Author Archives: Kat

A Rediscovered Novel:  “Everything in the Garden,” by Elizabeth North

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Elizabeth North

In 1979, a small press, Academy Chicago Limited, began to reissue the novels of the English writer, Elizabeth North.  One of the books was Everything in the Garden, which I reread with pleasure and surprise recently:  why is North so little-known here?

This is the kind of book I love, a witty social novel in the vein of Alice Thomas Ellis and Stanley Middleton.  North’s observations of life in a country town are mordant and often funny.  The narrative is a bit edgy, because the protagonist, Joan, can be moody and cranky.

Set in the 1950s in a country town in Dorset, the novel begins with a description of the idyllic countryside. Joan, a secretary for an architectural firm, and her boyfriend, Richard, an articled clerk at a solicitor’s office, are bicycling  home from work holding hands. 

North emphasizes the beauty of the scene.

You could not help but think it was the prettiest place to be…They rode along holding hands because the traffic was so sparse. You could hear a tractor or a country bus a mile away….  The lanes smelt all the sweeter for the diesel fumes.

In this mellow setting for love, the couple have sex outdoors, never in the same place twice. Both are sexually satisfied:  24-year-old Richard assumes they will marry someday, but Joan is unsure.    She loves Richard in a way, but has romantic fantasies.

Living at home with their respective parents, the two are immature and a little spoiled.  Sometimes they discuss moving to a city, as their older siblings did, but it is so comfortable here. Yet Joan’s father, the Colonel, wants to get her off his hands:  he wants her to move out. 

Richard and Joan are literally in Paradise in the lush gardens, where Joan picks fresh strawberries to give to Richard’s mother when she is invited to dinner. There is a slight contretemps between the two women about whether they need to be washed or not. Joan says no, but Mrs. Pridaux prevails.

North is expert in her dissection of the nature of fantasies. Though Joan had stellar marks on exams, she squanders her talents in the typing pool. She is an asset at the office:  she corrects her boss’s wording in letters and has a photographic memory for numbers. But out of the office she dreams about fashion:  she wants to look like Mitzi Gaynor in South Pacific,  singing about how she’s “gonna wash that man right out of her hair.”  She wants a short curly hair-style and perky breasts like Mitzi’ Gaynor’s, but realizes the latter especially would be difficult to achieve.  On payday, she spends four pounds of her five-pound salary on stylish red shorts to wear at a tennis party. Joan doesn’t play tennis, but her parents insist on throwing a tennis party for her.

The third main character, Ben Hodges, is in his thirties, the junior partner at the architectural firm.  He has a wife, two children, and a mortgage, and is faintly bored by his home life.  He is sorry for his wife Win, taking care of the children all day, but doesn’t see what he can do about it.  And when they visit friends for a weekend, he happily flirts with Liz, a former model.

When he is bored at work, he makes nonsensical lists of women he would like to have  sex with and where they might have it. This, by the way, might be inappropriate in our era, but North clearly understands men’s fantasies.

Here is part of his fantasy list:

Mrs. Adderley, twice in orchard with Mr. Adderley watching from the wheelchair.

Joan Falconer daily at ten on office floor.

Liz endlessly and everywhere.

His previous secretary, once in the car and three times in her flat.

Despite the list, Ben is sweet and satiric, and does not harass the women. His poor wife, Win, stuck at home, is jealous and suspicious.  Joan has a pretty good idea what is going on, between the letters marked PRIVATE! and a woman who calls and will not leave her name if Ben is out, and Win’s frantic phone calls asking where Ben is.

By the end, one marriage plot is achieved, rather like a satiric modern Jane Austen novel, but there is not a happy ending for everyone. The characters who have a chance seize the day, and as for the others… we are sorry for them.

Why We Want to Go Back to the ’70s: The Bookstores!

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If we could go back in time, we would return to the 1970s, when everyone watched The Forsyte Saga on PBS,  browsed The Whole Earth Catalogue, read Colette and Middlemarch,  and gossiped about John Cheever sightings during his semester as a visiting professor.

Glen and Harry Epstein at Epsteins’ Booka

My most vivid memories are of the many, many bookstores of that time, which seemed to line the streets of downtown America.  Not a day went by when I didn’t browse at a bookstore. 

