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The Navy Party/13

"Done what?" asked the teacher, who felt sympathy for the boy since he had himself often felt just like that.

"Do you promise to God, boss, that you won't tell anyone?" he asked in a whisper.

"It depends on what it is," said the teacher, "there are some things which can't be kept secret." He was wondering at the time what these things were so that he could figure out if he was right.

"I guess I can trust you," said Schumacher, "the fact is, boss, that I'm married."

"What's wrong with being married?" asked the curious teacher, "lots of people are married."

"If the big shots knew that I was married," said Schumacher, "I would get thrown out on my ear. If you're in the V-12 program, you're not supposed to get married. My wife lives in Worcester and I tried to get to see her twice a week and that's why I don't study my lessons enough. I'm busy with her. And anyway, I had a feeling that if I broke the rule about not getting married, everything would go wrong once I was in the V-12 program."

Cannon tried to reassure the boy, but he spoke without much conviction because he knew how poor Schumacher was in English, or Direct Communication. He told the boy that he would carry his secret marriage a secret to the grave, and he also remarked that most of the other boys were not doing very well in most of their subjects.

CUH

All God's Children

A discussion of Jeremiah's religious education commenced
between Philip and Elizabeth Rose, and soon enough his appointed
tutor, Bertholde Cannon, was asked to participate in the dis-
cussion, or perhaps it should be named an argument, or perhaps
it was a quarrel.

The issue, at any rate, was as to whether Jeremiah was
to go with his sister to Sunday School at the nearby Unitarian
Church or at Christ Church, Protestant Episcopalian in denomination
and also not very far.

Unitarianism had long since been defined as "the father-
hood of God and the brotherhood of man in the neighborhood of
Harvard." For the time being, Cannon was in favor of it because
it might prevent Jeremiah from jumping to theological conclusions.
He was also in favor of the Protestant Episcopalian Church because
he loved the prayer book they used, the justly famous book of
Common Prayer.

Philip Rose was against Jeremiah's going to Sunday
School because he did not believe in God and at times detested him.
Elizabeth Rose, on the other hand, was very much in favor of
Jeremiah going to hear about God and his works because she loved
God very much, whether he existed or not.

Philip Rose yielded to his wife and friend because of
the goodness of his heart and because he loved his children very
much and wanted them to have everything, and a little more some-
times.

The two children went to the Unitarian Church. Since
Elizabeth would have preferred Christ Church, this was in the
nature of a compromise.

Invited to the Roses for Sunday dinner, Cannon was sent
out to bring the children home. In this way he learned

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All God's Children/3

"Qui vous a mis dans cette fichue position?"

"Who has put you in that embarrassing fix?" asks Joseph of his young wife Mary, who is pregnant although she has never permitted him to make love to her.

"C'est le pigeon, Joseph--It was the pigeon, Joe, dear," Mary sweetly answers, and with such charm that her wary husband, ever perplexed, thinks that she is joking.

The second story was somewhat more complicated and it might difficult to tell Jeremiah because he did not know much about pregnancy, although he did know about pregnant cats, having seen them give birth.

In this story, Joseph and his pregnant wife Mary are going to Egypt to escape the slaughter of the innocents. It is August, it is hot, they are on a dusty road, and Joseph is irritated as well as perplexed, perhaps because of the heat, or perhaps because of the dust, or perhaps because his wife is pregnant and not by him. Mary is hot and tired too, but she is also thirsty. She suffers from a powerful thirst such as one might have after playing five sets of tennis in July. The wedded pair pass a pear tree, and Mary asks Joseph to get her a pear from the tree which is on a slight hill next to the road.

"Let him who gave you that child get you the pear," he answers her, in his irritation and perplexity.

Then the little child in Mary's womb speaks from the womb to the pear tree.

"Pear-tree, bend down, that Mary may have the pear of her desire," says the infant foetus Jesus, "let my will be thy will. In my will is your peace."

The pear-tree bends low and Mary takes a pear from it

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All God's Children/4

and quenches her thirst and Joseph, gazing upon the miraculous
event, is moved to depthless awe and fear and yet also joy and
relief.

Cannon wondered how Jeremiah would receive this story.
Perhaps, such was Jeremiah's assurance, he might go about
Cambridge, and in an imperative voice command various trees to
bend down. He might ring up and command some store to deliver
a case of Coca-Cola to his mother during the summer. His play-
ful nature was extremely imitative and here in this story he had
the authority of a masterpiece, "The Imitation of Christ."

Cannon thought that perhaps after telling this story he
ought to recite to Jeremiah a poem which explained how complicated
and difficult was the story of Christ and what effect he had
upon some who knew him and who lived after him.

The poem was called, "To The Divine Image;"

To mercy, pity, peace, and love,
All pray in their distress,
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.

For mercy, pity, peace, and love,
Is God our Father dear;
And mercy, pity, peace, and love,
Is man, His child and care.

For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity, a human face;
And Love, the human form divine;
And Peace, the human dress.

Then every man, of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine;
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.

And all must love the human form,
In heathen, Turk, or Jew;
Where mercy, love, and pity dwell,
There God is dwelling too.

CUH
Tiger, Tiger

In the midst of his concern with children, Cannon became very much interested in cats. He had had a cat as a child but it had been taken away from him by his parents when they moved from a one-family house to an apartment. He soon forgot his sorrow and his cat, or at least it did not preoccupy his conscious mind.

However, his interest in cats sprang up quite quickly when a friend of his named Barbara acquired a cat named Pushkin. At first Cannon had not liked this male cat because he was selfish and mean, and did not care very much for Cannon. But soon he had become very devoted to Pushkin for precisely this reason--the fact that Pushkin did not like him--and soon he brought Pushkin gifts, such as liver and catnip, and in his growing fondness decided to rename the cat Prince Alexander Pushkin, or merely briefly, the Prince, a reference to both Machiavelli and the cat's tactics in securing food and affection.

Barbara felt that there was something wrong in Cannon's affection for Pushkin, especially since it was unrequited.

Perhaps matters would have changed, but Pushkin died suddenly--in three days--of distemper. Barbara had had to go out of town on the first day, she had left him with Cannon, and on the third day, after Pushkin had refused the most expensive food and affection, after a visit to a vetinerian who had given Cannon false hope and Pushkin an injection, Pushkin collapsed on the floor of Cannon's kitchen, moaned grievously, and gave up the ghost. It was a dreadful death, for it was not only unexpected, but Pushkin had vomited greenly at the very end.

Soon after his death, Barbara returned, suitcase in hand, appalled by the death of her cat, and unwilling

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the poor corpse. The question of how to get rid of the dead
body arose and Cannon, who was practical chiefly in the most
impractical ways, decided that he ought to be wrapped in some
kind of shroud, namely, a turkish towel, and carried to the
street outside where, conveniently enough, repairs were being
made so that the whole street was full of trenches which might
serve Pushkin as a grave.

"Poor Pushkin is dead," he said to himself, "the poor
beast and tiger cat is dead."

As he prepared to make arrangements for the disposal
of the unfortunate animal, he recited to himself the famous
poem by William Blake:

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

The poem, he explained to himself, is about Nature,
of which the tiger is the most fiery symbol. Thus in the death
of this poor tiger cat we see the death of Nature. Ho!

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Tiger, Tiger/3

the death of nature, how much I love nature, though I have often
resented her, and very much, but for the wrong reasons.

Barbara had shrunk into a corner of the room and begun
to weep while Cannon was preoccupied with literary revery. She
resented his preoccupation, but was too sorrowful about the cat
to let her resentment preoccupy her.

And then Cannon decided that Barbara ought to look at
her dear animal, Pushkin, before he was taken to the grave.

"You'll be sorry, if you don't," he said to her, echoing
what had been said to him by his cousin at the funeral of his
father when he had been afraid to look at his father's falsely
composed and rouged face. His cousin had guided him gently by
the arm and he had looked at his father's face.

But Barbara was unwilling and Cannon did not know how
to persuade her gently. In fact, he did not know how to persuade
her at all, for she was very stubborn.

Instead she protested very loudly when she saw that her
friend was about to wrap the poor corpse in one of his excellent
turkish towels. This seemed a needless expense to her.

"But after all, it is for Pushkin," said Cannon sadly,
"it is his funeral and he deserves a good one."

Barbara stubbornly said that it was a needless expense
and one which Pushkin could not appreciate.

"I am doing it for my own sake," said Cannon, "I
appreciate it. I loved that cat."

As he said this, he wrapped the expensive towel about
the cat and shuddered, for the cat's body felt like a towel
which has frozen to the washline on a winter's morning, the cold
near zero. He had gone then with Barbara and left the cat's
body in a trench of the dug-up street. Barbara kept toji

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Tiger, Tiger/4

the idea that Pushkin was not really dead, for she had not felt
the cat's corpse, stiff as a piece of ice. And as they went to
a sad dinner, this idea mounted, for she did not have to face
the actuality of death. Meanwhile her friend sought to compose
an elegy for his departed little friend, but he succeeded only
in finding the first line (the line given by the gods):

All of the senseless being everywhere...

# # #

Cannon thought soon after Pushkin's death of securing
a cat of his own. But it seemed to him necessary that he reflect
with care upon the problem of bringing up a cat, or, as Barbara
expressed it, "a little baby kitten." He also felt that the
possession of a cat presented severe problems of an emotional
character. It seemed to him that human beings secured from cats
and from dogs the kind of love they could never get from other
human beings. But perhaps this kind of love would not be good
for him, however good it was for some of the other human beings.
It might be habit-forming. He might begin to desire from his
friends (and perhaps from his second wife, if ever he had a second
wife) the kind of love his cat had given him. The two might be
jealous of each other, although Cannon felt that the major
difficulty would be that his wife would suspect him of preferring
the cat to herself.

His first wife had said that she was jealous of every-
one, including herself. Cannon tried to understand how this could
be and after much effort he decided that she was jealous of her-
self at previous stages of her life, she was jealous when her
mother described to friends what a wonderful child she had been,
how rosy-cheeked, charming, and well-behaved. Cannon chanted to

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himself again, repetitive:

Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite.

He was thinking of the great unhappiness and suffering which
Edith made for herself.

While Cannon hesitated about getting a cat, Barbara's
young half-brother, Joseph, brought her a cat as white as Moby
Dick from the country. Barbara, who always wished to please
everyone (to a fault) decided to keep this white cat if Cannon
liked him sufficiently.

It was a case of love at first sight.

Cannon was infatuated as soon as the cat jumped out of
the bag. His name was Muffin, but Cannon decided that now that
he had come to the big city, he ought to have a city name, and
in any event, Muffin seemed to Cannon quite inadequate. He might
just as well have been called Shredded Wheat.

Cannon decided, after securing Barbar's permission, to
call him Riverrun Pushkin again Play, for Play was Barbara's last
name, (Pushkin again memorialized the dead Pushkin, and Riverrun
was the first word in a book of which Cannon was very fond, (a
minor and naive work entitled "Finnegans Wake".))

He decided to call him Riverrun for short.

The name seemed quite appropriate, for when Riverrun
ran, he did seem to resemble the movement of water. Riverrun
appeared to like the name and to like Cannon very much. He was a
very friendly cat and liked everyone, unlike Pushkin who hardly
liked anyone, including himself.

Cannon liked Riverrun better than any other cat, in-
cluding Pushkin. He liked him so much that he announced to

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Barbara that he was going to buy the cat a present in the depart-
ment store pet shop.

"I am getting jealous of that cat," Barbara declared
nervously.

"I will get you a present also," Cannon said simply.
And foolish Cannon was surprised to see that this reply had
awakened a look of annoyance, even resentment, upon Barbara's face.

Meanwhile Riverrun was gradually losing the fine dazzle
of his whiteness. The soot of the city was staining his fur in
fine points, especially since he went out at night a great deal.
It seemed possible that Cannon had overestimated the virtues of
this cat, for he turned out to be an opportunist who frequented
grocery stores and meat shops, despite the fact that he was well
fed and indeed fed too much by Cannon and Barbara.

Cannon had to go to Chicago for a month to do some
unnecessary resume because of his scholarly pursuits and the
Almighty Dollar and during this period, to the great dismay of
Cannon and Barbara, Riverrun disappeared.

"Maybe he was coming to see me," Cannon wrote to Barbara,
but he knew that this was merely wishful thinking.

He became very angry at the disappearance of the lionized
cat, and he rehearsed to himself some of the benefits which the
ungrateful Riverrun had received. For example, Cannon, reading
of a cat show in Boston, had found a picture of the elegant lady
cat, Azure Mu-Et, an Angora as dazzling as a Ziegfield Follies
chorus girl of 1922. Azure had been the winner of the entire cat
show and she was owned by a lady named Mrs. Bennington Lodge.
Cannon had cut out Azure's picture and pinned it upon the wall
for Riverrun, after showing it to him and saying:

"Say, Riverrun, do you want a girl?"

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Tiger, Tiger/7

Riverrun had shown no sign of interest whatever.

Nevertheless, Riverrun's girl number had been pinned
upon the wall and Cannon had announced to the somewhat disdainful
Barbara how his made Riverrun pre-eminent:

"He is the only cat in America who has a pin-up girl!"

Barbara accepted this explanation somewhat and Cannon
proceeded to tell Riverrun that he was going to arrange for a
meeting between Azure and Riverrun. He would ring Mrs. Bennington
Lodge when he went to Boston and tell her that her lady cat had a
suitor of very high (Egyptian) social position who would like to
pay court to her.

In view of such benefits, Cannon felt justified in
being indignant at Riverrun's departure.

Barbara, seeing how keenly Cannon took Riverrun's de-
sertion, went to look for him in the nearby market center, crowded
with fish stands, pushcarts, and the like. This was a cynical move
on her part and she was so good a human being that she would have
regarded her looking for Riverrun in such obvious a place as a
kind of betrayal of not only the handsome white cat, but a violation
of her ethical principles, the principle of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence
which declares whereby you believe all are innocent until proven
guilty. Except for the fact that Cannon's feelings had been so
much hurt by Riverrun she would have never done such a thing.
But Barbara lived by a double standard. There were two moralities,
one the morality by means of which she judged Cannon and herself,
the other morality a kind and forgiving morality, a New Testament
morality, which she reserved for everyone else except Cannon and
herself.

