis, said
Tom's father, was God's punishment for sin, and he hoped that
no cure would be found for it; otherwise he believed it might be
necessary 'to emasculate our children to keep them clean.' Sex
instruction for children meant 'giving them a letter of introduction
to the Devil.'" Eliot's mother, who decorated her bedroom with
a painting of the Madonna and an engraving of St. Theodosius
and St. Ambrose, wrote poems celebrating "Priests and prophets,
saints and sages, / Martyred in successive ages," and cultivated in
her son an obsession with those who sought enlightenment and
grace in the darkness. "Ye who despair / Of man's redemption,
know, the light is there, / Though hidden and obscured, again
to shine," she exclaimed in "Saved!" Eliot felt so beholden to his
mother and her poetry that he published some of it at Faber &
Faber.
Eliot told his flatmate John Hayward that the years between
1933 and 1938, during which he wrote most of Old Possum's Book
of Practical Cats, were "the only happy years" of his life because
he had finally freed himself from his wounding marriage. During this period, as Four Quartets would confirm, his mind often
returned to that other period in his life when he was relatively
happy: his chüdhood in St. Louis and at his family's vacation home
on the Atlantic coast near Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he
had indulged his passion for saihng. As Ehot made clear in "The
Dry Salvages," a poem referring to "les trois sauvages . . . a smafl
group of rocks, wâth a beacon, off the N.E. coast of Gape Ann,
Massachusetts," his goal in the 1930s was to salvage his life after
his marriage had foundered Uke a boat on the savage rocks he
had encountered as a youth. One of the places where he sought
sanctuary from his romantic anguish was his office at Faber &
Faber. "Gat Morgan Introduces Himself," the last poem in later
editions of Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, confirmed Eliot's
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T. s. ELIOT'S AUTOBIOGRAPHIGAL GATS
perception of himself as a battered saflor seeking respite after
years of hardship. Morgan, according to EUot, had once been a
pirate who had "sailed the 'igh seas" and gotten "knocked about
on the Barbary Coast." It may seem as odd for EUot to identify
himself with a Barbary pirate as it is for him to identify with
Hercules, but one of his favorite personae was the tough ship
captain who had found peace after his misfortunes on the high
seas. Like Morgan "a-taldn' my ease . . . in Bloomsbury Square"
and overseeing "business with Faber—or Faber," EUot lived a
guarded existence at Faber & Faber. His secretaries protected
him against Vivienne's persistent intrusions, and he took measures
to guard himself, too. Seeking reUef from the suicidally depressed
Vivienne in 1923, EUot rented a secret flat in London's Burleigh
Mansions that was guarded by a Morgan-Uke porter. According to
Eliot's friend Osbert SitweU: "Visitors on arrival had to enquire at
the porter's lodge for 'The Captain,' which somehow invested the
whole estabUshment with a nautical [atmosphere]."
EUot affirmed in a letter to Bonamy Dobrée that he wrote his
cat poems during a "Bolovian period"—that is, a period similar
to the pre-Vivienne one when he wrote humorous verse about
a sea captain named Columbo (based on Columbus) and his
African mate King Bolo. SaiUng the Mediterranean Sea near
the Barbary Coast, Columbo, Bolo, and their Rabelaisian crew
engage in all sorts of risqué and offensive activities. They visit
whorehouses, bugger young men, rape women, masturbate, and
defecate and urinate on one another. Peter Ackroyd and other
EUot biographers have maintained that Old Possum's Book of
Practical Cats "has the spirit, if not the content, of the Bolovian
stanzas which he had been writing since his early twenties."
The cat poems, however, are very different from the scatological
Columbo poems, even though both offer gUmpses of the sort of
perverse—even criminal—impulses festering in EUot's psyche.
