The Cat and the Devil | James Joyce | Little Island Books 2021

James Joyce, with illustrations by Lelis

The Cat and the Devil

Little Island, 2021 (illustrations 2012)
Hardback, 32 pages
ISBN: 9781912417919

Joyce’s grandson Stephen remembered that as a child he knew ‘Nonno’ was a famous writer whowrote complex and difficult books. Even so his Nonno found time, when Stevie was little, to sit with him and tell him stories in a language any boy or girl could understand. Many of Joyce’s friends recollected how Stevie crawled onto his grandfather’s lap and asked persistent questions which Joyce answered patiently in a Dublin drawl, offering increasingly fantastic replies.

Some of these ended up in correspondence. In August 1936, when Stevie was four, Joyce sent him a toy cat with sweets inside, smuggled under the noses of his parents. That inside joke, and a shared love of cats, led to The Cat and the Devil coming in a letter Joyce posted from Beaugency a few days after.

Based on a Beaugency folktale, The Cat and the Devil tells how a mayor makes a bargain with the
devil to have a much-needed bridge built overnight. The price is that whoever first steps across it
belongs to the devil—and the crafty mayor makes sure it’s a cat who crosses the bridge. Joyce added
humorous touches, such as depicting Beaugency’s mayor as Alfred Byrne, a famous Dublin politician
who was quite a character, and making jokes about the devil reading newspapers to find wicked
ideas and speaking French badly with a Dublin accent. Versions of the folktale, and countless
numbers of actual bridges attributed to the devil’s craftsmanship, exist in almost every European
country and as far away as the Caribbean, USA, and Argentina. Many of these folk tales and legends
are found in folklore anthologies and picture books in many languages.

But Joyce’s playful way with words make his version especially delightful, so that many countries
have published it. The latest edition, by Little Island, has wonderful illustrations by the Brazilian
illustrator Lelis (the book uses the images from an earlier publication in Portuguese from Brazil). Like
many other interpretations, the devil shares Joyce’s features.

A few weeks after Stevie received The Cat and the Devil, Joyce was in Copenhagen and sent his
grandson another letter with a story about cats. This eventually found its way into another children’s
picture book attributed to James Joyce, The Cats of Copenhagen—but that’s a story for another day.

                                                                                                                    Pat Ryan