By Stuart Mitchner

In the unlikely event that the New York Times Book Review or anyone else ever asks me what books are on my night stand, the tome that’s been there for years waiting for me to write about it is Carl Van Vechten’s The Tiger in the House: A Cultural History of the Cat (Knopf 1920), which has been called “the best single treatise on the cat” and “a treasure house of literary gossip.” Like so many of my books, this one, the 1936 edition, has passed through the secondhand bookstores of Manhattan and therefore embodies three of my favorite things — cats, used bookstores, and New York City.

Driving to the city last week with Shostakovich’s 8th Symphony on the stereo (speaking of favorite things), I was planning some Christmas shopping for my son around a visit to Keetah, the cat on the back cover of Shop Cats of New York (Harper Design 2016). According to cat blogger Tamar Arslanian’s commentary, customers at Bleecker Street Records (“one of the last old-school record stores in New York City”) make a point of paying their respects to the gray female cat with the white heart-shaped patch on her chest. Another of Andrew Marttila’s photographs shows Keetah lounging atop bins of blues LPs in “the relative solitude of her basement lair where she retreats for peace and quiet among the vintage vinyl.”

One of the photographs shows Keetah sitting on the shoulder of the shop’s owner, who inherited her along with “her now deceased brother” from another store, because, “for whatever undisclosed reasons,” they “could no longer stay where they were.”

That’s a roundabout way of saying the other store closed. It’s the eternal New York story, the city’s a work in progress, and always will be.

Composed in a Hen House

I had to turn off Shostakovich going through the Holland Tunnel, no way to keep to the 35 mph limit with the third movement charging full-tilt toward glory. What the composer himself termed “a very forceful, dynamic march” has been my most reliable energy source for weeks. Whenever the pace of life seems to drag, whenever the weight of 24-7 Trump news pulls me down, I hop aboard the third movement and imagine Charlie Mingus hearing it in the late 1940s and thinking, “This is what it’s all about.” In a 1943 interview quoted in Laurel Fay’s biography, Shostakovich says the symphony’s “philosophical conception” is that “life is beautiful” and “everything that is dark and gloomy will rot away, vanish, and the beautiful will triumph.” It’s an extraordinary statement for a Russian to make in 1943, given the wages of war, millions dead, mass starvation, the cities uninhabitable, thus Shostakovich’s retreat to the country, where he composed the second and third movements in a converted hen house on a poultry farm.

As someone who rates cats near the top among the things that make life beautiful, I figured Shostakovich had one close at hand in the hen house, and in fact there’s a photograph from 1925 online showing him with a tabby in his lap. He was only 19 when the picture was taken, already working on his first symphony and paying the rent by playing piano accompaniment for silent films in St. Petersburg cinemas like the Picadilly and the Splendid Palace.

Drifting Off to Dreamland

Like any large city with lots of nooks and crannies and hidden secrets, The Tiger in the House is there to be explored, all 367 pages, which is what makes it an ideal bedside book. There are chapters on cat haters, the cat and the occult, the cat in the theatre, in music, in art, in fiction. Say you’re yawning, ready to nod off, and you have time only for some drowsy musing on Henry James’s remark that “he rubbed himself against the Seine-front in Paris ‘for endearment and consecration, as a cat invokes the friction of a protective piece of furniture.’” There’s a thought to dream on, the Master in his 20s marking his spot and purring, drugged on Parisian catnip. In the very next sentence George Eliot is wondering “Who can tell what just criticisms the cat may be passing on us beings of wider speculation?” She could be writing about our ample tuxedo Nora, who is sleeping on the same bed with my wife and me and her tuxedo brother Nick. When Nora looks at me and mews her silent mew, no criticisms are involved, just or otherwise, only feline anticipation of my talent for stroking her belly and reading to her about Kitty, a black and white beauty from Shop Cats of New York who hangs out at Sal Anthony’s Movement Salon in Union Square.

One nightmare passage from Van Vechten’s book not recommended for bedtime reading claims that Johannes Brahms was “an avowed enemy of the feline tribe” who silenced cats “infesting the backyards of Vienna” with a special bow and arrow “used in Bohemia to slay sparrows.” After “spearing the poor brutes” and reeling them into his room like “a trout fisher,” he allegedly “listened to the expiring groans of his victims” and transcribed their “piteous utterances” into chamber music.

The source of this gruesome tale, however, is Brahms’s arch rival Richard Wagner, who has been called out for perpetuating the myth by the various music scholars who have debunked it.