"Macavity: the Mystery Cat" is no Ucentious sailor (though he does
tear up plans of "the Admiralty"), but, like Columbo and Bolo, he
"has broken every human law." Macavity, in fact, is as mysteriously
divided as EUot. "Outwardly respectable," he harbors "deceitfulness" beneath his mask of "suavity." He shares EUot's passion for
philosophical thought and mystical transcendence; he has a "brow
. . . deeply Uned with thought" and "powers of lévitation [that]
HENRY HART
389
would make a fakir stare." He also has a possum-like ability to
play dead. Referring to the contrast between his passive exterior
and vibrant interior, Ehot notes: "When you think he's half asleep,
he's always wide awake." One of the selves he artfully conceals is
that of a Herculean strongman; he is "the Napoleon of Grime"
who "controls the . . . operations" of other shady cats such as
Mungojerrie and Griddlebone. A Mafia-Uke godfather, he is also a
trickster with an uncanny ability to befuddle and escape those who
pursue him. Whenever tjhe police try to catch him at the scene of a
crime, "Macavity's not there!" Based on Sir Arthur Gonan Doyle's
fictional character Professor Moriarty (whom Doyle called "the
Napoleon of Grime" in his story "The Final Problem"), Macavity
is essentially an escape artist whose ability to become invisible
allows him to survive and prosper in a hostile environment.
Eliot not only wanted to "escape from personality" through his
poetry, as he famously—and deceptively—said in "Tradition and
the Individual Talent," he also wanted to escape from Vivienne.
During the first year of their separation, she played a cat-andmouse, or dog-and-cat, game o( hide-and-seek with him. She
regularly wrote, phoned, or visited Faber & Faber to persuade
him to return to their flat at 68 Glarence Gate Gardens. If she
knocked at the door of 24 Russell Square, secretaries would notify
Eliot, who would hide in the bathroom or escape down the back
stairs. Informed that Eliot—like Macavity—was not there, Vivienne would sometimes collapse in tears in the foyer As his poems
demonstrate, Eliot had always feared face-to-face communication
or physical contact with women who were sexually passionate or
suffering a crisis. He struggled, as Prufrock says, "to prepare a
face to meet the faces that you meet." The Vivienne-like woman in
The Waste Land whose "nerves are bad" and who yearns for conversation with her husband says: "Speak to me. Why do you never
speak. Speak. What are you thinking of?" Eliot doesn't speak; he
reflects silently on his dead marriage: "I think we are in rats' alley/
Where the dead men lost their bones." During his separation from
Vivienne, he rebuffed her attempts to speak to him with silence.
When she came caUing, sometimes with gifts of chocolate to persuade him to return home, he disappeared Uke Macavity. After he
had her institutionalized, he never spoke to her again.
Excruciatingly self-conscious, Eliot projected his guilty awareness
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T. s. ELIOT'S AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL CATS
of his escapist tendencies onto another cat, the satanic "Mr. Mistoffelees," who has the ability to erase any signs of the crimes he
commits. He makes things—including himself—disappear: "You
have seen it one moment, and then it is gawn\" He is a shy mystery man, an invisible poet as "vague and aloof as Eliot, who has
the "singular magical powers" of throwing others off his trail. In
short he can deceive pursuers about his identity and location by
projecting his voice through different personae in different places.
"His voice has been heard on the roof / When he was curled up
by the fire. / And he's sometimes been heard by the fire / When
he was about on the roof." His ability at "performing surprising
illusions / And creating eccentric confusions" has earned this
Mephistophelean cat great respect from his audiences, just as
similar talents for ventriloquism contributed to Eliot's mystique.
(The first title of The Waste Land, "He Do the Police in Different
Voices," drew attention to Eliot's skillful ventriloquism that both
revealed and concealed crimes.)
Eliot's "invisibility" aided him in his ongoing attempts to elude
his wife. Determined to avoid any direct contact with her, he
hired others—the way Macavity hired agents—to deal with her.
One of his main concerns was the return of his books, papers,
family silver, and other possessions in the flat they once shared.
Suspecting Eliot might send authorities to the flat to demand the
items, Vivienne deposited the silver in a bank vault and stashed
various documents in another flat she rented in her building.
Frustrated by her unwillingness to comply with the demands he
sent by mail, Eliot contacted lawyers who issued a court order
so that bailiffs could enter the flat on the morning of December
11, 1934. Eliot's henchmen woke Vivienne and pushed her aside
when she tried to prevent them from ransacking her rooms. She
later recalled: "A man put his foot in [the door] and pushed me
violently, forced the door open, and five or six men pushed their
way in." The bailiffs scoured the flat, took Ehot's books as well
as Vivienne's, and tore shelves from walls in the process. Already
fearful of intruders. Vivienne now had more reason to worry that
she might be "kidnapped, arrested, 'done in or murdered,'" as she
put it in her diary.
