Writers spend a lot of time at home, in silent rooms, staring at paper. In these eerie vacuums, the chirr and grind of an HP printer becomes as loud as the CERN particle collider ingesto-regurgitating its own atomic excrement. The unexpected appearance of a sparrow at the window can be genuinely terrifying, similar to when window-cleaners force coitus interruptus (usually sans coitus, in my case) by appearing without warning on the wrong side of the fenetre. Writers are strange creatures, loathing distraction, craving life. A screaming infant is repulsive, a doting but uninteresting spouse, anathema. Pets, on the other hand, are just right.
Listening to writers go on about their animals is a bit like listening to fortysomething housewives go on about their kids. One does rather suspect the topic to be a symptom of lack rather than affluence in terms of sentient-life-capital. And yet writers aren’t that predictable. William Burroughs’s The Cat Inside is as much a psycho-paean to human cosmologies as it is a tender rumination on his (vast) collection of strays. And what of all the hybridised texts – Hesse’s Steppenwolf, Will Self’s Great Apes or Kafka’s Metamorphosis? These books are concerned with one very particular animal, and it’s not a wolf, or a baboon, or a beetle.
People who read Burroughs tend to read The Naked Lunch, and nothing else. Two reasons. Firstly, once read, people feel they’ve ‘done’ Burroughs, and need never return (a bit like how salty teenagers tell you they ‘did’ Argentina when all they really did was ‘get done’ by a night-clerk in an expensive Buenos Aires hostel). Secondly, there’s nothing more likely to put someone off reading William Burroughs, than reading William Burroughs. The Naked Lunch is, in my opinion, Burroughs at his alienating, reader-repelling, incentive-destroying best. But the next time you’re in the book shop, let your Water-stoned eyes wander a little further through the fiction section, and you might come across a slight, light, mighty gem of a book. The Cat Inside is about ninety paragraphs long – you can read the whole thing on the tube journey home.
William Burroughs was a cat-man. This appeals to me. Allergic though I am to the scrawny little bastards, I own two. I’ve always been slightly repelled by the deference of the dog – its pawing, panhandling a-persona. It says a lot about a person that they prefer dogs to cats – as Burroughs says, ‘Man molded the dog in his own worst image…self-righteous as a lynch-mob, servile and vicious, replete with the vilest coprophagic perversions…and what other animal tries to fuck your leg?’ (The Dumbledores at Time Magazine claim this is a book full of ‘heartwarming anecdotes’, which rather suggests they didn’t make it past page ten before closing shop and leaping to a conclusion. Even Burroughs says it’s ‘an allegory, in which the writers past life is presented to him in a cat charade’).
Cats retain a certain purity of Being, for Burroughs. They understand the nature of relationships as being predicated – Marx wouldn’t like this – on some form of exchange, regardless of content. Dogs, on the other hand, aspire to something like morality, and in the process become man’s ‘best’ friend, his bumbling servant, his fumbling Hennimore.
We tend to associate Burroughs with dystopian futures or twice-removed apocalyptical otherworlds – arid Interzones. But Burroughs is as much about the receding road as he is the approaching horizon, a fact that creeps through this moggy meditation like a hieroglyphed coffin in an ancient funeral procession. Burroughs postulates that ‘cats started as psychic companions, as Familiars, and have never deviated form this function’. Some cerebral interlink – a cognitive affiliation wound up in cosmic time – crosses between the minds of cats and humankind alike. It is this intellectual laterality that allows for a strange, history-bound harmony, something you don’t find with other animals and the odd manoeuvring of responsibilities demanded by their neediness. Man and cat alike is bound in Time, and through it both are linked to all that has passed and all that is yet to be. When a cat called Ruski injures itself, the cry it makes is ‘a sad, plaintive voice of lost spirits, the grief that comes from knowing you are the last of your kind.’ Burroughs is as savvy to the immemorial as he is the in memoriam – as psychic companions his pets are also front-seat riders on a winding highway of dark and doom-laden moments, spots of time that stretch back far beyond living memory.
But a good reason to read The Cat Inside that isn’t to do with cosmic frequencies or temporal trajectories, is that it’s funny. Burroughs muses on whether cats write signs like hoboes to mark their turf: ‘FUCKING CAT HOUSE’, and breaks from his dyspeptic canine abuse to remark how bollocks bunnies are too: ‘They aren’t cute at all, even the little ones. All they do is make stupid, galvanic attempts to get out of your hands, and big rabbits can give you a very nasty bite.’ If you want an introduction to Burroughs the humorist, the moralist, the sage, The Cat Inside isn’t a bad place to start. So long as we think of Burroughs’s texts as psychotic perambulations, and his life as a mystery and a mess, we will forever see him as a different breed indeed, a vagrant species. The Cat Inside suggests, to the contrary, that there is more of him in us, and more of us all in each other, than we might previously have supposed: ‘All you cat lovers, remember all the millions of cats mewing through the world’s rooms lay all their hopes and trust in you.’ Cat owners of the world UNITE! You have nothing but your rat-problem to lose.
P.S. I should apologise to anybody who read last week’s column (I realise I’m being optimistic here), and noticed how at one point I had misspelt Ireland, Island. This was an elementary gaff wrapped up in my wondering whether Ireland was called Ireland for the same reasons that an orange is called an orange; i.e. when they were deciding what to call it, did the Irish simply get stuck, name it after what it is (an island), and then misspell Island? I’m yet to receive a satisfactory answer to this question.
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