‘Emperors of Flats’

Press, 15 December 1979, Page 19

‘Emperors of Flats’

The Book of Cats. Edited by George Macßeth and Martin Booth. Penguin, 1979. 353 pp. $7.50. (Reviewed by Lorna Buchanan) It would be difficult to put together a more splendid compendium of cats and cat literature than is assembled in this little book. The illustrations, many in colour, range from the sacred cats of ancient Egypt to the startling, crazy cats of Louis Wain. The text has familiar favourites: Kipling’s cat that walked by himself, Mehitabel from Don Marquis, and T. S. Eliot’s unforgetable Macavity. It also strays to such curiosities as Baudelaire’s cats, the “emperors of flats,” to Theodore Roosevelt writing with affection of a kitten called Tom Quartz, and to the stem injunction of P. G. Wodehouse that “cats are not dogs.” Whenever possible text and illustrations are appropriately matched so that Paul Gallico’s poem “Ballad of Tough Tom” is accompanied, for instance, by a splendid photograph of

just such a cat. Readers are reminded that to gain the friendship of a cat is no easy thing, that cats can be studied for clues to human behaviour (a theme expanded here by Aldous Huxley), and that Ambrose Bierce, in “The Devil’s Dictionary” defined “Cat” thus: “A soft, indestructible automaton provided by nature to be kicked when things go wrong in the domestic circle.” With about 100 separate items, not everything in the collection will appeal to all readers. But something will delight any admirer of cats who dips in. The sheer diversity is a delight, not least in the names that humans have dreamed up for their cats. A brief sampling yielded Blackjack and Mouthwatch, Don Pierrot de Navarre and Seraphita, Webster and Jekkel, Growltiger and Ming, Hurlyburlybuss, Mowler and Dusty. No doubt many readers could add their own curious inventions to such a list, whether their, cat’s name be as common as “Fred” or as unlikely as “Smersh.” —Lorna Buchanan.