Review: Beware the Cat by William Baldwin

 

In the spirit of the anonymous animal tales I read last summer, I read Beware the Cat,  a work written in 1553 (though not published till later because of its anti-Catholic sentiments) that some academics have argued as the first novel written in English. That does depend a lot on the working definition of a novel, but novel or not, it’s a fascinating and captivating work.

It starts with a later rhyming introduction, implying that the cat in the title refers to Cat-holics, and that they hide their sharp claws under their fluffy exteriors. This prepared me to read the book as anti-Catholic allegory, but it turns out the cats in the book actually have a different function and that we must beware them for a different reason. 

Then the dedication has the author say that he’s passing on a story told by a Gregor Streamer, and that he’s written it so accurately to the way it was told to him that the reader will “dout whether he speaketh or readeth”. (This book is written in the nonstandard spelling of the time but is not too difficult, certainly not Morte D’Arthur levels of difficult).

The story starts on the 28th of December 1552 and a group of men are having a sleepover around the house of the King’s Master of Revels, George Ferrers. This man really existed and the book includes a number of real people, fictional people and fictionalised versions of real people in one big stew - an interesting, almost meta-fictional element to this early piece of fiction. The lads of all had their first sleep, back in the days when sleep was split into two parts, and they spend the time before the next sleep in discussing whether animals, and cats in particular, have their own kind of intelligence.

There are stories about cats talking, of them hearing of the death of one ‘Grimalkin’ (a name often used for witches’ familiars) and even on taken revenge on her death. There’s a lot of talk of superstition, of Ireland, especially the gullibility of the Catholic Irish but members of the sleepover really attest they heard stories of witches and talking cats from unimpeachable sources. There’s talk about witches being able to inhabit cats nine times, hence the cat having nine lives. Other talk about people who swap between being wolves and humans every other seven years, and talk of cats eating people alive and of other people roasting cats.

Streamer, a fictional character, says he has the final word on cat intelligence and he will tell the story on the proviso that nobody interrupts him. He says how he was staying with John Day a (real) Tudor printer who had premises near Aldgate. There’s a creepy, almost gothic-tale build up of the place as the gate has the preserved torsos of traitors, a practice he declares as against Biblical law. While he is there he is kept awake by the yowling of cats and he creeps into an empty room to watch them.

What he sees looks like a law court, with a grave, judge cat and a hyperactive cat for the defence. A roof tile falls and disturbs this court, at which Streamer “whip’t into” his room because he’s worried the cats might think he threw it at them and come after him. He becomes obsessed with divining what the cats are saying to each other and he gets a book by (real writer) Albertus Magnus so he can create a means to understand them.

How he creates his mixture is my favourite part of the book, it’s ludicrous and gory and ridiculous. He goes into St John’s Wood, which is till a wood at this point, to get a dead fox, a dead kite and various other dead animals. He upsets some hunters by mentioning hedgehogs, because apparently they are the result of witches - a superstition I’d never heard before. As he does these things he does them with special magic words like, “Shavol swaghameth gorgono liscud” and Iulsheley huthotheca liscud’” - I really enjoyed the silly magic words. He’s also doing this in accordance with various astrological principals, which he describes. Then he takes all the guts, livers, spleens and such and strains, pulps, fries, drinks, distills and does all sorts of disgusting things with them. At one point he tricks a small boy into eating ‘a cat’s toord’ and laughs at him, which seems hypocritical when considering all the gunk he’s ingested.  

He then makes special ear pillows, which he straps to his head. These boost his hearing so he can hear everything and these are described in a wonderful, rhyming list;

“The barking of dogs and grunting of hogs,
The wailing of cats and the rumbling of rats,
The gaggling of geese and the humming of bees,
The rousing of bucks and the gaggling of ducks,
The singing of swans and the ringing of pans,
The crowing of cocks and the sewing of socks,
The cackling of hens and the scratching of pens,
The squeaking of mice, and the rolling of dice,
The calling of frogs and toads in the bogs,
The chirping of crickets and shutting of wickets,
The screeching of owls and fluttering of fowls,
The routing of knaves and snorting of slaves,
The farting of churls and fizzling of girls,
And many things else, such as ringing of bells,
And counting of coins and mounting of groins,
The whispering of lovers, the snaring of plovers,
Of groaning and spewing, and baking and brewing,
Of scratching and rubbing, and watching and shrugging”

Having got his enhanced hearing under control, he listens to the cat court. They are trying a cat for not being promiscuous and she’s given the extenuating circumstances. There’s a story about a secret Catholic priest and a madam who shrives herself frequently so she can carry on her exploitative ways. She even involves the cat in her deception, blowing pepper in the cat’s face to make it cry so she can claim the cat in a woman transformed for not seeing to her husband often enough. 

