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Letters
from a Cat
would be a charming old-timey book if it weren't for what
is revealed in the gut-wrenching introduction,written many
years after the events of the book. When Helen Hunt Jackson,
as a small child, went on a brief journey with her father,
her mother arranged for her to get missives from her beloved
cat, who bore the then normal cat name of Pussy. Although
the journey is described in the introduction, I cannot bring
myself to look at that part of the book again. In my mind,
they are alternately on horseback, forging rivers, trailed
by additional mules packed with clothes and sifters for gold,
or in a nice but not too ostentatious carriage. Miss Hunt
has blonde curls and mary janes, and her father is moustachioed.
Years later, Helen Hunt Jackson published the epistolary memoir
of her delightful cat, but she reveals Pussy's tragic and
cruel end in the intro. To put it bluntly, Puss got sick and
was put out of her misery by Hunt Jackson's uncle.
The book
itself is actually made up of the letters Hunt received from
her cat while on this journey. When Miss Hunt and her father
would stop at various locales, there would be waiting a letter
or two from Pussy. Pussy had some lively adventures she wished
to share with Helen, and she also complained, as cats do,
in hyperbolic fashion about injuries and slights and food
and so on. Puss would sign her letters, "Your aff. Pussy."
Puss's
writing style is quite mannered and lively—she was obviously
highly educated. When Helen's mother cruelly taunts Puss with,
"Poor pussy, no more good plays for you till Helen comes home!"
she writes, "I thought that I should certainly cry. But I
think it is very foolish to cry over something what cannot
be helped, so I pretended to have got something into my left
eye, and rubbed it with my paw." What could be more charming!
She then goes on to complain that "Josiah" knocks over her
bowl constantly and sometimes she has nothing to eat but flies.
If you have read the intro, which I implore you not to read,
you already know that Josiah is the foul uncle. All I can
say is that it's a good thing for him that he's long dead,
for I would recruit an army of cats to nibble at him until
only bone was left. EVIL, evil man.
The second
letter shows how prone Pussy is to excitability, and how confused
she is about human day-to-day activities. In the previous
letter, she hinted that a man was doing something dreadful
to the garden—no doubt it was just being weeded and pruned.
In letter two, household renovations are a cause for extreme
fright from the affectionate kitty, who writes, "If you do
not come soon, there will be no home left for you to come
into. I am so frightened and excited, that my paws tremble,
and I have upset the ink twice, and spilled so much that there
is only a little left in the bottom of the cup… There was
Mary with her worst blue handkerchief tied over her head,
her washing-day gown on, and a big hammer in her hand. As
soon as she saw me, she said, 'There 's that cat! Always in
my way' and threw a cricket at me, and then shut the parlor
door with a great slam." I think the cricket she refers to
is an actual cricket, not some sort of quaint term for a pillow.
Running away from Mary, who was probably the maid, Pussy spends
an uncomfortable night hiding in the vegetable bin, all the
while thinking Mary is planning to destroy the house and steal
everything inside. She ends the missive with some gossip.
Pussy
is such a darling character, and this is enhanced by her idiot-savant
nature and the lovely illustrations that pepper the book.
But having read the introduction first makes Puss's letters
and adventures incredibly heartbreaking. And this is a clear
difference between publishers then and now—any contemporary
publisher would have copiously edited down that introduction.
But life was harsh in the nineteenth century, for cats and
humans.
(April
Fools, 2009)
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