Eliots CATS

 

Thomas Stearns Eliot understood cats. He "felt" all that in a cat, which doesn't let itself be described. And even more, he manage with his words to get his audience to understand the inner nature of the cat: a creature- none creature dedicatedly described in his book of poems about cats Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, publicised year 1939.
'Possum' means opossum, a small animal of the same family as the kangaroo, which lives in America. It was a playful nickname that Eliot had been given by his friends.
The poems are very hard to translate to other languages, since the original idea/spirit easily gets lost. It's really hard to make the poems justice, since Eliot worked with 'word-games' , that is practical impossible to give back in any other language. Every poem is a game of words- first of all the suitable and fantastical cat-names, Jellicle Cats- for cats in common- then the different individuals Jennyanydots, Growltiger, Rum Tum Tugger, Macavity, Rumpleteaser and Sillabub just to mention some.

Eliot knew exactly how to catch the cats nature- or more likely their 'catish' way- already with the first name 'Jellicle Cats' . Jelly and jellicle can be associated to something like restless, shimmery, glowing- 'Jellicle moonlight '.
He shows his talent in finding expressions for the cats' mystic and reserved nature in the poem The Naming of Cats. It isn't easy to find and give a cat a name. Like Eliot says it isn't just a holiday game, especially since a cat needs more than one name: one in the family, daily , ordinary; one other, unusual, more dignified, on that only that especial cat have, a name that is peculiar and with such a glow that the cat feel proud and happy about it, and keep up his tail perpendicular and spread out his whiskers; and a third one that the humans never can guess, a name that the cat himself never will confess, a name that Eliot defines as his ineffable, effable, effanineffable, deep and inscrutable singular name.

He writes about cats against cats and cats against humans, but more about cats than about humans, in the difference from older days when the cat only was permitted to show the humans weakness, like in Aesopos and Phaedrus fables.

Eliot wrote about cats he had studied- the horrible troublemakers Mungojerrie and Rumpleteaser, two unseparable vagabonds, who's basically doing is to make all sorts of trouble with a skill that is typical for cats. It is of course close to hand to identify these both pranksters with humans, but when reading Eliots poems you get so engaged in the cats world, that you have so much fun to all the trouble they make, either it's about spilling out the milk over the set table or turning the house to a battlefield or breaking the vase, which 'was commonly said to be Ming' and then disappear from the crime scene in a mystical way that only cats but not humans can. Eliot sent the poem to his little niece but apologised for it may not be so good, since " . . . the two cats in the poem are much worse in reality then he had been able to see for himself".

There are much in the book that makes the reader to smile, either because he recognise himself and his own weaknesses in the different characters or because they act especially.
Like the Terror of the Thames Growltiger, a cat who holds a serenade for his chosen one, the lovely Griddlebone, unknowingly of the danger lurking around his barge. His enemies, the Siamese, are boarding the barge, while the "moonlight shine reflected from a thousand bright blue eyes", and forces Growltiger to walk the plank, like he had done with many of his own victims. (Griddlebone gets away.) Other characters are the effective Jennyanydots, who arrange classes for the mice in "music, crocheting and tatting" and she forms the cockroaches " from that lot of disorderly louts, to a troop of well disciplined helpful boy-scouts with a purpose in life and a good deed to do", and Old Deuteronomy, the old wise village cat, who is respected by all and never gets disturbed, not even when he sits down to rest in the middle of the "high street on market day"- and so on.

And Eliot continues to joke with us. Once again he describe cats as creatures- none creatures, nature- none nature, that the human barely can understand. The ending poem Addressing of Cats asks the final question- what is a cat? The writer answers jokefully: ". . . a cat is not a dog" and "A dog's a dog a cat's a cat" and continues a bit more serious: to understand a cat we must respect, that "he resents familiarity" and offer him true friendship.
Only then we can hope for him to treat us as a trusted friend and not until then
reach or aim- to finally call him by his name, his "ineffable, effable,
effanineffable , deep and inscrutable singular name."