Gallico Cat

THOMASINA (288 pp.)--Paul Gallico--Doubleday ($3.95).

A cat is a cat is a cat

Neither human nor divine--

Like the plant of Miss Gertrude Stein

Which was, as everybody knows,

Neither more nor less than that--A rose.

Paul Gallico has written a highly sentimental novel about a cat--and there is no one quite so sentimental as a 200-lb. ex-sportswriter (a type who can weep real tears over a carload of redundant wrestlers). Gallico's cat Thomasina should go down in literary history as an outstanding example of the pathetic fallacy, i.e., the attribution of human emotions to nonhuman objects. There are whole libraries of books that follow the fallacy like blind bird dogs--books about elephants, Teddy bears, toads, and even, in one notorious case (E. B. White's Stuart Little), mice. In the present case, the Gallico Cat ("Who Thought She Was God," according to the book's subtitle) mixes ailurophilia and religiosity in equal parts.

Ginger-colored Thomasina is the pet of a vet named Andrew MacDhui in a little Scottish town called Inveranoch. Thomasina is actually part-narrator of this book. She is a guid Scots puss and purrs with a burr; before Author Gallico is through with the unfortunate beast she does everything but carry a Harry Lauder cane and sing I Love a Lassie.

Gallico's plot is intricate, skillful, absurd. The vet, a big red-bearded man, really hates other people's pets because his wife has died. His little daughter dotes on pets but specially on Thomasina. Coldly the vet orders aged pets chloroformed, but away in the glens there lives a mad witch who has a silver "Bell of Mercy'' hung on a great oak tree. When small boys ring the bell and bring frogs with broken legs to her door she restores them to health. Comes the day when the hardhearted vet orders Thomasina to be chloroformed. She is buried to the skirl of bagpipes, but the vet's brokenhearted daughter won't speak to him. How the witch magically restores Thomasina to life, unveils the heart of gold under the cruel vet's tartan, and marries the man provides a fascinating and horrible example of how not to write about animals.

Perhaps poets like T. S. Eliot (whose cat Macavity was a being of singular depravity) or those who are as sensible as Dr. Johnson (he had a cat called Hodge and he fed it oysters) or as mad as Edward Lear (who had a cat called Foss which resembled an owl) should be permitted to write about cats. A cartoonist like the late great Herriman, whose Krazy Kat spoke a wild, weird kind of New York Yiddish in Coconino County, Ariz., also belongs in this noble company. Not so Thomasina. Cats may be useful animals to have around any house, but not around a publishing house. Doubleday & Co. should have reminded Author Gallico that

No cat ever spent a wet night on its owners' graves

When small boys drown, it neither barks nor saves

A cat is neither foolish nor ghoulish.

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