Some of the stories the cat tells have a Chaucerian bawdiness to them. A prankster glues walnut shells to her feet and the tap-tapping is interpreted by the superstitious secret Catholics as a devil. This involves a who kerfuffle with a frightened bare-arsed boy and a priest, where the priest ends up with his face up the boy’s arse as he shits himself with fear. She also exposes a cheating love by biting and scratching his testicles as he hides behind an arras, so the husband sees a “bare ars’t gentleman strangling me with his stones in my mouth”. Some of these stories reminded me of later books like The Surprising and Singular Adventures of a Hen or Pompey the Little. 

The conclusion is reached, that we should beware the cat because they see all our “noughty living” that we try and hide, and they tell each other about it. It’s not that cats are an allegory for Catholics, it’s that they are domestic spies and, if they wanted to, they could tell all our secrets. 

The version I had was an Amazon print on demand thing. Although repackaging out of copyright works and flogging them on Amazon is a bit of a con, when they are done well and formatted nicely (as this one was) they are so much better than the old print on demand classics or bad scans where the pages were sometimes unreadable. The only thing missing from this copy were the glosses in the margin, which apparently add gags and fun stuff, but I don’t have the hundreds of pounds for a more accurate copy - and this was very readable and full of good stuff.

I’m not sure whether it counts as a novel, it’s a far looser, baggier thing than that but it is a striking work that feels remarkably fresh. While some of the attitudes are very much of their time (it does take part in that charming genre of fiction, misogynist literature) the handling of speech, character and frame feel bright and modern. As for whether cats can speak, I did once live in a place where the cat next door’s meow sounded very much like my name. I never found out what the cat wanted with me though.

Re-read Review: A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy by Laurence Sterne

I first read A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy fifteen years ago when I was going through my first flush of eighteenth century novels. Seeing as I read, Tristram Shandy, Boswell’s Life of Johnson and London Journal, The Vicar of Wakefield and Fanny Hill, I found A Sentimental Journey to be so-so. I remarked that while it didn’t frustrate me as Tristram Shandy did, nor did it delight me as much. I also noted that the comedy servant, Fleur, didn’t do much comedy-servanting.

It tells the story of Parson Yorick from Tristram Shandy, who is challenged when he describes something being organised better in France. Realising he’s never actually been, he immediately pops across to Calais, has a little wander about, stays in Paris for a couple of months and makes plans to move on to Italy. Then Laurence Sterne died, rendering the title inaccurate. The book has a really weird relationship with Tristram Shandy, as one of the most famous pages of that book is the black page mourning Yorick’s death, yet Yorick also has the last line in the book. In this, Yorick talks about his parishioner, Walter and mourns the death of Uncle Toby - which means it slots between some parts of Tristram Shandy and not others (which probably says more about that book than any other).

Yorick is not a typical traveller, he’s not after tourist destinations, he’s after sensations and emotions under the catch-all term of ‘sentiment’. These aren’t just how he feels about things, but also the physical effects. On arriving in Calais he gets himself a bottle of cheap plonk and drinks it. This gives him a warm generosity of spirit where he forgives the King of France for a rule where, if he died in the country, he items go towards the crown. As well as this generosity of spirit, he feels a rush of blood to his face and head, a sense of muffled warmth - the physical effects of the alcohol as well as the emotional.

