{"id":142785,"date":"2020-02-12T09:00:50","date_gmt":"2020-02-12T14:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=142785"},"modified":"2020-02-13T18:12:47","modified_gmt":"2020-02-13T23:12:47","slug":"the-torment-of-cats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/02\/12\/the-torment-of-cats\/","title":{"rendered":"The Torment of Cats"},"content":{"rendered":"

In her monthly column,<\/em>\u00a0Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn\u2019t be.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>

Right, Hrabal with one of his cats (courtesy of New Directions)<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cIf you want to write, keep cats,\u201d Aldous Huxley famously said. As I read Bohumil Hrabal\u2019s haunting but strange slip of a memoir, All My Cats<\/em>, I wondered if the Czech writer would have agreed with him. Hrabal\u2019s book was originally published in 1986, as Auti\u010dko<\/em>\u2014which translates as \u201cthe Little Car,\u201d the nickname Hrabal gave first to his Renault 5, a small white car with ginger-colored seat covers. He later gave the same name to one of his cats, a kitten with \u201cwhite socks and a white bib, and the rest of it had a tabby pattern, but in ginger.\u201d The volume has only recently been translated into English, excellently so by Paul Wilson. Do not be fooled by the cuteness of the book\u2019s original title, though. In it, we encounter a cat lover trapped in a hell of his own making, driven to the brink of madness.<\/p>\n

Hrabal, who was born in 1914 in Morovia, began writing poetry in the forties, and by the following decade switched to prose. Little of what he was writing made it into print\u2014instead he read his work aloud at meetings of an underground literary group, attended by the novelist Josef Skvorecky and run by the poet Jiri Kolar. Some of Hrabal\u2019s stories appeared in samizdat editions, but his first officially published work, Lark on a String<\/em>, was withdrawn in 1959, a week before it was due to be released; his formally inventive style regarded as the antithesis of the realist works glorified by the Communist regime. (It eventually appeared, four years later, as Pearl on the Bottom<\/em>.) In the early sixties, Hrabal\u2019s \u00e9migr\u00e9 friends helped distribute his work abroad, where it found a success that allowed him to write full time. He\u2019d worked, before then, as a railway laborer, an insurance agent, a traveling salesman, a laborer at a steelworks, a compactor of wastepaper at a trash plant, and a theater stagehand. Those odd jobs inspired certain of his novels, such as Closely Observed Trains<\/em>, a story about a Czech railway worker who defies his Nazi oppressors, and Too Loud a Solitude<\/em>, in which the narrator builds his own library from books he\u2019s salvaged, as Hrabal did during his time at the trash plant. The publication, in 1963, of Pearl on the Bottom<\/em> launched Hrabal\u2019s career properly in Czechoslovakia. This was followed, only a year later, by Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age<\/em>\u2014a book that, like Lucy Ellmann\u2019s recently lauded Ducks, Newburyport<\/em>, unfurls in a single, rambling sentence\u2014and the year after that by Closely Observed Trains<\/em>, which further cemented Hrabal\u2019s success when it was adapted into a movie. Directed by Ji\u0159\u00ed Menzel, Ost\u0159e sledovan\u00e9 vlaky<\/em> won the 1968 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and remains today one of the popular works of the Czech New Wave.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Although by the mid-\u201960s Hrabal was famous, this didn\u2019t mean he had carte blanche to publish whatever he wanted. After the Prague Spring in 1968, his work was once again banned until the late seventies. It\u2019s thanks to people like Skvorecky\u2014who had left Czechoslovakia for Toronto, where he published the works of his friends\u2014that Hrabal\u2019s writing still reached readers. Not that the years of censorship did much to dim Hrabal\u2019s fame. In 2008, his fellow countryman Milan Kundera called Hrabal \u201cour very best writer today,\u201d and with each new translation of one of his works, Hrabal continues to find new admirers further afield.<\/p>\n

That it has taken thirty-odd years for All My Cats<\/em> to join these translations perhaps isn\u2019t surprising. Although it showcases many of the same stylistic elements that distinguish Hrabal\u2019s fiction\u2014such as the near stream-of-consciousness, meandering soliloquizing of his narrator\u2014this memoir is a trickier beast to wrangle with. Although All My Cats <\/em>starts out as an enchanting account of a cat lover\u2019s feline-filled existence, the book soon transmogrifies into something much darker, becoming a meditation on love, loss, genocide, and guilt.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Writing in the New York Times<\/em> three years ago, Parul Sehgal memorably described Hrabal as \u201cone of the great prose stylists of the twentieth century; the scourge of state censors; the gregarious bar hound and lover of gossip, beer, cats and women (in roughly that order).\u201d In 1983, when Hrabal sat down to write All My Cats<\/em>, he was sixty-nine years old and recovering from a serious car accident. The cats in his life, he admits at the very beginning of the book, had by this point replaced the women of his youth: \u201cSomehow I had reached an age where being in love with a beautiful woman was beyond my reach because now I was bald and my face was full of wrinkles, yet the cats loved me the ways girls used to love me when I was young.\u201d<\/p>\n

