Eliot's Cats: Serious Play behind the Playful Seriousness

I have received from whom I do not knowThese letters. Show me, light, if they make sense.

—James Merrill

In an essay in Children's Literature, Marion C. Hodge charges T. S. Eliot with the offense of moralizing: "In Prufrock, in The Waste Land, in Four Quartets, he preaches to adults. In Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats he preaches to children (and adults)."¹ Hodge contends that these lines from "The Ad-dressing of Cats" invite us to see the book as didactic:

You now have learned enough to seeThat Cats are much like you and meAnd other people whom we findPossessed of various types of mind.For some are sane and some are madAnd some are good and some are bad . . .²

Hodge treats the cats as object lessons. The Old Gumbie Cat, for example, is "damned . . . because she does not realize the depth of man's depravity." Practical Cats testifies, then, to Eliot's "conviction that catkind/mankind is prone to crudity, cruelty, and violence, and is beyond reformation"; secondarily, it is a "quest for order."³ I wish to defend Practical Cats against such overseriousness, and yet suggest that it is one of Eliot's serious undertakings, a book that makes sense in terms of his career as a poet.

Very few students of Prufrock and The Waste Land would argue that those poems moralize; in any case, the charge cannot be successfully prosecuted against Practical Cats with the lines that Hodge quotes, as the subsequent lines make clear: "some are better, some are worse—/ But all may be described in verse" (CPP, p. 169; my italics). Old Possum here clearly disavows any intention to praise or condemn; he has not judged but merely catalogued and marveled. We feel, moreover, no surprise when, in the book's last poem, Possum acknowledges the obvious resemblances of his cats to humans with more and less serious failings. But Practical Cats' "lesson" is spiritual, not moral. Cats live; this is the deepest impulse behind Eliot's writing. Vital, sassy, perseverant, wrongheaded, perverse, magical, and mysterious they are—but never indifferent, mundane, or mediocre. Their conformity to any laws religious or social is clearly irrelevant to Eliot, who seems to have chosen his genre with escape from such adult baggage specifically in mind.⁴

Eliot's cognomen, "Old Possum," which was given to him by Ezra Pound, emphasizes his desire to escape the adult responsibility to be sensible. On closer examination, Practical Cats comes more to look like a side of Eliot's character and poetic practice that we do not often see, but which runs deep—namely, a fascination with children's voices, "chantant dans la coupole!" (CPP, p. 43). Neither a sermon nor an aberration, the book expresses Eliot's love for dog-, cat-, and mankind, and his desire to keep alive in himself the irreverent child.

Eliot the reactionary, it is known, began as Eliot the rebellious son. He married against his parents' wishes and even dressed the dandy. He rehearsed at Harvard the bitter ironies of Laforguian verse. Manuscripts in the New York Public Library's Berg Collection make it clear that he excised and left unpublished much poetry dealing explicitly with sex. He guarded his privacy; there are many letters that will not be available until well into the next century. The nickname of "Old Possum" seems to fit especially well that quizzical yet flaunting attitude that Eliot took toward the somewhat dour mask he showed the world, a mask he apparently loved to remove in friendly company. He was not anxious to please those who wished to canonize him for literary posterity, and he no doubt took delight in the puzzlement with which some readers received Practical Cats in 1939. John Holmes, reviewer for the Boston Evening Transcript, thought Practical Cats an indiscretion: "It should have been prevented," huffed Holmes.⁵

Eliot had long been interested in children's rhymes; they played a role in The Waste Land ("London Bridge is falling down") and "The Hollow Men" ("Here we go...