It’s as he is congratulating himself on his feeling of generosity that a monk enters the room, looking for alms. He suddenly finds that whilst he is a big-hearted, giving sort of person who’d share his last penny with a penniless scamp, he doesn’t want to give money to the monk. In fact, he’s angry with the monk for asking him for money and tells him out-right. However, it’s then he sees a beautiful woman and he sees the monk speaking to her. He imagines how the monk is telling her how rude he is and that the woman will think less of him so his attitude to the monk changes and he goes to make up with the monk. In making up, he and the monk swap snuff boxes - his is a fine tortoiseshell number and the monk’s is a cheap horn one. It actually turns out that the woman doesn’t care about what the monk says about Yorick and he’s wasted his time and snuff box to impress her but from then on, the sight of his new horn snuff box remind him to try and be more open and generous.

All this to-do in Calais about monks, beautiful women and snuff boxes takes an hour in Yorick’s life but fifty pages in the book. It’s a book with an odd relationship with time, speeding up and slowing down as later, in Paris, there’s a time skip of a month. It’s because the book measures time by the sentiment created and merely wandering around Paris for a while doesn’t feed this need.

The big drama in Paris is to do with his passport. In his rush to leave England and explore the continent, he forgot that France and England are at war. He even joked with a friend that being imprisoned over the channel would save him money in the long run. At first he tries to minimise the problem, not looking at it squarely in the face but an encounter with a starling in a cage brings his mind back to it. Now imagining what the truth of imprisonment might be, he’s prepared to be as obsequious and fawning as possible to get his passport. He even plays on his famous surname (and possible ancestor) to get onboard with a Shakespeare-loving, French aristo. He doesn’t even kick back at the aristo’s assumption that he is, himself, a jester, admitting that he does jest, though nobody pays him for it.

The aristo even has ideas of why Yorick is in France, sniggering that he has come not to spy out the nakedness of the land; but the people. Yorick responds in spluttering disbelief, saying that he has too much respect for women and that he “conceives every fair being as a temple, and would rather enter in and see the original drawings and loose sketches hung up in it, than the transfiguration of Raphael itself.” He’s trying to say he wants to see what’s in people’s hearts but this sets the aristo sniggering again.

This is another theme in the book. It just so happens that Yorick’s innocent misunderstandings always lead to implied sex, or almost-sex. He may be innocently buying some material, doing the door dance with a woman, sharing a carriage or taking her pulse but so many of his behaviours lead to him being near, or alone with, beautiful women. At the end of the book, due to a classic eighteenth century inn mixup, he finds himself grabbing the fille de chambrés…end of volume two. That interruption during the action is typical of the book, if Tristram Shandy is a novel with impotence being a guy theme, A Sentimental Journey’s main organising principal is the coitus interruptus. This is exacerbated by Sterne’s death interrupting the book half way through. 

 

The version I read this time was the Shandy Hall one with illustrations by Martin Rowson. These are brilliant, wonderfully striking pictures with Yorick always being accompanied by an angel and demon on each shoulder, reacting events. The only thing is, given Rowson’s style, Yorick and all the other characters are depicted as extremely ugly. Yorick is illustrated as a thin, cadaverous man who also manages to have multiple chins, and an almost sharklike set of teeth. The tone of the book is light and faux-innocent but the tone of the illustrations are of ugly lechery. 

I can see why A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy didn’t grab me as much as the other books I read that decisive year, and I do find it a less exciting book than Tristram Shandy but it is still full of fun double-entendres, silly scenarios and an open acceptance of humanity, faults and all. The comic servant didn’t have much of a chance to comic servant though. 

Top Ten Books of 2024 (5-1)

The second, and highest rated batch of books of 2024 has a surprisingly large amount of non-fiction compared to my usual choices. They are also all books I’ve written about on the blog this year. 

As usual, I’ve made a list-challenge of the books I’ve read this year. 

Number Five

Patterns of Love - Oliver Other

I’m pretty surprised that I’ve included this at all, let alone picked it as one of my top five. It’s long, it’s frequently boring and it features views and politics utterly different to mine (let alone how it creates a ludicrous nightmare dystopia of views I broadly hold). Yet… yet… it stuck with me in a way that many of the other books I’ve read this year haven’t. It’s held me longer and deeper than Proust did, It’s stranger than many other books, rougher and thornier. 

I wrote about it extensively here.

Number Four

Johnsonian Gleanings - Aleyn Lyell Reade

I’ve read a number of these and every time I have, I’ve been blown away by the attention to detail and sheer work. There’s something amazing about how a project which started as a work of genealogy became something which revolutionised the understanding of Samuel Johnson’s earlier years. 

