Customer Reviews

Kipling's Cat: A Memoir of My Father

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This warm and intriguing biography of Jeffries Wyman (1901-1995) begins with 5 gallon jars of blue horseshoe crab blood clinking in the rumble seat of his Model A roadster. It's a fitting introduction to a man whose eccentricities were so linked to his Yankee, blueblood ancestry and whose lifelong interest in the oxygenation of blood gave rise to the important field of allosteric regulation.

From this part biography/ part memoir written by his daughter, we learn that Jeffries Wyman was a most unconventional parent. When his first wife died in 1943, Wyman left his two children in the care of relatives and disappeared into the world of secret research for the U.S. Navy. From then on, he brought up his children mostly with letters written from far away places, sporadic visits, cruising on the coast of Maine and physically challenging hikes abroad.

Despite this odd upbringing, both his children came to appreciate such an interesting and talented father. His son, when asked what he thought of his father's parenting, surprised his sister by saying, "I think he was perfect! He taught me everything I care about in life." The author seems to have had a more rebellious relationship with her father-- at one point pushing her father off the dock, and at another point pulling him into the bathtub; to which displays of pique, he responded with surprising good humor and respect for her high spirits.

The author eagerly sought her father's approval as he went on to make quirky choices in stepmothers and as she developed her own career as a travel and editorial page writer for the Boston Globe. For the most part she had to settle for receiving her father's praise second hand from her brother since her father shied away from direct compliments to his children. My guess is that writing this biography served the author by bringing her closer to the father whose letters and complex scientific mind made him such a tantalizing and elusive figure in her life.

The author compares her father with "The Cat that Walked by Himself" in Rudyard Kipling's "Just So Stories" to describe his propensity for sudden departures and his well-developed self reliance. He became bored with academic life at Harvard and left mid-career to become a science attaché in Paris. He left the State Department job to work for the UNESCO in Egypt. Approaching sixty he considered turning to painting full time. Then a door opened in England leading to an invitation to work with a team in Rome. While in Rome, he collaborated with French scientists Monod and Changeux on a seminal paper in allosteric theory. At the age of 89 he and Stanley J. Gill published the textbook, still widely used in graduate courses, "Binding and Linkage: Functional Chemistry of Biological Macromolecules." Along the way, he took side trips to places like Japan where he met the emperor and to Alaska's Brooks Range where he was taken in by Nunamiut Eskimo families.

The author wonders whether such a peripatetic scientific career could flourish as well today. My guess is that such an extraordinary thinker would flourish in any age despite his unconventional choices. The author describes how Wyman did much of his scientific work in his head with legal pads and pencils applying thermodynamics and mathematics to data collected from laboratories and leaving it to laboratory scientists to test how well his formulas predicted allosteric binding and linkage in macromolecules.

In this age when so many people couple education narrowly with preparing and advancing a career, it is consoling to read how Wyman's wide ranging intellectual interests, uncoupled from ambition, opened so many doors for him and led to such an extraordinary life.

I grew up on the plains of Texas where most folks were newcomers and some were just passing through. My mother and grandmother taught me that it was rude to ask too many questions about a person's background or family. There might be things that it was just as well that we didn't know. (The days of the horse thief on the family tree were not to far away.) A woman (or a man) was judged on her (or his) own merits.

The world of Anne Cabot Wyman, self-described blue-blood and Boston Brahmin, is as foreign and fascinating to this still-Texan as Margaret Mead's work on the Trobriand Islanders. I read this memoir of her father--scientist, diplomat, artist, adventurer--as if it were an anthropological study.

For Wyman, names such as Cabot, Forbes, and Lowell are familiar, not for their appearance in history books or society columns, but as relatives and friends. Descriptions of individuals are often accompanied by a brief genealogy, not only parents, but grandparents, sometimes more.

Still, families are families. Dad reads aloud to the two children every night. Mom and Dad practice small economies. They share bath water before donning their dinner clothes and Mom does lots of the sewing. But there is always a cook, a nanny and a maid.

Nevertheless, no family is immune from tragedy; the Wymans were no exception. In 1943, the mother succumbed to cancer and the father to grief. He farmed the children out with various relatives as he would continue to do until they were grown. (Wyman was about 13 when her mother died.) Jefferies Wyman took off. His daughter likens him to a cat that Rudyard Kipling said "walked by himself"; hence the title of the book.

Wyman has applied her skills as a professional journalist and produced a story that is close and personal without being over emotional or self-pitying. She chronicles with apparent love and a clear eye the life of an exceptional man. Jefferies Wyman was a Harvard scientist; he served the Army and then the government throughout the world before becoming an accomplished artist. She incorporates her own story and that of her younger brother, describing both the isolation of their youth and the coming together of the family in later years.

I enjoyed the book on many levels. I know much more now about Boston blue-bloods; I've met a fascinating character; and I have been a witness to the workings of a family. There is a bonus: an abundance of photographs and a color appendix of some fascinating painting by Jefferies Wyman.

by Patricia Nordyke Pando
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

More than the story of a man, "Kipling's Cat" delivers wonderful behind-the-curtains insights into the lives of Boston's "Brahmins" in a time a period when names like Cabot and Lowell and Forbes had a resounding ring, when newspapers still had "society" pages and sent photographers to debutante cotillions. In these pages we find vivid pictures of life as it once was in the Brahmin enclaves of Chestnut Hill, a glimpse of the Cabot family's summer colony in Maine, and even more rare, a walk around the very private Naushon Island. Naushon is the largest of the Elizabeth Islands that string along the south coast of Massachusetts, less than a mile from Woods Hole in the town of Falmouth - yet it is is so closely held and guarded by its owners, the Forbes family, that few ever set foot there. Kipling's Cat takes us to visit its beaches and its deep woods, and invites us to walk through its houses. All this is wrapped within a fine story of a a true Brahmin eccentric and told in detail with affectionate yet no-nonsense prose.