About three years ago, I read the novel Darconville's Cat by Alexander Theroux.
It is the tale of a young Professor who discovers the ecstasy and agony
of romantic love when he falls in love with a student and is brutally jilted.
It is a 700 page, autobiographical exercise in revenge. Theroux threatened
his departing lover with a literary expose -- a novel about their romance.
She said "Do your worst." And he did.
I have rarely laughed so much. Absolutely side-splitting. Beyond that, it is one of
the most wingful descriptions of a man falling in love that I have ever read
and a gut wrenching description of his later heartache, seething anger, revenge
-plotting and remorse. Theroux used the girl's real name in the book.
(Does this sound familiar yet?)
While reading the novel, and after finishing, I kept wondering about the
title. (I hadn't listened to or thought about Cat Stevens since the 70s.)
The name of the main character was Alec Darconville. He had a cat.
But the cat was utterly irrelevant. What was relevant were names.
Throughout the book, Theroux constructed names that concealed meanings.
They would mean something if transliterated, or would conceal a clever literary
reference. It was just obvious that "Darconville" had to mean something.
But what?
Happily, I had made the wise decision to purchase a rare edition. The manuscript
had specified that a solid black page be inserted into the novel at the exact
point where Isabel walks out of Alec's life in the arms of another man. Of course,
the cheapskate publishers didn't do it. Theroux was furious and demanded a fix.
I found one of the very rare 1- 1/2 edition copies with the jet black page *and*
a portrait of the main character, painted by Theroux, on the dust jacket.
"How odd that he would write an autobiographical book" I wondered, "but paint
a portrait of someone else."
As I was sitting at my computer one afternoon, looking at the album cover
of Cat Steven's "New Masters" album, I suddenly realized that the portrait on
Darconville's Cat was like a shadowy mirror image. Then it hit me:
Darconville. D'Arbanville. Cat. Cat Stevens. An homage ?
Is Alexander Theroux's masterpiece novel an homage to Cat Stevens?
Theroux was born in 1939 and lived in England from about 1968 to 1970.
His first novel, _Three Wogs_, published in 1971, celebrates his years in England.
Darconville's Cat was published in 1981. It earned Theroux teaching positions
at Harvard and then Yale. He is also a poet, essayist, author of several
books for children and a painter. Just another all around genius.
He is a devout Catholic who, inspired by Thomas Merton, spent some years
living in a Trappist monastary before deciding to leave in order to write full time.
Inspired by Kandinsky's "On The Spiritual in Art" and from his own work as a painter,
he wrote three volumes of essays exploring the meanings of colors. Alexander
Theroux abruptly abandoned his Professorship at Yale around 1990 following
political disputes with university officials.
Meanwhile, Alexander's brother, Paul Theroux, is an author of travelogues who has
written about encountering Cat Stevens somewhere in the middle east after
his conversion to Islam.
Here's the cover art:
Attachments:
!!