{"id":113767,"date":"2017-08-08T17:31:24","date_gmt":"2017-08-08T21:31:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=113767"},"modified":"2017-08-08T17:45:21","modified_gmt":"2017-08-08T21:45:21","slug":"purfect-prose-appreciation-kitty-litterature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/08\/08\/purfect-prose-appreciation-kitty-litterature\/","title":{"rendered":"Purfect Prose: An Appreciation of Kitty Litterature"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

From the cover of issue no. 136 (Fall 1995) of The Paris Review<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

It has been said, erroneously, that poets are cat people, novelists dog people. In fact, lots of novelists are into cats. Hilary Mantel included a photo of her cat in her <\/a>Art of Fiction interview<\/a>. So did Ali Smith<\/a>.\u00a0Hemingway\u2019s home is famous for its clowder of six-toed cats<\/a>;\u00a0Capote, Chandler, and Kerouac all kept the five-toed variety.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

We\u2019re not going to deny the special connection between felines and poets. That would be ridiculous. Think of poor crazy Christopher Smart celebrating his cat Geoffrey; or cat-obsessed Charles Baudelaire (who loathed dogs); or the creator of Magical Mister Mistoffelees, T. S. Eliot, who treated the superiority of cats as a given, at least in his <\/a>Art of Poetry interview<\/a>:\u00a0\u201cof course dogs don\u2019t seem to lend themselves to verse quite so well, collectively, as cats.\u201d<\/p>\n

But, in honor of International Cat Day, we bring you one of the first essays we ever published: \u201cCats<\/a>,\u201d by Pati Hill:<\/p>\n

A cat lying on a stone is not thinking of another cat lying on a radiator and a cat licking himself in a patch of sun on a winter\u2019s day is inclined to feel cheerful about it. If he finds an old piece of fat fallen into a crack in the pavement he thinks it is all to the good and it tastes better to him than liver twice a day. A cat does not look forward or backward or worry about his sins the way we do. I would not like to be a cat I don\u2019t suppose because I\u2019m used to my miseries and I would feel lost without them, but to a cat the best of our lives would probably be an utter tragedy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It has been said, erroneously, that poets are cat people, novelists dog people. In fact, lots of novelists are into cats.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":784,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1188],"tags":[8017,571,30005,504,15413],"class_list":["post-113767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-from-the-archive","tag-cats","tag-ernest-hemingway","tag-international-cat-day","tag-literature","tag-pati-hill"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nPurfect Prose: An Appreciation of Kitty Litterature<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"It has been said, erroneously, that poets are cat people, novelists dog people. 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