Cats -- TS Eliot and the road to the musical. Episode 15 (Cats 1 of 8)

TS Eliot had demons.  He wrote about his demons.  He said that writing poems were like demons escaping from his body, and that when he finished writing them he would experience a “moment of exhaustion, of appeasement, of absolution, and of something very near annihilation, which is in itself indescribable.”

He wrote a poem that would become the archetypical anthem of a newly-emerging modernist movement in literature – it was dark, and brooding and anxious, and grim, and disturbing and unsettling.  That poem would be called, cheerily enough, the wasteland.

And in the middle of all that, he would write a delightful children’s book about cats, that would be picked up by Andrew Lloyd Webber and transformed into one of the biggest Broadway smash hits of all time.

What’s up with TS Eliot?  What shaped this guy and made him tick.  What were his demons…and how does Cats fit into all of that?  

Transcript

Episode 1: TS Eliot

               TS Eliot had demons.  He wrote about his demons.  He said that writing poems were like demons escaping from his body, and that when he finished writing them he would experience a “moment of exhaustion, of appeasement, of absolution, and of something very near annihilation, which is in itself indescribable.”

               He wrote a poem that would become the archetypical anthem of a newly-emerging modernist movement in literature – it was dark, and brooding and anxious, and grim, and disturbing and unsettling.  That poem would be called, cheerily enough, the wasteland.

               And in the middle of all that, he would write a delightful children’s book about cats, that would be picked up by Andrew Lloyd Webber and transformed into one of the biggest Broadway smash hits of all time.

               What’s up with TS Eliot?  What shaped this guy and made him tick.  What were his demons…and how does Cats fit into all of that?  

[Canned introduction]

               If you haven’t heard of him, TS Eliot was kind of a big deal.  He was a writer at a time just before TV and the internet, when entertainment mostly meant reading and theater with the occasional silent movie thrown in.  How and why he became so famous is what we are interested in here.

               The next two episodes are a chronology of his major life events and the poems that he wrote.  This will help us understand how the original poems were written, what made them catch on, and place the production of Cats in context.  There will be much written and said about TS Eliot and the Broadway musical based on his book, and a lot of it….isn’t really accurate.  To figure out why, we’ll walk through the life of TS Eliot.

The TS Eliot story starts in mid-1600s, when the very first Eliot takes the boat from England to the US.  His name is Andrew Eliot and he’s from East Coker.  Two centuries later, that’s the same city TS Eliot would be buried in.  England is a huge part of TS Eliot.  But for now we’re talking about Andrew, who in 1690 had a job as the clerk of Beverly, MA, an adjoining village to a place called Salem, MA that would have a very eventful 1692.  And Andrew would be a part of it.  

There is research we’ll get to in our upcoming episode on TS Eliot and the occult – yes, the author of a beloved children’s book that inspired the Broadway musical was involved in the occult – and that research will show that Andrew Eliot did 3 things.  First, he accused a widow of witchcraft.  Second, he served as a juror on one of the witch trials.  Third, he along with a bunch of other citizens and jurors from Salem signed a document recanting their involvement in the whole mess that involved joining a mass mob purge that killed scores of their very innocent neighbors.  Shout out to you if you’ve ever played John Proctor in your high school production of Crucible.

There are 2 biographies that I’ll be relying on and they both mention this briefly.  Russell Elliot Murphy, a Prof of English and Dept Chair at Arkansas, Little Rock, wrote a biographical introduction to a book spanning  614 pages, that includes commentary on every work of Eliot’s.  His brief comment is that Andrew was “reported” to have been a Salem witch juror.  The second biographer is Peter Ackroyd.  He’s a Graduate of Cambridge, Fellow at Yale, and recipient of numerous literary awards.  He’s written an extensive biography on Eliot.  Acroyd takes this quote from an 1860 Genealogical Dictionary: “He was of the juries, says tradi.[tion] Wh.[ich] Tried the witches, and had great mental affliction on that acc. In the residue of life.”  Acroyd then describes him as an “unhappy man.” In all fairness, neither Murphy or Acroyd are not as fascinated as I am by the Salem Witch trial connection, but I can add a little oompf to what they both kind of tiptoe around.  Andrew was definitely a juror, he was definitely an accuser, and he was not alone in recanting his involvement in all of it.  

