37. Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by TS Eliot

Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats was the book of poems that provided the libretto for the musical Cats. It is sometimes credited with saving Faber and Faber from extinction.

Possum, of course, was Eliot himself. The name was bestowed on him by the one he called, more sonorously, il miglior fabbro (‘the better craftsman’): Ezra Pound. It derived from a game the two poets played, in which they would talk in ‘Uncle Remus’ slang, Brer Possum being one of the Remus characters. Pound’s letters to Eliot are usually written in this manner, even when discussing Sophocles and Sextus Propertius. A typical example of 16 April 1938 begins ‘Waaal Possum, my fine ole Marse Supial…’ and ends with a pseudo-Remusian poem, which, interestingly, mentions cats and possums in the same breath but pre-dates Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) by one year:

Sez the Maltese dawg to the Siam cat
‘Whaaar’z ole Parson Possum at?’
Sez the Siam cat to the Maltese dawg
‘Dahr he sets lak a bump-onna-log.’

‘Possum’ was therefore a name that Eliot could quite happily apply to himself - since he put it into his title - and it seems to have been widely understood in literary circles. Pound often wrote to others mentioning the name, for example in a letter to Ronald Duncan of 10 January 1939 on the demise of Eliot’s literary magazine The Criterion, in which he says:

Who killed Cock Possum?
Who bitched his blossom?

‘I,’ said young Duncan,
Sodden and drunken, ‘I bit The Criterion.’

‘I,’ said ole Wyndham,
‘I bloody well skinned ‘um.’

‘I,’ said Jeff Faber,
‘I, the worse neighbour,
I tightened the puss-strings.’

Consulted:
Paige, DD, ed.: The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-1941 (1971)


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