Eliot may have been guiltily reflecting on the baihffs' tactics in
HENRY HART
391
"Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer," a poem about two cats who are
"remarkably smart at a smash-and-grab." Like Eliot himself, who
had developed a close friendship with the retired detective William Leonard Janes (whom Vivienne called "an ex-policeman" and
"a habitual drunkard"), these two cats "liked to engage a friendly
pohceman in conversation." Eliot, in fact, had hired Janes—ostensibly as a servant and handyman—to spy on Vivienne at the 68
Glarence Gate Gardens flat. He was another agent who helped
him in his campaign, which Vivienne regarded as criminal, to
abduct her and send her to an asylum. The bailiffs did the same
sort of "smash-and-grab" work as Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer,
who were notorious for rushing "through the house hke a hurricane," leaving "drawers . . . pulled out from the bedroom chests,"
and reducing rooms to "a field of war." What is interesting about
his poems about the two invasive cats is how EUot acknowledges
the suffering of their victims. He could have been thinking of Vivienne when he says that one person who suffered such an invasion
had "a voice that was broken with sorrow." In fact Vivienne was
on the verge of a nervous breakdown as a consequence of Eliot's
invasive tactics and refusal to talk to her in person.
In June 1935 Ehot and Vivienne's brother Maurice decided
she should be certified as insane and sent to a mental hospital.
With that goal in mind Eliot asked his ex-pohceman friend, Janes,
to escort two psychiatrists. Dr. Gyriax and Dr. MiUer, by taxi to
her flat. The plan was stymied, at least for the time being, when
the doctors determined that she was too rational to warrant an
involuntary reception order that would have committed her. To
avoid her relentless pursuers, Vivienne fled to Paris, where she
hid under a false name. Afraid she might be murdered, she wrote
on June 23, 1935: "If the assassination of Edith Gavell [a British
nurse executed by Germans in World War i] is a crime which
shook the world, I say the assassination of Vivienne Haigh Eliot is
a crime which will shake the world witli far more consequence."
Thus fluctuating between paranoia and megalomania, Vivienne
had begun to imagine herself as a martyr being hounded by a
"Napoleon of Grime" and his agents.
In July 1935 stifl naively hoping for a reconciliation with her
estranged husband, Vivienne devised yet another scheme to meet
392
T. s. ELIOT'S AUTOBIOGRAPHIGAL GATS
him. She wrote him a letter accusing him of Macavity-hke deception: "It almost makes one doubt your sanity, the way you are hiding yourself up as if you are committing a crime. The shame and
slight on your family, the name of EUot, is more than one could
beUeve an Eliot could do. Have you lost all shame? And have you
forgotten Ghristianity and become a heathen or are you STILL terrorized and blackmailed?" Vivienne's biographer, Garole SeymourJones, contends in her chapter "Gat and Mouse" that Vivienne
suspected her husband of being "terrorized and blackmailed"
by a homosexual lover. If Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats is
any indication of EUot's true state of mind, he was as terrified of
Vivienne—in the guise of Lady Griddlebone—as she was of him.
During EUot's romantic tribulations his friends often commented with bemusement on the array of personae he used to
protect himself. V. S. Pritchett said it best: "[EUot was] a company
of actors inside one suit, each twitting the others." EUot twits his
internal personae in "Gus: The Theatre Gat," although he had
already done so in the title of his book—Old Possum's Book of
Practical Cats. It was Pound who had dubbed his friend "Old
Possum" to poke fun at his way of playing dead to survive in the
world he found so painful. Gus incorporates botii EUot's possum
persona—Gus is an old actor who "suffers from palsy"—and his
Growltiger persona as an energetic fiend. EUot says Gus was "the
smartest of Gats" and "a terror to mice and to rats" (Growltiger
was the "Terror of the Thames"). A talented actor who has "played
. . . every possible part" and "knew how to let the cat out of the
bag," Gus channels his demonic energies into "his grandest creation"—the role of "Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell." This
fiend is reminiscent of the famous hound—made fiery by the use
of phosphorus—^who is the fiend of the fell (an EngUsh moor) in
The Hound of the Baskervilles. In "East Goker," a poem written
at about the same time as "Gus: the Theatre Gat," EUot alludes to
the famous hound and his provenance near the Great Grimpen
Mire ("On the edge of a grimpen, where is tio secure foothold, /
. . . monsters, fancy lights" menace the unsuspecting traveler).
