![]() In The Waste Land his unhappy wife Vivienne appears in pleading glimpses. If Eliot’s cat book spoke to the terror of the times, it also mapped the continuing disintegration of his personal life. If Eliot’s cat book spoke to the terror of the times, it also mapped the continuing disintegration of his personal life Growltiger, “the Terror of the Thames”, is an outlaw who preys on cottagers, canaries, geese, hens and the “bristly Bandicoot that lurks on foreign ships”. Rum Tum Tugger, meanwhile, is a contrarian who takes joy in creating “domestic muddle” just as Macavity, the master criminal, wrecks national security by stealing treaties from the Foreign Office and plans from the Admiralty. ![]() The juvenile delinquents wantonly smash items in the dining room and library (the sites of the civilised body and mind respectively) and think nothing of stealing food from families who can afford it least. In Eliot’s text Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer are two young thugs who destroy property for the hell of it – dislodging tiles “loose on the roof / Which presently ceased to be water-proofed”, anticipating the blitz by several months. Above all, here is the moral grubbiness of what Eliot’s younger friend WH Auden dubbed “a low dishonest decade”. ![]() Both share a sense of chronic disorder, where violence simmers just beneath the surface, regret drowns optimism and wilful self-interest trumps finer feeling every time. Initially conceived of throughout the 1930s with his young godchildren in mind, Eliot’s cat land is every bit as bleak as The Waste Land. ‘This piece of musical theatre would take place in a broken down post-industrial dump.’ Cats by Andrew Lloyd Webber at the London Palladium in 2014. Now, with Tom Hooper’s much-anticipated film version starring Taylor Swift and Idris Elba to be released on Friday, it is worth thinking again about the magnetic darkness that keeps us returning to TS Eliot’s feline universe at times of deep disturbance. Confronted by the melancholy of the material, critics were jogged into wondering whether there might be more to Cats, practical or otherwise, than meets the eye. It was Andrew Lloyd Webber’s determination to bring Eliot’s creatures to the stage in 1981 that changed all that. “Pleasant, inoffensive and unremarkable”, sniffed the distinguished Eliot scholar Burton Raffel, and this remained the dominant view throughout the postwar period. Nor did that judgment change significantly even once the book’s popular success became clear (right from the start it outsold The Waste Land significantly). The view that the book was a significant indiscretion was shared in Eliot’s native US where John Holmes of the Boston Evening Transcript snapped that Practical Cats “should have been prevented”. ![]() Death and destruction were clearly on their way, and here was one of the country’s leading intellectuals writing stuff for kids. At this very moment many families were contemplating euthanising their pets for fear of not being able to feed them properly once wartime rationing kicked in. ![]() Yet, despite the fact that he had such a pedigree, literary critics of the time couldn’t help feeling that Eliot, who was not only the author of Practical Cats but, by virtue of his job at Faber, its publisher, too, had misjudged the nation’s mood. It stands in a classic tradition of catty nonsense, reaching back through The Owl and the Pussy-Cat (Edward Lear) and the Cheshire Cat (Lewis Carroll) to Christopher Smart’s “ My Cat, Jeoffry”, an 18th-century epic that Eliot himself regarded as the Iliad of cat literature. Practical Cats consists of short verse profiles of 15 rambunctious felines with fanciful names, including Rum Tum Tugger and Growltiger. ![]()
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