Letters of Note: Cats (2020)
A collection of letters I found less interesting than I’d hoped.
I don’t have much to say about this – I picked it up on a whim and a few of the letters were fun, but it didn’t especially grab me.
Quotes and highlights
LETTER 06
YOU KILLED MY CAT
Guy Davenport to the drivers of Lexington:
Date unknownBorn in South Carolina in 1927, Guy Davenport was many things: a writer of fiction; an illustrator, sometimes of his own stories; a painter; a published poet; an award-winning translator of ancient Greek texts; a critic; and a Professor of English. He also, most importantly, loved his cat, and when his beloved feline friend was run over on the streets of Lexington, Kentucky, Davenport reacted by writing a furious letter addressed to the drivers of his city. He then sent that letter to the popular _Lexington Herald_ newspaper and paid for it to be printed in its pages.
TO THE DRIVERS OF LEXINGTON:
All of you, without exception, gape-mouthed teenagers who squawl your tires around the clock with no policeman to say you nay, ministers of God who take time off from sliding around in your Mercedes-Benzes to set me an example of charity, blue-haired ladies who never in your life have seen a stop sign, politicians too terrified of losing a vote to do anything about traffic which defines anarchy and illustrates idiocy, speeders, light-jumpers, drunks, dope-addicts, and the entire moronic, arrogant, shiftless lot of you: you have killed some 900 of yourselves this year in Kentucky, and maimed another 2000 for life, and this afternoon you killed my cat – not, I’m certain, on purpose, for with yourselves to kill, and children, and bigger game than cats, I do not suppose you could focus your feeble wits enough to do anything as concentrated as a deliberate act. You killed my cat out of the same sloth and God-forsaken laziness and pride by which you use the city streets for a race track and a parade ground to show off all that you have of significance on this earth, your expensive, poisonous, noisy, bullying, fast, lethal automobiles. I have taken this ad to express openly my utter contempt for the lot of you, and for the politicians who pretend to govern our city and who still let you have your selfish and degraded pleasure behind the wheelSincerely,
Guy Davenport
And this paragraph from Letter 22, from Raymond Chandler to Charles Morton:
She goes with us wherever we go journeying, remembers all the places she has been to before and is usually quite at home anywhere. One or two places have got her – I don’t know why. She just wouldn’t settle down in them. After a while we know enough to take the hint. Chances are there was an axe murder there once and we’re much better somewhere else. The guy might come back.