The Fur Person By May Sarton

[Ronald Gruzinsky]

IfThe Fur Person is not like any children's book you have ever read, that may be because it isn't a children's book. It is an adult's biography of a cat who became her pet and then her friend. May Sarton knows how to tell an adult about a cat. The usual hurdles of condescension and over-indulgence cause her no trouble. And she conspicuously avoids the Walt Disney custom of fastening human personalities onto animals. And that, in fact, is what the book is about.

The hero of The Fur Person does not start by being a Fur Person. He is first a stray who considers himself Cat About Town. Then he decides to be a Gentleman Cat and find a home. Though his first attempts are discouraging, he perseveres; and his fortunes are reflected in his changing names: Nice Kitty, Tom Jones, Jones, Terrible Jones, Gentle Cat, Cat of Peace, Glorious Jones, Official Philosopher, and, finally, Fur Person.

Yet he was Fur Person in a way to start with, partly cat and partly humans, because Miss Sarton's imagination allows her to take his viewpoint from the start. She knows that though cats can come to have human characteristics by living with people, still cats have their dignity, which human people must regard, especially those who dare write books about cats. Her point seems to be that it's easier for her to be a cat lover than for a cat to be a lover of people.

As Miss Sarton shows in a lovely way at the end, Fur Person is a cat who becomes partly a person. But other cats don't. She can only write as she does, inevitably, about a Fur Person. She doesn't pretend to be writing about just a cat. That, she might agree, would be harder.

Miss Sarton means only to write about a Fur Person who is, the blurb tells us, her own cat. It is, then, a charming book that cares for the prodigious cat dignity it describes so well. But it isn't a children's book, first because the words are too big, and also because the intricate varieties of cat thought and the comments on the human variety of life seem meant for adult ears. Though these might bore children, The Fur Person is an uncommonly charming book for grown-ups.

Sometimes the demon of self-doubt comes to tell me that I've been fatally divided between two crafts, that of the novel and that of poetry, but I've always believed that in the end it was the total work which would communicate a vision of life and it really needs different modes to do that. The novels have been written in order to find something out about what I was thinking, questions I was asking myself that I needed to answer. Take a very simple example, A Shower of Summer Days. The great house that dominates the novel was Bowen's Court. What interested me was the collision between a rich nature, a young girl in revolt against everything at home in America, and ceremony, tradition, and beauty as represented by the house in Ireland.

Not at all. It's a complete invention. The only person who is not invented in that book is the husband of Violet, and he is based on Elizabeth Bowen's husband. The house is, as I said, Bowen's Court. I stayed there.

No. Very little influence. None. Her style is too mannered. At her best, in The Death of the Heart, it's marvelous, but in the later books her style became too literary in a not very attractive way to me. For instance, a sentence is very rarely a straight sentence.

So what one hopes, or what I hope, is that the whole work will represent the landscape of a nature which is not primarily intellectual but rather a sensibility quite rich and diverse and large in its capacities to understand and communicate.

Ismail Kadar was born and raised in the town of Gjinokastr in Albania. He read literature at the University of Tiran and spent three years doing postgraduate work at the Gorky Institute in Moscow. The General was his first novel, published on his return to Albania in 1962, when he was twenty-six.

He lives with his wife and daughter in the Latin Quarter, in a spacious and bright apartment overlooking Luxembourg Gardens; he often travels to Albania. This interview took place at his home in February and October of 1997, with telephone conversations in between.

Kadar has the reputation of not suffering fools gladly, but I found him gentle, courteous, and rather patient with someone who does not know his country and its literature, both of which he cares about passionately. He speaks French fluently with a distinct accent in a quiet measured voice.

You are the first contemporary Albanian writer to achieve international fame. For the majority of people, Albania is a tiny country of three and a half million inhabitants on the edge of Europe. So my first question concerns the Albanian language. What is it?

When he was about two years old, and had been a Cat About Town for some time, glorious in conquests, but rather too thin for comfort, the Fur Person decided that it was time he settled down. This question of finding a permanent home and staff was not one to be approached lightly . . .