If EUot often complained in his poems about "abouUe" (apathy) and his inabiUty to take action to resolve the sort of "horrible
muddle[s]" that continually ensnare "The Rum Tum Tugger" cat,
in Ufe EUot did act decisively on many occasions—most notably
HENRY HART
393
when he joined the Anglo-CathoUc church in 1927, separated from
Vivienne in 1933, and committed her to Northampton House in
1938. Acting—in the practical and theatrical sense—was one of
his central concerns, especiaUy after he started writing plays in
the 1930s. "Prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action,"
he wrote in "Dry Salvages," were tenets of his postconversion and
post-Vivienne credo. Prayer and tliought, especially contemplative prayer and meditative thought, were especially important
to him during his battles with Vivienne. If Crowltiger, Macavity,
Mistoffelees, Cus, and Rum Tum Tugger flaunted the unsavory
metliods EUot used to cope with his horribly muddled marriage,
they also embodied the tragic consequences those methods could
have. To avoid tragedy—at least for himself—EUot advocated the
mystical path to enUghtenment charted so meticulously and systematically by Dante in The Divine Comedy. Although the myth
of Hercules—with its archetypal plot of heroic ordeals, triumphs,
tormenting love, death, and apotheosis—inform many of his writings ("Mr. ApoUinax," "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with
a Cigar," "Marina," "Little Cidding," The Cocktail Party), Dante's
mythical joumey through hell and purgatory to paradise is at the
heart of EUot's "mythical method." Dante's comedie structure and
tlie Christian mysticism that inform it are foundational to EUot's
thinking and writing from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
to Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats and beyond. "The Naming
of Cats," "The Old Cumbie Cat," "The Song of the JeUicles," "Old
Deuteronomy," "Skimbleshanks: the Railway Cat," and "The Addressing of Cats"—all bear signs of the grand Dantesque design.
During EUot's student years at Harvard he diUgently studied
The Divine Comedy and the lives of saints, martyrs, and mystics
such as St. Teresa of Ávila, St. John of the Cross, Jacob Böhme,
and St. Bemard. His nervous temperament drew him to the psychopathology of mystical experience as weU as the therapeutic
value of the via mystica. Evelyn Underhül's encyclopedic study
Mysticism (1911), which he read thoroughly and took notes on,
introduced him to the Christian mysucs whose visionary practices
would become important to him as an Anglo-CatlioUc and poet
struggUng to escape the infemo of his marriage. In EUot's bifocal
vision of things, Vivienne became a BeUadonna figure—a Lady
Criddlebone or Lady of the Rocks—who pitched him into Hefl
394
T. S. ELIOT'S AUTOBIOGRAPHIGAL CATS
and initiated his purgatorial journey toward transcendence. The
poem that begins his cat sequence, "The Naming of Gats," traces
the via mystica that Underhill discusses in her history of mysticism
and that her cousin Father Francis Underhiil, as Eliot's confessor, encourages him to follow. The poem hints at the Platonic
origins of Ghristian mysticism; at the seminal Ghristian mystical
text The Divine Nam^s that claims that "the One who is present
in all things and who may be discovered from all things . . . is
ungraspable and 'inscrutable' . . . ineffable and nameless"; and at
the Hercules myth of doomed love followed by apotheosis that
enthralled Ehot.
Soon after Eliot declares that poetry should be "an escape from
emotion" and "an escape from personality" in "Tradition and the
Individual Talent," he vows to "halt at the frontiers of metaphysics
or mysticism" and focus on the "practical conclusions" of his theories. In "The Naming of Gats" he goes beyond those "frontiers" to
affirm the mystical journey, just as Andrew Lloyd Webber did in
his musical adaptation of the poems when he chose "from Jellicle
Songs for Jellicle Cats" as his foreword. In this poem the Jellicle
cats form an "angelical choir" singing "Hallelujah" at the "astronomical heights" of the Heaviside Layer to "the mystical divinity
of . . . fehnity." Webber ends his score with another poem tided
"from Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats" to reinforce Eliot's notion
that "practical cats, dramatical cats . . . fanatical cats . . . allegorical
cats" and all his other cats are essentially "mystical cats."
