What is it about writers and cats?

Last year I used to have a daily visitor who would sit with me at my desk, often a warm cushion at my back but always a calming companionable presence. Sadly the animal only known to me as Cat was killed by a neighbourhood dog.  I never fed Cat because it is wrong to try and take over somebody else’s pet but even though I did nothing to encourage her, she appeared here every day and seemed happy enough. I don’t plan to get my own cat but every now and then sitting up here in the study, I feel the gap that Cat left and wonder why cats are such helpful creatures when anyone tries to write.

Far be it from me to compare myself to the writers below but there seems to be something that they all had in common. I suppose if their cats were like my Cat, their silent intelligent companionship inspired without distracting anyone undertaking the solitary job of writing.

Raymond Chandler

William S. Burroughs


Ernest Hemingway
Hermann Hesse
Tennessee Williams
Jean Paul Sartre
Allen Ginsberg
Jack Kerouac

Alberto Moravia

Aldous Huxley

Charles Bukowski

Doris Lessing
Edward Albee

Gore Vidal

 Hunter S. Thompson

Jacques Prevert

Jean Cocteau

Jorge Luis Borges

 Joseph Brodsky

Julio Cortazar

Mark Twain
Patricia Highsmith

Truman Capote

W.H. Auden
William Carlos Williams

T.S. Eliot

I couldn’t find a photograph of the most famous cat loving poet, T.S. Eliot but here he is reading on of his cat poems:

If T.S. Eliot’s Cats have made you think of something else then don’t blame me. It would be mean of me to deprive you though so here’s a secret video clip to be watched strictly in private. Never admit that you’ve seen it and I promise I won’t tell. Scroll down to it when no one’s around…

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