The cats he\u2019s talking about live at the country cottage Hrabal shares with his wife in Kersko\u2014about an hour\u2019s drive east of Prague. They\u2019d bought it back in 1965, when Hrabal was reaping the first financial rewards of his writing. It was a weekend getaway from the city; somewhere Hrabal could supposedly write undisturbed. At first, all was wonderful. The cats\u2014of which there were initially five\u2014eagerly awaited Hrabal and his wife\u2019s visits. \u201cI\u2019d gather them, one by one, into my arms and press them to my forehead,\u201d he writes, \u201cand somehow or other, those cats cured me of my hangovers and depressions.\u201d As if to corroborate Jean Cocteau\u2019s assertion that cats are \u201cthe visible soul\u201d of a person\u2019s home, Hrabal describes the early morning \u201cmeshugge Stunde\u201d<\/em>\u2014the \u201ccrazy hour\u201d\u2014during which the cats, warmed against the cold night air by the covers of Hrabal\u2019s bed, would take off, running wild around the house in joyful excitement, swinging on the curtains, pulling clothes off chairs, fighting over slippers and \u201cwinding themselves into little balls and knocking everything off the table.\u201d Before long, the cats become a responsibility weighted round Hrabal\u2019s neck, turning his former bucolic idyll into \u201ca hell,\u201d a \u201chouse of horrors and humiliations.\u201d<\/p>\n

When he\u2019s in Prague, he worries that the cats are cold, hungry, and lonely without him. Thus, unable to concentrate on his writing, he\u2019s drawn back to Kersko\u2014in the winter, he travels by bus, which is safer, he thinks, than driving himself, for who would feed his cats if he was hurt in an accident? But once there, his writing again eludes him: \u201cThe typewriter would clatter away but there was never enough time to attend to stylistic niceties, I had to write quickly so I could spend time with the cats because, though they lay there with their eyes closed, they\u2019d be watching me through tiny slits, lulled by the clacking of the machine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Soon enough, distraction turns to anger. Hrabal forcefully boots a particularly annoying feline out into the garden, and then is immediately overwhelmed with regret: \u201cI couldn\u2019t write because I had struck a cat that I loved, I had kicked an innocent creature who meant everything to me.\u201d This oscillation\u2014between exasperation, rage and violence, and contrition, love and self-reproach\u2014is what drives the narrative. Hrabal is trapped in a limbo. His distinctive \u201cpalavering\u201d\u2014Skvorecky\u2019s translation of what Hrabal himself termed his \u201cp\u00e1ben\u00ed<\/em>\u201d style\u2014or, in other words, his free-flowing monologue (as James Woods helpfully elucidates, an \u201canecdote without end\u201d) lends itself particularly well to such undulations. Repetitions become a considered stylistic element, most notably Hrabal\u2019s wife\u2019s exasperated protest, \u201cWhat are we going to do with all those cats?\u201d It\u2019s the very first line of the book; foreshadowing the actions Hrabal will eventually find himself forced to take. She herself is a vague figure, this is the only thing she says, but it\u2019s echoed as a refrain throughout the volume.<\/p>\n

What, indeed, is Hrabal going to do about all those cats? When two of Hrabal\u2019s cats produce a litter of five kittens each at the same time, enough is enough. Acting \u201cin a kind of fever,\u201d he sends his wife to the neighbors before picking three kittens\u2014still blind, and as tiny as \u201ctransistor radio batteries\u201d\u2014from each litter and bundling them into an old mail bag. As if \u201cin a trance,\u201d he carries the sack into the woods and \u201cbattered\u201d it \u201cagainst a tree, again and again and again.\u201d It\u2019s a scene of shocking violence, leaving him feeling \u201ccrushed, suffocated by what I had felt compelled to do\u201d:<\/p>\n

