Of Cats and Morality: A Gratifying Quote for Posterity

Few experiences are more gratifying than finding oneself quoted in a book, particularly a best seller.

So I was gratified when Cleveland Amory told me he had quoted me on Page 240 of his new best seller, “The Cat and the Curmudgeon” (Little, Brown).

I am not among Mr. Amory’s legion of friends, on both coasts, but we were both among the panel of authors at a mass autographing function in the Beverly Wilshire--a fund-raiser for the Robert F. Kennedy Medical Center.

Naturally, I opened Mr. Amory’s book and turned to Page 240 the first chance I had.

My eye fell upon the following: “Indeed, I am indebted to Jack Smith of the Los Angeles Times for what would seem to me to be a fairly definitive statement on this ticklish point: ‘I can honestly say,’ Mr. Smith writes, ‘that I never knew a moral cat.’ ”

Mr. Amory being the curmudgeon he is, I did not expect him to accept my judgment without challenge. Indeed, he commented:

“I take, however, some umbrage at this. Polar Bear has a kind of morality which I firmly believe is in many ways more honest than mine. The New England conscience, I have often said, does not stop you from doing what you shouldn’t--it just stops you from enjoying it. Polar Bear’s conscience, on the other hand, not only doesn’t stop him from doing what he shouldn’t, it also doesn’t stop him from enjoying it thoroughly.”

Polar Bear, of course, is the white cat Mr. Amory rescued from a New York alley on Christmas Eve 12 years ago, and the subject of his previous best seller, “The Cat Who Came for Christmas.” (That Mr. Amory refers to Polar Bear as who rather than that betrays his anthropomorphism toward cats.)

In fact, Mr. Amory employs the most charming sophistry in the service of this strange mind set, like that he used against my statement on the lack of morality in cats.

Happily, though, Mr. Amory does not indulge in the wistful fancies of many cat lovers. He does not make Polar Bear talk, or write, though he does claim to communicate with him. He is given, however, to the common notion among cat lovers that his cat owns him, instead of vice versa.

Though I do not share Mr. Amory’s love of cats, I found his book entertaining because it is more about Mr. Amory’s adventures, amorous and otherwise, on two coasts, than it is about Polar Bear. Since cats have no morals, it would be impossible to write an entire book about a cat. Where would the chance be for moral conflict?

At the outset Mr. Amory deals with Polar Bear’s distaste for the celebrity that the first book brought him. In fact, this chapter turns out to be a sophisticated essay on celebrity in general.

“When the word celebrity as we know it today, however, came along, and you could both have celebrity and also be a celebrity, it seemed people just stopped making the old distinction between fame and notoriety, and from that time on it seemed a celebrity was a terrific thing to be.”

That sentence, by the way, merely hints at Mr. Amory’s convoluted style. As one reviewer pointed out, on concluding one of his sentences the reader had to go back to the beginning to find out what it was originally about.

Of course, Mr. Amory confesses to that fault, and it is a part of his charm. His book is a series of digressions for which Polar Bear merely serves as a starting point.

Mr. Amory seems to have a genius, also, for convoluted personal relationships, many of which end in poignant frustration. He writes of his inept courtship of a “California girl,” who objects, among other things, to his calling her that. In the end, it is her allergy to Polar Bear that undoes him.

Mr. Amory also, as the founder of Fund for Animals, writes feelingly about cruelty to animals, including a devastating satire on hunters, devotes a chapter to astrology (both human and feline), another, as a result of his unsuccessful courtship, to cat-caused allergies, and yet another to the literature on cats, all of which are very diverting even if you don’t like cats and find the convoluted style difficult to follow.

Among his more engaging personal anecdotes is the one about his fruitless pursuit of Nancy Reagan (then Nancy Davis) during which he burned a deep cigarette hole in the top of her father’s treasured Alexander Hamilton desk.

With his characteristic mock self-esteem, Amory summarizes that episode: “When I read about Mrs. Reagan going on to be first First Lady of California and then First Lady of the Country, I had to admit that, under the circumstances, she’d done as well as could be expected for someone not at that time farseeing enough to see the possibilities in me.”

It is hard to keep in mind that Polar Bear is the celebrity here.