Kathleen Hale, who will be 100 next month, tells Charlotte Cory how the famous cat stopped her being the artist she might have been – and how the stories reflect her personal and sexual life
I HAVE only to hear the words “Orlando, the Marmalade Cat” to feel
that warm glow of being five years old again, curled up in a corner and lost
completely in a picture book. Orlando was the gloriously plump ginger cat with
eyes like “electric green gooseberries” who had marvellous adventures
that always ended happily. Whether he was running a farm, camping or going to
the circus, his busy world was idyllic. Mayhem and grown-ups were comfortably
under control and he enjoyed a perfect home life with an adoring tabby wife,
called Grace, and their three little kittens, Pansy, Mabel and the naughty Tinkle.
What made the Orlando books so wonderful was that there were plenty of them, and they were all stuffed with bright colourful drawings that had a strange painterly texture (which I now know to come from having been hand-lithographed). These rich pictures were accompanied by a few lines of amusing, rather quirky text. They were uncompromisingly old-fashioned and made no concessions to reality, but that was part of their charm. Because the books were printed in a sumptuous large format, it was easy for a small child to creep behind their covers and escape into the bigger, brighter world they contained.
I recently read A Slender Reputation, the alarmingly honest autobiography of Orlando’s creator, Kathleen Hale, reissued to celebrate her 100th birthday next month. It was astonishing to discover from this beautifully written sexually explicit book what an interesting and turbulent life Hale had led, so at odds with the cosy domestic world enjoyed by her famous cat. At the same time, it was amazing to discover how bizarrely biographical the Orlando books are. Orlando, the Marmalade Cat Buys a Farm, for instance, draws directly on her experiences as a land-girl during the First World War, while Orlando’s Trip Abroad derives much of its lively detail from the difficult time she spent with a shell-shocked lover in Etaples in France, in the early Twenties. Many of the people depicted are recognisable caricatures of friends, while her own house and pets also featured frequently.
Hale now lives in a nursing home in Bristol. I thought it might be fun to take her a big bunch of orange flowers that would sprawl in my arms as if I were carrying a cat. Having arrived in Bristol and combed the flower shops for the correct shade of marmalade, it was disconcerting when the first thing she said to me as I took out my notebook was: “I hate Orlando.”
Hale’s only real sign of frailty is that she wears a hearing-aid. I was convinced I needed one, too. I’m a fan, I told her, producing my battered childhood copy for her to sign. Hale eyed her creation critically. “I never liked him,” she said. “He’s so self-satisfied.”
After an awkward silence, I explained that since Orlando’s life drew so closely on her own, I had been wondering if I might not write this interview – with her permission – in the form of an Orlando story: Orlando, the Marmalade Cat, Celebrates his Centenary. I had visions of Rufus, my wire-haired fox terrier, who travels everywhere with me and who was waiting in the car, being cast as the reporter come to interview his hero. I could just see him taking notes and producing his battered puppyhood copy for Orlando to sign.
Hale dismissed the idea as twee. “Orlando cannot be allowed to age. Age implies death and Orlando is immortal. Anyway, he’s only 60.” The first Orlando book was published in 1938. “You can say though, she conceded, “that Orlando is proud of Kathleen Hale, and congratulates her on her centenary.”
I asked if she was still writing and drawing. It seemed a shame there weren’t any more Orlando books. Hale eyed me as critically as she had the cat. Apart from a touch of arthritis in her hands that has stopped her drawing, she reckons there are too many Orlando books already. “I remember thinking after eight, this is getting vulgar. One ought to be famous for one or two books, like The Wind in the Willows or Alice in Wonderland. There are now 18.”
She sighed wearily and declared that she had not looked at the books in years “because they are so awful”. When I opened my copy at random – at a wonderful picture of Orlando and Grace singing karaoke to the cat in the moon – Hale admitted grudgingly that “the lithography was rather good”.
One of the remarkable things about the Orlando books was that Hale not only wrote and drew them, she also took charge of the printing, producing each of the separate plates herself (128 for each book) to achieve the desired gradations of colour. I have done enough printmaking to know what a remarkable feat this was.
Hale shook her head at my enthusiasm. Orlando had ruined her life. “He took me over. I was besotted with him. For over 10 years, I had no social life, I did nothing else at all.
