I have a book that is a compilation of ‘Famous Writers and Their Pets’. It’s published by the British Library and is by Alex Johnson, who has a good track record in putting together such references.
It’s in a faintly chaotic alphabetical order – for instance, G (inter alia) is for Giraffe (Julius Caesar had one) while on the facing page you find Edward Gorey who had a quantity of cats (like all sensible people). It is a trove of thematic material – you have been warned.
E kicks off with Eliot (revealing that neither Maria Edgeworth nor Albert Einstein were pet inclined?), and lists a round half-dozen of his own felines. The Old Possum book starts with a well-known poem about The Naming of Cats. One of the earliest Listener puzzles I attempted (by Bart, a fellow Mastermind alumnus; it was in one of the Penguin collections) used it as a theme, but it’s certainly one that can be revisited.
I selected two from the list of Eliot’s own cats’ names, placed them either side of good old Macavity (if he can’t make the theme obvious, we are lost…), and draped the title quote top and bottom. The grid has slightly unusual symmetry – mostly rotational, but a few rows are vertically reflective. I’m not entirely sure now how that came about, but I think it may have had something to do with the quote requiring the suspension of rotational symmetry to allow the second part to be ‘poured into’ the bottom rows.
I always attempt a bit of research to see how easy it is to find corroboration for unusual themes and entries. I’d chosen Tantomile and Pettipaws from Eliot’s menagerie. Online there were several lists of his cats but they all seemed to derive from a single source. This is concerning because it’s easy to find yourself in a circular loop where the references are to references which link back to references to the original references. I suspect the original source to be the Ackroyd biography of Eliot – Johnson’s book only has picture credits.
Anyway, it was clear that putting ‘Pettipaws Eliot’ into Google would supply confirmation. ‘Tantomile Eliot’ was a different matter, though you could hardly say no confirmation was provided. The musical Cats generated extra characters (dancers like their solos…) and the theatrical crew went looking further afield for new, but relevant, names. The cast includes a pair of psychic cats named Coricopat and…Tantomile. Coricopat is echt Old Possum (from ‘The Naming of Cats’ itself – ‘Well, Mr Eliot, isn’t it convenient that one of your imagined cat’s names just happens to rhyme with…’), but for Tantomile they turned to the real-life Eliot.
Quite a lot to cover off in a preamble.
But that’s cats for you.
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