The reason Eliot says so emphatically that "a cat must have
THREE DIFFERENT NAMES" in his first poem is that he believes
every practical cat (like every ordinary person with a first, middle,
and last name) was created in the image of a Trinitarian deity
(Jesus the son, God the father, and the Holy Ghost). Eliot's three
names also correspond to purgation, illumination, and union—"the
time-honoured threefold division of the Mystic Way" tliat Underhill explains in Mysticism. Eliot's contemplative cats shed their
mundane names as they travel the mystic way toward union with
a nameless transcendent divinity. Names such as "Peter, Augustus,
Alonzo or James," according to Eliot, signify one's everyday identity that must be purged. The second group of "sensible everyday
names . . . / Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter" refer to
HENRY HART
395
famous characters in Greek philosophy, myth, and drama that
helped Ehot conceptualize his version of the mystic way. Admetus is particularly significant because of his marriage to Alcestis, a
woman who sacrifices herself so that her husband can hve longer
than the Fates decree, and who is ultimately resurrected by die
guilt-stricken Hercules. Eliot was so taken by the dramatizations
of this myth by Euripides in Alcestis that he used it as the basis for
The Cocktail Party. In Eliot's play the psychiatrist Dr. HarcourtReilly is the Hercules figure and, together with Edward, is one
of Eliot's personae. Reilly figuratively brings Edward's estranged
wife, Lavinia—whose name is a play on Vivienne—back from the
dead so she can rejoin her husband, who has been infatuated with
Geha, a saintly martyr modeled on Emily Hale. The reference to
the wifeless husband Admetus, with whom Ehot obviously identified, hints at the romantic turmoil behind the cat poems.
The goal of the mystic way is an escape from one's socially
recognized "daily" personality as well as one's "peculiar and more
dignified" personahty, which Eliot represents with a second "quorum" of names "Such as Munkusrap, Quaxo, or Goricopat, / Such
as Bombalurina, or else Jellylomm." These resemble Eliot's dramatis personae in his playful and playhke book. They are inventive,
man-made names that are practical—they identify characters—
but tliey must be discarded on the journey toward iflumination
and union with the divine. For Ehot tliat journey beyond "the language of the living" toward union, as he puts it in "Little Gidding,"
is an inner one, and it is also a paradoxical one that involves communing with a divine essence that cannot be named or thought.
Ehot claims: "No human research can discover" the name ofthat
inner divinity or soul sought by his mystical cats. The divine name
resembles "the unspoken word, the Word unheard, / The Word
without a word" that, as Eliot writes in "Ash-Wednesday," resides
at the central still point of the whirhng world and personality. The
divine name can only be "thought" on the via mystica, which is
why Eliot says at the end of "The Naming of Gats":
When you notice a cat in profound meditation.
The
reason, iI tell
tell you,
you, is
is always
always the
the same:
same:
lne reason,
lis
mind
is
fincracreH
in
a
rant
cnntpmnlaHnn
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
396
T. s. ELIOT'S AUTOBIOGRAPHIGAL CATS
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.
As Dionysius the Areopagite, the fabled writer of The Divine
Names, declares: "the dominant characteristic [of union with the
divine] is ineffabiUty."
St. John of the Gross, St. Teresa, and many other Ghristian mystics depicted the union with an inner or outer God as an ecstatic
sexual moment in a marriage between loving soul and beloved
God. St. John, whose mystical treatise The Dark Night influenced
many of the most significant passages in the Four Quartets, speaks
of the subUme "inebriation . . . of love" and "the ineffabiUty of
the divine language" in the marital union between soul and God.
What is unique about Ehot's portrayal of mystical union in his
cat poems is the lack of marriage imagery—at least of a romantic
sexual sort. His cat in "profound meditation" and in "rapt contemplation" is "engaged" to a "thought," not married in St. John's
"subhme and joyous union with God." EUot's abhorrence of any
sort of union with Vivienne, sexual or otherwise, seems to have
chastened his mystical imagery.
EUot alluded to numerous mystics in his prose and poetry, but
he reserved special fondness for the medieval Scottish mystics
Richard and Hugh of St. Victor. Because of his ascetic desire to
repress or escape emotions, EUot distrusted what he called the
"extraordinary outburst of mysticism" and the "several hundred
pathological ecstatics" ("Thinking in Verse") in sixteenth-century
Spain. He respected the Spanish St. John and St. Teresa, but
denigrated St. Ignatius of Loyola and his famous Spiritual Exercises, comparing the saint to the fanatical and beUicose Lenin.
