Tomi Ungerer always made illustrations, cartoons and sketches that looked the way I feel and felt the way I looked.
Now, don’t cancel me for being a cat-hater. I’m not, as a rule! I had a few feline pets (and a bobcat in my backyard, though that doesn’t count) in my early life, and I adore sweet little kittens. However, I became allergic to the extreme. It might have been a psychosomatic response to two romantic relationships in succession with cat owners that went sour. As well as another, whose otherwise cute fluffy feline routinely bit my toe at, shall we say, inopportune times. Of course, my transference was on the cats.
When I found this book illustrated by Ungerer a decade after it was originally published in 1963, before I knew Tomi (who could sometimes be a pussycat; other times a lion), I realized he was a kindred spirit. And William Cole, who I never met, but admire his wit , was saying in words what I was quietly thinking.
“Don’t look for objectivity here,” Cole begins the book, “there isn’t any.”
Since there was no Google back then to look up “ailurophobia,” I read further down the first illuminating page to find Cole’s definition: “dictionarily speaking, it is a fear of cats,” he wrote. “But words have a way of gradually sliding their meanings into something else, and ailurophobia is now accepted as meaning a strong dislike of the animals.” Quiet cat haters are everywhere, he claims. “It was heartwarming to find that what I thought would be a lonely crusade is truly a great popular cause.” This book became catnip for me after that.
I guess I was one of those long-repressed cat-challenged anti-cat people. I later learned in therapy where it all came from. But that’s an issue I’ll only tell medical professionals. For now, I’ll just share a collection of perfect drawings by Ungerer that are so nuanced in their gestures that fanatic cat haters or those who are occasionally feline-annoyed can equally relate with a belly laugh, throaty chuckle or hairball twitch.
