A cat, T. S. Eliot, and rare literary journals

My eighteen-year-old cat Claudine died recently. A tortie tabby or tortoise shell tabby, I had called her the Welsh Terrier Cat because her markings were similar to a dog breed I would like. She often sat near me when I wrote rough drafts. Despite kidney disease, she was spry up to three days before her end.

Claudine in 2018 with scratch paper

Watching her, I opened up poetry I hadn't read in years – T. S. Eliot's “Four Quartets.” The poet who provided lyrics for the musical Cats felt like good company.

Being involved with new journals and new poets, I probably don't read poets that fascinated me in college often enough. I had a seminar on T. S. Eliot however I read his “Four Quartets” again during a winter break. Lines from it stayed with me for years. The first stanza beginning with “Time present and time past/ are both present in time future,/And time future contained in time past” had a philosophical content that spoke to me when I had separated from home and my earlier years.

Four decades later, I found the poetry not only philosophical and written in a style that mirrored the deco era, but more understandable in its confrontation with time. It was about waiting and suggested a possible undiscovered dimension, pointing to physics. The flourishes and sudden everyday images in these contemplations, even though cats were not mentioned as they were in “Prufrock”, had a feline solemnity.

I had written an observation about Claudine and included that as the third section of a long poem, an after thought. Later on, I felt the linkage was weak so I revised the poem with only the two sections. I had a fragment, a revision project because there were a few lines I couldn't discard.

In this mood, I was reminded of the summer's best finds for my internet used bookstore. I obtained a number of The Dial back issues at a library sale. The Dial was the main literary magazine during the 1920's, during my favorite era of literature. No, I did not find the issue that first published T. S. Eliot's “The Wasteland”, darn. But I have issues with “London Letters” from T. S. Eliot, letters to The Dial about the literary scene in England.

The eight issues I still have contain an array of writers and artists still extant in our literary memory. I immediately read a poem by James Joyce, “A Memoir of the Players”, which describes a stage kiss. I'd read Chamber Music, a thin book of Joyce's poetry which reminded me of Stephen Dedalus's villanelle in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This poem was different!

In the issues I have are poems by E. E. Cummings before he committed his name to lower case, D. H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Sterling North, and Hart Crane. There's fiction by Thomas Mann and A. E. Coppard, essays by Virginia Woolf and Liam O'Flaherty, and a long piece by William Butler Yeats in which he seems to feel obliged to explain his work relationship with Oscar Wilde. An essay by Maxim Gorki is titled “About Murderers” and also refers to the cinema. There is art by Picasso, Kahlil Gibran, Rodin, Georgia O'Keefe, and Jean Cocteau.

Sanguine Drawing by Picasso in The Dial

 

The Flagpole (First Painting) by Georgia O'Keefe in The Dial

I don't know what it means for an artist to have a photograph of a work put in a journal. The value a famous writer's first publication or first printing of a literary piece is something I can better appreciate as in a gallery. For some, it might be beyond value, like the first memories of a person or a  pet after you've spent years with them.