And here is a short history of  four favorite bookstores of the ‘70s. 

Alandoni’s, Iowa City.  This tiny bookshop was kind of a dive, located in a run-down neighborhood south of downtown. Still, its small selection of books was stunning.  The owner lived in the store, which must have been trying, but at least he had money to eat on the days I shopped there.  I was thrilled to buy an inexpensive vintage ‘50s Classics Club hardcover set of Dickens, which included titles that were then difficult to find, like Barnaby Rudge and Martin Chuzzlewit.  I later gave away the Classics Club editions, because I thought I needed editions with notes.   I wish I had held on to both!

Later, Jim Mulac, a poet, bought the bookstore and renamed it Jim’s Books.  He, too, lived at the store.  Jim was affable, easy to talk to, and hosted poetry readings on Friday nights. I am not sure how long his bookstore survived.

There was much indignation a few years ago when the Iowa City Council decided to tear down the building, which protesters said was a part of Iowa City’s literary history.  Well, the building was a dive even in the ‘70s, so I am puzzled about their fervor.    It would have been far better if the City Council had preserved .. well, read ahead and you shall learn.

Epstein’s, Iowa City.  This was the iconic Iowa City bookstore in the ‘70s.  The Epstein brothers were literary hipsters who socialized with local writers and hosted  poetry and fiction readings, while their wives, if I recall correctly, took care of the bills, invoices, and paper work.  Epstein’s had a unique hip ambiance that no subsequent Iowa City bookstores ever achieved,  but, alas!  urban renewal drove them out of business.  One does wish the City Council had given them a rent break on the ugly temporary building they had to move into. The rent on the temporary was higher, too high for the Epstein brothers, and so a great bookstore was lost.

Caveat Emptor at its current location.

Caveat Emptor, Bloomington, Indiana.   Located on a shady street across the street from the university campus, this bookstore occupied two connected houses –  and that meant thousands of rare and used books.  Johannes, who manned the desk, meticulously examined each book before he bought it,  and stocked only books in excellent condition. I was grateful to find reference books and dictionaries at affordable prices – which saved me hundreds of trips to the library.  The shop has been bought and sold a few times but survives in a different building downtown.

Christopher’s, Bloomington, IN.  Christopher, the dashing, restless owner, strode around town in tall boots and a cloak.  In memory, at least, he resembled the hero of a Regency romance.  It was at his store that I discovered the Nobel-winner Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter, a  trilogy set in medieval Norway, one of my favorite books, and a stunning analysis ofthe stages of a woman’s life. 

I have no idea what happened to Christopher’s, but it is long gone.

I feel an affection for the bookstores of that time. There are, alas, so few bookstores left.

What I’m Reading:  “Heaven and Hardpan Farm,” by Nancy Hale

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Nancy Hale

Nancy Hale’s Heaven and Hardpan Farm, a novel consisting of six connected short stories published in The New Yorker in the 1950s, is far from her best work. These feather-light stories sketch the lives of a small group of neurotic ladies at a fancy sanatorium, Hardpan Farm.  These women do not have much wrong with them:   the psychiatrist divides them into extraverts [sic] and introverts who either follow the latest health fads or lie in bed sulking and snapping at one another.  The extraverts find the introverts tedious, and vice versa.  But all are obsessed with the health of The Doctor, their elderly psychiatrist. They think he works too hard.

 

Christmas is a strange time at Hardpan Farm.  Miss Hughes wonders if she made a mistake by turning down her brother Bernard’s invitation to spend Christmas with him at the rectory.  Others, too, have doubts about their plans. But the focus of this particular day in the Christmas season is the suspense of waiting  for The Doctor to return from the city in a blizzard.

The following passage illustrates a blizzardy, cozy sense of fun.

The blizzard had raged since morning of the day before.  Only in the early afternoon had it begun petering down from a still-leaden sky to light upon huge drifts.  Hardpan Farm lay under its counterpane of white looking like the most ideal greeting card, but underneath its roof was pent an atmosphere highly charged with doubt, suspicion, and anxiety.  Although the ladies within were busying themselves with preparations for Christmas, just over a week away, and making it a point to waft holiday thoughts toward their loved ones at home, their minds were uncontrollably taken up with a present, momentous concern.  The Doctor had a cold.

