100 Cats Who Changed Civilization (10 page)

THE CAT WHO HELPED
WRITE A DICTIONARY

Many a famous poet or novelist has written under the languid gaze of a feline. But few such four-legged muses can match the grit and staying power of a black cat named Hodge. He provided companionship to lexicographer Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) as he single-handedly composed the first truly authoritative dictionary of the English language.

Johnson gave eleven years to the work, churning out definition after definition at his home at 17 Gough Square in London. As the great lexicographer labored at his desk, Hodge was often at his elbow, amusing and diverting his owner from what must have been an unimaginable grind. The project was finally completed in 1775. It won universal acclaim, became the literary world’s reference of choice for more than a century, and earned its author the nickname “Dictionary Johnson.”

However, the world knows about Hodge (and his master) not because of the dictionary, but because of a young Scotsman named James Boswell. Boswell befriended Johnson in 1763 and spent the next few decades following him around, scribbling down the sage’s comments and making no secret of his desire to write the great man’s biography. In
1799, he duly produced
The Life of Samuel Johnson
, considered the first truly well-rounded, sympathetic, modern biography. It made Johnson, who might have merited no more than a footnote in the history books, into an immortal literary character.

Boswell also turned Hodge into a famous literary cat, despite being pathologically afraid of him. “I never shall forget the indulgence with which he treated Hodge, his cat: for whom he himself used to go out and buy oysters, lest the servants having that trouble should take a dislike to the poor creature,” Boswell wrote in
The Life of Johnson
. “I am, unluckily, one of those who have an antipathy to a cat, so that I am uneasy when in the room with one; and I own, I frequently suffered a good deal from the presence of this same Hodge. I recollect him one day scrambling up Dr. Johnson’s breast, apparently with much satisfaction, while my friend smiling and half-whistling, rubbed down his back, and pulled him by the tail; and when I observed he was a fine cat, saying, ‘Why yes, Sir, but I have had cats whom I liked better than this’; and then as if perceiving Hodge to be out of countenance, adding, ‘but he is a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed.’ ”

Johnson supported his four-legged companion to the bitter end. Boswell notes how the great lexicographer, as his cat’s final hours approached, went off to purchase some valerian (a relative of catnip) to
ease his suffering. Upon his death the poet Percival Stockdale wrote
An Elegy on the Death of Dr Johnson’s Favourite Cat
, which reads in part, “Who, by his master when caressed / Warmly his gratitude expressed / And never failed his thanks to purr / Whene’er he stroked his sable fur.”

Today, across the street from the building where Johnson composed his masterwork, stands a statue of Hodge perched atop a copy of his owner’s book. In his dictionary, Johnson defined cats in general as “a domestic animal that catches mice, commonly reckoned by naturalists the lowest order of the leonine species.” But it is his more gracious assessment of Hodge, as “a very fine cat indeed,” that adorns the statue of his literary soul mate.

CATTARINA

THE CAT WHO TOUCHED
THE DARK HEART OF POE

During his short literary career, Edgar Allan Poe wrote great poems, penned some of the world’s most terrifying horror stories, and invented the detective novel. But his achievements brought him neither happiness nor material success. Quite the contrary. Before his death from alcohol abuse in 1849 at age forty, he suffered more than a lifetime’s worth of disappointment, rejection, and grief.

In 1842, his wife, Virginia, was diagnosed with tuberculosis. For the next five years, until her death in 1847, her health deteriorated. The couple’s poverty exacerbated her suffering. Poe, though intermittently employed at various magazines, was never well off. And his personal demons, chiefly his inability to stop drinking, brought turmoil to his home. His problem grew so severe that he feared he might actually hurt Virginia during one of his drunken fits.

Throughout these years the couple’s most devoted companion was a feline named Cattarina. The Poes, who didn’t stand on ceremony, sometimes called their tortoiseshell cat Kate (Poe himself was often referred to as “Eddie”). The cat would sit on her master’s shoulder as he wrote and would cuddle next to Virginia, sometimes providing
the only warmth that their freezing cottage had to offer.