Barbara looked in the market center for the renegade
and did not find him, but such was the intensity of her search

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Tiger, Tiger/8

that she imagined she had seen a white cat who might well be
Riverrun disappearing in an alley. She leaped at this sight and
pursued the apparition and wooed the white cat from his hiding
place by means of a sardine only to find, as she explained to
her friend, that she had been making advances to a stranger.

He replied that he did not wish her to trouble herself
any longer about the ungrateful traitor cat.

# # #

Not long after, Cannon found it necessary to reside
once more in the university city and his passion to own a cat
returned with no little intensity. Who but Jeremiah Wallace Rose
should come to the fore at this time?! Returning from the pro-
gressive school where he was being educated, he found a stray
tiger cat, female in sex and very much distracted by the fact that
she had lost her home. He took her home with him and his kind
mother Elizabeth, knowing of Cannon's desire for a cat, rang
Cannon and told him to come to see if he wanted this new cat who
was yet hardly over being a kitten. She was, one might say, in
the adolescent stage of herexistence. Little did she know of all
that was soon to befall her.

Again it was an example of love at first sight. Cannon
was enchanted with the little girl tiger cat not so much because
she was good-looking (although she enjoyed ordinary good looks),
but because it was through Jeremiah that he had secured this cat.
He took her home with him to his house in a taxi, and although
the poor cat was frightened by her recent experiences, she soon
responded to Cannon's devout attention. She would not eat the
kidney he had secured for her on Elizabeth's instructions, but
she did not try to escape from the house, she looked to Cannon
as if she had decided that this was her new home, her old home

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Tiger, Tiger/9

and family being forever lost.

Cannon decided to name her Oranges for reasons which
may or may not be interesting.

As he decided upon her name and thought of the reasons
he had had for thinking spontaneously of Oranges as the Cat's
name, Cannon recited to himself a passage from a poem by Hart
Crane. The poem was entitled "Chaplinesque," and Cannon had
admired it since 1928. He recited to himself this stanza:

For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or worn torn elbow coverts.

Cannon had wondered for years if these statements
were sentimental or full of true love and charity. At any rate,
Charlie Chaplin was beautiful. He was one of the pure in heart
and he had inherited the earth.

Cannon reflected upon the period during which he had
very much devoted to oranges and to the squeezing of oranges.
It had been the saddest and most difficult period of his life.
He had been separated from his wife for a year and he had just
begun to feel the overwhelming pain and longueur of solitude.
He lived alone in the half-house where he had lived with his un-
happy and charming wife Ruth, and on days when he had no classes
to teach, he found it difficult to get out of bed because the day
stretched before him like a gray and dreary steppe. When he did
have to teach, he would force himself from bed before it was
light, he would tend the furnace, a painful and chilly chore,
(and one which he foolishly considered unnatural to himself),
and then climb the backstairs (some one is always climbing the
backstairs) and squeeze two oranges for himself in the circular
orange squeezer. When at last he drank the glass of orange

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Tiger, Tiger/10

juice, he knew the reward of pleasure at his own effort, he knew
he had overcome the temptation to sink into the abyss of sleep,
he knew he had conquered the wish to die (on the brink of which
he had tip-toed through the night), he had strength and confidence
and courage enough to proceed to crawl through the numb, boring,
and difficult day.

Since Oranges had had this effect upon him, Cannon
decided to name the girl tiger cat Oranges. He also decided to
make an identification card for her and he did and it read:

Oranges Cannon
20 Ellery St.
Cambridge 37, Mass.
Trowbridge 4481

Since this pleased him, he decided to think of new
projects for his newfound cat.

"I am no different from most people," said Cannon to
himself, "I am no worse than most people. And no better." It
seemed to him that his fondness for the new cat showed that he
was just like everyone else, only more so.

# # #

Meanwhile Oranges grew used to her new home and parent,
and she tentively sniffed at the kidney Cannon had left in the
plate for her which he had regarded anxiously because she had
not eaten it nor drunk any of the milk in her saucer. She
probably had begun to sense the great love Cannon had in store
for her, for she soon seemed to be able to understand his eccen-
tricities and accept them and adjust herself to them, within
certain limits. She waited at the head of the stair for him
when he returned from school and she meowed her displeasure at
his absence and because he had not seen fit to take her with
him. Cannon soon found the verses he wanted to recite to

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Tiger, Tiger/11

Oranges by the poor mad poet (crazy as a posse of foxes) Christopher Smart:

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 the God in the East he worships him in his way.
For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness...
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...

Oranges Cannon was not in the least interested in these verses.
She curled up on the living room carpet, however, and pretended
to some degree of politeness, since she liked the sound of her
protector's voice and was glad that he was present.

# # #

The sleeping arrangements, so to speak, changed rapidly.
At first Oranges slept in Cannon's bedroom near the warm radiator.
And then when her affection and trust came to fruition she joined
him in his bed for one night, only to find that he was such a
tossing, turbulent sleeper that she gained no rest when sleeping
curled like a fur comforter next to him. But she tried again,
supposing perhaps that he had merely had an unusual night. On
the third night she joined him again, but did not seem eager to
stay since she did not close her eyes. In the morning she was on
the floor next to the carpet slippers and it seemed to Cannon that
she had perhaps joined him when he went to sleep because she was
afraid she might hurt his feelings.

It seemed to Cannon that she had become his sister,
his wife, and his daughter.

When Cannon's sleep continued to be uneasy, he slept

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late in the morning, and this caused the first serious conflict
between him and Oranges, for she walked gently up and down his
recumbent body and psyche as if she had mistaken it for the
Atlantic City boardwalk. It was eight o'clock in the morning
and she was used to having her breakfast at that time. Cannon
arose and gave her a dish of sardines. But he was irritated and
unable to fall asleep again.

Impractical and ignorant, he did not know enough to
leave the cat's breakfast in the cat's dish under the stove in
the kitchen the night before. This idea had occured to him,
but he had rejected it, thinking that if he did, Oranges might
eat her breakfast, a midnight supper or consume it all in the
middle of the night.

Consequently, he shut his bedroom door, so that Oranges
would be unable to wake him for banishing her, but circumvented
him quickly (by falling back upon her native shrewdness.)

She had quickly learned to use the roof as her bathroom
and she had learned quickly that she could reach the roof by going
up the stair which led to the second floor of the house. One of
the two rooms of the second floor was used merely as a storeroom
for little magazines, *Life*, *Time*, and *Partisan Review* (for Cannon
was trying to keep a complete file), and here in this periodical
room the window was left open so that Oranges might slip out to
the roof, which was the bathroom. On the morning that Oranges
found herself excluded from her friend's bedroom, she scratched
patiently for a time at the closed door and then arose to the
roof with great speed and demonstrated her enormous intelligence
by figuring out where on the roof was the spot closest to the
bedroom where Cannon was trying to stay asleep (for her scratching
at the bedroom door had half-awakened him). The closest spot was

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just next to the rain-spout drain and for a second Oranges toyed
with the idea of trying to get to the bedroom by slipping down the
rain-spout on little cat feet. But her native prudence made her
reject this possibility as too dangerous. Instead she contended
herself with meowing and mewing in anguish and hunger.

Cannon could hardly believe his ears, for he did not
think that Oranges was knowing enough to find out the exact spot
above his bedroom window where she could meow to him. He rose from
bed, raised the shade, and saw to his amazement, and delight that
Oranges was making a very angry face at him. She was very angry
at him because he had shut the door in her face.

He cried out to her to come down and have her breakfast
and he gave her an egg as well as sardines to reward her for her
brilliance in tactics.

"She probably knows more about this house than I do,"
he said to himself as he gazed upon her passionate anxious and
ravishing lapping up of her breakfast.

After her breakfast, she rewarded him by coming to
sit in the living room where he was typing letters. And she re-
frained from playing with the typewriter because although this
practice delighted her, she knew it would interfere with the typing.

It was April, the coolest as well as the cruelest month
in that part of New England. It was the month when more human
beings commit suicide than in any other portion of the year (and
this is because of love as well as the unpredictable weather, as
unpredictable as a woman, as dark and unpredictable as the human
heart.)

Regarding Oranges, and thinking that she might soon be
in heat, Cannon decided to give a cocktail party for her and to
 invite all the handsome toms of the neighborhood so that she might

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inspect them and decide whom she liked best of all. This would
be her debut. Instead of liquor, catnip would be served. (A friend
suggested cointreau.)

Pleased by this project, Cannon took a pussy-willow
branch and tapped Oranges gently on the head. She responded to
this overture beautifully, and did an _entre-chat_ for pussy-
willow's sake. She hardly listened as Cannon recited to her his
plan for her debut.

Oranges took in the general air of excitement, effer-
vescent as soda in Cannon, and she began to show off, racing off
to the kitchen and racing back again from the kitchen to the living
room through the hallway and the living room. In this latter
demonstration she reminded Cannon of the thrilling times of his
childhood when at the Polo Grounds he had sometimes seen Frank
Frisch scoring from first base on a single hit to right field,
scoring as he slid under the catcher's knees.

"What a bride," said Cannon, "she will make some fortunate
tom-cat," admiring her speed and her frank innocent desire to win
attention, to gain applause, and to make another take pride in her.

"Or do I make too much of her," he questioned himself,
"do I over-interpret her actions as I over-interpret those of
human beings and my own. Perhaps she is just a figment of my
imagination? Perhaps I myself am just a figment of my own im-
agination? I do not think so. "my mind to me a _kingdom_ is, I am
the king thereof, playing games with consciousness, inspired--
(I hope?!)--by love."

# # #

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Tiger, Tiger/15

"Call us what you will," said Cannon to himself, "we are
made such by love." That's what a profligate preacher said. 'We
are such stuff as dreams are made on.' That's what a down hearted
playwrite said. Sigmund Freud paraphrased and extended these
observations under very different circumstances, at a time when
the nineteenth century still believed that it was possible to
achieve the kingdom of God on earth, or the terrestrial Paradise.
Yet one may well ask if the first two poets understood with as
much concreteness what they were saying as did the third poet,
native of Vienna."

These quotations and reflections were inspired in Cannon
by the fact that his cat Oranges was in heat and he did not know
what to do about it. The project of the catnip cocktail party for
tom-cat beaux had been regarded as a joke by his friends until
they saw that he was serious whereupin they warned him that such
a party would only lead to a battle royal in which one or more
cats, including Oranges, might lose a pair of eyes at the claws of
some rejected suitors. This possibility had horrified Cannon and
he had given up the idea of the party. Meanwhile Oranges suffered.
She moaned, she rubbed herself against all available objects,
including Cannon, and she sought to get out of the house, being
dissatisfied with all these substitutes for the real thing.

"There are no substitutes for anything," Cannon remarked
to himself for the nineteenth time.

Oranges saw other cats from the window and she tried
again and again to get out of the door when Cannon left the house
so that she might meet her truelove.

Cannon thought of the mad songs of Ophelia, daughter of
the Prime Minister:

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Tiger, Tiger/10

"How should she her true love know
From another one?
By his cockle hat and staff
And his sandal shoon"

"The rhyme is not very good," he remarked to himself,
"unless the Elizabethans pronounced one as woon or shoon as shun.
I ought to look it up, but probably I have more important things
to do."

# # #

Sorrowing and pensive about the trials of his cat
Oranges, Cannon taught his classes with a preoccupied mind. He
thought of discussing the problem of Oranges' love-life with
students whom he knew to be familiar and friends of cats. But
he decided that they might be embarrassed as well as titillated by
such a discussion.

When he returned one day during this period, exhausted,
weighed down by a book bag in which were too many books and papers
(because foolishly he was ever afraid that he might not have enough
to say, although in all truth he usually had far too much.) He paused
at the grocery store to purchase a can of sardines for Oranges.
The store was crowded and the exhausted Cannon had to wait in line.
When his turn came at last, it developed that no more ordinary
sardines were available. The only kind the store had were imported
Portuguese sardines at $.59 a can. Cannon, rather than wait ex-
hausted at some other store, decided to buy two cans because he
could not go home bear to return to his home and the lovesick
Oranges without some consolation for his cat. (At this time, not
long after the second World War, there was still little cat food
available at most stores.)

But as he left the store with the two expensive cans of
sardines, he became alarmed at what other human beings might say or
at least think of this expenditure. His alarm made him furtive

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Tiger, Tiger/17

about the brown paper bag containing the Portuguese cans, as if
some one might see him.

"They will say I am out of this world," he said to him-
self, "to buy such expensive sardines for a mere cat. But they
will be wrong. I am not out of this world in the least. I was
exhausted and I was protecting my own feelings in buying such ex-
pensive sardines. I was also protecting my poor lovesick Oranges
from the consequences of my being exhausted because teaching a
class invariably involves me in feelings of anxiety which make me
try too hard and which consume much of my nervous energy. (People
only have children because they can't have cats."

Oranges was at first suspicious of the new sardines.
Then she ate them very quickly and she seemed to like them. But
her liking of them was in no way different, so far as Cannon could
make out, to her liking for ordinary sardines. And as soon as she
was done with her lunch, she began again to moan from the depths
of her love-sick heart. Cannon did not know what to do.

"What will I do if I have a daughter," he said to him-
self, "I will probably go out of my mind because I will be afraid
to make any move whatever, possessed by the fearful consequences
of all moves, but then again perhaps it is best to do nothing, for
either she will know her own mind and all will be well, or she will
not know her own mind, which means not that nothing will be well,
but that one can only hope that she is lucky."

These thoughts did not seem to have much relevance to
the impoverished Oranges who was standing on his desk and looking
out of the window, seeking in all probability to see her true-love
passing by.

Cannon decided to go out and buy her catnip as a sub-
stitute, even though there are no substitutes for anything.

