The Joy of Pets: Writers and their cats, dogs, and laughing jackasses

"If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings," advised Aldous Huxley, "the best thing you can do is to keep a pair of cats.'”

From white whales to black horses, and rabbits in jackets to polar bears in armour, animals have always inspired writers. The once and future king changes into a hawk. The king of the elephants wears a bright green suit. Pigs become revolutionaries.

And of course as pets, they also make ideal companions. Pets force their writer-owners outside to get some exercise where their humans are also likely to meet other humans, they are (nearly) always loyal, and they provide companionship in what is often a very lonely working existence. They also offer practical services too, although sometimes, of course, they also eat first drafts and bite visitors. But even then they are loved.

V.S. Naipaul, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001, became very attached to his black and white cat Augustus, regularly getting up in the middle of the night to give him a drink of water. When he and his wife Nadira travelled, they limited their time away because their absence unsettled Augustus, and paid for two cat-sitters to keep him happy.

He told The New Republic after his black and white cat Augustus died following a kick to the head by a cow: “It was calamitous for me. I feel a deep, deep grief… I think of Augustus. He was the sum of my experiences. He had taken on my outlook, my way of living.” Naipaul had assumed Augustus would outlive him and included him in his will. He even placed a notice in The Times announcing his death.

Indeed, one of the oddest episodes in P.G. Wodehouse’s life shows the sacrifices some owners will make for their pets. He loved his dogs so much that he remained in France, where he was living with them and his wife Ethel in 1939, rather than returning to England because of the problematic quarantine laws. As a result, Wodehouse was captured and interned by the invading German army.

For many writers, their pets were direct inspirations for their work. Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote about her cocker spaniel Flush in two poems, To Flush, My Dog and Flush or Faunus as well as in letters to friends and family, including her husband Robert, whom a jealous Flush once bit quite badly. The following lines come from the former of these two poems:

Blessings on thee, dog of mine,
Pretty collars make thee fine,
Sugared milk make fat thee!
Pleasures wag on in thy tail —
Hands of gentle motion fail
Nevermore, to pat thee!

Flush gained additional fame when he became the main protagonist in Virginia Woolf’s ‘biography’ of him published in 1933. Though in some ways lighter than her other work, Flush examines the unenviable position of female writers, the ups and downs of urban London life, and the interaction between women and animals. The dog is essentially Woolf’s mouthpiece and is spectacularly observant of human mores (as well as being able to talk to other dogs) - imagine a canine reboot of Orlando meets A Room of One’s Own. In real life, Flush the dog was dognapped several times – and the ransomes paid - and these incidents appear in Woolf’s treatment of his life. Woolf later described it as a “silly book” and it was certainly not a critical success, although her friend the novelist E.M. Forster called it "doggie without being silly, and it does give us, from the altitude of the carpet of the sofa-foot, a peep at high poetic personages, and a new angle on their ways.”

Similarly, Aldous ‘Brave New World’ Huxley’s wrote about how humans and cats are alike in his essay Sermons in Cats. This includes his advice to an aspiring writer which includes this nugget: “'My young friend,' I said, 'if you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is to keep a pair of cats.'” Huxley goes on to suggest that he goes in particular for Siamese since they are not only beautiful to look at but also the closest of all cats to being human. The next step is to watch them every day, make notes, and learn from their behaviour.

It’s simply as companions that they are perhaps most favoured, for many people who work from home as well as writers. Lucy Maud Montgomery, best known as the author of the Anne of Green Gables series for children, had several cats including a grey tabby called Daffy – “The only real cat is a grey cat” she wrote in her diary, in which she stuck photos of her various cats - to whom she would read drafts of her work as she wrote while Daffy sat on her lap. Patricia Highsmith (who also kept pet snails…) had many cats. Ulrich Weber, curator of Highsmith's archive and estate in Switzerland where she spent her final years, said that “cats gave her a closeness that she could not bear in the long-term from people. She needed cats for her psychological balance.”

Yet sometimes a fondness for pets can get out of hand. It would be an understatement to say that poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti liked animals. A list of the animals who lived with him at his Chelsea home in Cheyne Walk, London, included a Brahman zebu bull (brought in through the house, tied to a tree in the garden, then given its marching orders when it escaped and charged at Rossetti), a zebra, various armadillos, wallabies, a Japanese salamander, an Irish deerhound called Wolf, a chameleon, a raven, a deer, dormice, rabbits, marmots, a racoon which hibernated in a chest of drawers, two laughing jackasses, a Pomeranian puppy called Punch, a barn owl called Jessie, parrots, peacocks, parakeets, and a kangaroo.

But not matter how much you love them, sometimes pets can get in a writer’s way. In his article for The New Yorker in 2018 Norwegian autobiographist Karl Ove Knausgaard raised readers’ eyebrows with his - perhaps lighthearted - assertion that his family’s pet dog “undermined his literary project”, preventing him from writing literary prose for two years, and posed the question, has a single good author ever owned a dog?

If you’re interested in finding out more about writers and their pets, might I humbly-brag recommend my book Edward Lear and the Pussycat: Famous Writers and Their Pets published by the British Library, and available everywhere good books are sold.

What I’ve been reading this week: Spurred on by a quotation sent to me by a friend from Hilary Mantel’s memoir Giving up the Ghost I have engineered its promotion from off my TBR pile. It’s a superb piece of writing, atmospheric, emotional, but never at all mawkish - the early chapters about her childhood memories are particularly well written. There’s a great review of it, though with mild ‘spoilers’ I suppose, at Slightly Foxed.