John Lee's Nursery Ballads ... and two Royal Umbrellas

John Lee's Nursery Ballads: I ran into these vaguely IOW-related works while Googling a strange dream I had - I get a few lately - about "Isle of Wight cake" (which for all I know exists).

Iapetus

Just a piece of stream-of-consciousness that led to some literature I'd quite forgotten... I saw an old Daily Mail article about the very cute cat Venus, who is a chimera - an organism composed of genetically distinct patches. It's not unusual in animals, but unusual to have such a distinct facial division: blue-eyed ginger tabby on the left, green-eyed black cat on the right. She even has a Facebook page.

The King of the Cats

I had to draw this, because Cosmo
wouldn't wear a tinfoil crown.

Following on from the story of the cat funeral (attributed by Jean Cocteau to Keats) in MK Joseph's poem The Rosy Cats of Doctor Paracelsus ...

It's a very good yarn, which Cocteau retold in his 1969 The Hand of a Stranger: (Journal d'un inconnu). Admittedly, this must get some kind of prize for the retelling most embroidered with irrelevant waffle about the angsts of the storyteller.

On a Cat Story
To be not marvelled at, but believed

As far as I know, Keats' cat story has never been written. It has been passed down by word of mouth, changing as it goes. There are a number of versions about, but the mood is always the same. A mood so subtle that I wonder if that is not why the story better fits speech, with its leisureliness, than the pen, which is impatient.

These are the facts : Keats was to go to the village of F. to lunch with a friend who was the parson there. He had to cross a forest. On horseback, he lost his way in it. Dusk made the labyrinth inescapable. Tying his horse to a tree, he decided to wait for daybreak, and try to find a charcoal-burner's hut where he might shelter overnight. While he was wandering round, afraid to go too far out of sight of his horse, and taking care to blaze a trail wherever he went, he noticed a light. He made his way towards that light. It came from a sort of ruin not mentioned by any guide book, that of an ancient amphitheatre, a Coliseum, a confusion of arches, steps, tumbled stone, collapsed walls, gaps, brambles. The light, which was very peculiar, quivered and lit up the dead amphitheatre. Keats went close up, slipped through a gap past a pillar, and peeped.

What he saw pinned him there with stupefaction and terror. The auditorium was occupied by hundreds of cats, side by side, like the crowd round a Spanish arena, they were milling about everywhere, miaowing at the top of their voices. Suddenly he caught the sound of miniature trumpets, and the cats were motionless at once, their phosphorescent eyes turned to the right, from where came the flickering confusion of light and shadow. The light came from torches, carried by fifty jackbooted cats, heading a procession of other cats, magnificently clad, with cat pages and heralds trumpeting, cats carrying banners and cat standard-bearers.

The procession filed right across the arena and began to wind back, when there appeared four white and four black cats, with cocked hats and swords, they too, just like the others strutting on their hind legs. These four were carrying on their shoulders a little coffin on which lay a small golden crown. Behind this came more cats, two by two, bearing cushions on which were pinned orders, the diamonds of which sparkled in the light of the torches and flashed in the moonshine. The procession wound up with drums. Keats told himself that he must be dreaming, he had fallen asleep on horseback and this was a dream. But dreams are one thing, reality another. He was not dreaming and he knew he was not. He was lost by night in a forest, he was the witness of a rite of which no man should have seen anything, and he was afraid. The moment his presence was discovered that crowd of cats would rush out of the amphitheatre and tear him in pieces with their claws. The heralds trumpeted, the standards fluttered, the coffin was borne, all in a silence made painful by those arrogant little trumpets. After one turn of the arena, the whole procession moved away. The trumpets died down. The lights were extinguished The crowd of cats left the tiers of the amphitheatre. Many of them leapt out through the breach in the wall into which Keats now made every effort to efface himself. The ruin became a ruin again, with only the moonlight to occupy it.

It was now that a much more dangerous idea than the scene he had witnessed came to Keats. It was that he would not be believed. This was a story he would never be able to tell. It would be classified as a poet's falsehood. Now, Keats knew that poets do not tell lies. They bear witness. [And he knew] that it is believed that they do lie. And he became frantic, at the thought a secret like this would remain his property, that he would never be able to relieve himself of it, sharing it with other men. A catafalque of loneliness.