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But before he had an opportunity to buy Oranges the exciting solace of catnip (feline marihuana), he was visited unexpectedly by two friends Mr. Rank Amhearst and his beautiful English wife Una. They were a strange and difficult couple who always arrived and departed unexpectedly, driven by feelings no one else knew about save for the wives of Rank's friends with whom he often had affairs, like his father before him. They invited Cannon to lunch, and although he tried to beg off by pleading the love sickness of his cat, their invitations were commands, or so Cannon felt them to be. Rank suggested that Cannon just let Oranges go out.

"Let nature rake its course," he remarked, speaking from the heart.

"But what if she disappears. Or what if her eyes are torn out."

"The world won't come to an end," said Rank, who had become callous during his internment in Germany during the 2nd World War, "and it won't be the end of your life. There are any number of cats and you can have most of them."

He decided--as one decides to leap into the cold mountain lake after fearing the shock for half an hour--to allow Oranges to go out into the backyard, an area full of trash cans, rejected bottles, clotheslines, and bulkheads which led to the cellar. Then he departed with the Amhearsts for lunch and drank four martinis rapidly because he was so nervous about Oranges, and bored the Amhearsts with his passionate account of his problems as Oranges' father.

He returned in a cab (because he was in haste, impatient) to his house and as he returned, the cabdriver told him of his last passenger, a veteran soldier who had had an attack of epilepsy and

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had been taken unconscious to the hospital so that the cabdriver
was deprived of his fare, $1.60. Cannon sympathized with the
driver, though nervous about Oranges, mounted in the rapture
and buzz of the four martinis, so that all things were sharply
defined, wonderfully interesting, and extremely strange, now,
and aborihinal.

"What was the soldier doing?" he asked the cabdriver.

"He was on a three day binge," said the cabdriver, "this
was the third day. He had been sleeping with all the women he
could find, and there were plenty of women where he was."

"That's it," said Cannon, who often felt that he under-
stood more than he actually did, "he was after too many women.
That's why he had the attack of epilepsy."

They arrived at Cannon's house, Cannon gave the cabdriver
the fare and the $1.60 which the unfortunate soldier had not paid
him, and he rushed to the backyard to find his cat Oranges.

She was behind a chickenwire fence, crouching and poised.
Near her was a fat tiger cat who looked just like her. And in a
semi-circle about the two there crouched and snarled what seemed
to Cannon at least half the tom-cats in Cambridge. An impasse,
like a trench war in France, had been reached, for no one of the
cats seemed ready to make a move.

He decided to try to rescue Oranges and the tom who was
obviously the choice of her heart from the mob of cats which
surrounded them.

Gazing at Oranges' truelove, who looked so much like
her, Cannon saw the bridegroom looking back.

"So Oedipus must have looked at his father," thought
Cannon, "when they met at the crossroads."

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He looked through the chickenwire fence at the glaring tom, and it must be admitted that amid his concern for his cat, there was an undeniable element of jealousy. He wanted to be her true love.

But the snarling of the ring of visiting firemen made him feel that something must be done and quickly. He went around the other side of the fence and moved slowly and reached for Oranges, who ran away.

He ran after her, justifying himself by thinking that he did not care about her virginity, but he did not want her eyes torn out.

As he ran after her, he trod upon a freshly planted garden, and an old man like God himself came out and yelled at him.

"You are ruining my garden," cried the old man who resembled Jehovah.

"I was just trying to rescue my cat," said the astonished and guilty Cannon.

Meanwhile Oranges had been retrieved by the old man's son, who resembled Jesus Christ, and who explained mildly and meekly to Cannon that his father was very much concerned about his garden of Eden.

The son gave Cannon his child Oranges, who did not wish to go with him, but rather to stay with the choice of her heart. She struggled in his arms, but he held her tightly, and took her back to the house, up the stair and into the living room. She immediately scurried up to the roof and sat on the height three floors above the garden while her truelove tom gazed upward in lust at her.

Cannon, perceiving this, took a bag of catnip from his desk and went down and went to the fence and tried to lure

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the lustful tom into the house. But the bridegroom was extremely
suspicious and he was not in the least interested in catnip at
the moment.

Cannon gave up this attempt to get the tom into the
house so that he and Oranges, his bride, might make love on the
third floor. And he decided to depart from the house and seek
companionship elsewhere, since Oranges was not likely to pay any
attention to him for the time being.

He had dinner with the Roses and conversed with them
and with Jeremiah and his sister about his problem child. They
found him overwrought, but they were used to seeing him in just
that state.

As he returned to his house, the starry sky above him,
the moral law within, he looked up and the stars shown down on him.

Little lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life, and bade thee feed
By the stream and o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, woolly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

CUH

Everyone Felt Much Better

It was inevitable that Mr. Bertholde Cannon should
come to the same subject, however he tried to run from it and
no matter what his misgivings.

But most of all it was when he had to deal with the
reading of poetry that the trying subject began to be as irrit-
ating as an itch. The students did not care very much for the
reading of poems unless it was made a puzzle and a mystery to
be answered. Even then they were annoyed and sometimes bored.
And they did not seek to be more polite than to their teacher
whom they regarded as an amiable and well-meaning fantast.

The teacher chose poems which were interesting in
their subject-matter, as murder and other crimes were to news-
paper readers. He tried to win their admiration by using every-
thing from melodrama to catastrophe. Thus when he read them
"Lydidas" by John Milton, they did not like this poem and were
pleased to hear that Johnson, whoever he was, or was he the
guy that was almost impeached after the Civil War? also did
not like this poem.

"I am sorry," said Mr. Cannon, "You are wrong and
Johnson was also wrong. This is a very beautiful poem."

"If it is beautiful," asked Charles Paris, a rich
boy from Brooklyn, "why don't I like it? I've been told that
I'm very sensitive to beauty."

"Let us keep sex out of the discussion," said Mr. Cannon, "If you were really interested in the matter, you would discover that this is a very beautiful poem. But since you are not interested and since I do not want you to take my word for anything, let me read you a poem in a different style."

He read his students "The Wreck Of The Deutschland,"
by Gerard Manly Hopkins, for it was about five Franciscan nuns

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Everyone Felt Much Better/2

who had been drowned just like the young man, Edward King, who
had been mourned by Milton, because he had been drowned on the
high seas.

On Saturday sailed from Bremen,
American-outward-bound

Take settler and seamen, tell men with women,
Two hundred souls in the round--

O Father, not under their feathers nor ever as guessing
The goal was a shoal, of a fourth the doom to be drowned,

Yet did the dark side of the bay of thy blessing
Not vault them, the millions of rounds of thy mercy not
reeve even them in?

The teacher jumped from part to part of this poem because it was
very long and because it was difficult to read aloud. He stated
that it was not as good a poem as "Lycidas."

"I like it better, Sir," said Charles Paris, "I don't
want to seem contrary, but the second poem has more punch to it."

"Alas! what boots it with incessant care," said the
teacher, "To tend the homely, slighted critic's trade? And
strictly meditate these thankless views? Were it not better
done, as others use to sport with brokers on a gay parade?
Or with the tresses of a chorine's hair."

The students were perplexed but used to and resigned
to this sort of thing.

"Let us try a third poem," said Mr. Bertholde Cannon,
and read his students "Beauty For Ashes", a poem about the death
in Italy of a very gifted young man. This poem had been written
by R. P. Blackmur whom the students immediately recognized as
the author of "Lorna Boone."

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Everyone Felt Much Better/3

"So you see," said Mr. Cannon, "how the death of the
innocent, the just, and the good makes the poet search the
depths of his mind."

"Lorna Doone is better," said Anthony Dickson, "much
more interesting."

Mr. Cannon was becoming desperate. He decided to try
one more poem, "The Convergence Of The Twain," by Thomas Hardy:

> Dim moon-eyed fishes near
> And gaze at the gilded gear

And query: "What does this vain gloriousness here?"
He pointed out how this poem was inferior to the other three and
he observed again that death by accident makes the mind fall back
on what to it is most dear or most significant.

But now the students had become interested in the sinking
of the "Titanic" and before he knew it, forced by his failures in
persuasion, he was telling them the story of this great disaster
at sea.

It was the great ship's maiden voyage. Predictions of
disaster had been made at Liverpool, and the ocean liner was said
to be like the Tower of Babel, a defiance of God's will, an arrog-
ance upon the part of heart of man, trying to improve on nature so
much.

Mr. Cannon had put aside his misgivings. He took
pleasure in holding the attention of the students, attention with
ease at last.

The captain was making his last voyage as a captain and
he had been chosen because he was an excellent commander. On board
was the general manager of the Cunard Line, and he wanted the Titanic
to win the Blue Riband, the prize awarded for the ship that made
the fastest crossing of the Atlantic.

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Everyone Felt Much Better/4

On the ship was what was then called the millionaires' deck, because so many of the rich had booked passage in these sumptuous and expensive cabins. And there were others aboard who represented all the stations in society, a French novelist, an English journalist, a painter, an aide and close friend of a former President of the United States, the vice-president of a railroad, the president of a railroad, a Broadway producer, and in the steerage seven hundred and six immigrants.

No sooner had they moved westward for two hours than a wireless message from an eastbound steamer warned the captain that there were icebergs. The captain,--his name was Smith-- showed the message to the general manager named Ismay. More messages came and they all pointed to the dangers of the ordinary route of a steamer westbound on the Atlantic. Captain Smith wanted to alter the course and take no chances, but Ismay insisted that he keep to the quickest and shortest course so that the *Titanic* would win the Blue Riband. Captain Smith argued with Ismay but Ismay became impatient and told him that he would fire him and make the first mate the captain, if he tried to take a slower and longer route. Had the captain been a man of more courage he might have insisted on his own authority, and had Mr. Ismay been less dictatorial and eager to win prizes, all might have been well. Certainly other officers on other ships, and some of the officers on this ship, were well aware of the dangers the ship was running.

As everyone knows, the *Titanic* struck an iceberg and began to sink.

Everyone showed his true character then, the catastrophe was like an X-ray and displayed the bare black bones and the swollen black shadow of the pumping grasping heart of each and all.

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Everyone Felt Much Better/5

The great liner sank slowly as each one consulted himself and conferred
with others and acted out the truth in which he believed, by which
he lived. Some tried to purchase or bribe their way to seats in
lifeboats of which there were too few available. Some, dandies
of dignity, put on their dress-suits to encounter the darkness
like a bride. An old and rich man tells his young and beautiful,
as she enters a life-boat, that he will be expecting her, after
a time. The immigrants are panicky and helpless. Two gamblers
try to sneak into a lifeboat and are shot for their pains. Mrs.
Isador Straus refuses her place in a life-boat because she will
be separated from her husband; "Where you go I will go." One
might well wonder if this reply was purely spontaneous or if she
had thought before of such a crisis and such a choice. One man
succeeds in getting his baggage in a ship, though there is not
enough room, and one man disguises himself as a woman to get a
seat and is ashamed forever after. Mr. Ismay did not take a seat
until the last lifeboat was lowered and the captain without hes-
itation went down with his ship. Little effort was made to help
those who struggled in the water, frozen and doomed and scared
as never before. Those in the boats were afraid that to help
the others might endanger themselves, and one woman punched a
terrified man in the face as he tried to climb into the life-boat
she occupied, while in some boats axes swung against the frenzied
hands of those who clung to the side, and no one who saw this
chopping was ever the same again.

"Never mind the *Titanic* anymore," said Mr. Cannon to
his listening students, "the story is sensational, but it is
very true. The problem faced by those poor people is eternal
and faces all of us at every turn everywhere and forever. What
would you do? Suppose you had a life-belt and you knew very well

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Everyone Felt Much Better/6

that it would only hold one person. And suppose another human
being paddles near you and says he would like to hold it, or
she would. What would you do? What? Would you save yourself or
save the other human being? Remember, it is taken for granted
that the life-belt will only hold one person."

Some students invariably said that they would act on
instinct and keep the life-belts. They might even go so far as
to kick the other person, with the ferocity of the desperate
and despairing, if he tried to get the life-belt. These students
thought they were honest realists.

The teacher protested that it was not wholly a question
of instinct, it was certainly true that some human beings did not
obey instinct only, as that old lady showed clearly when she chose
to die with her husband, choking with love and suffocated by water.

And furthermore, since this was a classroom, no matter
what one might do in an actual crisis, here in the schoolroom one
might enjoy the freedom and luxury of speculating about moral
choice and seek to make a genuine commitment of one's mind and
one's heart.

One of the civic-minded students declared that he would
give his life-belt to a great scientist who was of more use to
society than he was.

"But what about the principle, 'Women and children first'
asked the teacher, "is it not one of the rules of Western society
to save the weak, the children, and those who bear children. But
this principle is violated if we decide to save the great men,
scientists and the like, In addition, it would be quite difficult
to ascertain and judge the comparative merits of other human beings
in the midst of the shipwreck.

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Everyone Felt Much Better/7

"I would say that I had the life-belt first," said Charles Paris.

"Your friend might reply that you have had it long enough," said Mr. Cannon, "But that is just a joke and a poor joke, and I must apologize for yeilding to repartee, which I like very much. There is more than a little truth in your reply, though you state it in a way which would not persuade or convince anyone who is drowning or trying to keep afloat on desperate seas."

"What is the answer," cried the impatient and interested class, after the teacher had dismissed several other worthless suggestions.

"In one sense, there is no answer," declared the teacher, "it is something everyone had to decide for himself, and what he decides will be what he is, he will be expressing his whole being by his choice, and so important a choice cannot be made for you by anyone else, nor by any student of choice and disasters at sea. The most that can be done is to observe that every human relationship involves some sacrifice of the interests of the self."

The class was becoming bored again, and some were impatient to hear the conclusion, and some were pleased that they were on dry land, and some were biting their nails thinking of lunch.

The teacher announced that some observations might be helpful, even though no final answer was possible outside of the water. One kind of observation might be called natural and one kind might be called divine, although these names were inadequate because the natural was often divine, and the divine often very natural.

