Jeoffry E-Book

Oliver Soden

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 145

Beschreibung

Jeoffry was a real cat who lived 250 years ago, confined to an asylum with Christopher Smart, one of the most visionary poets of the age. In exchange for love and companionship, Smart rewarded Jeoffry with the greatest tribute to a feline ever written. Prize-winning biographer Oliver Soden combines meticulous research with passages of dazzling invention to recount the life of the cat praised as 'a mixture of gravity and waggery'. The narrative roams from the theatres and bordellos of Covent Garden to the cell where Smart was imprisoned for mania. At once whimsical and profound, witty and deeply moving, Soden's biography plays with the genre like a cat with a toy. It tells the story of a poet and a poem, while setting Jeoffry's life and adventures against the roaring backdrop of eighteenth-century London.

Leseprobe

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Oliver Soden is a writer and broadcaster. His first book, a biography of the composer Michael Tippett, was shortlisted for the Elizabeth Longford Prize and won a Somerset Maugham Award and the Royal Philharmonic Society Award for Storytelling. Jeoffry was a Book of the Year in the TLS and was championed by Eileen Atkins on Radio 4’s A Good Read.

Soden’s essays and reviews have appeared in a wide variety of publications including the Guardian, Spectator, Literary Review and London Review of Books. He grew up in Bath and Sussex, and lives in London.

PRAISE FOR JEOFFRY

‘Jeoffry is the greatest cat in the English language, and here are his life and times, wittily and deftly imagined, entwined with a memoir of Kit Smart, lunatic and poet, and the London he shared with Samuel Johnson and his cat Hodge. An inspired and original tale’

Hilary Mantel, author of The Mirror and the Light

‘Simply unforgettable ... Oliver Soden has written a little masterpiece ... The life and times of Jeoffry, the cat described in Smart’s famous poem, are imagined here by Soden in one of the most beautiful and haunting books of recent times. This is a book to savour, reflect upon, and give to friends ... It is beautifully written. It is gentle. It is full of historical detail and whimsy, in more or less equal measure. It is a complete treat ... a lovely, enchanting piece of work’

Alexander McCall Smith, author of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency

‘An absolute classic … Soden combines the originality of wit and concept found in Virginia Woolf’s Flush with an intimate portrayal of the humanity of a cat that T.S. Eliot understood so well. I found myself so gloriously moved and entertained by Jeoffry, who has leapt purring and stretching, hunting and curling his way into my heart’

Juliet Nicolson, author of A House Full of Daughters

‘In Jeoffry: The Poet’s Cat, Oliver Soden has pulled off a difficult feat. His book about the life and adventures of Christopher Smart’s considerable cat is charming without being twee, light but not lightweight, inventive within the bounds of respect for history ... Beautifully conceived and done with wit and tenderness. A book to cherish in times when Smart’s madhouse seems close to home’

Daniel Karlin, TLS Books of the Year

‘Both playful and profound: it’s a little classic. I found it tremendously moving ... You don’t have to be a cat lover to like this book – it’s about life’

Eileen Atkins on BBC Radio 4’s A Good Read

‘Soden’s delightful, insinuating book curls around your thoughts and tickles you with its whiskers ... Soden jokes that if Jubilate Agno is a magnificat (a song of praise to God), the Jeoffry verses are a magnifi-cat. His own magnifi-cat recreation … would make a fine stocking filler – silk, buckled or gartered’

Laura Freeman, The Economist

‘Oliver Soden has done for Christopher Smart’s cat Jeoffry what Virginia Woolf did for the Brownings’ dog, Flush. Except he’s made a much better job of it. This is a beautifully written, wise and wonderfully entertaining account of loyalty and the meaning of biography. Smart’s cat was indeed a magical being, and Oliver Soden has plucked a wealth of literary art from the cat’s life and from Smart’s unforgettable vision. I intend to give a copy to everybody I like’

Andrew O’Hagan, author of Mayflies

‘A heart-lifting delight; I absolutely loved it. A triumph’