Shaking himself, he went back to his horse. resolved to leave the forest, whatever it cost him. He then succeeded in reaching the parsonage, where he was no longer expected.

The parson was a very cultivated man. Keats had great respect for him, considering him, indeed, competent to understand his poems. He told his story, but without referring to the amphitheatre of cats. The parson had been in bed, and had got up again. The parson's valet was asleep. The parson laid a meal for Keats. Keats ate in silence. The parson was astonished to find him so distracted, and asked if he were not feeling unwell. Keats replied that he was not, but admitted that he was under the influence of a worry, the cause of which he was unable to tell. The parson gave him a friendly shake and said he certainly must explain what he meant. Oysterlike, Keats wriggled, but in the end the parson got him to give way, for once his guest had admitted that his anxiety was he would not be believed, the parson promised to believe him. Keats was not satisfied with a mere promise, but made the parson swear over the Bible. This however the parson could not do. But he did declare that his promise as a friend was really quite as good as the oath of a priest.

"I am all ears," he said, and lay back in his armchair, smoking his pipe.

Keats was about to tell, when he thought better of it. Fear overcame him again. The parson, now very interested, had to let him have his way and say nothing, in order to free his tongue. But at last Keats closed his eyes and told the story. The parson listened in the gloom, the window open on the stars, the fire dying down. Keats described the ruin, the strange gathering and the strange happening. From time to time, he opened his eyes, to shoot a glance at the parson ...
... section unfindable
Then it happened, just as sudden as a clap of thunder, without either Keats or the parson really grasping what was taking place. Keats had got to the procession, the torches, the trumpets, the pennants, the drums, and was describing the costumes, cocked-hats and high-boots. "Four white cats," he said, "and four black cats, were carrying a coffin on their shoulders. On the coffin lay a golden crown."

He had scarcely got these words off his lips when the cat which was sleeping in front of the fire arched its back. Its hair stood on end. "But that means I am now the king of the cats," it cried out in a human voice, and leapt out of the window.

- The Hand of a Stranger (Journal d'un inconnu), Jean Cocteau, Horizon Press, 1959

I haven't been able to track it to Keats - this seems to be an invention or mistake on the part of Cocteau (perhaps he was thinking of the remark by WB Yeats on Swinburne's death). But Mary Shelley repeated in her 1824 On Ghosts this version ...

A gentleman journeying towards the house of a friend, who lived on the skirts of an extensive forest, in the east of Germany, lost his way. He wandered for some time among the trees, when he saw a light at a distance. On approaching it he was surprised to observe that it proceeded from the interior of a ruined monastery. Before he knocked at the gate he thought it proper to look through the window. He saw a number of cats assembled round a small grave, four of whom were at that moment letting down a coffin with a crown upon it. The gentleman startled at this unusual sight, and, imagining that he had arrived at the retreats of fiends or witches, mounted his horse and rode away with the utmost precipitation. He arrived at his friend's house at a late hour, who sate up waiting for him. On his arrival his friend questioned him as to the cause of the traces of agitation visible in his face. He began to recount his adventures after much hesitation, knowing that it was scarcely possible that his friend should give faith to his relation. No sooner had he mentioned the coffin with the crown upon it, than his friend's cat, who seemed to have been lying asleep before the fire, leaped up, crying out, 'Then I am king of the cats;' and then scrambled up the chimney, and was never seen more.

... by Matthew G Lewis. who told it to the Shelleys. It appears as an English fairy tale - The King o' the Cats - but, interestingly, one often collected many decades after these literary sources. However, it appears many times in 19th century publications. There's an extremely erudite verse retelling in The Mouser-Monarchy, a piece by John Hamilton-Reynolds in The New Monthly Magazine, Volume 75, Part 3, 1845. Fraser's Magazine in 1837 has a verse retelling "narrated by Washington Irving as having been told by Sir Walter Scott to him" (here). It's also in the 1836 anonymous collection Poems on Several Occasions, from 1793 to 1816 (page 41), and also in the letters of Lord Lyttleton (see Letters of the late Lord Lyttelton, Volumes 1-2, 1785, pp 35-36). And it appears in folklore versions: Notes and Queries, for Dec 15th 1860, mentions the variant story about someone being told by a cat, "Tell Dildrum [that] Doldrum's dead". Stephen Vincent Benét's 1937 short fantasy The King of the Cats is based on the same story.