Anyway, for now I just want to flag that the Eliot family starts in and around Boston, and in and around the time of the Salem Witch trials.  All that is 200 years and 7 to 8 generations before TS is born.

Fast forward 150 years or so and in the middle-to-late 1800s his William Eliot, who will be TS Eliot’s grandfather, is one of the key early figures in the Unitarian church, and he treks out of Boston to go to St. Louis to spread the word about the new church.  He does that successfully, founds a church, and also founds Washington University in St. Louis.  William was a Harvard graduate in Boston, and he also founded a number of art and civic institutions around St. Louis.  He was a man of letters and a man of the cloth.

William’s son Henry, TS Eliot’s father, was not a man of letters.  In fact, and almost in snarky defiance of his father William, he made a job running a brick making business.  To put a fine point on how different Henry was from his dad William, he did publish a memoir and titled it “the reminiscences of a simpleton.”  But, he was literate enough and interested enough to write a book, which the vast majority of everyone doesn’t do, and – important to our purposes here – he sketched cats.

Henry married Charlotte Stearns, who was educated and had literary instincts.  She wrote, and wrote poetry, and buckled against the fact that women in what was still a frontier town didn’t have a lot of intellectual opportunities.  She never really got to develop as a writer the way that she wanted, but she never stopped thinking about literature.

Henry and Charlotte would have 8 children, the youngest of which they named Thomas Stearns, and who we know as TS Eliot.  He had 4 older sisters and 1 brother and was born with a congenital double hernia that made him wear a truss for life.  That only adds up to 6; the other two children did not survive, which is tragic but not uncommon just at the turn of 1900 and in a place like St. Louis.  He had a nurse, from Glouster, MA, who was a Catholic.  Very, very broadly speaking and for the benefit of those who really tune out religious lineages, the Catholics are one of the more old-school, main-stream, tradition-driven, hell-is-real kinds of Christians.  Basically, if you think you or someone you care about is possessed by a demon, you call a Catholic priest for the exorcism.  Unitarians – especially universalists – view a lot of the literal discussions of demons as metaphorical for evil.  So there’s a historical question about how TS Eliot, raised in the very Unitarian household, ended up being so old-school religiously conservative later, and one theory is that his nurse was a touch point.

He's got some academic aptitude, which his Mom wants to nurture, and his grandpa founded Washington University, so TS shows up at the Smith Academy, which is a prep school for the university.  Two items of note there.  First, the curriculum.  Listen to this, and now I’m quoting Ackroyd: “he studied Greek, Latin, French, German, Ancient History and ENglissh – which was then a proper discipline, taught as rhetoric.  In his final year at Smith, for example, Elito was studying Hill’s Principles of Rhetoric, Shakespeare’s Othello, the Golden Treasury, Milton, Macaulay, Addison, Burke’s Conciliation with America, Books II and IV of Virgil’s Aenid, Ovid, Cicero, Homer’s Iliad, Racine’s Andromaque  and Horace, Hugo’s Les Miserables, Moliere’s Le Misanthrope , La Fontaine’s Fables as well as physics and chemistry.  It does not go very deep, but it goes extraordinarily wide…”

Look, Peter Ackroyd, whom I recently discovered was not related to famous blues brother Dan Ackroyd (Dan also has a brother named Peter, but it’s a different Peter Acroyd), that would kill the vast majority of my undergrads.  I would adjust your standards a little bit.  That’s one doggone impressive junior high to high school education.  My State of Utah public education reading list did not include Virigl, Ovid, Cicero, and Homer.  So: Point number one, his education at Smith is pretty darn rigorous.

Second, he founded a student “newsletter.”  He called it the “Fireside” and it promised “fiction, gossip, theater, jokes and all interesting.”  Included are adventure stories, rhyming verse, and puns.  This endeavor showed an interest in humor and theater, plus an instinct to put words into print for others.

Age of 14, he read the poetry of Omar Kayaam and has an intellectual conversion – he’s hit some serious poetry, he loved it, and it’s changing his world.  Exact words were “he compared the experience to that of conversion, since the world itself seemed renewed and painted with bright, delicious, and painful colors.”  On that theme of pain he also read Edgar Allen Poe.  He would later describe his immersion in poetry as a “demonic possession.”  We’ll get to that concept of demon possession, also in our forthcoming episode on TS Eliot and the occult, but this is his first reference to poetry being like demon possession.  Ackroyd notes that his early writing is comic and ghoulish.