Her childhood was miserable. Her father died when she was five and she and her brother and sister were farmed out to relatives in the North as her mother struggled to make a living in Manchester selling pianos. To detect in Orlando’s happy family an idealised projection of what her own upbringing might have been is not far-fetched. She admits to looking for substitute father figures all her life, and it cannot be unconnected that Orlando is the perfect father of a boy and two girl kittens. Hale won a scholarship to study art at Reading University but first she attended the Manchester School of Art and was there at the same time as L S Lowry. She never met him, but their mutual tutor had a profound effect when he remarked to another student – who maliciously reported it back to Hale – that he reckoned she would never be more than a “decorative artist”. This prophecy haunted her to such an extent that it became self-fulfilling. She refers to it often in her autobiography and brought it up in our conversation, blaming Orlando for absorbing so much of her time and energy that she never had the chance to realise her greater artistic aspirations.
In 1917, her studies at Reading complete, Hale went to live in wartime London, hoping to make a life as an artist. She was terrified at first as her mother had warned her about the “perils of the White Slave Traffic” – a terror that was to manifest itself rather comically in the kidnapping incident in Orlando’s Silver Wedding. To avoid danger, she booked herself into a YWCA hostel, where she met Meum Stuart, Jacob Epstein’s favourite model. Through Stuart, Hale attended Epstein’s tea-parties in Cheyne Walk and soon developed a wide circle of friends among the writers and artists who frequented the arts clubs of the day.
She recounts this period of her life in fascinating detail in A Slender Reputation – recapturing it also in her many lively drawings of Orlando dancing and having a good time. Money was often scarce. She had a short spell working for Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell (painting background washes for them to decorate), and she spent 16 months as Augustus John’s secretary, once letting him seduce her “out of curiosity”. Today, two of his drawings hang on her wall in the nursing home.
A yearning for children prompted her to forsake the excitements of Bohemian London in 1926 and marry Dr Douglas McClean, a medical research doctor with whom she “fell in friendship”. She had fallen in love with his widower father, until, prompted by McClean senior (who did not feel he could marry a girl so much younger), he asked her: Will you live with me and be my love?” The marriage lasted until her husband’s death in 1967 and, although the friendship deepened and they had two adored sons, it was never a grand passion. She describes the horror of their first evening of married bliss: “After dinner, to my amazement, Douglas reclined in his Minty armchair, surrounded by newspapers and journals, and began to read the New Statesman.
“I found the domestic silence claustrophobic and grew restless. Finally, I asked him, ‘what are we going to do this evening?’ Douglas fondly replied that I was like a fox-terrier deprived of the excitement of hunting for rabbits. ‘I’m very happy reading,’ he said, ‘and I like to know you’re there beside me’.”
Hale is at pains to describe her husband as the model for the wise and steady Orlando (she likens herself to the wayward Tinkle). Although McClean inspired the book Orlando Becomes a Doctor, he suffered from bouts of very un-Orlando-like manic depression.
Having achieved the bourgeois domesticity the Orlando books so revel in (complete with nanny, au pairs and a beautiful big house in Hertfordshire), Hale felt stifled. A psychoanalyst prescribed an affair to cure her boredom and creative block so she had a fling with a painter, a notorious philanderer. (“Censorious friends dubbed him the ‘Prick-Ridden Professor’.”) Later, she caricatured him as the Katnapper in the book in which Orlando and Grace celebrate their silver wedding.
The cure worked. Hale began painting again. Unable to find suitable books for her sons, she started making up stories and plunged her energies into writing and illustrating them. The first two Orlando books appeared in 1938 and 1939. The nostalgic world they depicted proved popular in those troubled times. When a German friend of the McCleans was hanged for his part in the plot against Hitler, his wife fled with their family to Silesia, writing to Hale that Orlando had comforted them on their journey.
Demand for Orlando books kept Hale hard at work long after her sons had grown up and left home. A great-grandmother, she has watched her cat enjoy more than his allotted share of nine lives, as publishers have reprinted and remarketed the Orlando books for new generations to enjoy.
It is no wonder that her feelings towards the marmalade cat are ambivalent. She enjoys the celebrity he has brought her (including an OBE in 1976), but regrets the way her fame is dependent on an incorrigibly smug cat she dreamt up more than 60 years ago, who has dogged her ever since. She will forever be known as Orlando’s creator rather than as the artist she might have become, but for him.
A Slender Reputation will attract readers because
of its association with Orlando, yet this fascinating, forthright autobiography
is a masterpiece in its own right. The title comes from a friend’s remark
that Hale had hung her “slender reputation on the broad shoulders of a
eunuch cat”. A Slender Reputation may now bring her a reputation
that is anything but slender. Meanwhile, those of us whose childhoods were brightened
by Orlando’s colourful adventures will join him next month in raising
a glass of hot haddock milk, to congratulate Kathleen Hale on her centenary.
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