I had to include them as a group, not just because of how useful they’ve been in developing my current novel but also for the enjoyment I’ve found in them.

I’ve read a number of them but here I reviewed volumes III and X. 

Number Three

The History of the Lichfield Conduit Lands Trust - Percy Laithwaite

It seems ridiculous that my third favourite book of the year is a very local history of a small town but this book was more than useful to me, or informative but surprisingly sharp and funny. Local history bores have that reputation for being boring - I think it’s because they quibble over details and also because they talk about recent history. This book takes in a whole sweep of time and is not afraid of a good anecdote.

I talked about it in more detail, here.  

Number Two

Selected Writings - Abiezer Coppe

Of course a selection of slightly unhinged religious texts is my second favourite book of the year. I loved the writing of Abiezer Coppe, his passion, his command of rhythm and arresting detail, his freedom of expression (or his very false restraint when ‘repenting’). It’s surprisingly entertaining,

I’ve talked about it more here. 

Number One

The Life of Orator Henley - Graham Midgely

This had to be the top of the list. I’ve been making a list of my top forty favourite books for my fortieth birthday and The Life of Orator Henley is the only book I’ve read this year to make it in the list. It’s engagingly written and managed to recast someone who’s always seemed a bit of an idiot as someone who is a bit of an idiot but also something of a hero. I rather loved Orator Henley after this book, and that’s an impressive thing. 

 

More about it here.

For a special mention, 

Another fairly flawed book that still succeeded in staying with me, Outstared by a Bullfrog is a novel by Alex Burrett, whose short story collection My Goat Ate It’s Own Legs showed a variety of invention and a fondness for the bizarre. The novel is similarly inventive and odd, taking in a narrator’s life story but also sending him on a metaphysical adventure where he discovers the truth of his own life and the truth about God. 

Sent hurling through an office block window, the narrator finds he can astral-project, revisiting important moments and people from his life. He goes back to his first sexual encounter; in a moonlit pool on a camping trip, his greatest defeat at the hands of a kick-boxing kayaker, memories of his dearly missed, wisdom spouting Nan and many others. Throughout the journey through his life, he discovers a crumpled up face who nudges him into higher planes of existence. 

It’s a book that seems undisciplined at first, a series of scenes, but they layer on each other to tell a life of near misses and failure, of moral cowardice and lapsed opportunity. Something that seems incidental at first will turn out to be a major clue to his next destination and events revisited turn out to be very different from how the narrator remembers them. It’s not a book that can be predicted, always being a little wriggle ahead. 

There’s a confessional element to the book that is very raw. The narrator is not any worse than most, but his chance to examine his life lets his see his own weaknesses and they are not always the weaknesses found in fictional characters. We see the narrator’s secret lusts, his ignoble wishes and private his moments which frequently surprise. The book starts with God catching him masturbating, which he takes as a sign that the deity has a particular interest in his life, another mystery he has to solve. 

There are some striking sentiments, whether it’s “a young person’s funeral is a protest march” against death, or a realisation of love being sparked by the way a person makes a cup of tea. There are discussions about famous aphorisms and advice, the narrator being a great collector of them but coming to a realisation that other people’s wisdom is only useful to a certain extent.

Where I had difficulty with the book was its blokey-ness. The narrator made a promise to God not to have sex for ten years, and as a result he has a hang-up around women and sexual matters. Most of the female characters are defined in sexual terms, and a surprising number of them fall for our narrator despite his admitted hesitancies. While Burrett clearly enjoys describing beautiful bodies and sexual shenanigans, I found it a little relentless for my personal taste.

Where the book really excels is the ending, where the title comes into play. The book has been twisting and turning and found itself in a really sweet place, with the narrator finding his peace and looking forward to life. He then crashes his car, plunges through the mirror and lays dying. It feels like a cop-out at first, but his spirit goes back to the land of Gods - where all the deities of the world are nothing but giant children on a school trip.

His own guardian deity is a wheelchair bound child who can do nothing to stop the big boy (the Abrahamic God) from picking him up and laying him out for dissection. The narrator realises  that God won’t dissect him while he maintains eye contact, so he prepares to outstare God. He is nothing but a frog on a dissecting table, but if he’s going to be a frog, he’ll be a bullfrog. Not only did I find this a powerful ending, both pitiful and heroic, there is something really catching about the notion of outstaring God. It’s an image that’ll linger for a while.

