An A–Z of Exceptional Dogs. Mikita Brottman

I have not a penny left!” Nero was stolen and returned three times, once managing heroically to escape and make his way home under his own steam. Later in the same letter, however, we discover why the dog thieves had such an easy time of it. Mrs. Carlyle complains that she might have to start keeping Nero on a chain when they leave the house (“and that is so sad a Life for the poor dog”), an observation that suggests he was seldom leashed. While there was far less traffic at that time than there is today, and while horse-drawn vehicles rarely reached the speed of automobiles, there were surely plenty of opportunities for dogs to get into trouble, quite apart from being snatched up by kidnappers. Leashes may be a drag, but city dogs aren’t safe without them—in any century.

      Barrett Browning never mentions any of her dreams, but since Flush slept in her bed (against doctor’s orders), he no doubt played an active role in her dream life. Grisby appears in my dreams all the time, though not always in his usual form (and in dreams, as in life, he has to be taken out to answer the call of nature). Once I dreamed there were two Grisbys, identical twins who sat under my chair like little Cerberuses. In another dream, a larger dog followed him around everywhere. When I asked this dog’s owner what his breed was, she replied, “He’s a shadowboxer.” This nocturnal doubling and shape-shifting seem unsurprising; as Freud himself remarks, in our dreams, “we are not in the least surprised when a dog quotes a line of poetry,” though when we wake, we can’t help trying to make sense of these strange transfigurations.

      Most of my Grisby dreams, in fact, are nightmares—the expression, I assume, of all my repressed anxieties. They’re always the same, and they return me to a primitive, prelinguistic level of distress—the kind of primal pain experienced by the child taken from its mother, or by the mother who loses her child. In my nightmares, Grisby is missing. I’m devastated, torn between going in search of him and getting a new dog right away, to cushion the pain. Sometimes I do one, sometimes the other, but whenever I get a new dog, it’s always another male French bulldog, and I name him Grisby, too. Time passes. I grow to love my new Grisby. The old Grisby is forgotten. Then comes the moment of horror: All of a sudden, I realize the original Grisby’s still out there somewhere, all alone, lost, trying to get back to me. How could I have abandoned him? I’ll wake in a sweat, and it always takes me a moment to realize that Grisby is right there in bed with me—the original Grisby, whimpering in his sleep. Does he dream of losing me? Has he moved on to a new Mikita, leaving me lost, dogless, alone?

      Flush, too, moves on. By the time the Brownings have settled in Florence, he’s grown accustomed to his new master, Robert, successfully making the transition from lapdog to family dog—something Grisby has never been able to do. Though he’s lived with David all his life, Grisby is, categorically, my pet. “Your French bulldog,” according to the author of How to Raise and Train a French Bulldog, “will bond with one member of the family,” a line that David often repeats in a slightly affronted tone.

      In the wider culture, this exclusivity is largely considered unwholesome; I’ve heard Grisby called a “mommy’s boy,” and when I wear a long skirt, he sometimes likes to hide under it. It’s far healthier, according to popular opinion, for a dog to be part of the family. Family dogs are regarded as genial and good-natured, keeping guard over hearth and home. Free from pampering and protection, they romp with the kids each morning, nap in the sun all afternoon, then fetch Dad’s slippers when he gets home from work. Unsurprisingly, family dogs appear most often in children’s books, in which they love everyone unstintingly, demonstrating their loyalty by dragging old folks from burning buildings and saving kids from floods. Dogs like Lassie and Old Yeller spend their lives teaching families wonderful, life-enhancing lessons, and then, when they’re no longer needed, go gently to the grave.