Addendum, 31 Jan 2013: I'm not sure now I missed this one first time round, but David Platt of Small Finds from the Spoilheap kindly sent me a scan and pointer to Joseph Jacobs' version The King o' the Cats (from his 1894 More English Fairy Tales, Project Gutenberg, E-Text No. 14241).

Right: a low-res image of the nice artwork by Alan Howard accompanying the reprint of Jacobs' version in Northern Lights: Legends, Sagas and Folktales, ed. Kevin Crossley-Holland, Faber & Faber, 1987.

- Ray

The Rosy Cats of Doctor Paracelsus - and other poems

Further to The Time of Achamoth, and before that The Hole in the Zero, I've just been looking at the poetry of the 1950s-70s New Zealand author MK Joseph.

He was pretty good. The Poetry Archive has a feature on him - MK Joseph - with nine of his poems; but I just found a very good weblog, Reading for Believers, which has a number of his hard-to-find poems (check out the internal search) such as The Rosy Cats of Doctor Paracelsus. There are undoubtedly copyright issues with this poem, but he's long out of print and I reproduce it out of sincere homage to a great writer.

The Rosy Cats of Doctor Paracelsus M.K. Joseph

(paste-up, with montage of old movies)

Paracelsus claimed that he could make homunculi
(Little men) a span high, growing the lifeseeds
in vessels buried in dungheaps to maintain
a mild and even heat . . . Wise Paracelsus believed that if a rose
was burned in a crucible to finest ash
then in the heatshimmer as the smoke ascended
it would hover and shape itself into the grey
ghost of a rose. My grey ghost hand
plucks from the air, presents to you
This ghost of a rose.

When Nijinkski danced the Spectre of the Rose
leaving the dreaming girl he seemed to
float out of the window into the moonlight
light as a rose petal
then fell into a chair
backstage, where two attendants worked him over
like a heavyweight boxer's seconds with towel and sponge.

That was Jean Cocteau's story, perhaps he was lying.

Cocteau the magician conjured an Orpheus
who could walk through mirrors into death's kingdom.
He also had a story about cats. It went like this.

'The English poet Keats once rode
At night-time through an gloomy wood
When all at once he seemed to hear
A sound of tiny trumpets near.
Dismounting from his horse he sees
Small torches flickering through the trees
Bobbing and twinkling two by two
And presently came into view
Cats all dressed in funeral black
Marching along the woodland track.

Only the tap of drum is heard,
Six drummers pass without a word,
Then the trumpet's mournful cry
As six cat-trumpeters march by,
Six cats in mourning for the dead
Wave six black banners overhead,
With trumpets' cry and tap of drum
And flapping bannners on they come.

Then guards-men cats with arms reversed
Of which six musketeers were first
To fire the volley at the grave,
Six swordsmen-cats with whiskers brave,
Six grenadiers with drooping tail,
Six pikemen with pikes at trail,
Six cat-princesses glided by
Blackveiled and sobbing bitterly.
Last came six blackgowned pallbearers
Bearing heavily on their shoulders
The coffin draped, and on it set
A tiny golden coronet.
Silent they marched by where he stood
And vanished in the darkling wood.

When many a weary mile was past
Keats reached a friendly house at last.
Beside him on the hearth-rug sat
And purred a handsome ginger cat
As resting by the fireside
He told of his strange evening ride -

Torches and drums and minstrelsy
Banners and guards and heraldry
Princesses sobbing bitterly
But when he came to the coronet
Upon the little coffin set
The cat said: That means I'm king
Of all the cats. With sudden spring
He cleared the windowsill and quite
Disappeared in the summer night.'

(And when Swinburne died - so Karl Stead
told me - Yeats said
Now I'm king of the cats).

but Mary Shelley heard of this from Monk Lewis
at Geneva in the summer Frankenstein,
she also believed that if a cat ate roses
it would turn into a beautiful woman.

'Quickly, come quickly, the little cat
is eating the roses. It will turn into a beautiful woman
with green eyes and short sharp fingernails.'

