JAMES JOYCE’S CAT
Wednesday July 1, 2015The brilliance of Joyce’s rendition of Leopold Bloom’s pet cat early in Ulysses: Mkgnao! Prr. Scratch my head. Prr.; with the increasing forcefulness as the milk appears: Mrkgnao!… Mrkrgnao!; struck me with great pleasure again recently. I’d been dropping in on the forsaken cat of some holidaying friends – looked after by street neighbours and visitors such as me – and also re-reading this greatest of novels in conjunction with an excellent set of audio lectures by a top Irish-American Joyce scholar. Hamish the old ginger tom, up against my ankle, was done justice to.
I’d also been taking my ancient green Bodley Head edition of Ulysses into my regular coffee shop, where its dilapidation removed any possibility of pretentiousness. Once, in a full Sydney bus, I watched a gent in an executive pinstripe settle into one of the two jump seats that face into the body of the vehicle, and at once open ostentatiously before the peak-hour multitude a new, loudly-labelled copy of the book with a ratty, upsniffing face that said: I don’t imagine you peons would even know how famous this book is.
Anyway, I became aware one morning this past week that I’d mislaid it. I checked everywhere else but, oh damn, almost certainly it was at the coffee shop. The senior waiter there, an amiable young woman from Cork in Ireland living on some land in North Katoomba, where with her partner she breeds pigs – when I asked her was it for a business she frowned back at me most askance: ‘No. For eating!’ – now recalled finding a left book that she assumed belonged to the café’s reading section.
– Did it have a cover falling off? she said.
– Yes!
– Oh gosh, I think I took it home with some other old books for repairs. And you know, I’ve always wanted to read Ulysses myself, such a famous book.
I was so overjoyed the thing hadn’t been lost that I, there and then, promised to present her with her very own copy of it.
– But what if it turns out I don’t have it? she said.
– I’ll need a new copy anyway!
So I began a search of local bookshops, new and second-hand, and had soon collected a nice vintage 1946 Random House edition from America – very small print – and a new giant version made half as big again as the original by added-on scholar’s footnotes. It then struck me that probably neither of these would be suitable for a first-time reader like my codex-saviour from Cork. Therefore I ordered for her a brand new paperback from Oxford University Press, accessible and with a modern photo-cover.
She was due back for work in the café on Saturday, so on Friday at home, there beside my fast-extending shelf of Joyces, I was looking forward very much to meeting her.
A phone call came through from my friends who owned the ginger cat and had finally got home.
– John, we want to thank you for enhancing Hamish’s education!
– Huh?
– We found him lazing in the sun beside an opened old Bodley Head copy of Ulysses. He liked so much being read to!
