100 Cats Who Changed Civilization (12 page)

He was in a unique position to know. When Stowe decamped from her New England home to Florida, custody of Calvin was awarded to him. The cat prowled his Connecticut estate for eight years. “He would sit quietly in my study for hours, then, moved by a delicate affection, come and pull at my sleeve until he could touch my face with his nose, and then go away contented,” Warner wrote.
He could also open doors on his own and open register vents when he felt cold. According to his owner, Calvin seemed equal to almost any challenge, save for one: “He could do almost any thing but speak, and you would declare sometimes that you could see a pathetic longing to do that in his intelligent face.”

Calvin became such a part of the family that, when the feline finally passed away, he received a long, loving eulogy in the author’s bestselling collection of 1871 essays,
My Summer in a Garden
. The elegy, called
Calvin (A Study of Character)
, became nationally famous. “I have set down nothing concerning him but the literal truth,” Warner wrote. “He was always a mystery. I did not know whence he came. I do not know whither he has gone. I would not weave one spray of falsehood in the wreath I lay upon his grave.”

The pint-sized literary lion who loved the world of letters had now become a part of it forever.

DINAH

THE SECOND-MOST-FAMOUS CAT
IN
ALICE IN WONDERLAND

Ask the typical reader to name the feline star of the Lewis Carroll books
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
and
Through the Looking Glass
, and he or she will likely mention the Cheshire Cat. But another cat plays an important role in the two works. It’s a cat who, like so many characters in the books, was based in reality.

Carroll, whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, first spun the tale during a lazy afternoon boat trip down the Thames River with a friend, Robinson Duckworth, and three little girls of whom he was particularly fond: Lorina, Alice, and Edity Liddell. The three enjoyed the story so much that Alice, the tale’s namesake, asked Dodgson to write it down. He did, showed the draft to friends, and was encouraged to find a publisher. The first of the two books,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
, was published on July 4, 1865. It became an immediate sensation and has remained in print ever since.

For a tale of fantasy, the book includes a great many thinly disguised real people. The protagonist is, of course, Alice Liddell. Robinson Duckworth becomes the Duck, and Carroll himself becomes the Dodo (perhaps because he stuttered, which
caused his real last name to often come out as Do-Do-Dodgson). As for pets, the book’s Alice talks repeatedly about Dinah, Alice Liddell’s real tortoiseshell tabby. Interestingly, the references form one of the dark, rather sadistic veins that flow through the text.

Whenever poor Dinah comes up in conversation, it’s always in the context of thoughtless cruelty. For instance, early in
Wonderland
, Alice mentions how her pet is “such a capital one for catching mice,” apparently forgetting that she’s conversing with a talking mouse at the time. And later, in
Looking Glass
, she makes the same sort of faux pas when addressing a group of birds. “Dinah’s our cat,” she says. “And she’s such a capital one for catching mice you can’t think! And oh, I wish you could see her after the birds! Why, she’ll eat a little bird as soon as look at it!” No wonder Alice got into so much trouble in Wonderland.

FOSS

THE CAT WHO WAS ALMOST
TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE

The cats of great artists and writers often find themselves immortalized in their masters’ works. But in the strange case of nineteenth-century British artist and writer Edward Lear, a bit of poetic whimsy seems to have found its way into the real world.

The bearded, bespectacled eccentric gained fame as a painter of animals and landscapes. But he also published several books of children’s nonsense poems that made him internationally famous. Many, including
The Owl and the Pussycat
, are still read to toddlers today.

Lear illustrated his poems with lighthearted cartoons. One of his favorite subjects was a striped tomcat named Foss, who he acquired in 1872. Lear’s devotion to his pet is quite amazing, considering that Foss was by all accounts a most unattractive subject. He was fat, with a bobbed tail reportedly cut off by a superstitious servant who believed it would stop him from roaming. Yet there’s no end to the pictures Lear drew of himself and his rotund friend on adventures. No photos exist of the famous feline. When Lear tried to take one, the big orange cat jumped out of his master’s arms just before the shutter clicked.

Lear loved Foss so much that, when the artist built a new home, he made it look exactly like his old one, so as not to upset the cat. And when Foss passed away in 1887, he was buried in his master’s garden under a large memorial stone. Lear himself died only two months later.