Graduates and could go straight to Harvard but Eliot takes a year at Milton.  If Smith is the best prep school in St. Louis Milton is the best prep school in Boston, and maybe the US.  That’s 1905 and the next year, 1906 if my math is right, he does go to Harvard.  The then-President is one of his distant relatives named Charles William Eliot, and the President’s big idea is an “open curriculum” – instead of everyone taking the same stuff students have more freedom to pick and choose.  It’s like the first time a university decided to have majors.  Before that, everyone read the same classics.  They kind of still do that at Yale.

Three things are striking about his time at Harvard.  First, he likes humor and he’s kind of a joker.  On and off roomie is a guy named Howard Morris, who was himself not all that serious, and reported that Eliot liked comic strips and goofing off.  Second, he read poems by LaForge, which were another intellectual turning point, and they dwelt on detail and consciousness about daily life. Those are things that show up in Cats.  Third, and this was to me unexpected and curious, Eliot dislikes the open curriculum.  He likes standards and discipline … which is out of step with being a buffoon, but it will play a major role in his later life.  As the opening teased, Cats is a minor bit of comic relief against a body of work that is both serious and kind of depressing, and that ratio starts to show up as a Harvard undergrad.

Graduates from Harvard and goes to France, where he meets a guy named Jean Verdenal who is a medical student.  They really hit it off, and when Eliot finally publishes his first really significant poem he dedicates it to Verdenal.  For those who think Eliot is homosexual, this is a significant relationship.  

Carole Seymour-Jones wrote a book called "Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, First Wife of T. S. Eliot, and the Long-Suppressed Truth About Her Influence on His Genius."  They haven’t yet met in our narrative, but Vivienne will end up being Eliot’s first wife in a couple of years.  They have a toxic relationship with some fraught sexual elements, and history has kind of written off Vivienne as a crazy woman who dragged TS Eliot down.

Seymour-Jones is convinced that Vivienne impacted Eliot more than is known and was a driving force behind his success, and is also very sure that Eliot is homosexual or at least has urges in that direction, and that Verdenal is proof of that.

Another author who is very sure that Eliot had homosexual feelings for Verdenal is James E. Miller.  Miller is the Helen A. Regenstein Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Chicago, and his book is titled Personal demons, a re-examination of The Wasteland.  Huh – there’s that word demon again.  Anyway, Seymour-Jones is interested in exploring the impact that Viviene had on Eliot and his writing; Miller is interested in using biographical information to get a better interpretation of the Wasteland.  

It’s not clear to me that either really succeeded, but both thought that homosexuality or repressed homosexuality was central to their projects, and both point to Verdenal as the leading candidate for romantic interest.

So, this is a year that Eliot will romanticize in his own life, Verdenal is clearly a part of it, and the tragic end is that Verdenal will die in 1915 while serving as a medic in World War 1.  The two never see each other after that summer.  Some of Verdenal’s letters to Eliot still exist, and, according to a New Yorker author named Louis Menand, they’re not love letters.  They clearly have some fondness, no direct evidence that it’s sexual in nature.

There is also some heterosexuality at this point.  Eliot is in France studying French poetry and taking a hand at writing some.  As is typical of men of his age, he thought about women, but it was nervous and guilt-racking.  Definitely frowned on in his childhood home … he describes himself as a virgin just about right up until his marriage.  Anyway, he spends a year in Paris where he writes a poem called The Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock, which will become his first really successful poem.  But it is not yet published and won’t be for years.  It is “demotic” – that word again!  Oh wait.  That is not demonic.  Demotic and that means that part of the text is written in an old Eyptian script.  Darn it.  No demons in the poetry – yet.  But there is heterosexual tension and, uh, despair.

James Miller, our English Professor, notes that there is a lot of sexual anxiety about women in this poem.  Another biographer named Raffel says the poem is about “a man sexual enough to admit desire, but insufficiently sexual to do anything about it.”  TS Eliot is at this point describing himself as virginal, and he’s not happy about it.