This out-of-print light novel  is uncharacteristic of Nancy Hale’s excellence and complexity. I recommend her Selected Stories and her 1942 novel, The Prodigal Women, which have been reissued by Library of America. The simplicity and silliness of Heaven and Hardpan Farm is slightly awkward. She is not naturally a silly writer.

Yet this book is a cozy read, as the extraverts battle the introverts and vice versa.

A Modern German Classic: “All for Nothing” by Walter Kempowski

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The German writer Walter Kempowski’s last novel, All for Nothing, is partly autobiographical, partly based based on his compilation of letters, diaries, and memoirs of World War II experiences.  During World War II, the rebellious Kempowski was forced to join Hitler’s Youth, and in 1948 he was accused of espionage and served eight years in prison.

Set in 1945, All for Nothing focuses on a single family, the von Globigs, who live on Georgenhof, a small estate in East Prussia.  In 1945, the Russians have invaded East Prussia and the German army is in retreat, but the von Globigs ignore the distant sound of gun fire and bombs falling. It seems impossible that the war will affect them, or that they will be forced to leave.. The refugees on the road seem to be people of a different species.

Only one family member understands the perils of the Second World War. Eberhard, the head of the household, is a special officer in the German army, stationed in Italy. Thus far he is safe, but his family is not:  he warns them to leave. 

The von Globigs are curiously anachronistic.  Home is everything to them, and, indeed, this novel is about the meaning of home, and what it means when home is destroyed. Eberhard’s lovely, languid wife, Katharina, spends her days locked up in her comfortable apartment in the manor house reading novels: she locks the door so no one will disturb her. Peter, her bright, quiet 12-year-old son, studies with a knowledgeable but strange tutor and daydreams about how grand Georgenhof must appear to the refugees.  And Auntie, a frugal housekeeper, is a savvy wheeler-dealer at the markets, bargaining and hustling. She is also an ardent Nazi who considers turning in traitors. 

It is difficult to ignore the stream of refugees. Sometimes the von Globigs are asked to put someone up for the night. A talented singer and a one-armed pianist perform for them at home, and the music has a powerful impact, stimulating their imagination and making them more tolerant.    But it is almost too late to leave by the time Katharina performs an act of unexpected bravery and is arrested.  That is the first step of the destruction of the family.

Throughout the novel, Kempowski repeats the phrase, “All for nothing.”  This emphasizes the miserable knowledge that the personality of an individual and an entire culture can be wiped out in a matter of weeks. 

And at the end of the novel, Peter is  (probably) saved by the generous act of a a former neighbor. 

“Was everything all right now?”

And that is the poignant last line. 

I’m Crying!  Songs Made Me Do It

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‘Speech’—is a prank of Parliament—
‘Tears’—is a trick of the nerve—
But the Heart with the heaviest freight on—
Doesn’t—always—move —  - Emily Dickinson

“I’m crying, crying, crying”- The Animals

“Only love can break your heart.” – Neil Young

I learned the art of crying from WLS.  Hours of listening to the radio, waiting for the new Al Stewart or Elton John. Larry Lujack, DJ, introduced us to the trope of male crying in rock songs, though he never said “trope of male crying.”  He played back-to-back renditions of crying songs:  Neil Young:  “Only Love Can Break Your Heart.” The Band: “Crying Heart Blues.”  The Animals:  “I’m Crying.”

We believed instinctively that “only love can break your heart.”

Crying is so feminine, isn’t it? And no wonder:  we spent one-eighth or possibly one-fourth of our girlhoods listening to sad love songs. So much crying goes on in those songs.  I mean, so much.

We were hazy on the subject of men’s tears.  Did they cry?  But we were experts on feminine tears, and were fans of women’s crying songs, even though they encouraged our lovesick sighs, moans, and weeping.

 I must have played Linda Ronstadt’s “The Tracks of My Tears” a thousand  times during a tumultuous relationship.   Bonnie Raitt’s “Love Has No Pride”  got even more play.  I wish I had had a little more pride. 