Today pictures of Foss can still be seen in collections of Lear’s nonsense poems. But there’s something mysterious about them. The
real
Foss didn’t enter the artist’s life until 1872. Yet years earlier he regularly produced drawings of a similar fat, striped, stub-tailed cat. And for some reason, Lear was convinced that Foss lived a near-impossible thirty-one years—so much so that he had that figure carved on his friend’s tombstone. Perhaps he saw the real Foss as the incarnation of the imaginary cat he’d carried in his mind’s eye for decades. “Edward adored Foss, and it was mutual, but the Foss we know belongs more to the world of nonsense stories than he does to the real world,” says Lear biographer Peter Levi. Maybe he always did.

COBBY

THE CAT WHO STOLE HIS
MASTER’S HEART—LITERALLY

After the death of English poet and novelist Thomas Hardy on January 11, 1928, his pet cat, Cobby, reportedly vanished, never to be seen again. This strange occurrence gave rise to one of the most macabre stories in the history of Western literature.

It began shortly after the great man’s passing, when a contest broke out over where to bury his body. Hardy’s will stated explicitly that he wanted to be laid to rest with minimal ceremony in his hometown of Stinsford. However, the executor of his will thought that the author of such classics as
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
,
The Mayor of Casterbridge
, and
The Return of the Native
should enjoy more august accommodations. Specifically, he wanted Hardy to find repose in the fabled Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey, near such luminaries as Charles Dickens, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Dr. Samuel Johnson.

After heated debate with the family, a compromise was reached: Hardy’s body would go to Westminster Abbey and his heart to Stinsford. This would require a bit of postmortem surgery—a job that Hardy’s personal physician reportedly declined to undertake. Another doctor was found,
and the organ was removed while the great author lay in state at his home. Tradition says it was wrapped in a tea cloth, placed in a biscuit tin, and set aside for transport.

According to one version of the story, the next day the undertaker charged with carrying the heart to Stinsford discovered the box was empty and Cobby was nowhere to be found—the assumption being, of course, that the cat ran off with his owner’s heart. But there’s an even more horrifying telling of the tale. Some contend that, on the fateful day, authorities found the box empty save for a few scraps of flesh—and that Cobby sat nearby, washing the blood off his muzzle.

In this version of the story, the undertaker came up with a rough-and-ready solution. He had to bury the heart. The heart was inside Cobby. So he throttled the poor cat and secretly interred him at Stinsford. How much of the story is true? Only an inspection of the grave’s contents could answer that question. But what is known for sure is that poor Cobby was never seen again.

POLAR BEAR

THE CAT WHO CHARMED
A CURMUDGEON

Cleveland Amory was a well-known literary figure throughout his life. He was the youngest-ever editor at the
Saturday Evening Post
, chief critic for
TV Guide
, and the author of such bestsellers as
The Proper Bostonians
and
Who Killed Society?
But it took a New York City tomcat to turn him into a household name.

It happened on Christmas Eve 1977, when Amory, an avowed dog person, helped rescue an injured stray cat lurking in an alley near his apartment. The cat rewarded his effort by slashing him across both hands. Nevertheless, Amory adopted him. He discovered, while bathing the extraordinarily dirty creature, that it was snow white. Accordingly, he named him Polar Bear.

The two became fast friends, and the cat became an invaluable partner in Amory’s long-running crusade for animal rights. Over the years Amory had done everything from cofounding the Humane Society of the United States to launching the Fund for Animals, dedicated to protecting rare and endangered wildlife. Those causes received an enormous boost in 1988, when he published a book about his life with Polar Bear called
The Cat Who Came for Christmas
. It rocketed to No. 1 on
the
New York Times
bestseller list, as did its two sequels,
The Cat and the Curmudgeon
and
The Best Cat Ever
.

The works turned Polar Bear into a celebrity among cat fans and animal rights activists. He was even invited to become ship’s cat aboard the Greenpeace vessel
Sea Shepherd
(an offer that Amory, on his pet’s behalf, respectfully declined). Perhaps most importantly, he cast light on his owner’s animal rights work, including a scheme to airlift burros out of the Grand Canyon to save them from government culling and an effort to paint seal pups with harmless dyes to make their pelts worthless to trappers.

The two parted ways in 1991, when Polar Bear passed away. He was buried at Black Beauty Ranch, a Texas refuge established by the Fund for Animals to care for abused and abandoned creatures. His memorial reads, “Beneath these stones lie the mortal remains of The Cat Who Came for Christmas, Beloved Polar Bear. ’Til we meet again.” They met again when Amory, who died in 1998, was laid to rest beside him.