Marcel Purroust

Eight years ago, in the redwood-paneled Edwardian drawing room that is the home of The Marcel Proust Support Group, a cat named Kate gave birth to a litter of five. For several days Kate tolerated the stream of human traffic coming to play with the kittens, but one day when I was out she decided to move the brood to a more isolated nest in the attic. I came home just as she was dragging the third baby out through the kitchen and up the stairs, leaving two squalling siblings huddled together in their box. In forty-five minutes she was back for a fourth, leaving the runt of the litter, a scrawny, half-moustachioed piebald, quaking and sqeaking, all by himself.

I sat down next to the box and gently stroked his back while I told him not to worry because Mama was coming back for him, and in the meanwhile I was going to baby-sit. He kept on shaking and vocalizing, but he also started to purr. He was suffering deeply from his infancy abandonment trauma, and needed to talk about it; I let him express himself, throwing in the occasional understanding "uh-huh" while he bonded irrevocably with my scent. I was present at both his birth and the birth of his neurosis.

When the kittens were old enough to venture out of the attic, the little piebald began to follow me around, particularly after his seventh week, when Kate had a serious accident and the kittens were prematurely weaned, occasioning additional neurosis. Clearly he was mine, and I named him Marc, after Marc Anthony, the man for whom Cleopatra died. (There is a personal reference here: Cleopatra, a Greek, after all, came from the land across the water from my ancestral home; I once saw a photograph of a bust of her, sculpted in her lifetime by a Greek sculptor. She did not look like Elizabeth Taylor - she looked like me.)

Marc was five human years old when we began reading Proust, no longer scrawny, but still verbose and neurotic. He never grew very big, but what he lacks in size he made up for in intelligence. He understands English perfectly, and even speaks a bit, and he is an excellent judge of character.

Late one night, after a meeting of the Proust Support Group, I sat down at my desk to sift through the day's accumulation of loose objects. On the top was a photo of Marc that someone had left in the kitchen earlier that day. Right below it, and surrounding the snapshot, was a xeroxed portrait of Proust. I gasped.

It was 3AM, no one was up, and I had just discovered that Marc looks exactly like Marcel, had he made a serious faux pas while shaving. So I laughed out loud all by myself, and put the evidence on the mantlepiece. The next day, I showed the two pictures to everyone in the house, who also gasped, and then laughed. From that day on, Marc became known as Marcel Purroust.

It was a joke at first, those superficial similarities in appearance, stature, verbosity and neurosis shared by Proust and our cat; but as the months went on, we began to notice other things. If, for example, any item of Proustiana should be laying about, Marcel the cat would be laying on top of it, even when an inviting pile of warm, clean, black laundry should be heaped up mere feet away. There is his taste in food to be considered: a fastidious feline, Marc will eat nothing that has touched the floor. Indifferent to most comestibles, he is rabidly fond of chicken (gay slang for young boys) and crepes. And then there is the issue of the cat's vocabulary; science has identified something like 19 distinct cat words, but Marc has hundreds at his disposal, which he employs with a certain profligacy. Most amazing, perhaps, was the period of time when Dean Gustafson's gorgeous portrait of Proust (reproduced on the cover of our premiere issue) first arrived at our house. I had not expected to get it so soon, and the place of honor over the fireplace was still covered with endless impedimentia. So we propped the painting up on a convenient object where it could be admired, and in seconds the cat was on it, preeening, posing beside the face of his namesake, and for weeks he would sit nowhere else at all.

The explanation for this behavior was perfectly clear to my housemate John, the person who instigated the Marcel Proust Support Group to begin with; among his other talents, he is a powerful psychic. According to John, the spirit of Proust found this nest of admirers and wanted to bask in the adulation; seeking a body through which to manifest, Proust found that the easist one to enter was the cat. And so our cat channels Proust, and talks and talks and talks.