Alexandra Harris, author of Weatherland

‘Protagonist of the most anthologised section of the mad poet Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno, the eccentrically spelled ginger tom now takes a fresh lease of fictionalised life in this jeu d’esprit … It’s at once a sly introduction to Christopher Smart and the literary milieu of 18th-century London … and a cat’s-eye view of 18th-century social history … It has a good deal, too, to tell the reader about cats … But it also poses the implicit question of how fictional biographies are in any case … All biographies adopt points of view, make suppositions, put fictional flesh on the bones of the facts the record gives us; and their test is how persuasively they do so. This one does so with great panache and not a little of the writerly flourish’

Sam Leith, The Spectator

‘An intensely poignant portrait of a celebrated cat … told with vibrant pace and energy … As we follow the irresistible subject towards and through his interaction with the poet who would give him his immortality, we smell the streets and the confined spaces, we suffer the blows, we weep the tears. This beautifully written and highly affecting book is a must-read for lovers of poetry, of the 18th century, and of cats’

Jane Glover, author of Handel in London

‘Soden’s clever and vivid book is an imagined biography of this undocumented creature of the London streets ... Jeoffry’s life is envisioned here with ingenuity and tact ... Soden can write and knows feline liquidity and transformation’

Min Wild, Times Literary Supplement

‘Although Jeoffry has become famous through Smart’s much-anthologised poem “My Cat Jeoffry”, he has left no other pawprint on the historical record ... It is this gap that Oliver Soden proceeds to plug in his delightful “biography” of Jeoffry ... In a particularly fine evocation of a cat’s-eye view, Soden has Jeoffry distinguish Smart’s asylum visitors from each other by the shape of their lower legs: he is able to tell apart the bulging calves and hobbled feet of Dr Johnson and the more springy limbs of Charles Burney. When David Garrick arrives, Jeoffry recognises him from the way the actor’s theatrical vibrato moves the air in the little cell. It is, after all, what whiskers are for’

Kathryn Hughes, Literary Review

‘A bracing and heartfelt scamper through Georgian London, and the life of a much-loved cat – like Jeoffry himself, this delightful book is an irresistible mixture of “gravity and waggery”. With its supporting cast of 18th-century luminaries such as Handel, Dr Johnson and the bloated brothel-keeper Mother Douglas, this is a carefully researched and beautifully imagined feline biography’

Emily Brand, author of The Fall of the House of Byron

‘Inspired by Flush, Virginia Woolf’s “biography” of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog, Soden’s book is a witty, charming, semi-fictional biography of the cat that kept Smart company in the madhouse’

Tristram Fane Saunders, Daily Telegraph

‘Jeoffry: The Poet’s Cat is an engrossing recreation of 18th-century London at its grittiest, from brothels to insane asylums, as seen through the eyes of a famous cat. The blend of scrupulous scholarship with imaginative invention is wonderfully effective’

Leo Damrosch, author of The Club

‘I greatly enjoyed this book ... Oliver Soden has found a really vivid “ground-level” way to capture Georgian London, and as soon as Smart comes on the scene a most moving chemistry develops between the cat who has no words and the poet who is adrift in them’

Ann Wroe, author of Francis

A masterpiece of witty and learned speculative biography’

Daunt Books

‘A beautiful picture of a cat [but] the book is as much about Christopher Smart. Heartbreaking … I had a lump in my throat and I don’t often cry at books … I learned so much from it’

Harriett Gilbert on BBC Radio 4’s A Good Read

For Ruth Smith

First published 2020

This paperback edition published 2022

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Oliver Soden, 2020, 2022

The right of Oliver Soden to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 9593 1

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

“CAT. n.s. [katz, Teuton. Chat, Fr.] A domestick animal that catches mice, commonly reckoned by naturalists the lowest order of the leonine species.”

Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, Vol. 1

“[Christopher Smart’s] poem about his cat is to all other poems about cats what the Iliad is to all other poems on war.”

T.S. Eliot, “Walt Whitman and Modern Poetry”

“All faiths, whether religious, humanistic, instinctive, or the creative artist’s act of praise, are in fact one.”

Patrick White, Letters

CONTENTS

Author’s Note

The Poem

1  The Cattery

2  The Raid

3  The Poet

4  The Flowers

5  The Flute

6  The End

Afterword

Acknowledgements

Notes

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This book is a biography of Jeoffry, the real-life cat who belonged to the poet Christopher Smart (1722–71).

Between 1759 and 1763, and partly while incarcerated in an asylum with only Jeoffry for company, Smart wrote his vast religious poem Jubilate Agno (Rejoice in the Lamb). The poem was not published until 1939, after fragments of the manuscript were discovered in a private library.

