The pint-sized critics who made ‘Cats’ purr

When TS Eliot was struggling to write, he sought help from his harshest readers: children. By Tristram Fane Saunders

You would’ve had to be a bold editor to turn down a new poem by TS Eliot, particularly in the late Thirties when he was at the height of his fame. By then, Eliot had had a Broadway hit with Murder in the Cathedral and his Collected Poems had cemented his critical status – but that didn’t stop Donald Morley, editor of The Family News, from rejecting several of his cat verses before finally accepting, in 1938, a poem about cows. Donald was 10 years old.

When Eliot began writing cat poems for the children of his friends (Faber and Faber cofounder Frank Morley’s son among them) he couldn’t have imagined the extraordinary afterlife that awaited them. Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) not only became a bestseller for his publishing house but also – thanks to the royalties from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Eighties stage musical – would go on to save the struggling firm from ruin. (According to an internal memo, Cats made them £950,000 in the year to May 1986.) A £70 million film of the musical, out this month, proves there’s life in the old possum yet.

Yet, as the latest volume of

Eliot’s letters reveals, he found the process of composing the poems far from easy. “I am more and more doubtful of my ability to write a successful book of this kind,” he fretted in a note to his colleague Geoffrey Faber. “The various Poems (how many should there be?) might not be good enough.”

The 14 poems of Practical Cats were written between 1936 and 1938, a trying period in the author’s life. He was carefully avoiding his unstable, estranged wife Vivienne, who was confined to an asylum in 1938. Juggling his duties at F&F and as editor of the Criterion magazine, Eliot was overworked, exhausted and often unwell. Bedridden for 10 days with bronchial influenza in February 1936, he complained in a letter to Geoffrey Faber: “What with tearing my tubes out with coughing at night and sleeping all day I feel thoroughly stupified.” From his sickbed, he found the time to write a poem about goats (now lost, alas). He was also worried about money, writing shortly before the book’s publication that “my financial future seems to depend on CATS”. His teeth were yet another source of trouble.

“Poor old Possum has to wait/ For something called a Dental Plate,” he wrote in a rhyming letter to his goddaughter Alison Tandy.

The more upbeat letters Eliot sent his young godchildren – particularly Alison, and Geoffrey’s son Tom – were not just pleasantries. He was testing his work on the most discerning readers he knew. “I think the Poem might be improved a good deal in places, but I send it to you meanwhile and of course should be grateful for any criticism of it,” he wrote earnestly to Tom, then aged about 10, in 1936, enclosing a copy of “The Rum Tum Tugger”, about a particularly unmannerly cat.

He sent the same poem to

Alison, later offering a kind of apology: “The last Cat I wrote about, was such a Boastful Brutal Beastly Bloody Bad Pirate, that you may think I am a kittenthrope, or Hater of Cats: but such is not the Case. On the contrary.”

Eliot was determined not “to write children’s poems which will appeal primarily to sentimental adults. That kind of verse seems to me definitely unpleasant.” He took his young readers’ criticism seriously. Knowing this, in 1938 Alison’s father sent a mock-solemn reader’s report offering the thoughts of her brother Richard on

‘Dear Uncle Tomithy,’ wrote Donald, ‘I fail to see how Pollicle DOGS has to do with CATS’