The natural observations, which might be called divine,

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Everyone Felt Much Better/8

consisted, in short, of declaring to the other human being that
one had the life-belt as a matter of chance, good luck, or the
grace of God, just as one might have beautiful blond hair, a
beautiful face, or a marvellous tenor voice. The cause of this
gift was natural or divine. To ask you to give it to another
human being was like asking you to stop being beautiful or gifted
because others were not beautiful or gifted, or because they
became jealous, or because they had stringy or kinky hair and
suffered the consequences. This answer was as natural as the
Grand Canyon as just and democratic as nature, and as reasonable
as the course of history. It was divine because it was hard to
see how this inequality of good fortune, talent, and difference
might be avoided without annihilating all that was valuable in
them. But it was doubtless a hard answer to make.

The other answer was not only natural as well as
divine, it was also slightly sentimental, if one was sensitive to
such standards and distressed by sentimentality. This answer
assumed the existence of a situation which was unique and yet desirable
and not too infrequent, perhaps, namely, the situation in which
you are in love with the other human being.

"Let us say that Romeo has the life-belt," said Mr. Cannon, "and Juliet comes swimming toward him and asks him to let her hold it."

"What does Romeo do?" asked the hushed class, moved by
the mention of love, although none of them were beyond the period
of puppy infatuation, school boy crushes, and adolescent lust.

"What does he do?" said Mr. Cannon pensively, "What does he do? and what does she do? Since he is in love with her and she is in love with him, they spontaneously decide that they

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Everyone Felt Much Better/9

will both try to hold the life-belt, since they love each other
and love life, but love each other better than life itself apart
from the other."

"But the life-belt can't hold two," cried Anthony
Dickson, "that's what you said, it can't hold two, or there is
no problem."

"Exactly," said Mr. Cannon, "but they know, since they
are in love, that they will feel much better if they drown to-
gether than if one survived and the other drowned. And in the
brief moments before they sink, they embrace each other and know
an ecstatic happiness, perhaps. They feel much better than they
would if they did anything else."

The class moaned and groaned, disappointed. They were
moved but they were also dissatisfied. They did not think that
life and love could be or would be so difficult, so disappointing,
so unsatisfactory and so sentimental, at best.

Some of the students suspected or entertained the view
that Mr. Cannon was talking through his hat, as often before, even
though he had cited the famous play about "Romeo and Juliet."

And yet, after a time, after the class hour had ended,
they all felt much better.

CUH

Four More Children

The three boys' names were Jack, Mack, and Dwight.
The little girl's name was Nancy. Cannon met them late one
afternoon on a visit to Dwight's father, Nicholas. Cannon
had just seated himself in an armchair and begun to hope
that his host and old friend would give him a drink when
the three boys came plunging into the apartment, excited
and giggling. Cannon was at first annoyed by their noise
and boisterousness, but soon their account of their just
finished adventure interested him so much that he forgot
about his desire for a drink and did not hear how loud they
were.

They had just finished taunting Nancy, the little
girl who lived in the apartment on the first floor. But it
was her fault, they said. Dwight insisted that it was her
fault. What does she do? asked Cannon. Yes, what does she
do, said Nicholas, to deserve such revenge.

Dwight explained that she stood by the window and
blew kisses to each of them and sometimes cried from the window
that she was in love with Jack, Mack, or Dwight, thus embarassing
them no end and sowing discord among them. Consequently they
had united in self-defense and ransacked her.

Ransacking a little girl sounded fairly terrifying
to Cannon, especially since he did not know what ransacking was.

It turned out that ransacking was a general term which
included most of the possible ways of expressing contempt for a
girl. A typical act of ransacking was to thumb one's nose at
Nancy. The three boys would stand on the sidewalk and thumb
their noses unitedly at the little girl. If this did not
intimidate her, if she persisted in blowing them kisses, then

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Four More Children/2

they were reduced to the glorious infamy of making believe that
they were about to open their pant's buttons and urinate in
front of her. This possibility of having to regard the private
parts of the three boys visibly in operation had always been
sufficient to drive the poor little girl from the window.

"Maybe she just likes you very much," said Cannon to
the three boys.

"She can't like all of us, can she?", the three boys
cried back, unanimous.

"Yes, she can," said Cannon, "and even if she likes
one of you best of all, she may be hiding this fact from the
lucky one of you because she is afraid you do not like her best
of all."

The boys were unconvinced, but both Cannon and Nicholas
felt very sentimental at the moment.

The boys were bored by the sententiousness which they
sensed in Cannon's point of view and suggestion or suggestiveness.

Nicholas, however, was interested. He had always felt
that there was something strange and unresolved in his friend's
interest in children.

The sudden drop into silence perplexed Cannon and he
decided to tell the boys a story he had read some time ago. He
told the story as if it had happened to him and not as if it
had been narrated by an author for whom Cannon did not care very
much (or toward whom Cannon felt a mixture of detestation and
admiration.)

"When I was a boy like you," said Cannon, "a thousand
years ago--"

"You're not so old," said Dwight, "you don't look so old."

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Four More Children/3

"I am five thousand years of age," said Cannon, "but never mind that. When I was a boy, I was always falling in love with little girls like Nancy and when I was not in love with a little girl, I was very sorry because I felt something was missing, and something was missing because when I went to bed at night, I did not have any beautiful little girl to think about and to think about kissing me goodnight."

"Ugh," groaned the three boys in chorus, "ugh!" For the idea of being kissed by a girl was supposed to be unmanly, ridiculous, and sissified to them during this period of their lives.

"When I was your age," said Cannon to the ten year olds, "I fell in love at the drop of a hat and I liked to fall in love except that I was afraid that girls did not like me very much, and even when they did like me very much, I did not believe in the signs."

"One Sunday a girl came with her father to visit me, my mother, aunt, and grandmother. I was soon very good friends with this girl and we played for awhile and then I thought that it would be a good idea to give a play for the adults. The play was based on a joke I had read in the newspaper. A fellow is driving in the country with a beautiful girl and they pass a handsome estate. 'That's my uncle's estate. I am his only heir,' says the fellow to the girl, because he is trying to impress her because she is very pretty. Then, a moment after, they pass the gateway to the estate where a sign announces that this estate is the state insane asylum. And that is the end of the play."

"What's the joke?" said Dwight.

"It's very sad," said Mack and Jack, "it's a very sad story."

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"I have not finished the story," said Cannon, "it is really a different story. The little girl acted out this story with me and the grown-ups looked, listened and laughed because unlike you fellows they thought that this was funny, and besides they liked to see a boy and a girl acting out a play. But here is what happened then which is really sad. I was so pleased by the performance that I wanted to repeat the play again. The little girl knew that this would never do and she pulled away and the adults laughed at me--not as an actor, but as a child-- and I was very embarrassed and ashamed of myself. I felt that I had made an awful fool of myself."

"You did," said Dwight.

Nicholas was pleased by his son's arrogance and impudence.

"I did not," said Cannon calmly, "I was right to want to repeat the play."

"Why?", inquired Mack and Jack.

"Yes, why?", asked Nicholas.

"I understand something no one else did," said Cannon self-righteously, "I knew that a play, if it is any good, ought to be repeated any number of times, or at least once or twice. I bet that when you fellows go to the pictures you don't want to go home after you have seen the pictures for the first time. You want to see them again and again, and sometimes someone has to come and drag you away, or you would stay from early noon until midnight, munching candy bars, hissing the villain and cheering the hero when he rides fast on his horse."

The boys were silenced by this explanation. They felt that perhaps there was something to it.

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Four More Children/5

Cannon turned to Nicholas and said: "You see, I
understood then that the essence of a play is not its ending
and not the story, but the experience of what happens, which
can be enjoyed any number of times."

Cannon saw that his friend Nicholas was bemused by
this abstract consideration and that the children paid no
attention to it. It was time to go.

As he went down the dark stairs, as he walked the
brickwalk streets returning to his house he thought to himself:
All stories are stories of love, and all actions are dictated
by love in some one of an infinite number of ways. Thus, the
three boys, Mack, Jack and Dwight had behaved toward the little
girl Nancy as they did because they did not understand the
nature of love. And the little girl had acted toward the three
boys as she had acted, because she was in love with love.

Cannon, arriving at the street on which his old house
stood, kicked a tobacco-like mess of brown leaves on the brick-
walk and recited to himself a famous Song of Experience:

"Love seeketh not Itself to please
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease
And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair."

So sung a little Clod of Clay
Trodden with the cattle's feet,
But a Pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet;

"Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to Its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven despite."

It is too true, too blue and it is not new, said
Cannon to himself. It is the awful truth.

Just before he entered his house he curled his upper
lip at the stars.

CUH

Two More Parents

The morning after his encounter with four more children,
Cannon thought again of the book he had read about a boy named
Hershey Green, for Hershey's childhood had been indeed a sig-
nificant one so far as any question of the education of children
was concerned.

Hershey Green's parents had taken him and his brother Ronald for a ride one Sunday when Hershey was in his ninth year. They were driving toward a suburb by the sea on this balmy Sunday, fresh and new, in the wonder shining sunlight of the month of May. As a special privilege granted him because he was two years older than his brother, Hershey sat next to his father in the front seat, a privilege and dispensation his good-natured brother Ronald accepted as being as natural as the sky and the earth. All was well, for the moment. All were in good spirits because they were taking an automobile ride. Then as they were driving through a fashionable and expensive suburb on the parkway, which went to the suburb by the sea, Hershey, an avid reader of all printed matter, saw a great billboard advertisement of a Broadway play entitled "The Bad Man."

He read the name of the play aloud and it turned out
that his mother and father had seen it. His mother speaking from
the backseat where Ronald was seated pleasantly beside her, began
to tell the enthralled Hershey the story of the play. It was
about a beautiful girl who is going to marry a rich and un-
pleasant business man, because her father is an invaled who has
to use a wheel-chair for the rest of his life. The play occurs
in New Mexico. The beautiful girl is really in love with a
handsome ne'erdowell who is penniless and who is looking for gold
mines in New Mexico. He is also behaving unpleasantly because

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Two More Parents

He read the name of the play aloud and it turned out
that his mother and father had seen it. His mother speaking from
the backseat where Ronald was seated pleasantly beside her, began
to tell the enthralled Hershey the story of the play. It was
about a beautiful girl who is going to marry a rich and un-
pleasant business man, because her father is an invaled who has
to use a wheel-chair for the rest of his life. The play occurs
in New Mexico. The beautiful girl is really in love with a
handsome neerdowell who is penniless and who is looking for gold
mines in New Mexico. He is also behaving unpleasantly because

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Two More Parents/2

the beautiful girl is going to marry someone else for the sake
of her poor father. Then a Mexican bandit, who had known the
handsome ne'erdowell as a chum during the 1st World War,
arrives at the ranch where all the other characters are staying,
and kidnaps all the characters with the aid of the other bandits
under his leadership.

Hershey was very much moved and excited by the story.
His father next to him sat in silence and drove the automobile.
His mother told the story of the play passionately.

The bad man kidnaps all the characters for the sake of
the ransom he can get from the rich business man. He then forces
the rich business man to show his true colors and behave like
a coward. And then he persuades the handsome ne'erdowell and
the beautiful girl to get married. No sooner are they married
than the handsome ne'erdowell hears that he has just discovered
an enormous gold mine. This is the happy ending.

Hershey Green's mother concluded by explaining the
true meaning of the play, which was that some who seem to be
good, like the rich business man, are really bad, and some who
seem to be bad, like the bad man bandit, are really good. She
spoke with a passion which her older son Hershey heard, but did
not understand. She was very much concerned with good and evil
because her husband was a rich business man who seemed to be
both bad and good.

Hershey Green's father seemed to be disturbed by the
story.

"You ought not to tell children such stories," he
said to his wife.

Hershey wondered why, although the story had perplexed
him.

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"What difference does it make what stories the child hears," said Hershey Green's mother, "when he sees the kind of thing that he does see in his own family?"

Hershey Green's father said nothing, for he knew that he would merely provoke his wife further. He had been away from his family for four days and he knew that this was the reason for his wife's anger.

"The bad man is really the good man and the good man is really the bad man," said Hershey Green to himself, perplexed. He was continually being surprised, if not astounded, by what he found out about existence from his mother and his father.

"But if the good man looks like the bad man," he said to himself, "and the bad man looks like a good man, then how can we tell the difference between what is good and what is bad?"

Hershey tried to answer this question by supposing that one recognized goodness by the appearance of badness. But he was too sensible to be convinced by this simple inversion.

It was not unlike the occasion when Hershey had gone with his parents one winter evening to the motion pictures, a place where Hershey was often perplexed as well as delighted. The trio: father, mother, and child, passed an institution for the deaf and dumb. Hershey's father explained to his son that the buildings and the great courtyard were the deaf and dumb academy where lived those poor people who could neither hear nor speak.

Hershey, impressed, cried out to the silence of the winter night and the institutional courtyard and buildings: "Deaf and dumb! deaf and dumb! deaf and dumb!"

Hershey's father told him sternly to stop. Hershey

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stopped but he wanted to know why.

"You said that they were deaf and dumb. They can't hear me."

"He has a very logical mind," said Hershey's father to his mother, "Some of the people who live there," he explained to his son, "are not deaf and dumb. They may be offended. They live there to help take care of the unfortunate deaf mutes and they are likely to be sensitive people."

"But they are not deaf and dumb," said Hershey, "they ought not to have their feelings hurt."

"Logic will be the undoing of this boy," said Hershey Green's father to his mother, thus offending her by implying that she was somehow at fault, since her child was too logical, a natural conclusion since he always made her feel at fault for everything.

"They may be fast asleep," said Hershey's father to his difficult son.

"I thought grown-ups don't go to sleep at eight o'clock," said Hershey stubborn as ever.

"Or they may be reading, or they may not like shouting," said Hershey's father patiently, "they may like it quiet. Perhaps that's why they accepted such jobs." He had come to the point where he was losing his own sense of conviction about the matter.

"At any rate," he said to his son, "shouting is not polite. And it is not polite to do whatever you want to do, even if no one hears you or sees you."

Either the moral note just struck or the fact that they had arrived at the interesting moving pictures sufficed to silence Hershey, as Hershey's father resolved to tell him the

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story of Gyge's ring.

Poor Hershey Green, said Cannon to himself, poor Hershey, sick with self-pity then as in later years.

