Cat Dreams

The first time I read On Cats, I was in a sentimental mood. I had just returned home after seven months in Germany, where I’d left behind two cats belonging to my host family, two small piebalds to whom I’d grown rather attached and whom I was missing terribly. This was, however, the first of Doris Lessing’s books that I’d read, so I did not know how patently unsentimental it was sure to be.

It may be difficult to find a writer more allergic to sentimentality; perhaps this is why so many people are surprised to learn that Lessing wrote about cats. I was unprepared for the first chapter, a nightmare montage of violent feline deaths, portrayed with disquieting frankness. On the farm where Lessing grew up in southern Rhodesia, in the mid-1920s, domesticated cats are under constant threat from snakes, predatory birds, and wildcats, who, Lessing writes, “lured peaceful domestic pussies off to dangerous lives in the bush for which, we were