Crazy over Cats

COVER STORY

Love 'em or hate 'em, they are a national mania

Cat: One Hell of a nice animal, frequently mistaken for a meatloaf.

—B. Kliban, cartoonist

Muhammad cut the sleeve from his robe rather than disturb his friend, asleep on the Prophet's gown. Samuel Johnson daily pampered his spoiled companion Hodge with meals of fresh oysters. Victor Hugo cherished Gavroche. Cardinal Richelieu left a generous legacy for the 14 he owned. Napoleon is said to have broken into a cold sweat at the sight of one. In his childhood, Smerdyakov, in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, was fond of hanging them. Thomas Hardy and Thomas Gray wrote poems to them; Hemingway shared dinner with his. Physician and Scholar Albert Schweitzer favored two ways to take refuge from human misery: playing the organ and delighting in the play of his cats.

From deification to demonization, and every stage in between, attitudes toward cats have been confused, variable, peculiar, consuming, jittery and, ultimately, baffling. Those sinuous forms represented in Egyptian art, valued as rodent-chasers by farmers, or draped luxuriously over an apartment radiator have elicited the best and worst from mankind in the 5,000 years since their domestication. The dog may be man's best friend, but the cat is his most perplexing one, if, indeed, he is one at all.

A prodigious number of Americans have become smitten with cats. Others continue to bad-mouth felines. Are cats stouthearted companions or unresponsive curmudgeons? Or are they, as Cartoonist Bernard Kliban suggested in his bestselling album Cat (1975), merely whimsical meat-loaves? While the fur flies in this battle, one cat gives folks a humorous peek at both armies in the controversy. The most famous feline to express this perplexing relationship between man and pet is Garfield, a comic-strip cat. His creator, Cartoonist Jim Davis, has three books on the New York Times trade paperback bestseller list, a first for any author. Garfield Bigger Than Life, Garfield Gains Weight and Garfield at Large, which has been on the list for an amazing 84 weeks, have sold more than 2 million volumes, and a fourth compilation of the daily newspaper comic will appear in the spring. Three other cat books also grace the list, including 101 Uses for a Dead Cat (on the list for 27 weeks); together they account for an additional 1.2 million kitty-cartoon albums (see box).