I was trembling all over but I had to keep going so I bent over and felt those tiny heads and realized to my horror that the kitten were still stirring and so, just like that time in the winter, I took the axe I used to split wood\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The reality of what Hrabal has done terrifies him. Looking down at the \u201cmishmash\u201d of what\u2019s left of the dead kittens, now lying in the hole in the ground he\u2019s dug for them, they remind him of \u201cimages from Nazi mass graves.\u201d Later that day, stroking the kittens he left alive, he realizes \u201cthat this was just like those photographs from the ghetto, where an SS officer or an executioner squad would have their pictures taken standing over a pit filled with corpses.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an appalling comparison, but one that befits the gravity of the deep rumination on guilt that follows: \u201cNothing could calm me, and I suddenly knew that the crime I had committed was greater than that of Raskolnikov, who beat two old women to death only to test the foolish notion that it is possible to kill and escape punishment.\u201d Hrabal is \u201cracked with self-loathing,\u201d plagued by remorse, yet at the same time, he can feel his face turning \u201cpale and ashen\u201d at the thought of his cats producing more kittens. He doesn\u2019t want to live without his beloved pets, but neither can he exist peaceably alongside so many of them. The only real solution would be for both him and the cats to \u201csimply cease to exist,\u201d but instead he has to keep killing them, which in turn tortures his conscience.<\/p>\n

The torment he suffers is so acute that he comes close to committing suicide. But, contemplating the act, he realizes that he doesn\u2019t want to die: \u201cI wanted to be in the world. There were still things I wanted to write.\u201d All the same, he\u2019s completely preoccupied by the crimes he\u2019s committed, likening his anguish to that of \u201call those who had taken part in wars and had killed millions of innocent people.\u201d His feelings of guilt intensify when he wonders at his \u201caudacity in comparing the life and death of cats to the life and death of people\u201d:<\/p>\n

Yet having realized that, my feelings of guilt for the death of those kitten and cats did not go away, because in the end I came to the conclusion that one cannot even kill a cat, let alone a person, with impunity, nor can one with impunity expel a person, let alone drive away a cat, without consequences.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

*<\/p>\n

When Hrabal began writing, he was drawn to the work of the French Surrealists. Although he departed from that model relatively early on in his career, he remained a writer always able to see\u2014as Seghal so perfectly puts it\u2014\u201cthe strangeness in ordinary life.\u201d As such, All My Cats <\/em>is both a simple tale about a man and his many pets, and a powerful metaphor. It\u2019s a book that forces us to reckon with the idea that to be human and to be alive is also to be guilty and to suffer for it. This is a book about what one does when existence becomes untenable, and how guilt\u2014as it gnaws relentlessly through us\u2014must be carried for a lifetime.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In the epilogue, Hrabal is out walking one cold winter\u2019s day when he comes across a swan, trapped in a frozen river. He inches out across the ice to try to rescue the bird, but she\u2019s wild with rage, raining jabs as sharp as axe blows down on his hands with her beak. Distraught and bleeding, he retreats. He returns though, the next day with thick leather gloves, only to find the bird has perished in the night. It\u2019s not just a coincidence, he thinks:<\/p>\n

the swan who refused to let me save her had been placed there by my destiny, which comes from outside of one, a part, a fragment, of a message from elsewhere and that in fact, since I was capable of beating to death those cats who had so passionately desired nothing more than to be with me in the world, so this swan, whom I had wanted to help survive and be in the world, instead sacrificed herself, preferring to die, to deny herself life, to show me, not that the opposite of everything is true, but on the contrary, that the opposite of everything is not true and that once again, I was guilty, just as I had been guilty all my life, even though I did not know why or what could have been the cause.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hrabal died in 1997, at the age of eighty-two, after falling from the fifth-floor window of a hospital in Prague, where he was being treated for severe arthritis. It was officially declared an accident\u2014he was supposedly reaching out of the window to feed the pigeons outside\u2014but in the run up to his death he\u2019d become increasingly obsessed with jumping from the fifth-floor window of his own apartment. Regardless of whether the fall was an accident or Hrabal intentionally took his own life, it\u2019s a tragic story, but in the light of the torments recounted in All My Cats<\/em>, I can\u2019t help but find something serene and consoling in the knowledge that Hrabal finally found release from the burdens of his conscience.<\/p>\n

Read an excerpt from All My Cats here<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Read earlier installments of Re-Covered here<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Lucy Scholes is a critic who lives in London. She writes for the\u00a0<\/em>NYR Daily,<\/em>\u00a0The Financial Times,<\/em>\u00a0The New York Times Book Review,\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Literary Hub, among other publications.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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