      Unlike the snippy, jealous lapdog, the family dog loves everyone, regardless of age. In J. M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan, Nana, a kind and docile black-and-white Newfoundland, keeps a close eye on the three Darling children, whose parents can’t afford a real nanny. When the children are flying away, Nana howls to alert their parents, but her warnings are ignored, leaving Mr. Darling so remorseful that he sleeps in the kennel himself, until their safe return. Nana, usually played by an actor in a dog suit, was based on Barrie’s own dog Luath, also a black-and-white Newfoundland, though, unlike Nana, Luath was a male. The author claimed he wrote Peter Pan “with that great dog waiting for me to stop, not complaining, for he knew it was thus we made our living.” Still, when Luath discovered he’d been given a sex change in the play, wrote Barrie, he couldn’t help expressing his feeling with “a look.”

      Other family dogs care for the elderly. In John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga, the dog Balthasar, a “friendly and cynical mongrel,” develops a close relationship with Old Jolyon, the family patriarch. Originally one of a litter of three puppies, all of which looked so wrinkled and old they were named after the three wise men, Balthasar is part Russian poodle and part fox terrier, “trying to be a Pomeranian.” The dog is found sitting protectively at Jolyon’s feet when the old man dies in his sleep one summer afternoon under a tree. In his own memoir, written in later life, Galsworthy meditates on the importance of dogs in his life, speculating that “it is by muteness that a dog becomes for one so utterly beyond value … When he just sits, loving and being loved, those are the moments that I think are precious to a dog.”

      According to Colette Audry (see DOUCHKA), certain breeds of dog are especially suited to this role. “Family men prefer poodles or cocker spaniels,” she writes, “harmless creatures chosen specially to amuse the children, ‘give them something to play with.’” As a feminist, Audry criticizes the way family patriarchs often reduce their underlings to the status of dogs. “The servant maintained a doglike silence, and the children romped about as though they were puppies,” she writes. “Inevitably, one’s love for one’s wife became confused, up to a point, with the feeling one had toward a favorite dog or horse.” Such a patriarch is the eccentric family farmer Dandie Dinmont in Walter Scott’s novel Guy Mannering. Dinmont owns six long-haired terriers (along with “twa couple of slow-hunds, five grews, and a wheen other dogs”) named “auld Pepper and auld Mustard, and young Pepper and young Mustard and little Pepper and little Mustard.” When asked whether this is not rather “a limited variety of names,” the farmer replies, “O, that’s a fancy of my ain to mark the breed, sir.” His fancy came true; this particular kind of long-haired terrier is now known as the Dandie Dinmont—the only example, to date, of a dog breed named after a literary character.

      In Dickens’s Dombey and Son, the loving dog Diogenes, largely democratic in his affections, is passed among the Dombey family. Originally owned by the schoolmaster Dr. Blimber, Diogenes is taken up by Paul Dombey, then given to his sister, Florence, after Paul’s death, even though he is “not a lady’s dog, you know,” as Florence’s admirer Mr. Toots explains, euphemistically. Diogenes is “a blundering, ill-favored, clumsy, bullet-headed dog, continually acting on a wrong idea that there was an enemy in the neighborhood, whom it was meritorious to bark at,” and in order to get him into the cab to deliver him to Florence, Mr. Toots has to pretend there are rats in the straw. As soon as he’s released from the vehicle, Diogenes dives under the furniture in Florence’s house, dragging his long iron chain around the legs of chairs and tables, and almost garroting himself in the process.

      Like many dogs in literature, Diogenes serves to indicate the character of the various people he encounters. Affectionate to Florence, Mr. Toots, Captain Cuttle, and Susan Nipper, he dislikes the sour Mrs. Pipchin and howls in her presence. Elsewhere the treatment of literary dogs can foreshadow human conduct. In Joyce Cary’s short story “Growing Up,” for example, the family patriarch returns from a business trip to find his young daughters appear unfamiliar and estranged. They express their violence first by mistreating Snort, the family dog, and then by turning on their father with homicidal aggression. This is the problem with being the household pet. If you belong to everybody, you belong to nobody, and you’re surely better off as a lapdog than a scapegoat, however undignified you might feel.

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