And I wish I had read more Emily Dickinson.  She was wry and distanced: tears were “a trick of the nerve.“ 

We cried over boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, husbands, ex-husbands, boring jobs, wishing we had kept the boring jobs, actually revising a an article on our wedding day (stopped at a print shop to send it by fax ),  bad books, leaky roofs, winter…

A  friend at book club recommended  a book on crying, The Crying Book.  The group decided against it – – “We’re already experts!” –  but we had a fascinating discussion about crying.   One friend had  a Tiny Tears doll:  you gave it its water bottle and it cried. What were they thinking? 

As young women we often cried. We burst into tears at work, but did not admit we were getting a divorce:  we said we had heartburn or invented the death of an imaginary friend.  We also tried different cures for crying: burning a boyfriend’s letters, throwing out your wedding pictures (Mom did that), pawning your ring, drinking unpotable cocktails from 195os recipes, reading Agatha Christie or Georgette Heyer, and singing crying songs.

Here is a lost beauty tip from the past for crying women: “Place cucumber slices on eyes and slather on makeup.” -Columnist at women’s magazine.

The tracks of my tears have furrowed the lines on my face. I have instituted a Zero Tears policy. Sometimes it works.

Nonetheless, carpe diem.  

You can always cry later.

Mikhail Bulgakov’s “A Country Doctor’s Notebook” & A Possible TBR

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This year I am reading Mikhail Bulgakov’s early novels and stories. One of my favorites is A Country Doctor’s Notebook, a charming, posthumously-published collection of autobiographical short stories chronicling his 18 months as a country doctor.  

Unlike his satiric masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, this quiet little book introduces Bulgakov’s serious side. The protagonist, a young, sardonic doctor, has a wry sense of humor, but is racked with self-doubt and loneliness.  After qualifying as a doctor in Kiev in 1916, he was drafted to a remote country practice and the sole doctor of a 40-bed hospital.

Bulgakov deftly captures the country doctor’s loneliness and isolation.  He misses Kiev: in this tiny hamlet, there are no shops, theaters, street lights, or electricity.  The weather is glum, cold, and generally terrible.And he is awakened in the middle of the night during a blizzard to drive miles in a horse-drawn buggy to treat a patient.

Although his knowledge of medicine is textbook-perfect, the 25-year-old doctor is hampered by inexperience.  Once he dashes back to his room to consult a reference book, and then recovers his near-photographic memory of a technique used during a difficult delivery. When  a farmer brings in his beautiful daughter with her legs mangled from falling into a flax brake, he feels he is looking at a living corpse. The midwife whispers, “What’s the point of smashing her up anymore?  She’ll die any minute now… you won’t save her.” The doctor, too  expects her to die in surgery, but she survives the amputation of both legs.  Months later, she walks in on crutches with her father to thank him and give the doctor the gift of an embroidered towel. 

Throughout the book, he has many touching, often humorous encounters with country folk.  He is astonished when a patient decides to take all of his medicine at one time, thinking it will be more efficient that way.  The doctor treats many cases of siphylis, whole families at a time, even children  and is grieved when a patient has left it too late to recover.  Eventually, he decides to leave the practice to become a venereologist in Kiev.  A few years later, Bulgakov gave up medicine to be a writer.

This book is touching, though never sentimental.  In some ways I prefer Bulgakov’s gruff, sardonic realism to his satiric brilliance.  Of course, my favorite of his books is The White Guard, a kind of miniature War and Peace set during the Russian revolution.  It has the perfect balance of gravity and humor.

THE POSSIBLE TBR:  TEN BOOKS I MIGHT READ IN 2024

I was given a planner for Christmas,  so I must plan.  Here are ten books I might read in 2024.

1.  Little, Big, by John Crowley. I am a fan of Crowley’s Aegypt trilogy, but have never read his famous novel, Little, Big, which won the World Fantasy Award.  The jacket copy says:  “This is the saga of the Drinkwater family, the sparkling inhabitants of Edgewood, and the ever-changing house that sits on the border between what we know is real and what we’ve always hoped is real.” 

I rather think I live on that border!

2.  Closely Watched Trains, by Bohumil Hrabal.  I enjoyed Hrabal’s bizarre short novel, Dancing Lessons for the Advance in Age, which I read on vacation and promptly forgot. Closely Watched Trains is said to be a classic, and the 1966 film is is famous. 

