T.S. Eliot really liked cats, according to his wife

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Tuesday, October 6, 2015

AP

This is an undated image made available Thursday, May 30, 2013 by Christie's London of poet T.S. Eliot and his wife Valerie Eliot.

(Originally published by the Daily News on October 8, 1982. This story was written by David Hinckley.)

In case there was any doubt, Valerie Eliot confirms that yes, it's true; her late husband, T.S., considered cats to be, well, the cat's meow. He liked dogs. He liked pigs. He even wrote light verse about pigs. But cats "had a special place in his affection," and that affection evolved into "Cats," a long-running musical sellout in London. And, last night, "Cats" opened on Broadway with the largest advance ticket sale in history.

‘CATS’ PREMIERES ON BROADWAY IN 1982

True, Mrs. Eliot says, a $4 million musical is not what her late husband had in mind when he wrote "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" in the late '30s. His idea then was to amuse his godchildren. He would be pleased, however, she thinks, at its stage form: "he loved the music Hall and this is the closest his work could have come to it."

Furthermore, despite the fact that many critics regard "Old Possum's Book" as a trivial digression from Eliot's serious poetry and criticism, the man himself rather liked it. In his later years, says Mrs. Eliot, he would keep a copy beside his bed and fool with the text, changing a word here and there, adding or subtracting a thought.

Previous Next

New York Daily News

New York Daily News article on 'Cats' in 1982.

"It is all of a piece with his other work, really," she says. "It was his witty, dry, humorous side, a part of the whole man."

Mrs. Eliot is in New York this week for the Broadway opening of "Cats," to which she contributed material she gathered while editing Eliot's papers. She is a striking woman, sharp, pleasant, articulate, well-dressed, well spoken, and except that her once-copper hair is now silver, she is probably not much different from the way she was when she married Eliot in 1957. She was turning 30 then; he was 68. She had been his secretary. By all accounts, the marriage was blissful; after Eliot died in 1965, Conrad Aiken wrote in Life that Valerie had kept him alive those final eight years.

Since then, she has immersed herself in Eliot's written legacy; several years ago she released the fascinating first drafts of his poem "The Waste Land," with the original editing of Ezra Pound scribbled in the margins, and she is now working on his letters.

"We had originally planned three volumes for the letters," she says. "Now it looks like four." She is clearly excited about what she has found; in one letter to Aitken, for instance, Eliot parodies his own propensity for obscure literary allusion by creating fictitious references. "That one will require a lot of footnotes," she says, laughing.

Scene in the Broadway musical 'Cats' in 1982.

Actually, she says, she had to talk "Tom" into allowing his letters to be published at all. "He didn't want to. I said they were simply too important. Then later on, when he was feeling ill, he found he liked having me read letters to him - Yeats, for instance. Finally he said, 'Okay, you win.'" She pauses and smiles. "Then, of course, he threw it all back on me by saying I had to edit them."

Not that she minds. In fact, she's delighted with the prospect of one work which can reflect all her husband's dimensions, not just the side his advocates call "serious" and his critics call "stuffy." To underscore the point, she notes that Eliot himself, in his public poetry readings, always inserted a cat stanza or two among the more straight-faced verse.

And oh yes, there's one more thing about Tom and animals. One day during an auto ride, he and his chauffeur fell into a conversation about dogs, and the chauffeur explained that his own dog was just lovable, not pedigreed. "He's not what you'd call a consequential dog," the chauffeur said.

"Tom just loved that phrase," Mrs. Eliot recalls. "And he immediately got the idea to write a book on 'consequential dogs,' as a companion to the cat book." She shakes her head. "Alas, he never got to it."
Alas, indeed, for the dog lovers of the world, who missed their golden opportunity for equal time on the Broadway stage. But they can console themselves in the knowledge that where T.S. Eliot and cats are concerned, they did have influential friends in high places. "Cats are fine," says Valerie Eliot. "But actually, I think I prefer dogs."

source