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Note on Cat Woman

George MacBeth wrote a Cat Woman piece.  I think it was a rewriting of a Ponge prose poem.  The MacBeth item inspired me to write a one-act play called Cat Woman, though it had little in common with George’s work, or with anything by Francis Ponge, some of whose writing I tracked down at the time.  I turned my play into a short story, then into this.  The woman is one of my sociopaths, like the lifer in The Moral Maze.  My Cat Woman gets an old man out of the archway hovel she rents him so that she can sell it and help a daughter she never sees.  But in her hate she makes her caged cats pay.  Sociopaths are not like you and me but they’re good at disguise.  This piece is tightly controlled but barren.  There’s not much drama, no exceptional language, just snappy jerks from scene to scene.  What makes her cruel?  What elicits from this monster a sudden act of kindness?  Why send money to the prostitute daughter when she never sees her?  There are no answers.  Would she herself know?  I’m tempted to say, ‘Of course she would, no one ever acts unconsciously or without purpose when being cruel, selfish, mendacious, sarcastic and so on.’

Alan Marshfield

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