BOOKreMARKS: DEWEY Rises Above Other Animal Memoirs

The day I purchased two stacks of animal-related books from the library sales cellar, I threw in Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World at the last minute. I’d tried to borrow it from my Chicago library branch years ago when it was first published, but someone else always got to it before me. After buying it, I wondered why I did when I could easily have borrowed it in the Bluegrass. After all, it was only a sweet little tale about a rescued cat’s life in a library. Like so many similar memoirs, it would be touching at first read, but it wouldn’t linger in my mind. It wasn’t a keeper.

How wrong I was—on so many counts.

I have to confess upfront that I missed all the media fanfare about Dewey back in the ’90s. So every page was new to me. That said, I was hooked by the heft author Vicki Myron gave the book, for she told not only Dewey’s story but also that of her town and her family. Readers come away enriched with insights about: living in a small town; the metamorphosis from family-owned farms to corporate farming; the effects of joblessness on rural communities and libraries; city and library politics; and, of course, the influence animals exert over humans. I got so much more than I bargained for—plus it’s not dripping with saccharine language and it’s not full of typos as are so many books of this genre.

“Sometimes a cat is more than an animal…”

Above all the insights, though, Dewey remains the star of the book. He was certainly much more than a cat. He was also a library promoter, Web traffic manager, storytime consultant, family counselor, workforce mediator, and affection magnet. His intelligence, his comic antics, and his empathy are lovingly illuminated. In fact, a film is in the works and Myron has penned two additional books featuring the golden feline.

Add Dewey to your summer reading list. It’s a fast read that you won’t soon forget. But be warned: You might be struck with the unusual desire to visit Spencer, Iowa.

[Photos of Dewey from his Web site.]

A Dewey Sidenote: Twisted Thinking
As testament to the secrets that small-town residents can harbor, no one ever discovered who threw baby Dewey down the library book-drop chute that frigid evening in 1988. But curiously, once Dewey later met with stardom and acquired a fan base, numerous people stepped forward to claim credit for abandoning him!

A Convergence of Literature, Memory, and Caregiving

I’m not sure I’d know who literary critic John Bayley was were he not the widower of Iris Murdoch. But since I’m currently reading The Bell, which Murdoch wrote around the time she married Bayley, I thought it would be informative to also read his take on their relationship.

I’d long ago started reading Bayley’s first memoir about his life with Murdoch, Elegy for Iris. I don’t think I finished it. In fact, I probably didn’t get far into it at all because, as I recall, I was disappointed that it was more about him than her.

Well, what was I thinking? It was HIS memoir, after all. And it would have been foolhardy to market the book without pushing the Murdoch connection.

Last month I thought I’d give him another try—especially in light of the fact that I felt I now had a tenuous connection to Bayley: caregiving. How did it affect him? Change him?

I was about 100 or so pages into Iris and Her Friends: A Memoir of Memory and Desire (note: the “friends” are not what you might expect)—each page turn requiring some cheerleading on my part to accomplish—when I decided to finish the book simply as an exercise in learning about someone/something I’m not really interested in. And then I reached this sentence on page 129:

“Most memoirs and autobiography have a ‘clever little me’ feel about them somewhere.”

I laughed because Bayley had admitted to one of the very reasons I was finding his memoirs tiresome. Yet by saying as much, he managed to break down the barrier between his story and his reader (me). He finally strikes me as genuine and straightforward, and I’ll likely enjoy the rest of his tale. I’m tempted to dust off Elegy for Iris next and give it another go.

I laughed also because I caught a slight reflection in that sentence of my own narrowmindedness and expectations of the book. The window into someone else’s history always casts new light onto our own lives and our understanding of the world. We just have to embrace what comes our way.

Mind wide open…

[Art: Tom Phillips’ portrait of Iris Murdoch for the National Portrait Gallery; cover for John Bayley’s recommended reading compilation, Hand Luggage: A Personal Anthology.]