COVER STORY Love 'em or hate 'em, they are a national mania Cat: One Hell of a nice animal, frequently mistaken for a meatloaf. —B. Kliban, cartoonist Muhammad cut the sleeve from his robe rather than
disturb his friend, asleep on the Prophet's gown. Samuel Johnson daily
pampered his spoiled companion Hodge with meals of fresh oysters.
Victor Hugo cherished Gavroche. Cardinal Richelieu left a generous
legacy for the 14 he owned. Napoleon is said to have broken into a cold
sweat at the sight of one. In his childhood, Smerdyakov, in
Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, was fond of hanging them. Thomas
Hardy and Thomas Gray wrote poems to them; Hemingway shared dinner with
his. Physician and Scholar Albert Schweitzer favored two ways to take
refuge from human misery: playing the organ and delighting in the play
of his cats. From deification to demonization, and every stage in between, attitudes
toward cats have been confused, variable, peculiar, consuming, jittery
and, ultimately, baffling. Those sinuous forms represented in Egyptian
art, valued as rodent-chasers by farmers, or draped luxuriously over an
apartment radiator have elicited the best and worst from mankind in the
5,000 years since their domestication. The dog may be man's best
friend, but the cat is his most perplexing one, if, indeed, he is one
at all. A prodigious number of Americans have become smitten with cats. Others
continue to bad-mouth felines. Are cats stouthearted companions or
unresponsive curmudgeons? Or are they, as Cartoonist Bernard Kliban
suggested in his bestselling album Cat , merely whimsical
meat-loaves? While the fur flies in this battle, one cat gives folks a
humorous peek at both armies in the controversy. The most famous feline
to express this perplexing relationship between man and pet is
Garfield, a comic-strip cat. His creator, Cartoonist Jim Davis, has
three books on the New York Times trade paperback bestseller list, a
first for any author. Garfield Bigger Than Life, Garfield Gains Weight
and Garfield at Large, which has been on the list for an amazing 84
weeks, have sold more than 2 million volumes, and a fourth compilation
of the daily newspaper comic will appear in the spring. Three other cat
books also grace the list, including 101 Uses for a Dead Cat ; together they account for an additional 1.2 million
kitty-cartoon albums .