Returns to Harvard by 1911, now he’s a doctoral student.  On this second stint at Harvard he performs in theater; this is the only formal training he’ll have until much later in his career when he writes successfully for Broadway.  That’s right – he will have his own broadway successes, but they have nothing to do with Cats, although he will eventually write the poetry that inspires that production.

He also meets a British professor named Bertrand Russell in 1914.  I don’t know if they talked about sex, but if Eliot is having weird anxious thoughts about sex Russell is, in polite parlance, a known philanderer, and has no moral qualms about sleeping with any woman he finds attractive regardless of anyone’s marital status.

Eliot also spends some time writing a thing called King Bolo.  I will quote Ackroyd here to give a flavor of this work: “These are comic verses which are consistently pornographic in content, with allusions to buggery, penises, sphincters and other less delicate matters.  [what’s less delicate than that?]  He seems to have derive a certain satisfaction from the description of sexual excess.”  This seems to be a more profane version of his Fireside publication from Smith, and for 15 years he circulates verses and versions to friends either saying he is an editor or that he’s sharing a schoolboy story. 

In 1914 he’s done with his work at Harvard but hasn’t published his dissertation yet, and he leaves for England and gets to Oxford.  In September of 1914 he’s introduced to Ezra Pound, and older guy, also an American, also a poet, and more established than Eliot.  They hit it off, here’s what Ackroyd says: “Here were two young Americans, discerning in each other the lineaments of a country which they had left behind, both of them more alike than they perhaps cared to admit.  They were both mid-Westerners; they had both educated themselves on their own”

I kinda stopped reading there.  Educated on his own?  Well, yes, if you discount the Smith academy where he read Ovid, Virigl, the Aeneid, Omar Kayaam and Victor Hugo, the Milton academy which is prep for Harvard, 4 years at Harvard, a year abroad in France to study French poetry, 4 more years of doctoral work at Harvard, and then time at Oxford, he was totally self-educated.  I don’t get that part of it, but beyond the curious self-educated thing there is no doubt Pound and Eliot hit it off.  Pound extroverted and extravagant; Eliot is reserved and sardonic, but they are fast friends.  And the biographers, Raffel in particular, note that Pound has a big influence on Eliot in more ways than just promoting his career – they are besties, and Pound is the much stronger personality, and Pound’s advice has an outsized influence on Eliot.

Pound is also very much taken with Eliot and promotes him quite a bit.  Pounds’ promotion works and Eliot has all his best existing poems published by 1915, including Prufrock.  Ezra Pound has a really big role in launching the career of TS Eliot.

Eliot doesn’t like Oxford, he wanted to hang out in the London Library and reading room, so he took off for there, which is about 60 miles away.  The reading went well, and Harvard gave him a second year on the fellowship, but his sex life is still barren.  I’ll read from Ackroyd again: “he was invaded by the same sexuality which had affected him in Paris, he was still unable to conquer that anxious reserve which had consigned him to a virginal existence.”

In this condition, by the summer of 1915 he meets Vivien Haigh-Wood; she’s English, respectable, bright, vivacious and outgoing.  They have barely met when they get married on June 26, 1915, and they don’t tell either set of parents about the wedding.  It’s not a shotgun wedding because nobody is pregnant, but that’s a little weird, right?  Whatever the reason they get married – and there are still debates about that -- with or without the in-laws, the marriage was a disaster for them both, although it would stretch almost two decades from 1915 to 1933.

Vivien might be respectable, bright, vivacious and outgoing, but she’s also very troubled.  Eliot may not known about the trouble until after they were married, and even if he knew some stuff he didn’t know the extent of them.  She is sick a lot, much of it involves “nerves” and what in the day is called “moral insanity,” she has menstrual irregularity, and will suffer a number of severe psychological collapses.

So in the summer of 1915 she gets sick and takes off on vacation to try to address it; the couple is accompanied by known philanderer and English scholar Bertrand Russell.  Vivien flirts with him.  They even live together in the same apartment for a while.

Eliot is now mostly done with school and has to make money so he tries teaching but hates it, mostly because of the difficulties involved in classroom management, and will eventually work as a banker for Lloyd’s of London.  He’s supposed to go back to Harvard in 1916 but cancels the trip at the last minute, sends his dissertation instead, and Harvard accepts it and gives him the PhD.