O catwoman mother of monsters
may the pads of your paws be
as soft and pearly as rose petals
your claws no sharper than thorns.
(A huge hand ripped off in a closing door
clawed with gigantic thorns.
Where could this be? In the arctic hut in
The Thing from Outer Space
the tall walking vegetable vampire*
whose seedlings must be nourished
with human blood. Trapped in the end
screaming in electric arcs
fried down for compost.)

*(played by James Arness later known as Matt Dillon.)

[Samuel Johnson had a cat named Hodge.
When it fell ill his friend the barroom doctor
Levett prescribed a nourishing diet of oysters.
Dilemma: should he send his black servant
Francis Barber who might feel put upon
running errands for a fat old cat?
Solution: Doctor Samuel Johnson went himself
to Billingsgate to purchase oysters for
Hodge who recovered. This is a digression.]

Doctor Pretorius (played by Ernest Thesiger)
was a paracelsian who kept his homunculi
imprisoned in glass belljars; when they knocked
with tiny fists upon the glass it rang
like toy telephones: this in The Bride of Frankenstein
In which the Bride (the Monster's of course: Frankenstein's
bride was played by Valerie Hobson who later
married a British Cabinet minister named
John Profumo, which is strange but not relevant)
was played by Elsa Lanchester who in 'real'
i.e. offscreen life was married to Charles Laughton
who was Quasimodo in the second Hunchback
of Notre Dame and Doctor Moreau in The Island
of Lost Souls in which the leader
of the Beast Men was Bela Lugosi who
(need I say it?) played the title-role in the original
Dracula in which Renfield the madman
who ate flies was Dwight Frye who acted
the malignant hunchback who in Frankenstein the first
selected the wrong brain for the poor Monster
(doomed from the start) who was played
by Boris Karloff who was played by
a very gentle Englishman named
William Henry Pratt.

Ash in the crucible revives
Roses and monsters hover in the mind.

Bernard de Fonatanelle who lived for a century
And dreamed of men dwelling on other stars
Also listened-in on the conversation of roses.
He overheard one rose say to another
No gardener has ever been known to die.

As a paste-up, it may well have meaning only discernible to the reader, but it's readable as a stream-of-consciousness piece by a writer who had wide interests across literature and popular culture. MK Joseph's interests show through in this poem - echoes of Samuel Johnson and Dr Pretorius turn up in The Hole in the Zero (see the update) and one of the future vignettes in The Time of Achamoth repeats the Paracelsus and Mary Shelley stories.

See The king of the cats for a follow-up on the Keats allusion.

- Ray

Pope and Wain's Cat Scouts

The co-authors of The Cat Scouts, a scarce children's book written by Jessie Pope and illustrated by Louis Wain, make an interesting partnership.

The Cat Scouts, written in 1912, is somewhat gung-ho, all about the merits of discipline and bravely putting up with hardship (the cat on the left is not about to be murdered, but released after punishment for playing marbles on duty). But Pope's style came into full flow with her WW1 pro-war poems, such as The Call and Who's for the Game? The anti-war poet Wilfred Owen, who knew first-hand that the trenches were far from the jolly game she portrayed, wrote a pointed dedication to her on the first draft of his Dulce et decorum est. The subject of World War 1 poetry is a very large topic; read Where death becomes absurd and life absurder for a good overview. One redeeming feature for Jessie Pope, though, was her recognition of the significance of Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and brokering its publication, even if its first edition appeared in her bowdlerised version that trimmed much of the socialist content and turned it into a more conventional "working-class hardship" story.

Wain's work, of which The Cat Scouts is typical, comes across as twee by present standards, though he has a following (see Catland) and he deserves credit for a major role in fostering a positive attitude toward cats in Britain in the late 19th century. Much of the interest nowadays is in the pathological aspects of his art. In later life, he developed schizophrenia, and its manifestation in his work - cats becoming increasingly threatening and psychedelic until they lose all resemblance to cats - is classic in the neurological field. See Cats Painted in the Progression of Psychosis of a Schizophrenic Artist. This Cat Fanciers' Association article, Louis Wain - Cat Artist, has a good short biography and bibliography.

- Ray