3.  The Sojourner, by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.  Last year I read The Yearling, which won the Pulitzer Prize.  It is one of those sad animal books, beautifully-written but weepy. The Sojourner sounds fascinating, a historical novel that follows the life of a farmer, Ase, from the 1860s to the beginning of World War II. Throughout his life, he tries to find his adventurous brother, Ben, who left the farm to travel and never returned.

4.  Christopher and His Kind, by Christopher Isherwood.  The jacket copy says:  “He describes his life in gay  Berlin of the 1930s and his struggle to save his companion…from the Nazis.”  I once wrote a paper on this exquisitely-written memoir. 

5.  The Death of a Nobody by Jules Romains.  According to the jacket copy, this is not the story of a man, but of an event.  The death of Jacques Godard inspires brief passing memories in the minds of the porter, his fellow lodgers, and others who casually knew him.

6. The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard.   Perhaps I will read a  few of stories in this enormous anthology, which I bought years ago.  However, I read Ballard’s The Drowned World and Drought last year and was not impressed. In fact, they were abysmally bad.

7.  Heaven and Hardpan Farm by Nancy Hale.  Library of America has reissued Nancy Hale’s short stories and her novel, The Prodigal Women.  I find her work uneven, but this is one of her later novels, and perhaps I’ll give it a try.. 

8.  Women in the Wall by Julia O’Faolain.  I have a Virago edition of this historical novel, set in Gaul in the Dark Ages. 

9.  Diary of a Pilgrimage by Jerome K. Jerome.  By the author of  Three Men in a Boat.

10.  Civil War Stories by Ambrose Bierce.  Well, this is a classic, isn’t it?  I’m not inspired, but it is a very slim volume of stories.

What’s on your TBR this year?  Or your MTBR (Maybe TBR)?

The Return of the Gothic:  Le Fanu’s “Wylder’s Hand”

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J. Sheridan Le Fanu has fallen out of fashion. 

One wonders:  how can this superb Gothic writer be overlooked? 

Victorian novel fans are rather like the Maenads, celebrating Dickens instead of Bacchus at secret rites. They adore sensation novelists like Wilkie Collins and Mary Braddon but Le Fanu has fallen into a ravine that devours neglected writers.

J. Sheridan Le Fanu

And yet Le Fanu remains a secret superstar.  In 2022 I lauded The Rose and the Key as my favorite book of all time. Was that rash?  This year it is his intriguing Gothic,  Wylder’s Hand, published in 1864, the same year as his famous novel, Uncle Silas. 

Wylder’s Hand, a chilling Gothic mystery, revolves around the disappearance of Mark Wylder.  For hundreds of years, the Wylders, the Brandons, and the Lakes, have quarreled about who owns the huge estate.  It passes from feuding family to feuding family, and Mark has just become the heir.  He and his beautiful, statuesque, silent cousin, Dorcas Brandon, who owns Brandon House, have decided on a marriage of convenience to keep the entire estate together. 

The marriage never takes place.

Chapters III and IV are called, respectively, “Our Dinner Party at Brandon” and “In Which We Go to the Dining Room and the Party Breaks Up.”  The narrator, an outsider, does not know the family well, but his dispassionate voice as he introduces the characters and situation makes the narrative all the more mysterious.  Fragments are missing; when will we find out what happened?  Just when you’ve got it figured out, everything changes.

Conspicuous at the party are  two attractive siblings,  the vivacious, impoverished Rachel Lake, who lives alone on a tiny income in a tiny house,  and her glib, unscrupulous brother, Stanley, who schemes to marry Dorcas.

Mark disappears, and we don’t know why.   We know that Stanley visits Rachel late at night and persuades her to go on a mysterious journey.  But we don’t know the details.  Has Mark bargained to spend a night with her in exchange for keeping silent about Stanley’s vices and troubles?  Is Mark is in a madhouse? In Mark’s absence, Stanley persuades Dorcas to marry him. 

Rachel is by far the strongest character, doing all she can to make peace and to save Mark’s brother, William, the vicar, from a scheming lawyer.

I have read somewhere – perhaps in a detective story – that the most common causes of murder are money and love.  This is certainly true in this spellbinding novel, a Gothic mystery with elements of the supernatural.