Poe never physically harmed his wife, who by all accounts he loved deeply. But the fear was always there, along with what must have been searing guilt over his inability to give her a better life. He shared those feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing in his story
The Black Cat
—a tale of unparalleled gruesomeness inspired in part by Cattarina’s devotion to Virginia and by Poe’s anxiety about his own dark side.

The story, written in 1842, tells the tale of a drunk who, in a fit of alcoholic rage, hangs his cat, who Poe describes as a “beautiful animal, entirely black, and sagacious to an astonishing degree.” Not long afterward he’s followed home by another feline that looks almost exactly like the one he killed—except for an unnerving ring of white fur around the creature’s neck.

The man’s wife takes an immediate liking to the newcomer, and they become inseparable. The man, however, comes to believe that his new pet wants to avenge his earlier crime. During yet another drunken rage he tries to kill it with an ax, only to murder his wife instead. He quickly walls up her body in the basement and is relieved to find that the cat has disappeared.

Later, he brazenly shows the basement to searchers sent to investigate his wife’s disappearance. But suddenly, a terrible wail erupts from
behind the masonry. The wall is pulled down, revealing the dead woman with the black cat perched on her head, screeching. In his haste the man had sealed up the animal with his wife.

The story’s finale is one of the most unforgettable scenes in horror literature—and one of the most psychologically revealing. In the real world, Poe tried his best to care for his wife, and never gave so much as a dirty look to his dark muse, Cattarina. But it probably crossed his mind that this tortoiseshell feline served his wife better and more faithfully than he ever managed to. If so, then perhaps
The Black Cat
accomplished two things: It cast the fears and inadequacies of its author into sharp relief, and it honored the memory of the selfless Cattarina, whose literary incarnation has outlived both herself, her mistress, and her master.

PANGUR BAN

IRELAND’S MOST FAMOUS FELINE

For most of history, the only way to create a new copy of an old book was to obtain a stack of fresh parchment, pull up a chair, break out a pot of ink, and laboriously copy every line by hand. During the Middle Ages this mind-numbing task was raised to an art form by Catholic monks, legions of whom spent their lives huddled over tables in stone cells all over Europe, copying everything from Greek and Roman classics to the latest papal pronouncements. Much of the knowledge that survived from ancient times did so only because of their unceasing efforts.

Working as a scribe was important, but not very creative. That’s why so few of these human photocopy machines made any sort of mark on history. One of that handful was a young man who, sometime in the ninth century, perhaps trained as a student copyist at the Monastery of St Paul in Carinthia, Austria. We don’t know his name, but thanks to a short poem he scribbled on the back of a copy of St Paul’s Epistles, we do know the name of his cat—Pangur Ban.

That feline, apparently, was the medieval manuscript copier’s bosom friend. The young Irishman (his origin is known because the poem was written in Gaelic) traveled all the way from the Emerald
Isle to Austria to acquire the skills of a scribe. There he must have spent endless days and nights in relative isolation, his only company the manuscript he was working on and his faithful white cat, Pangur Ban. Again, scholars can guess at the feline’s color because in Gaelic
ban
means “white.” This man, who was obviously a long way from home, decided, for reasons unknown, to slip among the monastery’s weighty manuscripts a short poem about his relationship with his cat. Reading it now (in a translation by Robin Flower), one can almost hear the feline frisking around the lonely monk’s cell as he works:

I and Pangur Ban, my cat,
’Tis a like task we are at;
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.

Better far than praise of men
’Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill will,
He too plies his simple skill.

’Tis a merry thing to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.

Oftentimes a mouse will stray
In the hero Pangur’s way;
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net.

’Gainst the wall he sets his eye
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
’Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.

When a mouse darts from its den,
O how glad is Pangur then!
O what gladness do I prove
When I solve the doubts I love!

So in peace our tasks we ply,
Pangur Ban, my cat, and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.

Practice every day has made
Pangur perfect in his trade;
I get wisdom day and night
Turning darkness into light.

No one will ever learn the ultimate fate of either the poetic monk or his cat. And of course, he can never know that his poem, authored perhaps in a moment of fatigue or whimsy, would leave its mark on history. Found centuries later, the little ditty became one of the greatest examples of early Irish poetry.