Cannon had reviewed the story he had read four years before and he had mused again on how, when children heard of the episodes in the life of Hershey Green, they were much taken, they might even be said to be fascinated, although this seemed strange to Cannon because the book about Hershey Green had been written for adults, and certainly not for children. Yet, thought Cannon in his blue study, perhaps the children were touched in a way that most children's stories did not touch them. For example, perhaps they were touched by the name Hershey without knowing why, without knowing that Hershey was a pleasant name because it made them unknowingly think of the Hershey chocolate bars all of them loved?

I must reread that book, said Cannon to himself, perhaps I will find in it more stories for my nephew Jeremiah Wallace Rose?

CUH

The Wish To Be A Grandfather

For some time after beginning to tutor Jeremiah
Wallace Rose, Bertholde Cannon avoided any discussion of being
a father himself, for he feared that this was a controversial
subject so far as his wife Edith was concerned. Her own
attitude toward Jeremiah had in it a certain element of re-
sentment, although she too loved the little boy.

However it was so often remarked, especially by the
jealous parents of other children, that Cannon ought to have a
son of his own and not exploit and over-praise someone else's
child, consequently, Cannon found it necessary to convert the
entire matter into a long-range and far-off matter.

The conversion in question was not very successful,
but it was certainly significant.

Cannon's subterfuge was to declare that he wished to
be a grandfather. Some were pleased and interested by this
wish, which they felt to be somewhat new in a young man only
twenty nine. Others supposed that it was fantastic, truly the
sign of a mind with a screw loose, or the disguise and mark of
some hideous and shameful desire. Edith said that here again
there were no limits to the extent of her husband's desires.
Nicholas O'Neil, an old and intimate friend of Cannon's, felt
that the idea was too literary, but Nicholas O'Neil was not
people like Bertholde Cannon.

Bemused by the reception given to this declaration
of his wish, Cannon went even further. In fact, he went too
far. He announced that it was highly likely that at least one
of his greatgrandchildren would be a pickaninny. He had arrived
at this conclusion during conversations with David Flug, an old
friend, who was a sociologist and who informed Cannon that

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The Wish To Be A Grandfather/2

unless immigration bars were lifted (an unlikely event), by
the year 2000, then inter-marriage between the white and
colored races would have produced so many human beings of
mixed blood that at least one grandson or another would be
likely to want to marry one of these Creoles, for such were
the probabilities of the laws of heredity.

Of course, they might never have any children at
all, a fact or possibility reiterated very often by Edith.
This possibility was worse than anything else to him.

Residents of the city in which Cannon lived, a
city which had once been a fountainhead of the abolitionist
movement, felt that this declaration about pickaninnies was
distasteful. They did not really think that Cannon was
serious, but they did not like the remark anyway. However,
they concealed their distaste because they were well-bred.

His friend Flug convinced Cannon that the coming
of inter-marriage was inevitable, and since he believed that
by hailing the inevitable in advance one became known as a
prophet, he hailed it. Also, he loved to be daring, although
at times shocked when he discovered that the effect of his
daring on others was not in the least what he expected it
to be. For example, like one who loves to skate on thin ice
and is astounded when he falls in.

It was during the time when this subject preoccupied
Cannon that he decided to tell Jeremiah the story of "Othello",
although that was not precisely a story of inter-marriage,
since Othello was a Moor, (on the other hand, Othello did act
as if he felt he were regarded as a Negro).

He consulted Jeremiah on his views of the race question

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The Wish To Be A Grandfather/3

and found that the little boy might be said to be without
prejudice, or, if anything, he was one who loved colored
people and found them very colorful, although he had not
seen much of them and they were in a way exotic to him.

And when Cannon spoke to Edith about becoming a
grandfather, she stated that to be a grandfather one had to
have a wife who desired to have children, and she did not.

Cannon hurt by his wife's remord (although he
should have been used to it by this time) replied that the
penalty of being a grandfather was the necessity of having
a wife.

Then he apologized for his reply and was told
that he was wrong to think that Edith's feelings had been
hurt. In Cannon, as in most of his kind, extreme sensitivity
was combined with extreme insensitivity to the feelings of
others.

CUH

Master Of Joy, Doctor Of Light

As Bertholde Cannon, part-time teacher and full-time
author and uneasy critic, departed from the concert hall where
he had just heard Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, sometimes entitled
"The Chorale" Symphony, he paused.

"What this country needs is a good five-cent psychiatrist,"
he remarked to himself.

It was early spring, an early spring evening in New
England, it was drizzling, the mouse-grey evening had entered
imperceptibly above the street-lights going on and the sizzle
of taxis upon the wetness of the avenue. Cannon did not want
to go home by subway, and since he disliked the subway very much,
it had occurred to him to think of the analysis of the mind and
the heart, dark labryinth of heroes and knaves.

This thought had occurred to him often before in other
forms, particularly when he perceived how intelligent human beings
were about everything except themselves. He included himself in
this criticism, it must be admitted.

The thought recurred because at that moment in Beeth-
oven's Ninth Symphony when the chorus shouts so eloquently the
words of Schiller: *Freude! Freude!* it seemed possible to Cannon
that they were not only crying aloud the German word for joy,
but they were also summoning from the dark earth, fertile with
the dead, the great savant, master of joy and doctor of light,
author of "Twice-Told Tales From The Viennese Woods," "The True
Meaning Of Dreams Unknown To Joseph," "The Royal Highway To The
Unconsciousness Of The Unconscious Mind," "The Family Romance
And Dance," "The Primal Scene And The First Bean," "The Question
All The Children Ask," "God Is An Anti-Semite," "Moses Was Not
A Jew, But An Egyptian Bastard," "Wit Is A Broadway Hit," "The

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Master Of Joy, Doctor Of Light/2

Credo Of The Libido," "Hitler Is Immortal," "Love Is A Four
Letter Word," "The Sermon On Mount Venus," "Dostoevsky's
Father Was The Czar," "The Incest And Breast Of Leonardo's
Mama, Mona," "My Father Made Me Stubborn," "The Reclamation
Of The Zuyder Zee, Or Consciousness Is Preferable," "One
Thousand And One Fights: A Short History Of The Psychoanalytic
Movement," "Venus And Genius," "I Was Wrong Like Columbus,"
"The Community Hangover In Athens After The First Performance
Of Oedipus Rex," "Civilization, Deprivation, Procreation, And
Sublimation, Or Has History Been Worthwhile," "Love Is A
Necessary Exaggeration," "The Perversity Of Park's (And Clerks),"
"The Pan-Sexuality Of Fauna And Flora," "The Fascination And
Fixation Of Gertrude's Son," "Jesus As A Good Jewish Boy."

Cannon had begun to walk back to his home in the
drizzling rain as he recited these celebrated well-known titles
to himself.

"Did he also write "A Street-Car Named Messiah?," he
asked himself, "or was that great vehicle written by Jehovah?"

"What this country needs is love," he declared dogmatically to himself as he walked upon a bridge and looked at the mist-ridden river beneath where he had seen some rescued from suicide and some sailing a boat.

"More and more love," he continued, "there cannot be
too much love: how can there ever be love enough? There is not
enough love in America, love, health, and a clear conscience, a
conscience cleared, a conscience accused, tried, and exonerated
at last, the health of these who have been sick and have become
well and have gained serenity, self-control, and self-possession
through the experience of sickness and suffering."

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Master Of Joy, Doctor Of Light/3

"This is not a sentimental idea, nor an erotic one," he remarked, for he frequently defended himself against criticisms which had not been made.

By the time he had arrived at his house, Cannon was damp and chilled and convinced of the truth of his speculations. He was under the impression that Freud would help many human beings to understand (to know) how to be in love. It was true enough, it seemed to him, that there were not enough doctors of the heart, and some doctors of the heart were not good enough for the human beings who suffered from the sickness of being unable to be in love, and some psychiatrists also had been good enough, but were no more because they had suffered from natural human weakness, exhaustion or derangement of the ego, or the passing of time. Also, many poor human beings were sick and did not know that they were sick, and some were afraid because of great pride, which is a great weakness, to recognize that they were sick or admit to themselves or to confess to others that they did not know how truly to be in love.

Before he retired for the day, he played a recording upon his phonograph, winking courteously at the dog (a chum since his fifth year, in a way) inscribed upon the Victor Album, His Master's Voice. He had made the recording himself, astonished profoundly by the sound of his own voice, and astonished also by his choice of poems to record.

He began one poem in the second stanza:

"Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; but once, in special,
In thin array, after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small,
Therewith all sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, 'Dear heart, how like you this?'

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Master Of Joy, Doctor Of Light/4

"It was no dream; I lay broad waking:
But all is turned, through my gentleness,
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodness,
And she also to use newfangleness.
But since that I so kindly am served,
I would fain know what she hath deserved.

"There may be some self-pity in this poem," said he
to himself, "but I do not find it disagreeable."

This poem by Sir Thomas Wyatt, one of the few poets
cuckolded by a king, and Henry VIII at that, made him very sad.
He decided to play the recording of one more poem, a poem very
different in conclusion, before seeking sleep. For the sadness
of Wyatt's poem disturbed him very much. He smiled at the dog
this time, placing a sonnet by Sir Philip Sidney upon the turn-
table;

Let dainty wits cry on the Sisters nine,
That, bravely masked, their fancies may be told;
Or Pindar's apes flaunt they in phrases fine,
Enamelling with pied flowers their thoughts of gold;
Or else let them in statelier glory shine,
Ennobling new-found tropes with problems old;
Or with strange similes enrich each line,
Of herbs or beasts which Ind or Afric hold.
For me, in sooth, no Muse but one I know;
Phrases and problems from my reach do grow,
And strange things cost too dear for my poor sprites.
How then? even thus--in Stella's face I read
What love and beauty be; then all my deed
But copying is, what in her Nature writes.

"Stella did not teach him his knowledge of the sonnet-form," he commented.

The turn-table revolved idly upon the inner circle of
the phonograph and made the dull tortured sound which seemed to
be a vain anticipation of a string quartet Beethoven might have
written, had he lived longer.

Cannon stopped the revolution and went to the bedroom,
hoping to stop the thronging festival of the populace of his
thoughts, mixing like a crowd on New Year's Eve on Times Square.

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Master Of Joy, Doctor Of Light/5

"This is like a party visited by eager interlopers and gatecrashers whom the host thinks he might have met somewhere, strangers whose faces are familiar, or human beings whose names he does not remember, although he should, uncles and aunts he has never seen but having the family resemblance.

He stretched out on his studio couch. "I am going to my naked bed," he said to himself, "as one that one would have slept." He paused, amazed at the obvious correspondence which had occurred to him.

"These poems were written during the reign of Elizabeth," he observed, as if he celebrated the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the triumph of Drake, the overwhelming defeat and humiliation of Philip of Spain, the second marriage of Edmund Spenser, the first marriage of John Donne, and the betrayal of William Shakespeare by the dark Lady.

His mind did not stop in the dark, although he pressed his face in the soft pillow, causing sparks and flashes of color.

"Alas, my love, you do me wrong," he murmured in quotation again, "to cast me off discourteously.

"There's an infinity to choose our ends, and yet we have no time to lose."

"Here is someone coming that wants a little place. I see a sea ten miles wide, ships sailing in the sea, and discharging the canon, regattas from Vladisvostok which sounds like an axe except I hear them so infrequently."

"I see a great sky too, and the moon and the stars, strange as they are. Good evening, moon; good evening, stars; glittering and twinkling with irony, or glowing like an ice skating rink."

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Master Of Joy, Doctor Of Light/6

"I see I am a fool and always was, at least that is
certain, at least some of the time.

"My heart is set upon the cherry orchard by the water-
side. Not cherry, but apple, and stunted, the fruit was heavy
perhaps?

"I dined with Dr. Friend and he said he wished that
he might be wrong and not wronged. He was thinking of something
which he did not tell me about and I misunderstood him, possessed
by my own memory of injury.

"You took my flowers', she said to me in 1931 when she
came late to class when we were drawing flowers in our Botany
notebooks, and I told her there are plenty more, there are enough
for you, but she looked hurt nonetheless. But it is only six
weeks before the Christmas holidays, and no more teaching for ten
full days and then I will know that I myself am wasting my freedom
because I sleep too late, waiting too late at the gate, alone like
a stone."

A HISTORY OF THE BOYS AND THE GIRLS

In this our life there is no beginning, but only departures entitled beginnings, wreathed with the formal emotions and flowers thought to be appropriate, and often forced. Darkly it rises each moment from the life that has been and that does not die, for each event lives in the heavy head forever, waiting to renew itself.

As if one composed a child's universal history; as if the old stories might be told again and freshly; as for a child that he might be prepared to suffer in himself the knowledge of wrong and wrong-doing, the knowledge of weakness which is necessary to strength--

Thus a child might be prepared to avoid the weak return to the past, the falling back and the flight which is a false expectation that the old harmony, however difficult, might be re-gained--

How Narcissus looked too long at his own face, how Psyche held the lamp and looked at Love's face in the dark, how Orpheus looked back at Hell's deliberate disorder--

How suspicion is a form of knowledge, but hope also is, and neither is knowledge, unless the other is also present and conscious,
(Whence comes the hero's fear and trembling, ever nervous upon the heights),

How no one fools anyone much, except himself; but everyone too much deceives himself,

How no one is ever alone, and yet none can give to anyone any thing,

And why love is the act of darkness, and by nature those who are possessed must their eyes that the whole being may overflow,

How twins conversed in the womb about this life, doubting that it might be,

How knowledge is memory, the recognition of the past in the future,

And how belief and doubt cannot be unjoined, and how the poet is the one who unites all things in love and metaphor, changing the water into wine.

A,B,C,

Well known as it is how difficult to make conversation and maintain small talk and avoid a heavy or frozen silence, who will ever equal the bon mot uttered as an opening remark by the young man who met a young man whose father had hanged himself: "Say, what's this I hear about your father hanging himself?"

Everyone laughed to hear the story.

It was soon pointed out that the report of the suicide inevitably evoked laughter, or at least a smile.

