Shaun Usher (editor) - Letters of note : cats

Letters of Note was born in 2009 with the launch of lettersofnote.com, a website celebrating old-fashioned correspondence that has since been visited over 100 million times. The first Letters of Note volume was published in October 2013, followed later that year by the first Letters Live, an event at which world-class performers delivered remarkable letters to a live audience.

Since then, these two siblings have grown side by side, with Letters of Note becoming an international phenomenon, and Letters Live shows being staged at iconic venues around the world, from Londons Royal Albert Hall to the theatre at the Ace Hotel in Los Angeles.

You can find out more at lettersofnote.com and letterslive.com. And now you can also listen to the audio editions of the new series of Letters of Note, read by an extraordinary cast drawn from the wealth of talent that regularly takes part in the acclaimed Letters Live shows.

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Canongate Books Ltd,

14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

canongate.co.uk

This digital edition first published in 2020 by Canongate Books

Copyright Shaun Usher, 2020

The right of Shaun Usher to be identified as the
author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

For permission credits please see p. 128

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 78689 554 7
eISBN 978 1 78689 555 4

CONTENTS

Nikola Tesla to Pola Foti

Rachel Carson to Dorothy Freeman

Jack Lemmon to Walter Matthau

Persian Snow (Erasmus Darwin) and Miss Po Felina (Anna Seward)

Sylvia Townsend Warner and David Garnett

Guy Davenport to the drivers of Lexington

Lafcadio Hearn to Basil Hall Chamberlain

Anne Frank to Kitty

Charles Dickens to John Forster

T.S. Eliot to Thomas Faber

Elizabeth Taylor to her missing cat

Henry Harland to The Yellow Book

Adlai Stevenson II to the Members of the Senate of the 66th General Assembly

Mary Midnight to the Royal Society

Frederick Law Olmsted to his son

Robert Southey to Grosvenor Bedford

Gabrielle-Ange Lvesque to Jack Kerouac

Thomas Gray to Horace Walpole

Edward Lear to Lord Aberdare

Ayn Rand to Cat Fancy magazine

William Darwin Fox to Charles Darwin

Raymond Chandler to Charles Morton

Ester Krumbachov to her cats

Katherine Mansfield to Ida Baker

Florence Nightingale to Mrs Frost

Jane Welsh Carlyle to Kate Stanley

John Cheever to Josephine Herbst

For Kala, Dodi, Gavin, Stacey, Silvie, Polo and Chico

A letter is a time bomb, a message in a bottle, a spell, a cry for help, a story, an expression of concern, a ladle of love, a way to connect through words. This simple and brilliantly democratic art form remains a potent means of communication and, regardless of whatever technological revolution we are in the middle of, the letter lives and, like literature, it always will.

INTRODUCTION

For many thousands of years, since human beings first began domesticating cats and dogs for reasons of pest control and hunting respectively there has been one particular question consistently on the lips of the population that has never failed to divide its audience straight down the middle:

Cats or dogs?

As the proud owner of multiple iterations of both since childhood, some more appealing than others, admittedly, it is plainly obvious to me that the correct answer, and in fact the only logical answer, is yes, because to choose between cats and dogs is to choose between food and drink: pointless, and likely to change depending on the time of day and current mood. For now, though, let us focus on our feline friends of this world, hundreds of millions of which are currently members of human families across the globe, slinking around the ankles of their two-legged housemates, purring loudly as they wait for breakfast, kneading soft furnishings with a look of such ecstasy that one cannot help but wish to swap roles if only for a minute, gracefully leaping through the air across impossible distances to escape the clumsy child with no boundaries to speak of, casually bopping the nose of the overexcited and intellectually inferior dog who shares the kitchen, somehow opening that cupboard door that leads to the treats, elegantly sauntering through the home with an air of arrogance that makes one wonder who has domesticated whom and, actually, hang on a moment, have we all been stitched up?

In this volume, you will discover that we owe one particular cat a huge debt of gratitude for inspiring one of historys most influential scientists to improve our lives immeasurably. You will learn about a musical instrument that was to be powered by cats. You will learn of a legally dubious business plan involving a steady supply of cats, rats and snakes, all for a very healthy profit. You will learn about supernatural double-tailed Japanese cats. You will learn about the cat who brought a much-needed smile to the face of a young girl hiding from the worst of humankind. You will learn about the Illinois governor who with great panache saved the cat community from intense embarrassment. You will learn about a poem written by one of the greats in memory of a cat who fell into a fishbowl. You will learn about the cat who defecated into a tissue box belonging to a famous novelist a novelist who, at the time, as luck would have it, had a cold.

You will learn all these things, and more, through the time capsule we call the letter humans most precious, enjoyable and endangered form of communication, currently being nudged towards the sorting office in the sky by the many digital, charmless, fugacious alternatives that invade our every waking thought, reducing our relationships to something far less meaningful. Indeed, my hopes for this book are two-fold: to further intensify your love for these magnificent animals, if that is even possible, and to remind you that without letters these stories would likely have died a quick death, never to be retold, and that we owe it to ourselves, and future generations, and all these cats who deserve and, lets face it, demand recognition, to write more letters.

So please do exactly that. Take ten minutes out of your day. Find a piece of paper, rescue your last remaining pen from the cat, and write to someone, if only to let them know that you are thinking of them. Theres a chance, albeit slim, that you may even get a reply.

Shaun Usher

2020

P.S. Please send me a copy.

The Letters

LETTER 01

IS NATURE A GIGANTIC CAT?

Nikola Tesla to Pola Foti

23 July 1939

Born in 1856 in Smiljan, in Croatia, Nikola Tesla was an inventor whose invaluable impact on the modern world is difficult to comprehend. During the course of his eighty-six years he made numerous breakthroughs in the realm of electrical engineering, particularly around his AC induction motor, and by the time of his death, the Father of Electricity had approximately 300 patents to his name. In Washington DC in 1939, aged eighty-three and in failing health, Tesla met Pola Foti, the daughter of the Yugoslav ambassador to the United States, and they bonded over their shared love of cats. Soon afterwards, from his home in New York City, Tesla wrote to his new friend and revealed the reason behind his lifelong fascination with electricity.