"He admired their independence, their serenity, and the magnificent completeness of their indifference to human opinion"

He named his cats Beelzebub. And Zoroaster. And Apollinaris. And Sour Mash. And Buffalo Bill. And Soapy Sal. Names borrowed from scripture, ancient philosophy, frontier legend, and whiskey — because Mark Twain saw no reason a cat should have an ordinary name when a magnificent one was available.

At certain points in his life, as many as nineteen cats lived in his home simultaneously. He did not consider this excessive. He considered it well-populated. "I simply can't resist a cat," he wrote. "Particularly a purring one."

Friends recalled him stopping mid-sentence — mid-thought, mid-argument — when a cat entered the room. He would scoop the animal into his lap and resume the conversation without explanation or apology. The cat's arrival was simply the more important event.

This was Mark Twain: the man who dismantled American hypocrisy with surgical precision, who wrote sentences that still cut cleanly after 150 years, who had no patience for foolishness or pretension — and who would interrupt anything for a cat.

One cat, above all the others, had his whole heart. Bambino had come into the household belonging to Twain's daughter Clara, but these things have a way of rearranging themselves. He was large and intensely black, with thick velvet fur and a faint white patch on his chest, and he had the particular quality of certain cats — a kind of gravity, a settled presence — that makes a room feel more complete when they're in it.

He perched on Twain's manuscripts. He curled at his feet while Twain wrote. The greatest satirist in American literature did his work with a purring cat for company, and there is no evidence he found this arrangement anything other than ideal. Then, one day in 1905, Bambino slipped out of the house on East 21st Street and did not come back.

Twain was devastated in the specific, slightly embarrassed way that people are devastated by things they know are not supposed to matter as much as they do. He placed an advertisement in the New York American.

This was Mark Twain placing a lost-cat notice. It could not be ordinary. Lost — A large and intensely black cat, with thick, velvety fur and a faint white mark on his breast. Difficult to find in the dark. He offered a reward. He asked for Bambino's safe return. And underneath the gentle self-aware humor — difficult to find in the dark — was the unmistakable note of a man who genuinely wanted his cat back. New York responded. 

People arrived at his door carrying black cats. Some came sincerely, hoping to reunite the animal with his family and collect a reward. Others came for the far more valuable prize of spending five minutes in the presence of Mark Twain. He received all of them. He inspected each cat carefully, thanked each visitor warmly, and gently sent them home when the animal wasn't his.

None were. Day after day the parade continued — a procession of black cats, each one arriving with hope and departing without ceremony. Twain greeted them all. His hope rose each time. It wasn't Bambino each time. Then, with the perfect timing of a creature entirely unburdened by other people's anxieties, Bambino strolled back through the front door.

He offered no explanation. He required none. He settled into his usual spot and resumed his usual life, and Twain observed that this was exactly what you should expect from a cat — that the advertisement had been unnecessary, the reward irrelevant, the parade of substitute black cats entirely beside the point. Bambino had returned when it suited him. Not a moment sooner, not a moment later. Twain loved this about cats more than almost anything.

He wrote about them throughout his life — not with the biting wit he reserved for politicians and hypocrites, but with something softer and more direct. Cats, he seemed to feel, were exempt from satire. They had committed no frauds. They claimed to be nothing other than what they were. He admired their independence, their serenity, and the magnificent completeness of their indifference to human opinion.

He believed that how a person treated animals — creatures with no power, no voice, no ability to advance or damage a reputation — revealed their character more honestly than any polished social performance. 

The cats, in this sense, were a test. Twain passed it with remarkable consistency. Behind the public figure who could devastate a congressman in a single sentence was a man who interrupted conversations to pick up cats and who wrote genuinely heartbroken lost-pet notices with elegant final lines.

These were not separate things. They were the same thing — a person who paid close attention to the world and its inhabitants, who noticed what others overlooked, who believed that kindness toward the powerless was not a sentiment but a standard.

Mark Twain died in April 1910. He left behind Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer and essays that still draw blood and aphorisms that still circulate daily in languages he never spoke. He also left the names Beelzebub and Zoroaster and Sour Mash, which still make people smile more than a century later.

He left the image of America's greatest satirist doing his work with a black cat draped across his manuscript. And he left one lost-pet notice — a few lines in a New York newspaper in 1905 — that still circulates because it contains, in miniature, everything worth knowing about him: A man of tremendous intelligence and devastating wit, who loved a cat named Bambino with complete sincerity, and was not embarrassed by either.

Difficult to find in the dark. The sharpest minds are often accompanied by the softest hearts. Twain proved it, quietly, every time a cat walked into the room and he stopped everything. 

 -Kelly Oliver Book's Post