EUot preferred "the mysticism of the thirteenth and twelfth centuries [that] was inteUectual and intemaüonal," revered Richard
and Hugh because they were "dry and abstract" in their writing,
and criticized the Spanish mysticism that came later for being
"definitely sensuous or erotic in its mode of expression." These
remarks, which were printed in a Listener article on March 12,
1930 (shortly before he began composing his cat poems), had first
been made in his Glark lectures on the varieties of metaphysical
HENRY HART
397
poetry. In his third Glark lecture he refers to Dante's praise of
Richard of St. Victor as a mystic "who in contemplation was more
than man" {Paradiso, canto 10) and goes on to praise Richard's
"wholly impersonal . . . clear, simple and economical style" that
"contains no biographical element whatever; nothing that could
be cafled emotional or sensational. In which it differs from the
works of the Spanish mystics of the sixteenth century." EUot draws
specific attention to a passage in Richard's treatise De Gratia Contemplationis that divides "the three stages of mental progress" into
thought, meditation, and contemplation. He quotes the original
Latin, which must have seemed "effanineffable" to at least some
in his audience: "Thinking crawls; meditation marches and often
runs; contemplation flies around everywhere and when it wishes
suspends itself in the heights. Thinking is without labor and fmit;
in meditation there is labor with fruit; contemplation continues
without labor but with fruit. In thinking there is wandering; in
meditation, investigation; in contemplation, wonder. Thinking is
from imagination; meditation, from reason; contemplation, from
understanding." Gompared to St. Ignatius, whose mysticism was
a "spiritual haschisch, a drugging of the emotions," Richard of
St. Victor was a clear-thinking classicist who contributed to "the
mysticism . . . of St. Thomas Aquinas and of Dante."
At the end of "The Naming of Gats" Eliot recounts the "three
states of mental progress" that were so essential to his spiritual
autobiography In other poems his sitting cats appear to be thinking, meditating, or contemplating (sitting is often a synonym for
meditating). In "Ash-Wednesday" EUot writes: "[I] pray to God to
have mercy upon us / And I pray that I may forget / These matters that with myself I too much discuss / Too much explain. . . . /
Teach us to sit still." EUot's mystically inclined cats have learned
how to sit still during the day and expend their considerable
spiritual energies at night. Jennyanydots in "The Old Gumbie Gat"
resembles Old Possum in the way she plays dead by sitting ("All
day she sits upon the stair"). She seems to be perched on Richard
of St. Victor's "steep stairway of love, by which the contemplative
ascends to union with the Absolute." Three times EUot repeats
the fact that "she sits and sits and sits and sits." The Jeflicle cats
are similarly "quiet" during the day: "They are resting and saving
themselves to be right / For the JelUcle Moon." Their devotion to
398
T. s. ELIOT'S AUTOBIOGRAPHIGAL GATS
spiritual "saving" and "right" action is reminiscent of the mystical
way, which traditionaUy progresses through a "dark night" and is
devoted to a higher power (in this case the moon). The JeUicles,
who "wash behind their ears" and "dry between their toes," are
saintly models of the orderly Ufe for adults as weU as for children.
So is Skimbleshanks, the Railway Cat, who "estabUshes control
by a regular patrol," keeps the trains running on schedule, and
"doesn't approve / Of hilarity and riot." Old Deuteronomy is
another Old Possum cat who prizes inner peace and order, and
manages to accompUsh it by pretending to be as dead as the many
wives he has buried. "Placid and bland . . . / he sits in the sun on
the vicarage wall," no doubt meditating on godly matters. He also
"sits in the street," obUvious to the cars, dogs, sheep, and buUs
that whirl around him, having found a meditative stiU point at the
center of the turning world.
EUot once said: "The highest Ufe is the Ufe of contemplation.
. We need to remind ourselves often [that it] is the highest
form of human activity." That may be tme, but he also reminded
himself of his obUgation as a good Christian to cUmb back down
the mystic ladder or stairway to illuminate others. Many of his
personae—whether people or cats—descend from their lofty positions to help those who inhabit lower niches in the social and
spiritual hierarchy. EUot inherited his sense of class stratification
and his missionary zeal to perform pubUc service from his distinguished family, which had included poUticians, businessmen, ministers, and coUege presidents (his uncle was president of Harvard
when he attended). He also leamed from Evelyn UnderhiU that
the most noble mystics felt compeUed to retum to their communities after scaUng the contemplative heights to unity with Cod.