In 1917, Bertrand Russell and Vivien have sex.  It did not go well.  In a letter to another lover Russell called it “hellish and loathsome.”  That split the intimacy between Russell and the couple; Ackroyd says there’s a dispute about whether Eliot knew about the fling and sort of concludes that he probably did.  Others have gone so far as to say that Eliot pushed Viven to have sex with Russell.  Whatever the start, the end was the same, and it was a 1-off mistake.  Eliot and Vivien stayed in touch with Russell but weren’t super-close after the bad sexual encounter.

By 1917 there’s a so-called “Bloomsbury group” that involves Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolfe, and her husband.  Woolfe has her own publishing house called the Hogarth Press. And at that time, Eliot is working at Lloyd’s, editor of a prestigious literary magazine called the Little Review, and has published Prufrock, and is part of the Bloomsbury group.

During 1917, Vivien is now in an asylum, and Eliot is in something like a spa but its also for physical and mental recover, and you’d go there for what we’d now call mental health reasons and maybe self care.  While there, Eliot writes his most famous poem called the Wasteland.  Although it wouldn’t be known for some time, Ezra Pound had a heavy role in editing it.  But it would sit for 5 years before being published in 1922.  

This poem changes everything.  For Eliot and for the field of literature generally.  Here is Murphy’s take: “Virtually overnight The Wasteland became a focal point and rallying cry for the culture wars of its time and brought Eliot a celebrity and iconic status that he would never live down and, within a short time, would be adamantly refusing to live up to.”  

The poem is not accessible.  It follows no narrative or train of thought or style, makes tons of references to great works like Ovid, Dante, and Chaucer.  It starts with Latin and Ancient Greek which are untranslated, and come from Petronicus.  The titles for all of its 5 sections are an allusion to another great work, which you’d really have to be a bibliophile to even get.  It’s got Buddhism and Hinduism and a tarot card reading.  The poem is dedicated to Ezra Pound.

It's hard to pin down a specific meaning to the poem, and Eliot was all in on rejecting the idea that a brilliant author with a clear purpose was behind a work of art.  He thought that not even the authors really knew where their inspiration came from and firmly believed that meanings were created by readers as much as authors.  But, there’s no doubt that the poem is not uplifting, dwelling on themes of the meaninglessness of life, sexual dissatisfaction, the themes are disillusionment and despair.  For its summary, Wikipedia says “The Waste Land can be read as an expression of post-war disillusionment and anxieties about Western culture” and the author cited is Pericles Lewis, who wrote a book on modernism.  James Miller, the author of the Personal Demons book, acknowledges that the common interpretation is that Wasteland is a scathing indictment of the modern world and argues that Eliot didn’t really think that.  He might be right, but that’s a useful academic point, and it’s still a pretty depressing poem.

Just to give a 30 second summary of the cultural moment, World War 1 has just passed.  All war has horrible human suffering and loss, but this was the war that brought modern industrial carnage on a scale not seen before.  Thousands of years of royal rule all came crashing to an end; the previously unquestioned Catholic religion was now just one of many contenders for western faith.  Whether fascism or democracy was the path forward was an open question.  There is a totally brilliant summary of all this in the Revolutions podcast in an episode called “the end of the world” and I’ll link it in the show notes.  It gave me a whole new appreciation for what a massive change World War 1 was in human history.  It didn’t change the winners and losers, like your typical war seeks to do, it changed the entire way that geopolitics was structured.  All the political structures we take for granted now were forged in the aftermath of World War 1.

And the poet who captured all of that most powerfully was TS Eliot, and he did it in his poem the wasteland.

By the way, HP Lovecraft – the famous horror author – wrote a parody of the poem.  I guess if you have nightmares like HP Lovecraft all that death and destruction and despair strikes you as a light giggle.  We’ll get back to Lovecraft in our episode that traces the demonology behind TS Eliot.

So now, professionally, Eliot is thriving.  He’s working as a literary critic, an editor, and a poet, he’s become the central figure in a literary movement called “modernism,” even moreso than James Joyce, and a type of literary criticism called “new criticism”.  This matters a lot in the field of literature.  To digress a bit, you might just like to read some, and that’s cool.  But if you are really into literature you probably majored in English, might be part of a serious book club, subscribe to a few serious literary magazines, probably get McSweeney’s mailed to your house as the only physical mail you get that isn’t a bill, and have strong opinions about Gravity’s Rainbow.  This all spans the spectrum from the general reading public, to those who are English students and professors, to those who are the most prominent English professors, to the very most elite of the elite, and on top of all that, in 1922, was TS Eliot.  Dude was a big deal.