Jeoffry gave rise to the most famous section of the poem: “For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry …”. These seventy-four lines of verse are among the most anthologised poetry in the language. In 1943 they were further immortalised in a musical setting by Benjamin Britten.

The dividing line between fact and fiction in this biography is necessarily wobbly, and sometimes one is disguised as the other. Had the facts survived, I would have written them. I have tried never to invent where information is known.

The extant text of Jubilate Agno can be found most easily in Christopher Smart: Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 1990). The poem’s 1,739 lines – all that survive of an estimated 4,000 – are divided into four fragments: A, B, C, and D. The seventy-four lines devoted to Jeoffry are B695–768.

THE POEM

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.

For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.

For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.

For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.

For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.*

For he rolls upon prank to work it in.

For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself.

For this he performs in ten degrees.

For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.

For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.

For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended.

For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.

For fifthly he washes himself.

For sixthly he rolls upon wash.

For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.*

For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.

For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.

For tenthly he goes in quest of food.

For having consider’d God and himself he will consider his neighbour.

For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.

For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance.

For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.

For when his day’s work is done his business more properly begins.

For he keeps the Lord’s watch in the night against the adversary.

For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.

For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.

For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.

For he is of the tribe of Tiger.

For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.

For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses.

For he will not do destruction, if he is well-fed, neither will he spit without provocation.

For he purrs in thankfulness, when God tells him he’s a good Cat.

For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon.

For every house is incompleat without him and a blessing is lacking in the spirit.

For the Lord commanded Moses concerning the cats at the departure of the Children of Israel from Egypt.*

For every family had one cat at least in the bag.*

For the English Cats are the best in Europe.

For he is the cleanest in the use of his forepaws of any quadruped.

For the dexterity of his defence is an instance of the love of God to him exceedingly.

For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature.

For he is tenacious of his point.

For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.

For he knows that God is his Saviour.

For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.

For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.

For he is of the Lord’s poor and so indeed is he called by benevolence perpetually—Poor Jeoffry! poor Jeoffry! the rat has bit thy throat.

For I bless the name of the Lord Jesus that Jeoffry is better.

For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in compleat cat.

For his tongue is exceeding pure so that it has in purity what it wants in musick.

For he is docile and can learn certain things.

For he can set up with gravity which is patience upon approbation.

For he can fetch and carry, which is patience in employment.

For he can jump over a stick which is patience upon proof positive.

For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command.*

For he can jump from an eminence into his master’s bosom.

For he can catch the cork and toss it again.

For he is hated by the hypocrite and miser.

For the former is afraid of detection.

For the latter refuses the charge.

For he camels his back to bear the first notion of business.*

For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly.

For he made a great figure in Egypt for his signal services.

For he killed the Ichneumon-rat very pernicious by land.*

For his ears are so acute that they sting again.*

For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention.

For by stroaking of him I have found out electricity.*

For I perceived God’s light about him both wax and fire.

For the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast.

For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.

For, tho he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.

For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped.

For he can tread to all the measures upon the musick.

For he can swim for life.

For he can creep.

Christopher Smart, from Jubilate Agno(B695–768)

________________

* Lines marked with an asterisk (*) are discussed in theNotes (pp. 167-71).

1

THE CATTERY

1750–1753

The earth shook when Jeoffry was born. Fish jumped out of the river, chimneys rained from the roofs, and the bells clanged in their steeples.

His life began in a cupboard, under the back staircase of a grand house in the Covent Garden Piazza. It was early March 1750. Frock-coated men had left their wigs and their consciences on a small Oriental table by the door, and were losing themselves among the perfumed candlelight of the upper rooms in a whirl of powder and petticoats. Jeoffry’s siblings had been arriving through the night at thirty-minute intervals, but the last kitten seemed reluctant to appear. Suddenly the cupboard was thrown violently from side to side, and a shower of dust fell onto the wriggling family, which squeaked at the sudden roar and clank from the street outside. And Jeoffry was shaken into the world. The beds in the rooms above tipped their couples apart as the house shivered around them and china fell from the dressing tables. A stream of scantily clad people made for the front door, and were not noticed in the piazza, which was already speckled with dozy Londoners clutching at their dressing gowns in the drizzling dawn.