M R James and his love for cats

M R James and his love for cats

Recently while reading in the Guardian newspaper, that cat paw prints had been found on a fifteenth century manuscript,
It brought to mind the very important relationship that M R James had with his own succession of cats. For his home wherever he made it was never complete without a feline presence. In the letters he exchanged between the widow of his best friend James McBryde, Gwendolen and her daughter Jane, many times there is also an imaginary dialogue included of James’s cat (whom he always regarded as “A little old person”.

Many authors in the Victorian/Edwardian era and indeed up to our own time have always regarded their cats as vital members of their family and indeed companions and muses to the writing process, who can forget T S Eliot’s succession of alliteratively named cats, Mistoffelees, old Deuteronomy, Rum Tum Tugger, Skimbleshanks or the mesmorising evil Siamese twins in Disney’s Lady and The Tramp.

James’s cats were comedic, like the cat who entertained his friend Sir Henry Roscoe, by hanging off the edge of his chair and alternately swinging upon it and catching her tail through the bars of the chair. But they were also villains that might have found a place in the goriest of his ghost stories. In his letter to Gwendolen dated 4th March 1913, he wrote,

“My cat is really very unprincipled. Of the last lot of kittens she smothered 3 by going to sleep on top of them and subsequently ate the remaining one: so I have very little to say to her,” or the time that his sister brought a big black tom into the James household and James wrote that his cat was convinced that as he had not announced his presence to her, and that as Spratt heads had been seen being taken upstairs on a tray, that he must be a German spy. As the year in which this was taking place was 1914, nearly the end of the Great War I think that his cat could be forgiven for being too vigilant.

What is evident is that James enjoyed the company of cats very much and like Eliot found them agreeable muses, even to the point that his favorite way of sitting was on the edge of a chair in his study with the cat taking up much of the space behind him. His life would not have been complete without a cat and while I sit here writing this entry in my blog, my cat I-pod, (it’s a long story) has made her presence felt by trying to walk across my key board. I would like to think that MRJ would be proud.