Some Cats I’ve Known

In my researches into the legend of Brahms as a serial killer of Viennese felines I ran across Lilian Jackson Braun’s The Cat Who Played Brahms. While I haven’t read any of the best-selling Cat Who series, the fact that the one playing Brahms is a Siamese got my attention because the first cats I ever lived with were Kiloo and Zuma, the two Siamese my father bought from Madame Manski, who sang the role of Isolde in the Vienna State Opera production of Tristan.

I still have the pencil portrait of our Siamese that I made when I was six, complete with claw marks from the stray who attacked it some 30 years later. I also have near at hand a small framed photograph of my father with Kiloo in his lap. Kiloo and Zuma spent most of their time out of our laps tearing up the furniture and keening like banshees whenever anyone came near the front door of the apartment. When the landlady who lived below us had had enough of the howling, we had to move, which meant giving up the cats because pets were not permitted in graduate student housing. Rules or no rules, I became attached to a female stray, took her in, named her Horntense, and cried when she died.

After we moved to “a real house” a sociable marmalade named Sam came along, soon to be joined by a calico we automatically called Penrod, thanks to fond memories of the characters created by Princeton grad Booth Tarkington.

The Best Cat Ever

The best cat ever was born in my study within arm’s reach of my desk. I was the first to see him poking his nose over the makeshift bed where his mother Tess had already produced four kittens. We thought that was it. Like her Thomas Hardy namesake, Tess had seen a novel’s worth of adversity by the time she showed up at our back door, pregnant, and not much more than a kitten herself. Her fifth born, the tuxedo runt of the litter, was the first to walk, to prance, to dance. We named him Dizzy out of affection for a lovable mutt who had been named for Dizzy Gillespie. It made sense because our Dizzy had a lot of canine in him, a Scots terrier’s jaunty posture, and a way of cocking his head that made you laugh with love, as did the way he’d herd you into bed and curl up beside you, soon snoring and snurfling in his dreams like an old hound. By day, he loved the outdoors, moving through his life with the cool ambiance that made “cat” the word of choice for jazz musicians.

Born when Saddam invaded Kuwait, he died a month after Bush invaded Iraq. He was almost 13 when he picked up an infection. I was with him all through the last night, he in his fast-panting agony, shaken by the force flaying him inside, hurling him forward, his whole body heaving with it hour after hour while I whispered pointless words of encouragement, saying everything twice, aware that this was something we did with all our cats: as if saying it once wasn’t enough to get the point across, as if they could understand. I do the same thing with Nora, who has mellowed beautifully after a wild youth as a feline Nijinsky performing fantastic leaps and sliding down banisters, no time for lap sitting. While her brother Nick is vocal, her silent mew is described in The Tiger in the House, where it’s observed that “to signify their intentions” some cats “open their mouths but do not speak.”

“Mkgnao!”

I never got to meet Keetah, the gray female residing at Bleecker Street Records. As happens in New York, the store was gone when I got to the corner of Sixth and Bleecker; no surprise, a Starbucks had taken its place. New York below 14th Street is no longer the Mecca of secondhand record stores it was in the 1990s. I can still remember when 4th Avenue south of 14th was lined on both sides with secondhand book stores, a number of which had cats in residence.

Right now, I’m thinking of the Old York up the road in New Brunswick, my favorite used bookstore, the one I wrote a novel around. If you want to know what made the Old York special, think about Shostakovich composing great music in a converted henhouse. John Socia, the owner, possibly the nicest, most generous and unaffected person I ever met, had no room for cats because he had two dogs who could usually be found gnawing bones somewhere between, as I remember, the Philosophy and Science sections. This most unbookish of book dealer’s favorite book was James Joyce’s Ulysses, which he loved the way I love the St. Louis Cardinals. Among the most visible cats in literature is the one Leopold Bloom begins his day feeding:

“Mr. Bloom watched curiously, kindly, the lithe black form. Clean to see: the gloss of her sleek hide, the white button under the butt of her tail, the green flashing eyes. He bent down to her, his hands on his knees.

“—Milk for the pussens, he said.

“— Mkgnao! the cat cried.

———

The Friends of the Princeton Public Library, who are holding a one-day book sale this Sunday, December 17 from 1-6 p.m., need donations, as do the the people planning next spring’s Bryn Mawr Wellesley book sale. To find out more, visit princetonlibrary.org/booksales and bmandwbooks.com/donations