They devotedly channeled their mystical insight and energy into
social activism. "All records of mysticism in the West," UnderhiU
writes, "are also the records of supreme human activity. Not only
of 'wrestlers in the spirit' but also of great organizers . . . missionaries . . . philanthropists . . . poets and prophets . . . and [political
activists who embrace] a national destiny." UnderhiU contends
that the soUtary retreats of mystics—their possum-Uke dying away
from the world—prepared them for a more active engagement
with the world: "They were impeUed to abandon their solitude;
and resumed, in some way, their contact with the world in order to
HENRY HART
399
become the medium whereby that Life flowed out to other men.
. . . This systole-and-diastole motion of retreat as the prehminary
to a retum remains the true ideal of Ghristian Mysticism in its
highest development." It is the ideal that Eliot's mystical cats
embraced as well.
In one of her discourses on the importance of Richard of St.
Victor, whose "solid intellectuality" she credits with saving "the
mediaeval school [of mysticism] from the perils of religious emotionalism," Underhill uses metaphors of parents and children that
may have encouraged Eliot to write his children's book. Referring
to the "incessant production of good works" by mystics, she notes
that Richard placed a premium on "fertile, creative [works]."
Saintly adults should produce make-believe children and create
surrogate families if they—like Eliot—had no children of their
own. According to Richard: "In the four degrees of love, the soul
brings forth its children. It is the agent of a fresh outbirth of
spiritual vitality into the world; the helpmate of the Transcendent
Order, the mother of a spiritual progeny. The great unitive mystics
are each of them the founders of spiritual families, centres wherefrom radiates new transcendental life. . . . The great creative seers
and artists are the parents, not merely of their own immediate
works, but also of whole schools of art; whole groups of persons
who acquire or inherit their vision of beauty or tmth." In Old
Possum's Book of Practical Cats Eliot was establishing a surrogate
family, imparting to children his vision of beauty and truth, and
also delivering cautionary fables of ugliness, evil, and deceit.
The poem that follows "The Naming of Gats" stresses the
parental principle of noblesse oblige—of civilizing children and
those in the lower echelons of society. The meditative Gumbie
Gat abides by the "systole-and-diastole motion" that Underhill
applauds. Jennyanydots plays meditative possum during the day
but works tirelessly as a cultural evangehst at night. She descends
to the basement to do her work among her benighted inferiors.
Like Eliot's mother she is a teacher and a proper gentlewoman
who has firm principles to inculcate:
She tucks up her skirts to the basement to creep.
She is deeply concerned with the ways of the mice—
Their behaviour's not good and their manners not nice;
400
T. S. ELIOT'S AUTORIOGRAPHICAL CATS
So when she has got them hned up on the matting.
She teaches them music, crocheting and tatting.
This practical cat may have been partly based on Eliot's nursemaid, Annie Dunne, who functioned as a mother to him in St.
Louis ("anydots" echoes "Annie Dunne"). Dunne was also responsible for introducing Eliot to Gatholicism, whose rituals and doctrines he eventually chose over his family's Unitarianism. Writing
from the vantage point of an adult Anglo-Gatholic, he approves
of the good manners, work-ethic, and rigorous discipline she
imposes on "that lot of disorderly louts"—the childlike mice and
cockroaches—"To prevent them from idle and wanton destroyment." Ehot might also be recalling his own experiences as an
English teacher (an "extension lecturer") who in 1916 travelled
from London to Yorkshire to meet workingmen and women at
night. His prejudice against the lower classes notwithstanding,
he was pleased by his students' "unabated eagemess to get culture," and in a letter to a cousin he said his "greatest pleasure"
was derived from his "workingmen's class in English literature on
Monday evenings."