Three Books I’ll (Probably) Never Read

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Some books never make the  TBR, though I have owned them for years. I shiver with apprehension every time I look at them, and yet I cannot give them away because they might make me wittier or thinner, or provide escape reading in February, the month devoted to The Green Hat and Terry Pratchett.   

Kathy Acker’s Don  Quixote was published in 1986. Neither my spouse nor I remember buying it. It’s as though it grew from the shelf like one of the pods in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  Though I have tried to read it several times, I am repulsed by her profane, potty-mouthed, post-modern  prose. And yet reading it would make me  hip and fabulous, because Acker is the Patti Smith, or is it the William Burroughs? of “punk” literature. 

Acker was relentlessly hip, and her writing relentlessly dull.  In this boisterous little novel, a female Don Quixote has an abortion and then travels with dogs across America and London, meditating on the insane cultures.  There is  one amusing bit:  Quixote believes that Prince should be the president of the United States, because “all the presidents since World War II have been stupid anyway.”  He would have been better at show biz than Reagan, an actor.

Acker’s prose is awkward.  “Don Quixote decided the only thing was to be happy.  Since the only reason she went out of the house was to fuck, she decided that to be happy’s to fuck.”

But isn’t that clumsy writing? 

Edna Ferber is an underrated, once popular, writer who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1924 for her novel, So Big, a page-turner about the struggles of a successful woman farmer and her worthless son.  Not surprisingly, Ferber never attained the kudos of comparable male Pulitzer winners, like Sinclair Lewis and  Booth Tarkington. 

I discovered Ferber’s historical novels when I found a Ferber omnibus at a sale.  She reminds me slightly of Willa Cather, and I’m surprised Ferber is not in the women’s sub-canon, if not the traditional academic canon.  I enjoyed her novel Showboat, which was made into a Broadway musical and movie. And her melodramatic, fascinating novel, Giant, which was adapted as movie starring Elizabeth Taylor, traces the drama and dysfunction of an unhappy, rich oil family in Texas. 

But there is one Ferber’s novel I cannot read, Cimmaron.

Cimmaron is, in a way, a Western, set during the Oklahoma Gold Rush. I read 125 pages, but the dreary landscape undid me In every scene, Oklahoma is dry and dusty, or muddy and dirty, and if I remember correctly, there are boards instead of sidewalks. 

It is culture shock for Sabra, a young woman from a Southern family, who follows her husband, Yancey, a lawyer, into the wilds, because he wants the free land: there is “a land rush.”  Sabra has the impossible task of turning of shack into a home, while Yancey, a lawyer, has to prove himself to their rough neighbors.  And everybody has a gun. Nobody in Oklahoma in Cimmaron ever thought of gun control. 

Depressing, yes? But will I finish Cimmaron in 2024?

It does feel like the time of year when I should read a historical novel.

Richard Garnett’s biography, Constance Garnett: A Heroic Life, is, in many ways, an appealing book. Fans of Russian literature will be curious about Constance Garnett, the famous early translator of Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky.

Her grandson, Richard Garnett, has written a thorough, if plodding, biography, with fascinating source material, including letters from Chekhov and Tolstoy.

It’s the size of the pages I don’t like,  This attractive paperback has oversized pages crammed with print.  Mjnd you, it’s not the size of the print so much as the size of the pages. But I might finish this in the summer, when the natural light is brighter, and it will seem more readable..

Do you hang on to books you positively dislike or will never read? Do tell.

Starbuck and Feline Rights:  A Trip to the Pound

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Starbuck with her arm around Louisa May.

Imagine yourself at the pound in the twentieth century. Hundreds of dogs and cats sit in cages waiting to be adopted.  This is not a no-kill shelter:  this large city, known to truckers as The Big Dirty, is basic in its approach to unwanted animals.  You walk past rows of cages.  The dogs and cats are frantic, terrified, bewildered, listless, or have given up.  They whimper or wag their tails.  They bark or meow.  They stick their paws through the wire.  They can smell death; they can smell the euthanized animals burning in the incinerator behind the building. 

I try not to think about the incinerators, about the animals smelling burning flesh.  The incinerators are monitored by the EPA and state air pollution agencies, because they generate  toxic emissions, as do the incinerators at human crematories.  Bodies are mostly  water, but the gas-fueled incinerators emit carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and oxide nitrogen.  

