T. S. Eliot's Autobiographical Cats

T.S. Eliot worried about how readers would react to the book he originally planned to call Mr. Eliot's Book of Pollicle Dogs and Jellicle Cats as Recited to Him by the Man in White Spats. After Faber & Faber announced a 1936 publication date, he considered demoting "the Man in White Spats"—a character based on his close friend and flatmate John Hayward—from his position as "reciter." He also considered scrapping the balloon flight that was supposed to end the book with poet, narrator, dogs, and cats ascending "Up up up past the Russell Hotel, / Up up up to the Heaviside Layer." He had ended The Waste Land with a similar chant to transcendence, repeating the word shantih three times to emphasize his hope for "the peace that passeth understanding," and in a few years he would conclude Four Quartets with another image of blissful transcendence, declaring: "All manner of things shall be well / when the tongues of flame are in-folded / Into the crowned knot of fire / And the fire and the rose are one." Even though he wrote his cat poems for his godchildren and the children of friends (Tom Faber, Alison Tandy, Susan Wolcott, Susanna Morley), he resisted the sort of uplifting celebratory end that typified generic comedy, sentimental fiction, and children's literature.

Pondering his narrative options, Eliot delayed publication of his cat poems for three years, finally releasing them under the shorter title Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats on October 5, 1939. He featured the man in "white spats" in a poem entitled "Bustopher Jones: the Cat About Town," which pokes fun at a dandyish glutton who frequents London's fashionable clubs in "impeccable" attire. During the book's slow gestation he decided to abandon his plan to focus on dogs, which had never exerted the same appeal on his imagination as cats. The dogs that did appear had little to recommend them. They were gullible simpletons, lower-class British louts, or heathenish foreigners who disturbed the peace by carousing and brawling in London's streets. Dogs represented what he called in The Idea of a Christian Society (a collection of lectures published several weeks after his cat poems) the "illiterate and uncritical mob . . . detached from tradition, alienated from religion, and susceptible to mass suggestion." They were heathens in need of enlightenment and discipline from the Christian cats.

Eliot may have decided to abandon the culminating balloon ride "Up up up to the Heaviside Layer" (the ionized layer of the atmosphere 50-90 miles above the earth) for the sake of autobiographical and historical realism. The looming crisis in Europe, which he wrote about in essays during the 1930s, called for worldly vigilance rather than sentimental flights, especially when Nazi Germany invaded Poland and Britain declared war on September 1, 1939. On June 10, 1940, fascist Italy joined the war against Britain and France.

Eliot did associate dogs with fascist aggressors for personal as well as political reasons. His wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, from whom he had separated in 1933 after years of painful skirmishing, had joined Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists on December 5, 1934. During the years Eliot composed his cat poems (from about 1932 to 1938), the histrionic Vivienne often dressed up in a fascist uniform and aggressively pursued Eliot around London with her feisty Yorkshire terrier, Polly. Having written to his friend Ottoline Morrell in 1933 that he never wanted to see Vivienne again since he regarded her as "morally . . . unpleasant as well as physically indifferent" (as Ronald Schuchard reports), Eliot mustered all his cat-like skill to avoid her.

The first time Vivienne successfully tracked down Eliot after their separation in September 1932 was deeply embarrassing to the poet—and it involved her dog. On November 18, 1934, wearing her fascist uniform and carrying Polly in her arms, she confronted Eliot at a Sunday Times book fair on London's Lower Regent Street. The disgruntled Eliot did his best to compose himself and deliver his lecture. According to Vivienne's biographer, Carole Seymour-Jones, Vivienne and her dog virtually chased Eliot off...