"He was a unfortunate young man, unfortunate in his father, was stiff, pedantic, forbidding, and proper. He had won all the prizes in public school and college. He was always well-dressed and self-assured. Some had suggested that he was able to study with such perfect concentration because he lacked imagination."

This suggests, does it not, that accidents always occur to the proper persons, making their way like homing birds. Or, as falling bodies subject to the law of gravitation, so should the bodies of the unfortunate be subject to the law of gravitation.

As for me, I had my accident when I was nine, struck by a rock as I was broad-jumping; struck on the temple.

The scar remains with me, since it festered and was not sewed properly. Needless to say, it was entirely proper that I should be struck on the temple."

Let me say again that I feel sure that I have had my accident.

People often ask me how did you get that scar, and of course I say that it is very long story and it is a great pleasure for me to say this because of my feeling that any answer I might give about anything is a very long story, in fact endless.

And also, if my father did not hang himself in his store, --for he had no store--he too destroyed himself in his own way, ruled by the libido which was in the beginning.

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The Strange Discovery/3/

decided immediately
said that such was one method of dealing quickly with anyone
who has just lost his mind. Consequently Rinehart was drenched all wet
and humiliated for the moment, but when the other boys found
he was very
out what had really occurred, they decided that he had a very
interesting mind, and they became friends with him and he almost
became a poet because that is how some boys become poets they
start shouting their own names or anything startling they can
think of and this makes other human beings think they have very
interesting minds".

"Rinehart! Rinehart!", said Jeremiah, giggling in
joy at his success.
Fish was naturally delighted by what he took to be
a fine example of irony upon the part of his protégé.

This story was the turning point, for thinking about
its conclusion, Jeremiah's ironic outcry, and surveying in
mind all the other stories he had told Jeremiah and Jeremiah's
comments, Fish discovered that what he really liked most of all
was Jeremiah's comments. He was much more interested in the
little boy's comments than in his own experience of telling
the story, although telling stories had long been an infatuation
desperate in him (so that he told stories which bored others
at times and was very hurt that he should be boring although
he himself had often been bored by human beings whom he liked
very much).

Now it seemed to Fish that if he were more interested
in Jeremiah's comments on his stories rather than in his own
experience of story-telling, then he must be more interested in
other human beings than he was interested in himself. This
amazing conclusion (with some people's children are fortunate
enough to be taught in infancy) made Fish very happy.

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"It was no dream; I lay broad waking;
But all is turned, through my gentleness,
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodness,
And she also to use newfangleness.
But since that I so kindly am served,
I would fain know what she hath deserved.

CUH

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Tiger, Tiger

In the midst of his concern with children, Fish became very much interested in cats. He had had a cat as a child but it had been taken away from him by his parents when they moved from a one-family house to an apartment. He soon forgot his sorrow and his cat, or at least it did not preoccupy his conscious mind.

However, his interest in cats sprang up quite quickly a friend of when/his named Barbara acquired a cat named Pushkin. At first Fish had not liked this male cat because he was selfish and mean, but he did not care very much for Fish. But soon he had become very devoted to Pushkin for precisely this reason--the fact that Pushkin did not like him--and soon he brought Pushkin gifts, such as liver and catnip, and in his growing fondness decided to rename the cat Prince Alexander Pushkin, or merely briefly, the Prince, a reference to both Machiavelli and the cat's tactics in securing food and affection.

Barbara felt that there was something wrong in Fish's affection for Pushkin, especially since it was unrequited.

Perhaps matters would have changed, but Pushkin died suddenly--in three days--of distemper. Barbara had had to go out of town on the first day, she had left him with Fish, and on the third day, after Pushkin had refused the most expensive food and affection, after a visit to a vetinerian who had given Fish false hope and Pushkin an injection, Pushkin collapsed on the floor of Fish's kitchen, moaned grievously, and gave up the ghost. It was a dreadful death, for it was not only unexpected, but Pushkin had vomited greenly at the very end.

Soon after his death, Barbara returned, suitcase in hand, appalled by the death of her cat, and unwilling to

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the death of nature, how much I love nature, though I have often
resented her', and very much, but for the wrong reasons.

(A page of analysis, which turns into comedy and parody,
of Blake's Tiger, if it does not interfere with narrative interest.)

Barbara had shrunk into a corner of the room and begun
to weep while Fish was preoccupied with literary revery. She re-
sented his preoccupation, but was too sorrowful about the cat to
let her resentment preoccupy her.

And then Fish decided that Barbara ought to look at her
bear animal, Pushkin, before he was taken to the grave.

"You'll be sorry, if you don't", he said to her,
echoing what had been said to him by his cousin at the funeral
of his father when his father had expressed an unwillingness
to look at his father's composed and rouge-lipped face. His
cousin had guided him gently by the arm and he had looked at
his father's face.

But Barbara was unwilling and Fish did not know how
to persuade her gently. In fact, he did not know how to persuade
her at all, for she was very stubborn.

Instead she protested very loudly when she saw that
her friend was about to wrap the poor corpse in one of his
excellent Turkish towels. This seemed a needless expense to
her.

"But after all, it is for Pushkin", said Fish
sadly, "it is his funeral and he deserves a good one".

Barbara stubbornly said that it was a needless
expense and one which Pushkin could not appr oiate.

"I am doing it for my own sake", said Fish, "I
appreciate it. I loved that cat".

As he said this, he wrapped the expensive towle

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about the cat and shuddered, for the cat's body felt like a
toward which has frozen to the washline on a winter's morning, the cold
near zero. He had gone then with Barbara and left the cat's
body in a trench of the dug-up street. Barbara kept toying
with the idea that Pushkin was not really dead, for she not\orf or in life/ frozen on the
cold
felt the cat's corpse, stiff as a piece of ice. And as they
went to a sad dinner, this idea mounted, for she did not have
to face the actuality of death. Meanwhile her friend sought
to compose an elegy for his departed little friend, but he succeeded
only in finding the first line (the line given by the gods):
All of the
Alas, the senseless being everywhere...

# # #

Fish thought soon after Pushkin's death of securing a
a cat of his own. But it seemed necessary that he reflect - no
with care
little - on the problem of bringing up a cat, or, as Barbara
expressed it, "a little baby kitten". He also felt that
e
the possession of a cat presented severe problems of an
emotional character. It seemed to him that human beings are secured
from cats and from dogs the kind of love they could never get
from other human beings. But perhaps this kind of love would
not be good for him, however good it was for some of the other
human beings. It might be habit-forming. He might begin to desire
from his friends/and perhaps from his second wife, if ever
he had a second wife,/the kind of love his cat had given him.
The two might be jealous of each other, although Fish felt
that the major difficulty would be that his wife would suspect
him of preferring the cat to herself.

with care

His first wife had said that she was jealous of every-
one, including herself. Fish tried to understand how this could

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Tiger, Tiger/5/

be and after much effort he decided that she was jealous of
of herself at previous stages of her life, she was jealous
when her mother described to friends what a wonderful child she
howrosy-cheeked, charming, and well-behaved.
had been, Fish chanted to himself again, repetitive:

Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to Its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite.

He was thinking of the great unhappiness and suffering which
Wilhelmina made for herself.

While Fish hesitated about getting a cat, Barbara's
young half-brother, Joseph, brought her a cat as white as
Moby Dick from the country. Barbara, who always wished to
pleased everyone to a fault, decided to keep this white cat
if Fish liked him sufficently.

Fish was infatuated as soon as the cat jumped out of
the bag. His name was Muffin, but Fish decided that now that
he had come to the big city, he ought to have a city name,
and in any event, Muffin seemed to Fish quite inadequatet.

Fish decided, after securing Barbara's permission,
to call him Riverrun Pushkin again Play, for Play was Barbara's
last name, Pushkin again memorialized the dead Pushkin, and
Riverrun was the first word in a book of which Fish was very
fohd, (a minor and naive work entitled "Finnegans Wake").

The name seemed quite appropriate, for when Riverrun
ran, he did seem to resemble the movement of water. Riverrun
appeared to like the name and to like Fish very much. He was a
very friendly cat and liked everyone, unlike Pushkin who hardly

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named Mrs. Bennington Lodge. Fish had cut out Azure's picture
and pinned it upon the wall for Riverrun, after showing it to
him and saying:

Nevertheless, Riverrun's opposite number had been
pinned upon the wall and Fish had announced to the somewhat
disdainful Barbara how this made Riverrun preeminent:

Barbara accepted this explanation somewhat and Fish
proceeded to tell Riverrun that he was going to arrange for
a meeting between Azure and Riverrun. He would ring Mrs.
Benington Lodge when he visited Boston and tell her that her
lady cat had a suitor of very high Egyptian social position who
would like to pay court to her.

In view of such benefits, Fish felt justified in
being indignant at Riverrun's departure.

Barbara, seeing how keenly Fish looked Riverrun's
desertion, went to look for him in the nearby market center,
crowded with fish stores, pushcarts, and the like. This was
a cynical move on her part and she was so good a human being
that she would have regarded her looking for Riverrun in such
obvious a place as a kind of betrayal of not only the handsome
white cat, but a violation of ethical principles, the principles
of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence whereby you must all be
innocent until he is proven guilty. Except for the fact that
Fish's feelings had been so much hurt by Riverrun she would have
never done such a thing. But Barbara had a double standard. There
were two moralities, one the morality by means of which she
judged Fish and herself, the other morality a kind and forgiving

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Tiger, Tiger/7

morality, a New Testament morality, which she reserved for
everyone else except Fish and herself.

for the renegade

Barbara looked in the market center/and did not find him, but such was the intensity of her search that she imagined she had seen a white cat who might well be Riverrun disappearing in an alley. She leaped at this sight and pursued the apparition and wooed the white cat from his hiding place by means of a sardine only to find that she had been making advances to a stranger.

She wrote of this to Fish who replied that he did not wish to be anymore about that ungrateful traitor cat.

###

Not long after, Fish found it necessary to reside once more in the university city and his passion to own a cat returned with no little intensity. Who but Jeremiah Wallace Rose should come to the fore at this time? 'Returning from the progressive school where he was being educated, he found a stray tiger cat, female in sex and very much distracted by the fact that she had lost her home. He took her home with him and his kind mother Helen, knowing of Fish's desire for a cat, rang Fish and told him to come to see if he wanted this new cat who was yet hardly over being a kitten, 'he was, one might say, in the adolescent stage of herexistence. Little did she know of all that was soon to befall her.

"Again it was a matter of love at first sight. Fish was enchanted with the little girl tiger cat not so much because she was good-looking (although she enjoyed ordinary good looks), but because it was through Jeremiah that he had secured this cat. He took her home with him to his house in a taxi, and although

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the poor cat was frightened by her recent experiences, she soon responded to Fish's devout attention. She would not eat the ham-burger he had secured for her on Helen's instructions, but she did not try to escape from the house, she looked to Fish as if she had decided that this was her new home, and her old home and family were forever lost.

Fish decided to name her Oranges for reasons which may or may not be interesting.

As he decided upon her name and thought of the reasons he had had for thinking spontaneously of Oranges as the cat's passage from a poem by Hart Crane. The name, Fish recited to himself a/poem poem was entitled "Chaplinesque", and Fish had admired it since 1928. He recited to himself this stanza:

> For we can still love the world, who find
> A famished kitten on the step, and know
> Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
> Or worn torn elbow coverts.

Fish had wondered for years if these statements were sentimental or full of true love and charity. At any rate, Charlie Chaplin was beautiful. He was one of the pure in heart and he had inherited the earth. (Changed from *to Kenneth Harris*)

Harris reflected upon the period during which he had very much devoted to oranges and to the squeezing of oranges. It had been the saddest and most difficult period of his life. He had been separated from his wife for a year and he had just begun to feel the overwhelming pain and longueur of solitude. He lived alone in the half-house where he had lived with his unhappy and charming wife Ruth, and on days when he had no classes to teach, he found it difficult to get out of bed because the day stretched before him like a gray and dreary steppe. When he did have to teach, he would force himself from bed before it was light, he would

CUH
Tiger, Tiger/9

tend the furnace, a painful and chilly chore, (and one which he
foolishly considered inferior to himself), and then climb the
backstairs (~~some one is always climbing the backstairs), and~~
squeeze two oranges for himself in the circular orange squeezer,
~~and~~ when at last he drank the glass of orange juice, he knew the
regard of pleasure at his own effort, he knew he had overcome
the temptation to sink into the abyss of sleep, he knew he
had conquered the wish to die (on the brink of which he had tip-
toed through the night), he had strength and confidence and
courage enough to proceed to crawl through the numb, boring,
and difficult day.

Since Oranges had had this effect upon him, Kenneth
decided to name the girl tiger cat Oranges. He also decided to
make an identification card for her and he did and it read:

Oranges Harris
20 Ellery St.
Cambridge, 37, Mass.
Trowbridge 4481

And since this pleased him, he decided to think of
new projects for his newfound cat.

"I am no different from most people", said Harris
to himself, "I am no worse than most people. And no better".
It seemed to him that his fondness for the new cat showed
that he was just like everyone else, only more so.

# # #

# # #

Meanwhile Oranges grew used to her new home and
t parent, and she tentatively sniffed at the ~~hamburger~~ Harris
had left in the plate for her which he had regarded anxiously
because she had not eaten it nor drunk any of the milk in her
saucer. Soon probably had begun to sense the great love Harris

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Tiger, Tiger/10

had in store for her, for she soon seemed to be able to understand
his eccentricities and accept them and adjust herself to them,
within certain limits. She waited at the head of the stair for
him when he returned from school and she meowed her displeasure
at his absence and that he had not seen fit to take her with
him.

he wanted to recite to Oranges
Harris soon found the verses/by the poor mad poet
(crazy as posse of foxes) Christopher Smart:

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

Oranges Harris was not in the least interested in these verses.

She curled up on the living room carpet, however, and pretended
to some degree of politeness, since she like the sound of her
master's parent's voice and was glad that he was present.