Burton Raffel I have referenced a few times now; he is an Eliot biographer with solid credentials.  He has MA from Ohio State and a JD from Yale, translator of Beowolf and Don Quixote and Dante’s Divine Comedy.  He makes the point that at a very young age Eliot was hugely successful which made the things that happened later in his life influential, especially after the Wasteland.  By this time in his life he has massive influence, says Raffel, and he’s such a big deal that you don’t have to agree with him to see how significant a figure he is.  Kind of like, say, Andrew Lloyd Webber.  Without all the celebrity, I doubt that his book about Cats would ever have been published.

[Conclusion]

That’s where we’ll end for now – right about the middle of TS Eliot’s life.  He’s written one of the most important poems of the century, is finally a full-time author, he’s in the middle of a disastrous marriage.  Oh, and the demons.  Yeah, he’s got demons.  When are they gonna show up?

But Eliot still has more to do – there’s another world war to fight.  There’s a theatrical career to launch.  And he has to write some children’s poems about Cats.  We’ll get to how all that happened in the next episode of THM.

References

Ackroyd, P. (1988).  TS Eliot.  London, England: Cardina.

Burton, R. (1982).  TS Eliot.  New York, NY: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co.

Cats: The book of the musical.  New York, NY: Harcourt Brace & Company: A Harvest book.

Chandler, D. (2016).  We are all one Grisabella: Prostitution, Theology, and the cult of Cats in Japan.  Studies in Musical Theater, 10(3), 297-309.  doi: 10.1386/smt.10.3.297_1

Childs, D. J. (1997).  TS Eliot and the Occultation of Knowledge and Experience.  Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 39(4), 357-374.  https://www.jstor.org/stable/40755132

De Loach, Z. (2024, June 8).  ‘Cats’ the musical is my Roman Empire.  TCA Regional News, Chicago.  Tribune Content Agency.

Donaldson, K. (2019, December 18).  Cats story explained: What the musical is actually about.  Screenrant.com.

Eliot, T. S. (1955).  The Three Voices of Poetry.  Cambridge, MA: The National Book League.

Juzwiak, R. (2019, Dec 16).  Is the stage cast of Cats embarrassed?  An Inquiry.  https://www.jezebel.com/is-the-stage-cast-of-cats-embarrassed-an-inquiry-1840420702

Kaufman, S. L. (2019, Sept 20).  Love it or hate it, “Cats” the musical has way more than nine lives: Powerfully sung and flashy, the touring version of the 2016 Broadway revival is at the Kennedy Center through Oct. 6.

Kunze, P. C. (2017).  Herding Cats, or the possibilities of unproduction studies.  The Velvet Light Trap, 80 18-31.  Doi: 10:7560/VLT8003

Lowerre, K. (2004).  Fallen Woman Redeemed: Eliot, Victorianism, and opera in Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Cats.  Journal of Musicological Research, 23, 289-341.  DOI:10.1080/01411890490884472

Menand, L. (2002, Sept 22).  The Women Come and Go.  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/09/30/the-women-come-and-go

Miller, J. E. Jr. (1978).  TS Eliot’s personal waste land: Exorcism of the Demons.  University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Murphy, R. E. (2007).  Critical companion to T. S. Eliot: A literary reference to his life and work.  New York, NY: Facts on File Inc.

Roach, M. K. (2002).  The Salem Witch Trials: A day-by-day chronicle of a community under siege.  New York, NY: Cooper Square Press.

Romano, A. (2019, Nov 20).  Taylor Swift’s “Beautiful Ghosts” might be the best part of the Cats movie. Vox.  https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/11/20/20967261/beautiful-ghosts-taylor-swift-lyrics-cats-memory-meaning

Sternfeld, J. (2006.  The megamusical.  Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Tolentino, J. (2019, December 16).  The improbable insanity of “Cats.”  New Yorker: Culture Desk.  https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-improbable-insanity-of-cats

Vulture Staff (2019, Dec 9).  Let us gather to discussion Taylor Swift and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s T.S. Eliot-Inspired Cats song.  www.vulture.com