Those critics who deemed—and in some cases damned—Old
Possum's Book of Practical Cats as a radical depariure for Ehot
were mistaken. From his earliest poems he had been deploying
cats as symbols of different stages along the via mystica. He drew
on the stereotype of the erotic but dangerous cat woman, a popular figure in fiction and films, and used her to evince the sexual
appetites he was afraid to satisfy. The polluted soot-filled "yellow
fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes" and falls asleep
on the "soft October night" in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is one of the earliest examples of Ehot's association of cats
with women and sex. Like the lower-class women who—unlike
the women "talking of Michelangelo"—promise "restless nights
in one-night cheap hotels," the cat-hke smog both attracts and
repels. Pmfrock wants to explore it on his noctumal jaunt through
the seedy side of town, even though he is too shy to explore
women in a sexual way. The fog that "licked its tongue into the
corners of the evening, / Lingered upon the pools that stand in
drains" appears only shghtly transformed as "the cat which flattens
itself in the gutter, / Slips out its tongue / And devours a morsel
HENRY HART
401
of rancid butter" in "Rhapsody on a Windy Night," another poem
EUot finished after encountering Parisian prostitutes on night
prowls in 1911.
Because of his inhibitions EUot identifies with the silly, overly
civiUzed Harvard professor with a cat name, Ghanning-Cheetah,
in "Mr. AppoUinax," even though he's drawn to the uninhibited
high jinks of the Priapus- and centaur-Uke ApolUnax, a stand-in for
Bertrand Russell. The prose poem "Hysteria" (1915), which EUot
placed directly after "Mr. Apolhnax" in his first book, Prufrock and
Other Observations, treats his wife Vivienne—^whom the priapic
RusseU would soon seduce—as if she were another highly sexed,
devouring cat. Alluding to the ancient Greek theory that hysteria
was caused by a woman's uterus—hystera—rising to her throat,
EUot imagines being "drawn in by short gasps [and] inhaled" by
Vivienne until he is "lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat,
bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles." A female dancer appearing under the ahas Grishkin in "Whispers of ImmortaUty" is yet
another highly erotic, devouring cat, a "couched Brazihan jaguar"
who seduces her male prey "with subtle effluence of cat," only to
gobble them up Uke so many small monkeys. "Ash-Wednesday,"
which documents EUot's struggles to embrace the contemplative Ufe after his conversion, does so with images of even more
ferocious cats. The "three white leopards" and the white-gowned
Lady, who controls them tlie way a trainer might, enact EUot's
bodily purgation. The big cats consume EUot's flesh so that he
may live again in the spirit. If the tiger-Uke Vivienne drove EUot
toward purgatory and a vita nuova in the church, the poem suggests a saintly "Lady" and her sacred leopards directed his journey
along the via mystica.
Although EUot's cat poems reveal love wounds and ways of
deaUng with them inherited from his family, in the end the poems
provide entertainment by making Ught of EUot's flaws and mystical cures. His book of practical cats on one level is a book of
practical jokes. If Virginia Woolf was right in saying that Vivienne
was a "bag of ferrets . . . Tom wears round his neck," it can also
be said that EUot was an old possum-Uke cat jokingly unleashing
tlie fiendish ferret-Uke cats bagged up inside him. Like medieval merchants who stuffed cats in bags when chickens or other
edible animals were purchased (the unwary customer would get a
402
T. s. ELIOT'S AUTOBIOGRAPHIGAL GATS
surprise after "letting the cat out of the bag"), EUot is both concealer and revealer. He deceives with personae who boast of their
skill at deception; but, as he admits in "Gus: The Theatre Gat,"
he also playfully lets his autobiographical cats out of the bag. His
sequence of poems corroborates Stephen Dedalus's statement
in Ulysses, a novel EUot revered: "We walk through ourselves,
meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves." EUot walks
through himself in Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats and offers
a multifaceted self-portrait.
Many who knew EUot said that he even looked Uke a cat. Gonrad Aiken, one of EUot's closest college friends, commented that
his "pecuUarly luminous" eyes resembled those "of one of the
greater cats, but tiger, puma, leopard, lynx, rather than those of a
lion." After first meeting Eliot in 1917, Osbert Sitwell detected in
him "a tiger's fiery core of impatience." One of Bertrand Russell's
many mistresses, the actress Golette O'Neil, remarked that she
felt EUot's eyes "might spring out on one at any moment—Uke a
cat," though he usually composed himself in a possumish "manner [that] was detached and . . . frigid." EUot signed letters to
Pound POS SUM, which in Latin means "I am able to"—indicating
the cat-Uke practicaUty that kept his mystical propensities in balance. As with his many other poems he used personae to vmte
autobiographically, dramatizing a tumultuous Ufe and his efforts
to transcend it. His intriguing cats, in the end, acted as eyelike
windows into his complex soul.
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