While a little rough around the edges, Outstared by a Bullfrog has an energy to it that would be missing if it were a little smoother. It also sticks in the mind sharper than a more conventional book, especially the narrator’s fate at the end.

Top Ten Books I read in 2024 (10-6)

 I had a very hard time coming up with my top ten books. It’s not necessarily that I haven’t read lots of good stuff this year, it’s more that very little of what I read jumped out as really great and memorable.  As a result, the choices may be a little peculiar. 

As usual, I’ve made a list-challenge of the books I’ve read this year. 

Number Ten

The Book of Embraces - Eduardo Galeano

I think I’ve got to accept that I will never be able to describe The Book of Embraces or the multifaceted effect it had on me. I have memories of being blown away by it but it hasn’t quite lingered.

A collection of small stories, (perhaps even fragments or Incidences), The Book of Embraces starts with fables but grows more tethered to reality and history as it goes on. It’s truly strange that a book that feels this positive and joyful can be so full of murder, exile, torture, imprisonment, colonialism and despair.  Some of it is truly terrifying, the account of the professional torturer, the firing squads and prison wardens, yet there are joyful stories like the flirting bus driver, or freeing ones like the person who learns to fly.

These stories are arranged very well, mixed up enough to not make the book seem grim nor superficial but clustering together themes or reflected images so they come in waves, reinforcing what’s come before. 

The comic moment of the small child calling the ‘little birdy’ in the story ‘a shit’ made me laugh out loud. So did the comment that barbers humiliate him by charging half price. Darker are the comments that ‘it have become unnecessary for the police to ban books, the price does that for them’, that ‘numbers live better than people’ and that ‘the electric cattle prod turns anyone into a prolific storyteller.’

In amongst this all is true playfulness and true camaraderie. He brings up the notion of ‘key-friends’, those who will lend you the key to their place to hide out in times of trouble. There’s also a brilliant description of ‘compatriots in time’ that really resonates with me.

In the end, what makes this a wonderful collection of odds and ends is the spirit behind them. I can always get behind someone who says they don’t want to die because they want to ‘play forever’.

Number Nine

The Commitments - Roddy Doyle

A last minute addition to the list. The Commitments made it in because it made me laugh out loud on multiple occasions and that’s more than any book has made me laugh in years.

It’s a short book and I read it in a morning. It tells the story of a bunch of Dublin scrubs in the late 90s who decide to create a soul band and bring soul to Ireland (before realising that Ireland isn’t yet ready for soul.) 

It’s a very musical book. Not only is it about music, with the songs often transcribed (down to the instruments going “CHUNK CHUNK… THUM -  THUMTHUM”.) but it’s a book that revels in the sound of voices. There’s very little visual description or scene setting, just lots of dialogue and music, often weaving and overlapping in lively and funny ways.

It’s a cliché that the Irish use of language is musical, but there’s some truth in that cliché. It was some Dubliners who taught me how much more musical it is to refer to an arsehole as merely a hole, and this book taught me how all holes can be serviced by such a phrase. This book also taught me such musical phrases as, describing Gene Clark’s ‘manly whinge’ or complimenting some girls that people will “be eating chips out of your knickers.”

The characters are simple but effectively drawn. Jimmy is the musical Svengali, having got into Frankie goes to Hollywood before everyone else, and against them first as well. There’s the drummer, whose main influence “yer man Animal”, and the bass player, a butcher who plays bass like a butcher, who isn’t impressed with his name ‘meatman’ until he learns it is also American for langerman’. I found Jimmy ‘the lips’ and his pseudo-religious diktats of what soul is to be very annoying, but his outrage at the ‘musical wanking’ that is jazz to be very true.

It’s a slight book, but a funny one and I enjoyed it very much. 

Number Eight

The Metamorphoses of Ovid - David R. Slavitt

I really loved David Slavitt’s free and easy approach to Orlando Furioso, so when I saw a translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. As such, I knew going into it, that it would probably be a loose but entertaining take on the work.

