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Millions of Cats,
by Wanda Gág, 1928
Once there was a little girl named Wanda. She was the eldest child of an artist named Anton Gág and his wife Lissi. Along with her five younger sisters and her one brother, Wanda grew up in a small town in Minnesota.
All seven of the children were artistically gifted, and all "began to draw as soon as they could hold a pencil." (I'm quoting Rebecca Keirn in a book called Three Women Artists.)
But the children didn't just draw. They also made music, told stories, decorated eggs, loved to write. Let's look in on a typical evening, say in the year 1905. Wanda is 12. The whole family is gathered in the living room, which is unlike any other living room in New Ulm, Minn.—and unlike 99.99 percent of living rooms in the U.S. Among his many artistic activities, Anton paints murals, and he has completely covered the ceiling with cherubs and clouds.
Down below, on the mortal earth (or, more precisely, on the floor of the living room), the whole family is grouped around the piano. Lissi plays, and they all sing. Another evening it might be perfectly quiet in the house, because everyone except the baby is busy drawing. A third evening, one of the children might be reading a story aloud, usually one she had written herself. Poor kids, what else could they do with their evenings? They grew up not only pre-television, but pre-radio.
Though Anton and Lissi probably wouldn't have had a TV set anyway. Being Bohemians, they would have scorned to. Anton in fact was a double bohemian. Bohemian with a capital B because he grew up in that part of the Austro-Hungarian empire called Bohemia, where his father had been a woodcarver. He only came to the U.S. in 1873. Bohemian with a small b, as was Lissi, because he was unconventional, non-bourgeois, what was then called a free spirit. I'm not just thinking of the cherub-covered ceiling and the row of little girls busy making sketches. Anton was determined to make his living from art, whether that was a practical idea or not, and in New Ulm, Minn., at the turn of the century, it was a resoundingly impractical one. As Rebecca Keirn temperately puts it, Anton was "an exceptionally competent easel painter in an area where the market for such work was limited." That's your true bohemian: a starving artist.
But it's one thing to starve alone in a garret, and quite another to have seven hungry little faces looking at you down the table. So Anton found a new art. The average American at the turn of the century may not have cared greatly about easel painting or cherubs, but he would buy a photograph, so Anton and Lissi opened a photographer's studio, and they scraped by. Later, Anton even got an occasional commission for a mural in a courthouse or a church.
But bohemians, lower-case, are often physically frail; artists often die young. When Wanda was 14, her father fell ill, and when she was 15 he died. The last words he spoke were to her, whom he considered the most talented of all his children. She must be the successful artist, he told her, that he himself had never quite managed to be.
Wanda was in ninth grade when her father died. She had a few things to do before she could become a major artist, like finish high school and help her grieving mother raise the younger children. They had almost no money. Anton's yearlong illness had been costly, and health insurance was far in the future, like TV.
Wanda helped a lot—was even a second mother—and her financial contribution came entirely through art. As a high school student, she designed and sold greeting cards. She gave drawing lessons. Best of all, she began to sell both drawings and stories to the children's section of a Minneapolis newspaper. (Poor Minneapolis kids: no TV.) In one two-year period she sold 35 pictures, 14 stories (10 of which she also illustrated), and four poems.
After graduation she briefly lapsed into prudence and spent one non-artistic year teaching school. She was 19. Then she got scholarships: first to an art school in St. Paul and eventually to the Art Students League in New York. She never finished the course. Soon after she got to New York, her mother died, which left it to her to finish raising the younger children. She dropped out of the League, moved those children still at home to New York, and supported them all by doing commercial art. In the variety of artistic schemes to make money that she thought of, she showed herself to be her father's true daughter. She painted lamp shades. She did fashion illustrations. She designed interesting toys. And—my favorite—in 1925 she began syndicating a series of picture puzzles that she called Wanda's Wonderland. She was now 32. She had raised the children, she was enjoying a bohemian life in New York City, she had become financially successful. But she had done no major work yet, nothing to fulfill a deathbed promise.
Then, three years later, the miracle occurred. Wanda published her first book, a picture book for small children. It's called Millions of Cats, and it has stayed in print from that moment to this.
It is a very simple book with a very simple story. An old man and an old woman live in a "nice clean house which had flowers all around it, except where the door was." What perfect phrasing those last five words are—exactly how a child would see it or say it.
But the old couple are lonesome. "‘If only we had a cat,' sighed the very old woman." So the old man sets off to find her one.
What he finds is like the Gág family, only more so. In the famous refrain that runs through the book, he comes on a hill and sees:
Cats here, cats there,
Cats and kittens everywhere,
Hundreds of cats,
Thousands of cats,
Millions and billions and trillions of cats.
He selects one cat to take home. But then he sees another so appealing that he picks that one, too. Then a third, a fourth, and finally he picks the whole several trillion. They all accompany him, and they are like a force of nature. They come to a pond, they all take a drink—and the pond is dry. Now they are hungry. Each cat eats one bite of grass (this is not sound natural history, like Watership Down), and the hills are bare.
The old woman is much startled when the procession arrives: "‘My dear!' she cried, ‘What are you doing? I asked for one little cat, and what do I see?'" Then she speaks the refrain. After that she adds, "We can never feed them all."
The ending of the book is actually quite bloody. The old woman asks the cats (they are talking cats) to select the prettiest one of all, for her to keep. The ensuing brawl is so violent that she and the old man run into the house (which may possibly have cherubs on the ceiling) to avoid the noise. Both of them are gentle and peace-loving.
When it's finally quiet again, and they come out, only one kitten is left; the rest have performed the anatomical impossibility of all eating each other. The old couple is happy with the one kitten left.
The ending doesn't feel bloody, though, and that's because it's obvious to a child from the very first wonderful drawing that these are not flesh-and-blood cats, or people, either. Everything is stylized, symmetrical, incantatory—and almost perfectly timeless. Millions of Cats is one of those rare books that feels on publication day as if it had been part of our literature for a couple of centuries. It was seen as an instant classic in 1928, and it remains as pure a delight today as it was then. To those who know the history of the author's family, there is a little extra pleasure in being aware that there is one touch of collaboration. Wanda wrote all the words, and drew all the pictures. But she didn't do the very pretty hand lettering in which the story is told. That's the work of another of the seven talented Gágs, her younger brother Joseph.
One doesn't repeat a success as nearly perfect as this one. Though like both parents she died early, Wanda had time to produce half a dozen other books. All are worth looking at for their art, and the one called Nothing at All is also worth reading for the story, provided you and the child you are reading to have a tolerance for a slightly mechanical plot structure. But only Millions of Cats is up there in the empyrean, safe among the cherubs and clouds. Anton would have been proud.
