The Cats of Copenhagen by James Joyce (review)

“Mrkgnao!” (U 4.25)

A new children’s book by James Joyce! Seventy-one years after his death! Wow! This tops the recent Jimi Hendrix album, released only forty-two years after he died! Is this the start of a trend? Well, sort of. … Actually, the Hendrix material (called People, Hell, and Angels¹) is a full album of previously unheard rock-music tracks (some quite good), whereas The Cats of Copenhagen²—barely two hundred words extracted from an unpublished letter Joyce wrote to his grandson in 1936, spread over nineteen pages and accompanied by about a dozen or so drawings by a modern-day illustrator—leaves hardly any tracks of any kind (pun intended)—unless, that is, you are intrigued by some of the skullduggery associated with why and how this book surfaced and the intricacies of copyright law. In short, to quote Jimmy Doyle from “After the Race,” it seems that The Cats of Copenhagen was primarily published because there was “money to be made … pots of money” (D 45). Of course, that is likely true of the Hendrix album as well, but more on it anon.

The Cats of Copenhagen, unlike Joyce’s more substantial children’s story The Cat and the Devil (also letter-sourced),³ has hardly a story line and can be briefly summarized: Joyce, who is visiting Denmark, cannot send his grandson Stephen a Copenhagen cat because there are none: there are lots of fish and bicycles but no cats. Copenhagen’s policemen lie in bed all day smoking Danish cigars, drinking buttermilk, and reading telegrams, letters, and postcards delivered by young delivery boys dressed in red riding uniforms. Joyce suggests he will return someday to Copenhagen and bring a cat; he imagines cats staying in bed all day and smoking cigars but not drinking buttermilk—they only eat fish: end of story.

The text of The Cats of Copenhagen is set in an array of twentieth-century Italian and French fonts; some individual words have a mixture of such fonts. Casey Sorrow’s commissioned pen-and-ink drawings are of irregular (and sometimes sorrowful) quality. The images of Joyce and a cat-faced Nora are fair enough. Unfortunately, the myriad illustrations of cats to be found on these pages, in particular, leave much to be desired. More than one reader thinks the cats look like pigs; another says monkeys. The net effect of all this—a very thin story, confusing lettering, and poor drawings—is not likely to make The Cats of Copenhagen a children’s classic.

For the adult market, the jacket flap and preface to the text suggest that the story reflects an “anti-establishment” quality and “almost anarchic subtext” in Joyce’s writing. The publisher, Anastasia Herbert, has opined that the story expresses Joyce’s “somewhat absurdist” sense of humor, that it “champions the exercise of common sense, individuality and free will.”⁴ Elsewhere, Herbert is quoted as saying, “In this tiny text, we see Joyce commenting on fascism, even in its guise as communism, with the ‘red boys’ carrying out the orders of the Politburo.”⁵ Sure, in a letter to his four-year-old grandson … not bloody likely!

That said, even an abbreviated account of how this book came to be is a story in itself and may reveal more about the publisher than anything else. The letter involved in The Cats of Copenhagen had been in the possession of Giorgio, Joyce’s son and the father of Stephen, for whom the little story was written. It eventually passed to Hans Jahnke, Giorgio’s stepson by his second wife and Stephen’s stepbrother. In 2005, Jahnke donated the letter, with a cache of other Joyce material, to the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, on the condition that it be made available for viewing by the public and researchers. Jahnke died in 2011. The Foundation, a leading Joyce research center, honored Jahnke’s request, and access to the Joyce...