What a strange, baggy work Metamorphosis is. The introduction described how Ovid was trying to jump on the ‘epic’ bandwagon but had a far more intimate sensibility and this is how he mixed those two impulses. This means that the incidents in the book share a theme of change and transformation but this theme is rather loosely handled with and ‘and then’ quality to the structuring. There’s also a chronological element, with the first transformation being from chaos into the world, and the last being of Rome from loose band of ruffians to world superpower. All this also leads to a very striking message at the end.

I was interested in the Biblical overlap that took place in the first few sections. The creation of the world was not created by the logos in this telling, but by science. Essentially the atomic weight of the different elements caused them to separate and become what they are today, even if those elements are earth, wind, fire and air. 

There’s also a flood myth. It always surprises me when I reminded that the Greeks and Romans has a flood myth of their own. As portrayed by Slavitt, Ovid’s depiction of the flood is so evocative. The rains don’t simply happen, Jove squeezes the water droplets out of the clouds, the rivulets of water flowing down his hair and beard. The flooded world is an enchanted playground, dolphins romp in the woods, darting like huge birds. It’s also interesting to see what Deucalion (the tale’s Noah figure) does when he lands. He cries. Noah never seems to be all that moved by the destruction of almost everything he knew - though I suppose getting pissed and sleeping naked could be seen as a trauma response.

Whereas the Biblical flood was due in part to the evils of man, the Greek/Roman one was due in part to the terrible kingship of King Lycan - like many of the future transformations, his name is a hilarious hint at what he was to become - in this case a wolf. The change is one of the more viscerally described,

   “Imagine how foam flecks at his jaws, and his body hair.

    thickens and mats. His hands deform, and his arms are twisted

    into a wolf’s forelegs…”

I don’t know if it’s Slavitt, I don’t know if it’s Ovid - I suspect and hope it’s a combination of the two, but there are some really vivid sections. There’s a plague which is truly horrific, Perseus against the monster and the the fight agains the centaurs. People of the imagined heroic past really shouldn’t have had weddings, things always go wrong (just look at the one between Peleus and Thetis). It’s worse than Eastenders.

I think the worst thing to be in Classical mythology is a dryad, or a woman. Neither can escape from being constantly pursued, raped or being turned into plants. One poor woman is turned into a plant to escape Apollo, her pursuer, who then strokes the tree, which she can feel but not escape from. Other terrible fates included a man cursed to eat himself to death and some women who weep themselves into trees and are in agony when some well-intentioned family members try and tear their bark off. Their cousin, Cygnus also is transformed - you’ll never guess into what.

Then there are the interesting tales of gender non-conformity. The strange tale of Hermaphrodite - a combination of Hermes and Aphrodite (of course that’s how that word came to be but I’d never realised). Then there is Tiresius, who I’d only known as an old, blind mystic. How he became blinded and blessed with the gift of prophecy is wild. As a young man, he saw two snakes fighting and hit them, which turned him into a woman. After years living as a woman, he found the snakes and hit them again, turning him back into a man. Jupiter and Juno are having a debate about who enjoys sex most, men or women do they ask Tiresius, who’s had a go at both, who says that it’s women. Enraged at losing the argument, Juno blinds him, so Jove gave him the gift of visions to compensate. 

After a run through these myths, a sprint through the Illiad and the Aeniad, we get to a curious part about Pythagorus. He gives an impassioned speech about vegetarianism before explaining his belief in the migration of souls. This leads to the message of the book. That all change, even striking, sudden change is usual. 

  “The world is arbitrary, abrupt, astounding” and we sometimes forget this. “It is we who are dull and lacking in vision, for we have forgotten the wonder of things.” If anything, Metamorphosis is about the re-wondering of the world, the reminder that it’s a fascinating and wonder-full place.

Number Seven

Pickwick Papers - Charles Dickens

This may be Dickens’s happiest work, certainly the happiest I’ve read but it’s also a little flimsy. While I had a good time while I was reading it, it wasn’t until writing it up till I found how much I had enjoyed it and how much I’d fallen in love with Samuel Pickwick, Sam and Tony Weller and all the rest of the gang. 

Read the write-up here.

Number Six

The Adventures of a Black Coat - Anonymous

A prime and proper piece of Grub Street fun, this book offers a window into the lives of chancers, grifters and others. 

I wrote about this here.