like to disturb the dog,” you can tell yourself as you linger another hour in bed or at the beach.)
Back home on the East Coast, I take Grisby to the Chesapeake Bay to escape the summer heat. Our favorite beach is just a twenty-minute drive from the city; it’s free, easily accessible, and totally deserted. Here’s the catch: it’s filthy. For most people, this would be a deal breaker, but dogs are different. It’s true that the water is cloudy and the sand strewn with plastic debris, but none of that bothers Grisby, so it doesn’t bother me. One of the many things he’s reminded me of is that it’s more fun to be dirty than clean. He loves the smells and textures of trash, and he spends hours digging for buried chicken bones and discarded sandwiches. We spend many summer mornings on our special dirty beach, sunbathing, swimming together, dozing, and searching for treasure. At times, I have to veto Grisby’s playthings—used diapers and dead fish are going too far—but in short, I’ve learned to love a beach with dog-friendly detritus.
Speaking on behalf of Grisby, filth is fun, and it’s a rare dog that looks forward to bath night. Charles Robert Leslie, a nineteenth-century royal academician, wrote in his autobiography that when Victoria returned from her coronation, she heard her spaniel barking in the hall, and was apparently “in a hurry to lay aside the sceptre and ball she carried in her hands, and take off the crown and robes, to go and wash little Dash.” It’s hard to imagine the older Victoria washing her many dogs, and equally difficult to imagine the dignified Prince Albert bathing Eos. On the other hand, I can’t imagine the stately Eos bounding, as Grisby did recently, into a stagnant cemetery pond and emerging covered in stinking graveyard mud (naturally, he climbed into my lap in the car and sat there steaming and reeking all the way home). I also can’t help wondering whether Eos ever actually did guard Albert’s possessions, as she does in the Landseer portrait, or whether the picture’s composition is purely symbolic. Another question that’s crossed my mind is whether Albert struck his dog with the same cane Eos is carefully guarding; according to the biographer Jules Stewart, the prince “took a severe hand to his children’s upbringing” and “could easily sink into ill-temper.”
Grisby’s never been known to guard any of my possessions, though since we go for a run together every week, he’s grown especially attached to my running shoes (so much could be said about what shoes signify to dogs), not only because they’re sweatier and smellier than most of my other shoes but also because they speak his language; he knows what they mean. Thomas Mann observed a similar skill in his dog Bashan: “He sees what my intentions are. My clothes betray these to him, the cane that I carry, also my attitude and expression, the cool and preoccupied look I give him, or the irritation and challenge in my eyes. He understands.” Heatstroke is another anxiety when we go running since, like other flat-faced breeds, bulldogs are particularly susceptible to overheating and should be watched in hot weather (we never leave home without water, and I’m well versed in snout-to-mouth resuscitation). Still, he seems pretty resilient, and when he’s well and truly beat, he’ll flop down in the shade and refuse to move. Unlike many of us, he knows what he can take.
Our running loop in Baltimore is in a wooded area of Druid Hill Park behind the zoo, where, although we’re right in the center of the city, we’ll sometimes encounter foxes, deer, box turtles, and rat snakes. On our run, we follow a densely wooded path, which sometimes, after a storm, will get blocked by a fallen tree. When this happens, I climb over the trunk, and Grisby follows me, usually with a little trepidation, half jumping, half climbing, and landing on the ground each time with a satisfying snort.
With jogging as with walking, Grisby likes to keep his own pace; sometimes he’ll run ahead of me, sometimes he’ll fall behind. He likes to investigate wayside smells, chase squirrels and rabbits, take shortcuts, and greet strangers. On this particular path, people generally have their dogs off leash, and we always go early, when we’re least likely to run into people who might not appreciate a French bulldog’s exuberant greeting. For this reason, too, we stick to the more secluded areas of the park. The northern end, which contains some of the oldest forest growth in the state of Maryland, is a natural wooded habitat. Here, undergrowth covers a crumbling man-made pond, and the roads are closed to traffic. Sometimes we meet stray dogs wandering around in the woods; there’s apparently a small feral population, mostly pit bulls; they’ve all been friendly so far.
Our morning run, when we have one, is always the best part of my day. Nothing ever goes wrong. Grisby’s enthusiasm is never dampened. Then I go home or to work, and life goes on in the usual fashion, which is to say it’s full of drawbacks, hesitations, disappointments, arguments, and anxieties, the kinds of things that never bother me when I’m running with Grisby. I love being in the park with him; he loves being there with me. It’s really as easy as that.
“HE & I ARE inseparable companions,” wrote Elizabeth Barrett of her cocker spaniel, Flush, “and I have vowed him my perpetual society in exchange for his devotion.” The poet kept her promise and remained committed to her pampered spaniel until he died, at a healthy old age. Her loyalty was, she wrote, the very least she could do, since Flush had “given up the sunshine for her sake.”
The young spaniel was originally a gift from Elizabeth Barrett’s friend Mary Mitford in 1842, given partly to help ease the poet’s grief after losing two of her brothers in one year and partly to relieve her loneliness, as she was bedridden with symptoms of consumption. When Flush arrived in her life, Barrett, aged thirty-five, was spending almost all her time in an upstairs room in her family’s London home at 50 Wimpole Street; her delicate health meant she rarely saw anyone other than her immediate family and their household servants. The popular perception of Barrett before her marriage, like that of her contemporary Jane Welsh Carlyle (see NERO), is of a lonely, childless, unhappy middle-aged woman for whom her dog was a compensation and substitute for human love, yet the situation of both women was far more subtle and indeterminate than this easy cliché suggests.
Flush is best known to us not through Barrett’s letters, in which he plays a major role, but through Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography (1933), created, in part, as a playful parody of the popular Victorian life histories written by her friend Lytton Strachey—books like Eminent Victorians, Queen Victoria, and Elizabeth and Essex. In this charming story, told from the spaniel’s perspective, Woolf makes use whenever possible of Elizabeth Barrett’s and Robert Browning’s own words, drawn mainly from their letters. “This you’ll call sentimental—perhaps—but then a dog somehow represents—no I can’t think of the word—the private side of life—the play side,” she wrote to a friend, which perhaps explains why she later dismissed Flush as “silly … a waste of time.” Nevertheless, it remains one of her most popular books.
Part of the reason for its popularity, I’d suggest, is that Flush is really and truly about Flush, and not his human companions. Without wanting to generalize too much, I’ve noticed that dog books often have much more to say about humans than they do about dogs. In many cases, it seems, those who write about their dogs are actually writing about something else entirely—their families, their childhoods, or their bonds with nature. Or perhaps they’re writing about dogs as a way to remind us to appreciate the simple things in life, to enjoy the kinship claim of animals, or to accept the latter half of life with grace and dignity. In such books, the dog’s purpose is to catch the attention of the reader and, like Hitchcock’s famous MacGuffin, to drive forward the human plot. “Much more than a dog story,” reviewers will say, as if a dog story by itself is so very little.
In