An anxious employee told me a horror story that haunts me.  She was traumatized and going mad, or she wouldn’t have told a stranger. Someone had dropped off a litter of kittens stuffed in a paper sack. These poor terrified mutilated kittens had to be euthanized. I gave her a pack of kleenex from my purse.

I took a deep breath. I did not share the sad story with my husband, because this was supposed to be a happy day.

And at that moment, a tiny black-and-white kitten demanded our attention. She climbed up the wire cage door, stuck to it with her claws, and meowed plaintively. 

She was the one.

We called her Starbuck.  She relaxed as soon as we left the building.  She purred in my lap in the car.  A car was a better living space than a cage.  And soon we were at home.  Wow, she loved running around that space.

Starbuck was so small that she had to be fed tiny morsels by hand for the first few weeks.  When she caught a cold, I sat with her in the bathroom and ran the shower so the steam would clear up her sinuses. And perhaps because I gave her so much attention, she became not only a good friend to cats and humans but a social worker and feline rights activist.  

A few years later, we adopted a kitten named Louisa May.  Starbuck washed her, cuddled with her, and taught her how to use the litter box. 

Starbuck and Louisa May were inseparable. One of their favorite activities was breaking into the attic. They would claw at the carpet under the door for hours, having figured out by kitty engineering or instinct that the door might open if they dug their claws in the right spot for long enough. One day I found the door open and the two cats happily  burrowing in boxes of books.  Louisa May left tiny claw tears on the cover of a Willa Cather book. I was so impressed with their break-in that I couldn’t stop laughing.

Starbuck also became a social worker.  When our oldest cat, Martian, who really was ancient, began to spend most of her time dozing in the Barcalounger, she was bullied at meals.  Emma was a feline rights activist:  she escorted Martian to the food bowls and batted away the bully while Martian ate.

Nowadays, in our small city, a no-kill shelter seems to have taken over the work of the pound.  And what a good thing that is! We loved our cats from the pound, but I am so happy that the animals now have a better chance of finding a good home. There are many adult rescue cats, as well as kittens. And the adult cats often are “buddy cats,” who come from the same home and cannot be separated.

An automatic family!

Lonely Insomniac: Why Aren’t All Our Cats Named Chloe?

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I lived at the square in a cozy railroad apartment. At the time, I was an insomniac who devoted hours to studying classics.  I translated the Gettysburg Adress into Greek in the style of Lysias,  a whimsical task assigned by my Greek Composition professor.  Who thought these things up, I wondered?  It was in the tradition of the nineteenth-century gentleman reading classics at Oxford or Harvard.   I would never become  a nineteenth-century gentleman, but I might well be the reincarnation of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who also translated Greek.

But what to do about the loneliness?  There I was, stuck in a carrel at the library, consulting reference books, dictionaries, classical journals, re-translating Lysias’s speeches, and skimming a biography of Abraham Lincoln (that was unnecessary). Sometimes I dragged my books down to the cafeteria for a snack and coffee.  It was the refuge of raggedy, wild-eyed, incoherent students who had not slept in days and barely remembered their names.  There should have been a sign above the coffee pot:  WE NEVER SLEEP.

And then it happened: someone was giving away free Siamese kittens at the market.  She was wild, but it was love at first sight. Here’s what no one told me:  Chloe knew Greek.

It was no longer necessary to live in the library. Chloe helped me:  she batted at my Bic pen when I wrote in a spiral notebook,  guiding me to refine my prose.  She sat in the dictionary when I tried to look up kakodaimon (“evil genius”).

“Chloe, don’t you want to look up kakodaimon?”

She did not.  And so I affectionately called her Kakodaimon if she left footprints in the cornbread, ripped the curtains while speedily climbing them as if they were Mount Everest, or knocked over the Christmas tree.

Chloe was not thrilled when we adopted other cats.  One day she led them through the back of cupboard to a crawl space between the floors.  One of the cats got lost.  We called her name repeatedly to guide her back through the portal.

I wonder why we didn’t name any of our later cats Chloe. Some people do that. If their dog is Fluffy, all their later dogs are called Fluffy.

But we have never had another Siamese. And it wouldn’t be right to call a calico or tuxedo cat Chloe. 

And they probably wouldn’t answer to it anyway.