###

The sleeping arrangements, so to speak, changed
rapidly. At first Oranges slept in Harris' bedroom near the
warm radiator. And then when her affection and trust came
to fruition she joined him in his bed for one night, only
to find that he was such a restless, indeed turbulent sleeper
that she gained no rest when sleeping curled like a fur
Complatter next to him. But she tried again, perhaps supposing
that he had merely had an unusual night, On the third night

CUH/16/
Tiger, Tiger

he paused at the grocery store to purchase a can of sardines for Oranges. The store was crowded and the exhausted Harris had to wait in line. When his turn came at last, it developed that no more ordinary sardines were available. The only kind the store had were imported Portuguese sardines at the price of $.59 a can.

Harris, rather than wait exhausted at some other store, decided to buy two cans because he could not go home bear to return to his home and the lovesick Oranges without some consolations for his cat. (At this time, not long after the second World War, there was still little cat food available at most stores.)

But as he left the store with the two expensive cans of sardines, he became alarmed at what other human beings might say or at least think of this expenditure. His alarm made him furtive about the brown paper bag containing the Portuguese cans, as if some one might see him.

"They will say I am out of this world", he said to himself, "to buy such expensive sardines for a mere cat. But they will be wrong. I am not out of this world in the least. I was exhausted and I was protecting my own feelings in buying such expensive sardines. I was also protecting my poor lovesick Oranges from the consequences of my being exhausted because teaching a class invariably involves me in feelings of anxiety which make me try too hard and which consume much of my nervous energy."

Oranges was at first suspicious of the new sardines. Then she ate them very quickly and she seemed to like them. But her liking of them was in no way different, so far as Harris could make out, to her liking for ordinary sardines. And as soon as she was done with her lunch, she began again to moan from the depths of her love sick heart. Harris did not know what to do.

CUH/18

Tiger, Tiger

who had become callous during his internment in Germany during the
2nd World War, "and it won't be the end of your life". There are
any number of cats and you can have most of them".

He spoke as one who knew about such things.

Harris feared that he might appear to be an overdevoted parent, and to a mere cat.

He decided -- as one decides to leap into the cold mountain
lake after fearing the shock for half an hour-- to allow Oranges
to go out into the backyard, an area full of trash cans, rejected
bottles, clotheslines, and bulkheads which led to the cellar.
Then he departed with the Amhearsts for lunch and drank four
martinis rapidly because he was so nervous about Oranges, and
bored the Amhearts with his passionate account of his problems
as Oranges' father.

He returned in a cab (because he was in haste, impatient)
to his house and as he returned, the cabdriver told him of his
veteran
last passenger, a soldier who had had an attack of epilepsy and
had been taken unconscious to the hospital so that the cabdriver
was deprived of his fare, $1.60. Harris sympathized with the
driver. He was, though nervous about Oranges, mounted in the
rapture and buzz of the four martinis, so that all things
were sharply defined, wonderfully interesting, and extremely
strange, new, and aborihinal.

"He had on a three day binge," said the cabdriver, "this was the third day. He had been sleeping with all the women he could find, and there were plenty of women where he was."

"That's it", said Harris, who often felt that he
understood more than he actually did, "he was after too many women.
That's why he had the attack of epilepsy".

CUH/19
Tiger, Tiger

They arrived at Harris' house, Harris gave the cabdriver the fare and the $1.60 which the unfortunate soldier had not paid him, and he rushed to the backyard to find his cat Oranges.

She was behind a chickenwire fence, crouching and poised. Near her was a fat tiger cat who looked just like her. And in a semi-circle about the two there crouched and snarled what seemed to tom Harris at least half the cats in Cambridge. An impasse, like a trench war in France, had been reached, for no one of the cats seemed ready to make a move.

He decided to try to rescue Oranges and the tom who was obvious-ly the choice of her heart from the mob of cats which surrounded them.

Gazing at Oranges' truelove, who looked so much like her, Harris saw the bridegroom looking back.

"So Oeidpus' must have looked at his father", thought Harris, at "when they met/the crossroads".

CUH

Tiger, Tiger

However, his interest in cats sprang up quite quickly a friend of when/his named Barbara acquired a cat named Pushkin. At first Fish had not liked this male cat because he was selfish and mean, and did not care very much for Fish. But soon he had become very devoted to Pushkin for precisely this reason--the fact that Pushkin did not like him--and soon he brought Pushkin gifts, such as liver and catnip, and in his growing fondness decided to rename the cat Prince Alexander Pushkin, or merely briefly, the Prince, a reference to both Machiavelli and the cat's tactics in securing food and affection.

CUH
Tiger, Tiger/3

And then Fish decided that Barbara ought to look at her
dear animal, Pushkin, before he was taken to the grave.

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Tiger, Tiger/4/

about the cat and shuddered, for the cat's body felt like a
toward which has frozen to the washline on a winter's morning
near zero. He had gone then with Bárbara and left the cat's
body in a trench of the dug-up street. Barbara kept toying
with the idea that Pushkin was not really dead, for she not
felt the cat's corpse, stiff as a piece of ice. And as they
went to a sad dinner, this idea mounted, for she did not have
to face the actuality of death. Meanwhile Her friend sought
to compose an elegy for his departed little friend, but he succeeded only in finding the first line (the line given by the goals);
All of the
senseless being everywhere...

# # #

Fish thought soon after Pushkin's death of securing a
a cat of his own. But it seemed necessary that he reflect no
little on the problem of bringing up a cat, or, as Barbara
expressed it, "a little baby kitten". He also felt that
the possession of a cat presented severe problems of an
emotional character. It seemed to him that human beings secured
from cats and from dogs the kind of love they could never get
from other human beings. But perhaps this kind of love would
not be good for him, however good it was for some of the other
human beings. It might be habit-forming. He might begin to desire
from his friends and perhaps from his second wife, if ever
he had a second wife, the kind of love his cat had given him.
The two might be jealous of each other, although Fish felt
that the major difficulty would be that his wife would suspect
him of preferring the cat to himself.

CUN
Tiger, Tiger/5/

be and after much effort he decided that she was jealous of
of herself at previous stages of her life, she was jealous
when her mother described to friends what a wonderful cat she
howpropy-cheeked, charming, and well-behaved.
had been, Fish chanted to himself again, repetitiously

Fish was infatuated as soon as the cat jumped out of
the bag. His name was Muffin, but Fish decided that now that
he had come to the big city, he ought to have a city name,
and in any event, Muffin seemed to Fish quite inadequate.

Fish decided, after securing Barbara's permission,
to call him Riverrun Pushkin again Play, for Play was Barbara's
last name, Pushkin again memorialized the dead Pushkin, and
Riverrun was the first word in a book of which Fish was very
 fond, (a minor and naive work entitled "Finnegans Wake").

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Tiger, Tiger/6/

Fish liked Riverrun better than any other cat, including Pushkin. He liked him so much that he announced to Barbara that he was going to get the cat a toy in the department store pet shop.

"I am getting jealous of that cat", Barbara declared nervously.

"I will get you a toy also", Fish replied. And foolish Fish was surprised to see that this reply had awakened a look of annoyance, even resentment, upon Barbara's face.

Meanwhile Riverrun was gradually losing the fine dazzle of his whiteness. The soot of the city was staining his fur in fine points, especially since he went out at night a good deal. It seemed to be possible that Fish had overestimated the virtues of this cat, for he turned to be an opportunist who frequented grocery stores and meat shops, despite the fact that he was well fed and indeed overfed by Fish and by Barbara.

Fish had to go back to town for a month because of his or
scholarly pursuits and the Almighty Dollar and during this
period, to the great dismay of Fish and Barbara, Riverrun
disappeared.

"Maybe he was coming to see me", Fish wrote to Barbara,
but he knew that this was merely wishful thinking.

He became very angry at the disappearance of the
lionized cat, and he rehearsed to himself some of the benefits
which the ungrateful Riverrun had received. For example, Fish,
reading of a cat show in Boston, had drawn a picture of the
elegant lady cat, Azure Mu-Et, an Angora as dazzling as a
Ziegfield Follies chorus girl of 1922, Azure had been the
winner of the entire cat show and she was owned by a lady

CUH
Tiger, Tiger/6

Nevertheless, Riverrun's opposite number had been
pinned upon the wall, and Fish had an uncused to the somewhat
disappointful Barbara how this made Riverrun preeminent:

Barbara accepted this explanation somewhat and Fish
proceeded to tell Riverrun that he was going to arrange for
a metting between Azure and Riverrun. He would ring Mrs.
Ben ington Lodge when he visited Boston and tell her that her
lady cat had a suitor of very high Egyptian social position who
would like to pay court to her.

Barbara, seeing how keenly Fish took Riverrun's
desertion, went to look for him on the nearby market center,
crowded with fish stores, pushcars, and the like. This was
a cynical move on her part and she was so good a human being
that she would have regarded her looking for Riverrun in such
obvious a place as a kind of betrayal of not only the handsome
white cat, but a violation of ethical principles, the principles
of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence whereby you bleive that everyone
is innocent until he is proven guilty. Except for the fact that
Fish's feelings had been so much hurt by Riverrun she would have
lived by
never done such a thing. But Barbara had a double standard. There
were two moralities, one the morality by means of which she
judged Fish and herself, the other morality a kind and forgiving

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Tiger, Tiger/7

for the renegade

Barbara looked in the market center/and did not find him, but such was the intensity of her search that she imagined she had seen a white cat who might well be Riverrun disappearing in an alley. She leaped at this sight and pursued the attraction andwood the white cat from his hiding place by means of a sardine only to find that she had been making advances to a stranger.

She wrote of this to Fish who replied that he did not wish to her anymore about that ungrateful traitor cat.

###

Not long after, Fish found it necessary to reside once more in the university city and his passion to own a cat returned with no little intensity. Who but Jeremiah Wallace Rose should come to the fore at this time?! Returning from the progressive school where he was being educated, he found a stray tiger cat, female in sex and very much distracted by the fact that she had lost her home. He took her home with him and his kind mother Helen, knowing of Fish's desire for a cat, rang Fish and told him to come to see if he wanted this new cat who was yet hardly over being a kitten, "he was, one might say, in the adolescent stage of herexistence. Little did she know of all that was soon to befall her.

"gain it was a matter of love at first sight. Fish was enchanted with the little girl tiger cat not so much because she was good-looking (although she enjoyed ordinary good looks) but because it was through Jeremiah that he had secured this cat. He took her home with him to his house in a taxi, and although

CUH

Tiger, Tiger/8/

the poor cat was frightened by her recent experiences, she soon responded to Fish's devout attention. She would not eat the hamburger he had secured for her on Helen's instructions, but she did not try to escape from the house, she looked to Fish as if she had decided that this was her new home and her old home and family were forever lost.

As he decided upon her name and thought of the reasons he had had for thinking spontaneously of Oranges as the cat's name, Fish recited to himself a poem by Hart Crane. The poem was entitled *Chaplinesque*, and Fish had admired it since 1928. He recited to himself this stanza:

> For we can still love the world, who find
> A famished kitten on the step, and know
> Recess for it from the fury of the street,
> Or worn torn elbow coverts.

Harris reflected upon the period during which he had very much devoted to Oranges and to the squeezing of oranges. It had been the saddest and most difficult period of his life. He had been separated from his wife for a year and he had just begun to feel the overwhelming pain and longueur of solitude. He lived alone in the half-house where he had lived with his unhappy and charming wife Ruth, and on days when he had no classes to teach, he found it difficult to get out of bed because the day stretched before him like a gray and dreary steppe. When he did have to teach, he would force himself from bed before it was light, he would

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he wanted to recite to Oranges
Harris soon found the verses/by the poor mad poet
(crazy as posse of foxes) Christopher Smart;

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 the God in
the East he worships him in his way.
For this is done by wreathing his body seven times
round with elegant quickness....
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 without provocation...

Oranges Harris was not in the least interested in these verses.
She curled up on the living room carpet, however, and pretended
to some degree of politeness, since she like the sound of her
master's voice and was glad that he was present.

The sleeping arrangements, so to speak, changed
rapidly. At first Oranges slept in Harris' bedroom near the
warm radiator. And then when her affection and trust came
to fruition she joined him in his bed for one night, only
to find that he was such a restless, indeed turbulent sleeper
that she gained no rest when sleeping curled like a fur

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Tiger, Tiger/11

she joined him again, but seemed not intent on staying since she
did not close her eyes. In the morning she was on the floor
next to the craspet slippers and it seemed to Harris that she
had perhaps joined him when he went to sleep because she was
afraid she might have hurt his feelings.

It seemed to Harris that she had become his sister,
his wife, and daughter.

When Harris' sleep continued to be troubled, he slept
late in the morning, and this caused the first serious conflict
between Harris and Oranges, for she walked gently up and down
his recumbent body and psyche (as if she had mistaken it for
the Atlantic City boardwalk) at eight o'clock in the morning
because she wanted her breakfast at the proper time. Harris
arose and gave it to her (a dish of sardines), but he was
irritated and he was unable to fall asleep again.

Being impractical, he did not know enough to
leave the cat's breakfast in the dish under the stove in the
kitchen the night before. This idea had occurred to him, but
he had rejected it, thinking that if he did Oranges might
eat her breakfast at midnight supper or in the middle of the
night.

Consequently, he shut his bedroom door, so that
Oranges would be unable to wake him up whenever she wanted
breakfast. She forgave him this banishment, but circumvented
his purposes by falling back upon her native shrewdness.

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Time, and Partisan Review (for Harris was trying to keep a
complete file), and here in this periodical room the window was
left open so that Oranges might slip out to the roof. On the
morning that Oranges found herself excluded from her friend's
bedroom, she scratched patiently for a time at the closed
door and then arose to the roof with great speed and demon-
strated her enormous intelligence by figuring out where on
the roof was the spot closest to the bedroom where Harris
was trying to stay asleep (for her scratching at the bedroom
door had half-awakened him). The closest spot was just next
drain
to the rain-spout and for a second Oranges toyed with the
idea of trying to get to the bedroom by slipping down the
rain-spout on little cat feet. But her native prudence made
her reject this possibility as too dangerous. Instead she
contented herself with meowing in anguish and hunger.