The most remarkable thing about the two kind ladies was that they left him to eat in peace and did not say one word. They had the tact to withdraw into the next room and to talk about other things, and leave him entirely to himself.

For a Fur Person is a cat whom human beings love in the right way, allowing him to keep his dignity, his reserve and his freedom. And a Fur Person is a cat who has come to love one, or in very exceptional cases, two human beings, and who has decided to stay with them as long as he lives.

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This enchanting 1957 cat-memoir by May Sarton may be the grandmother of the current litter of cat-cozies, a fact that may or may not endear it to you, depending on how you feel about cats and cozies. I ran across it on my shelf last week and sat down with it immediately, remembering the great pleasure it has given me over the years.

The Fur Person chronicles the adventures of Tom Jones, a Cat About Town who lives wild and free on the streets of Boston until he reaches a certain age and begins to see the virtue in reliable meals, a warm bed, and a comfortable lap. After several abortive attempts to hire a Housekeeper, he finally finds two, Brusque Voice (May Sarton) and Gentle Voice (her companion Judy Matlack), who take him in and provide fresh haddock (his favorite), warm milk, chopped liver, and even (yes!) catnip. Fighting Tom learns that cat-life is calmer and more rewarding after a certain . . . alteration in his tomcat-nature. By the end of the book, he has become a Fur Person, who loves and is loved by a human person.

And those Commandments (When frightened, a Gentleman Cat looks bored)? I confess to having been under their influence when Bosworth Badger (who lives on Holly How in my series, the Cottage Tales of Beatrix Potter) presented me with the Badger Rules of Thumb:

We got a tiny bit. I sent my daughter who lives in Colorado a picture of our roof with a tiny dusting and she laughed and laughed! I have always lived in the Dallas area, and remember as a child we would get at least 2 good snows. What good memories!

Of her mother:

She had lifted out of a pile of rubbish a single Venetian glass on a long delicate stem so dirty it had become opaque, but miraculously intact. How had this single object survived to give us courage? It went back with us to Cambridge and it was always there, wherever we lived. And now it is here, in my own house, a visible proof that it is sometimes the most fragile thing that has the power to endure.

May Sarton is most closely associated with Nelson (a tiny settlement in southwestern New Hampshire which readers of Plant Dreaming Deep, Journal of a Solitude, and As Does New Hampshire will recognize immediately), and York, Maine with The House by the Sea.

Of her 18thC farmhouse in Nelson, with its five fireplaces and thirty acres of land bordered by a brook:

I had brought up a silk panel, turquoise damask, embroidered by my mother with a geometric design in blue and gold. That panel had never found a place on the walls at Channing Place, but both the shape and the color fitted perfectly in my study [at Nelson]. It was, I saw when I had hung it experimentally, surely meant as a background for flowers, and so it became a kind of stage where the whole glorious sequence could be played out, from daffodils and tulips in May, to iris, and then to the great white peonies, the vivid blue delphinium, the long sequence of lilies, to end with chrysanthemums and asters in the fall. It is the tokonoma of the house, the sacred place where beauty is kept alive in the memory of the dead.

Plant Dreaming Deep

Nothing will ever replace Nelson in my life, even the spacious world where I now watch sunrise over the ocean. Deep down inside me Nelson is home, and I am glad I shall be buried in the cemetery there under the maples.

At Seventy: A Journal

These are the great days when clarity comes back to the air and all is a radiant suspense before the first leaf falls. Autumn is on the threshold, but for a week or two we have the best of everything. A still center before the wheel turns.

Recovering: A Journal 1978-1979

Loneliness is the poverty of self;

Solitude is the richness of self.

Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing

When I said that all poems are love poems, I meant that the motor power, the electric current is love of one kind or another. The subject may be something quite impersonal.

Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing

I can cast out the wrong idea of fidelity and understand that in the end one cannot be faithful in the true life-giving sense if it means being unfaithful to oneself.

Recovering: A Journal 1978-1979

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