BEERBOHM
THE CAT WHO UPSTAGED BRITAIN’S FINEST THESPIANS
For centuries no self-respecting English theater—at least, none that wished to be free of vermin—could do without a cat. But besides hunting mice, these felines came to serve other functions. Actors considered them good luck charms, and their calming presence cured many a bout of stage fright. They grew so useful that even the most egotistical performers overlooked the fact that the cats occasionally wandered onstage during productions, upstaging their human associates.
No modern theater cat served as ably, as famously, or as long as Beerbohm, who handled vermin suppression duties at the Gielgud Theatre (formerly the Globe) in London’s West End from the 1970s to the early 1990s. The regal-looking tabby often picked certain actors to fawn over, and he wandered onto the boards at least once during the run of every show. Named after British stage veteran Herbert Beerbohm Tree, he worked in show business for twenty years before retiring to Kent to live with the company’s carpenter. He died in March 1995—a sad passing that was honored with a front-page obituary in the theater newspaper The Stage. His portrait still hangs in the Gielgud.
HODGE
THE CAT WHO HELPED WRITE A DICTIONARY
Many a famous poet or novelist has written under the languid gaze of a feline. But few such four-legged muses can match the grit and staying power of a black cat named Hodge. He provided companionship to lexicographer Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) as he single-handedly composed the first truly authoritative dictionary of the English language.
Johnson gave eleven years to the work, churning out definition after definition at his home at 17 Gough Square in London. As the great lexicographer labored at his desk, Hodge was often at his elbow, amusing and diverting his owner from what must have been an unimaginable grind. The project was finally completed in 1775. It won universal acclaim, became the literary world’s reference of choice for more than a century, and earned its author the nickname “Dictionary Johnson.”
However, the world knows about Hodge (and his master) not because of the dictionary, but because of a young Scotsman named James Boswell. Boswell befriended Johnson in 1763 and spent the next few decades following him around, scribbling down the sage’s comments and making no secret of his desire to write the great man’s biography. In 1799, he duly produced The Life of Samuel Johnson, considered the first truly well-rounded, sympathetic, modern biography. It made Johnson, who might have merited no more than a footnote in the history books, into an immortal literary character.
Boswell also turned Hodge into a famous literary cat, despite being pathologically afraid of him. “I never shall forget the indulgence with which he treated Hodge, his cat: for whom he himself used to go out and buy oysters, lest the servants having that trouble should take a dislike to the poor creature,” Boswell wrote in The Life of Johnson. “I am, unluckily, one of those who have an antipathy to a cat, so that I am uneasy when in the room with one; and I own, I frequently suffered a good deal from the presence of this same Hodge. I recollect him one day scrambling up Dr. Johnson’s breast, apparently with much satisfaction, while my friend smiling and half-whistling, rubbed down his back, and pulled him by the tail; and when I observed he was a fine cat, saying, ‘Why yes, Sir, but I have had cats whom I liked better than this’; and then as if perceiving Hodge to be out of countenance, adding, ‘but he is a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed.’ ”
Johnson supported his four-legged companion to the bitter end. Boswell notes how the great lexicographer, as his cat’s final hours approached, went off to purchase some valerian (a relative of catnip) to ease his suffering. Upon his death the poet Percival Stockdale wrote An Elegy on the Death of Dr Johnson’s Favourite Cat, which reads in part, “Who, by his master when caressed / Warmly his gratitude expressed / And never failed his thanks to purr / Whene’er he stroked his sable fur.”
Today, across the street from the building where Johnson composed his masterwork, stands a statue of Hodge perched atop a copy of his owner’s book. In his dictionary, Johnson defined cats in general as “a domestic animal that catches mice, commonly reckoned by naturalists the lowest order of the leonine species.” But it is his more gracious assessment of Hodge, as “a very fine cat indeed,” that adorns the statue of his literary soul mate.
CATTARINA
THE CAT WHO TOUCHED THE DARK HEART OF POE
During his short literary career, Edgar Allan Poe wrote great poems, penned some of the world’s most terrifying horror stories, and invented the detective novel. But his achievements brought him neither happiness nor material success. Quite the contrary. Before his death from alcohol abuse in 1849 at age forty, he suffered more than a lifetime’s worth of disappointment, rejection, and grief.
In 1842, his wife, Virginia, was diagnosed with tuberculosis. For the next five years, until her death in 1847, her health deteriorated. The couple’s poverty exacerbated her suffering. Poe, though intermittently employed at various magazines, was never well off. And his personal demons, chiefly his inability to stop drinking, brought turmoil to his home. His problem grew so severe that he feared he might actually hurt Virginia during one of his drunken fits.
Throughout these years the couple’s most devoted companion was a feline named Cattarina. The Poes, who didn’t stand on ceremony, sometimes called their tortoiseshell cat Kate (Poe himself was often referred to as “Eddie”). The cat would sit on her master’s shoulder as he wrote and would cuddle next to Virginia, sometimes providing the only warmth that their freezing cottage had to offer.
Poe never physically harmed his wife, who by all accounts he loved deeply. But the fear was always there, along with what must have been searing guilt over his inability to give her a better life. He shared those feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing in his story The Black Cat—a tale of unparalleled gruesomeness inspired in part by Cattarina’s devotion to Virginia and by Poe’s anxiety about his own dark side.
The story, written in 1842, tells the tale of a drunk who, in a fit of alcoholic rage, hangs his cat, who Poe describes as a “beautiful animal, entirely black, and sagacious to an astonishing degree.” Not long afterward he’s followed home by another feline that looks almost exactly like the one he killed—except for an unnerving ring of white fur around the creature’s neck.
The man’s wife takes an immediate liking to the newcomer, and they become inseparable. The man, however, comes to believe that his new pet wants to avenge his earlier crime. During yet another drunken rage he tries to kill it with an ax, only to murder his wife instead. He quickly walls up her body in the basement and is relieved to find that the cat has disappeared.
Later, he brazenly shows the basement to searchers sent to investigate his wife’s disappearance. But suddenly, a terrible wail erupts from behind the masonry. The wall is pulled down, revealing the dead woman with the black cat perched on her head, screeching. In his haste the man had sealed up the animal with his wife.
The story’s finale is one of the most unforgettable scenes in horror literature—and one of the most psychologically revealing. In the real world, Poe tried his best to care for his wife, and never gave so much as a dirty look to his dark muse, Cattarina. But it probably crossed his mind that this tortoiseshell feline served his wife better and more faithfully than he ever managed to. If so, then perhaps The Black Cat accomplished two things: It cast the fears and inadequacies of its author into sharp relief, and it honored the memory of the selfless Cattarina, whose literary incarnation has outlived both herself, her mistress, and her master.