Harris could hardly believe his ears, for he did not
think that Oranges was smart enough to know the exact spot above
his bedroom window where she could meow to him. He rose from
bed, raised the shade, and saw to his amazement and pity and
delight that Oranges was making a very angry face at him, she
was genuinely angry at him because he had shut the door in her
face.

He dried out to her to come down and have her breakfast
and he gave her an egg as well as sardines to reward her for her
brilliance in tactics.

"She probably knows more about this house than I do",
he said to himself as he gazed upon her passionate anxious
and ravishing consumption of her breakfast.

After her breakfast had been concluded, she rewarded
him by coming to seat in the living room where he was typing
letters. And she refrained from playing with the typewriter

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Tiger, Tiger/13

coolest as well as
It was April, the cruellest month in that part of
New England, It was the month when human beings commit
suicide than in any other portion of the year (and this is
because of love as well as the unpredictable weather, as un-
predictable as a woman, as dark and unpredictable as the human
heart.)

Regarding Oranges, and thinking that she might soon be
in heat, Harris decided to give a cocktail party for her
and to invite all the handsome toms of the neighborhood
so that she might inspect them and decide whom she liked best
of all. This would be her debut. Instead of liquor, catnip
(Later, a friend was suggest cointreau.)
would be served.

Pleased by this project, Harris took a pussy-willow
branch and tapped Oranges gently on the head. She responded to
this stimulus beautifully, she did an entre-chat for pussy-
willows sake, and she did not listen as Harris recited to
her his plan for her debut.

Oranges took in the general air of excitement
which was effervescent as soda in Harris and she began to
show off. She raced off to the kitchen and she raced back again
from the kitchen to the living room through the hallway and the
living room and in this latter demonstration she reminded
Harris of the thrilling times of his childhood when he had gone
to the Polo Grounds and seen Frank Frisch scoring from first
base on a single hit to right field, scoring as he slid under
the catcher's knee.

"What a bride", said Harris, "she will make to some
fine tom-cat", admiring her speed and her frank innocent desire

CUH/14

Tiger, Tiger

"Or do I make too much of her", he questioned himself,
"do I over-interpret her actions as I overinterpret those of
human beings and my own. Perhaps she is just a figment of my
imagination? Perhaps I myself am just a figment of my own
imagination? I do not think so. <u>my mind to me a kingdom is,
I am the king thereof, playing games with consciousness,
inspired --(I hope?!)--by love".

"Call us what you will," said Harris to himself,
we are made such by love". That's what John Donne said.
"We are such stuff as dreams are made on". That's what
William Shakespeare said. Sigmund Freud repeated these
doctrines under very different circumstances, at a time when
the nineteen century still believed that it was possible to
achieve the kingdom of God on earth, or the terrestri al
Paradise. Yet one may well ask if the/two poets understood
with as much concreteness what they were saying as did the third
poet, native as he was of Vienna".

These somewhat far-fetched and rhetorical reflections
were inspired in Harris by the fact that his cat Oranges was
in heat and he did not know what to do about it. The project
of the catnip cocktail party for tomcat beaux had been re-
garded as a joke by his friends until t hey saw that he was
serious whereupin they warned him that such a party would only
lead to a battle royal in which one or more cats, including
Oranges, might lose a pair of eyes at the claws of some rejected

CUH/15

suitors. This possibility had horrified Harris and he had given up the idea of the party. Meanwhile Oranges suffered. She moaned, She rubbed herself against all available objects, including Harris, and she sought to get out of the house, being dissatisfied with all these substitutes for the real thing.

"There are no substitutes for anything", Harris remarked to himself for the nineteenth time.

Oranges saw other cats from the window and she tried again and again to get out of the door when Harris left the house so that she might meet her truelove.

Harris thought of the mad songs of Ophelia, the Prime Minister's daughter:

"How should she her true love know
From another one?
By his cockle hat and staff
And his sabdal shoon"

n

"The rhyme is not very good", he remarked to himself, "unless the Elizabethans pronounced one as woon or shoon as shun. I ought to look it up, but probably I have more important thin gs to do".

###

Sorrowing and pensive about the trials of his cat Oranges, Harris taught his classes with a preoccupied mind. He thought of discussing the problem of Oranges' love-life with students whom he knew to be familiar and friends of cats. But he decided that they might be embarrassed as well as titillated by such a discussion.

When he returned one day during this period, exhausted, weighed down by a book bag in which were too many books and papaers(because foolishly he was afraid that he might not have enough to say) although in all truth he usually haid far too much),

GUH/16/
Tiger, Tiger

He paused at the grocery store to purchase a can of sardines for Oranges. The store was crowded and the exhausted Harris had to wait in line. When his turn came at last, it developed that no more ordinary sardines were available. The only kind the store had were imported Portuguese sardines at the price of $5.59 a can.

Harris, rather than wait exhausted at some other store, decided to buy two cans because he could not go home bear to return to his home and the lovesick Oranges without some consolation for his cat. (At this time, not long after the second World War, there was still little cat food available at most stores.)

But as he left the store with the two expensive cans of sardines, he became alarmed at what other human beings might say at least think of this expenditure. His alarm made him furtive about the brown paper bag containing the Portuguese cans, as if some one might see him.

"They will say I am out of this world", he said to himself, "but they will soon die of hunger. They will buy sardines for a mere cat. But they will be wrong. I am not out of this world in the least. I was exhausted and I was protecting my own feelings in buying such expensive sardines. I was also protecting my poor lovesick Oranges from the consequences of my being exhausted because teaching a class invariably involves me in feelings of anxiety which make me try too hard and which consume much of my nervous energy."

CUH/17/

"What will I do if I have a daughter", he said to himself, "I will probably go out of my mind because I will be afraid to make any move whatever, possessed by the fearful consequences of all moves But then again perhaps it is best to do nothing, for either she will know her own mind and all will be well, or she will not know her own mind, which means not that nothing will be well, but that one can only hope that she is lucky".

These thoughts did not seem to have much relevance to the impoverished Oranges who was standing on his desk and looking out of the window, seeking in all probability to see her truelove passing by.

Harris decided to go out and buy her catnip as a substitute, even though there are no substitutes for anything.

###

But before he had an opportunity to buy Oranges the exciting selace of catnip (feline marihuana), he was visited unexpectedly by two friends Mr. Rank Amhearst and his beautiful En glash wife Una. They were a strange and difficult couple who always arrived and departed unexpectedly, driven by feelings no one else knew about save for the wives of Rank's friends with whom he often had affairs, just like his father before him. They invited Harris to lunch, and although he tried to beg off by pleading the love sickness of his cat, their invitations were commands, or so Harris felt them to be. Rank suggested that Harris just let Oranges go out.

"Let nature rake its course", he remarked, speaking from the heart.

"But what if she disappears. Or what if her eyes are torn out".

"That won't wont be the end of the world", said Rank,

CUH/18
Tiger, Tiger

He decided --as one decides to leap into the cold mountain lake after fearing the shock for half an hour--to allow Oranges go out into the backyard, an area full of trash cans, rejected bottles, clotheslines, and bulkheads which led to the cellar. Then he departed with the Amhearats for lunch and drank three martinis rapidly badouse he was so nervous about Oranges, and bored the Amhearts with his passionate account of his problems as Oranges' father.

He returned in a hab (because he was in haste, impatient)
to his house and as he returned, the cabdriver told him of his
veteran
last passenger, a soldier who had had an attack of epilepsy and
had been taken unconscious to the hospital so that the cabdriver
was deprived of his fare, $1.60. Harris sympathized with the
driver. He was, though nervous about Oranges, mounted in the
rapture and buzz of the four martinis, so that all things
were sharply defined, wo'erfully interesting, and extremely
strange, new, and aborihinal.

"He had on a three day binge", said the cabdriver,
"this was the third day. He had been sleeping with all the women
he could find, adthere were plenty of women where he was".

CUH/19
Tiger, Tiger

She was behind a chickenwire fence, crouching and poised. Near her was a fat tiger cat who looked just like her. And in a semi-circle about the two there crouched and snarled what seemed to tom Harris at least half the cats in Cambridge. An impasse, like a tranch war in France, had been reached, for no one of the cats seemed ready to make a move.

"So Oeipus' mst have looked at his father", thought Harris, at "when they met/the crossroads".

CUH

# "The Uncontrollable Mystery On The Bestial Floor"

A discussion of Jeremiah's religious education commenced between Richard and Helen Rose, and soon enough his appointed tutor, Bertram Harris was asked to participate in the discussion, or perhaps it was an argument, or perhaps it was a quarrel.

The issue, at any rate, was as to whether Jeremiah was to go with his sister to Sunday/at the nearby Unitarian Church or at the Christ Christ, Protestant Episcopalian in denomination and also nearby.

ian

Unitarism had long since been defined as "the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man in the neighborhood of Harvard". For the time being, Harris was in favor of it because it might prevent Jeremiah from jumping to/conclusions. He was also in favor of the Protestant Episcopalian Church because he loved the prayer book they used, the justly famous Book of Common Prayer.

Richard Rose was against Jeremiah's going to Sunday school because he did not believe in God and at times setested him.

Rose on the other hand was very much in favor of Jeremiah going to hear about God and his works because she loved God very much.

Richard Rose yielded to his wife and friend because of the goodness of his heart and because he loved his children very much and wanted them to haveeverything.

The two children went to Unitarian Church. Since Helen would have preferred Christ Church, this was in the nature of a compromise.

Visiting the Roses for Sunday dinner, Harris was sent to bring the children home. In this way he learned that the first day in school had not turned out as well as it might have. It developed that Jeremiah had immediately adopted a facetious attitude toward God because he did not care for the Sunday school teacher, av

CUH

When Shenandoah first began to think of the project of being Jeremiah's tutor, he fell prey to emotions which were alternately lyrical and didactic. brilliant

Seated in his study, looking out at the river at the end of an autumn day, he became lyrical and he said to himself:

"Jeremiah! little boy! verve, vigor and vivacity sparkling, superb and unsurpassed (elan enough to run a railroad train!), is it not time for you to go to kindergarten? Is it not time to go to Sunday school? Is it not time to go to that black school where chalk upon the blackboard always screams? A nameless fate awaits us, priceless boy, a fate growing as secretly as teeth, growing with ice-hard pain, unmarked necessity, a hidden fate, dear juvenile".

Shenandoah knew well enough that he would not be able to hold conversations such as this with the child. What was necessary was that when he spoke to the child, and used the language and knowledge common to them, there should be present in his consciousness some sense of these fundamental matters, such as fate and necessity.

"Look", Shenandoah decided he would say to his protégé, "do you see how my beard has grown, though I shaved this morning? Each morning in the glass I see how my face has grown dark with hair while I slept and did not know what was happening. So I know enough to look at my body and think about it and see how much and how little control I have over it. One's body is very interesting. But most interesting of all is the dark mind behind the face and the immortal past in every place".

Again Shenandoah felt that he was becoming too

Invocation/2/

much concerned explicitly with matters he discussed only with
himself and which would merely perplex a little boy, however
gifted. But he could not control himself, as the night descended
on the lawn
from the sky and grew up from the ground/in front of his
with himself
house. He began to discuss/general principles of his
education of the child:

mind
"How good", (I will bear in my /as I give my lessons)",
he said to himself, "how good it is to know the wicked worst,
the untouchable and forbidden apple, guilt, the gulf of love.
How good it is if at the same time one can bear in mind the
at the same time as
growing early morning light one makes studies of the
night."

Again he hesitated, knowing very well how difficult
it would be to explain this to a little boy.

CUH
**Invocation of Noah**

Lyrical once more, the boy's teacher, speaking to himself,
invoked the Biblical character, Noah:

"Noah, captaih of the blue and unforeseen (expected un-
expectedness of mariners) has it availed to say to Psyche 'Don't
look love in the face!'? Has it done any good to tell Narcissus
not to look too long in the glass, warning him judiciously that
nausea and boredom are the true end of self-love?

"Does any knowledge truly help save for the knowledge
gained in the frying pan and in the fire by the burned and
pained hand?

"The sage said, 'Know yourself'. But this knowledge is
often too painful to be borne, and even when borne it is often
not enough, for to know oneself, one must also know other
human beings, but they hide from one as they hide from
their own self-knowledge, and they are ashamed to let you
know them.

"For even when you listen to a shell, all that you
hear is your own heart's roar, thunderous like coal going down
a chute (and yet it is a pleasant sound).

"One might as well speak maxims to the senseless sways
of the North Atlantic, for all the good it will do such a one
as you, Noah.

"A fat sad wise man said long ago: 'Were there no future
time, I'd ride all day in a closed and handsome cab, closed with
the blinds drawn and a pretty lady next to me'. But there is a
future time, there is always a future time, one is afraid of
disgracing oneself at the moment of death or having a dirty
tomb.

"Noah, amid the slushing of the wakeful sea, amid the
chortling of the beasts below, before the horizons' blue-grey

CUH/Invocation of Noah, 2.

 distances, these sentences, pretty as firworks, might sparkle for
 our budding prairie: let his be Adam's look the day Creation
 stopped and let him remember how Abel looked when his brother
 struck him. And here and there and everywhere let him possess
 the Magi's amaze when, as if ordinary as a bread, the waiting women
 showed them the little child.

2.

CUH
The Truth/2/

"Arithmetic, for example, is true of everything, and monotonous as box cars on a track. Yet arithmetic is often incorrect. One and one are sometimes two and sometimes three and sometimes sixty-nine. One and one make a small child sometimes and this makes three and sometimes an error in arithmetic will lead to sixty-nine years in prison.

"To know the truth you must know of great Rome's decline and of the Caesars who suffered such passions that their foreheads burst. But sometimes to know this is to be foolish enough not to know many other important things.

"To know the truth one must know how dark the future is, darkened by hope more than by any other thing".

CUH

Beauty/2/

For otherwise and most of the time our glances fall as if
though windows or as if on stairs which mere take us where we
wish to go and we keep climbing on the stairs, never arrived,
although the mind leaps to the as yet unopened door where
party sounds arise from troops of friends and all hearts play
like ponies cantering".

"This is the beginning", said She nandoah to himself,
"of an explanation of the beautiful to myself. But it is far
from an explanation for the little boy".