to walk, but he likes other modes of transport as well; he enjoys riding in the small red cart used by the concierge in our building to deliver large packages. If he loves to be pushed, he loves even more to be driven. Like Mr. Toad, he has a head for motoring adventures, and he’ll start racing in excitement whenever he realizes we’re heading for the garage. Like all dogs, he loves sticking his nose out of the window and catching a breeze, letting his ears blow back in the wind. He’s even worked out how to press the electric window button with his paw (though “worked out” may not be exactly the right way of putting it), which, on a cold morning, can lead to some frustrating battles between us (of course, he can undo the window lock, too).
Best of all are our rides back from the beach together on summer days, when Grisby—warm and wet, with sand in his fur—is strapped into his harness on my lap. On these drives, we’re connected at a physical level, like Don and Caesar climbing up to the roof. Strapped to my body, Grisby presses heavily into my stomach, and our bodies respond together to the jolts of the car. At those moments, with a wet bulldog snoring on my lap, it’s as though we’re merged together organically, a hybrid creature of flesh and fur, a single animal with two beating hearts.
DOUCHKA, A TROUBLESOME and neurotic German shepherd, was the subject of Behind the Bathtub, a book that won the Prix Médicis (a major French literary award) in 1962. The author of this sober and touching memoir was Colette Audry, a French literary critic, screenwriter, and expert on the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom she often collaborated. She was a militant feminist, deeply involved in the anti-Stalinist left.
When she first acquires Douchka, Madame Audry is divorced and living in Paris with her teenage son. The dog’s parents, she discovers too late, were brother and sister, and as a result Douchka has various psychological problems, the most serious of which, from Audry’s perspective, is her furious barking in cars. In the company of Douchka, any trip, however short, becomes a nightmare. Sedatives are completely useless. So relentless and unbearable is the racket she makes that at one point Audry seriously considers having the dog’s vocal cords removed. The barking gets so infuriating that she often wants to throw Douchka bodily out of the car, and on one occasion actually opens the door and lets the dog fall into the road, leaving the desperate creature to run for two miles on swollen paws—a punishment the dog’s mistress bitterly regrets.
Barking is Douchka’s worst problem, but not her only one; in fact, it may not be going too far to describe the dog as barking mad. She’s nervous and needy and can’t be left alone, demanding Audry’s constant attention, dragging her away from her writing and political activism. When her mistress goes out at night to put up antigovernment posters in the Paris streets, Douchka manages to escape and follows her; for the activists, the dog’s anxious barking becomes a dangerous liability. As time passes, Douchka’s needs gradually compel Audry to give up most of her customary activities, and often prevent her from leaving her apartment. On top of this, Audry is convinced it would be wrong to “alter” her dog, and consequently, twice a year, she ends up “fighting off Douchka’s would-be admirers like an officious chaperon.”
As she gets older, Douchka grows increasingly disturbed, and Audry finds herself almost overwhelmed by the responsibility of caring for the creature. For a while, she considers putting Douchka to “sleep,” but is unable to go through with it, and she finally realizes that something must give. “I could neither cure Douchka or her neurosis,” she eventually admits, “nor myself of the enormous emotional burden she laid on my life.” For Douchka’s sake, then, Audry gives up “what no man had ever taken from me—my freedom of movement and decision,” and accepts the kinds of restrictions that, as a militant feminist, she’s battled against all her life. Yet once she’s stopped struggling, Douchka’s mistress starts to find that although in some ways her independence has been curtailed, the payoff is unexpectedly sweet. Now she can devote herself completely to the intractable Douchka, and she confesses that “loving her gave me a special pleasure: it was unlike anything else I have ever experienced, a mixture of responsibility, amusement, and gaiety, a small deep-rooted delight concentrated on her and her alone.”
Reading Behind the Bathtub is a mixed experience. The book is beautifully written but often very sad, and Douchka can be infuriating. It made me realize how blessed I am by Grisby’s placid nature and traveling chops. Sure, he likes to be around me, even to the extent of following me to the toilet and pushing open the bathroom door with his flat snout, but he’s never too clingy. At the beach, I’ll lie on a blanket and read while he plays nearby like a well-behaved child, paddling and exploring, safe in the knowledge that, should he need me, I’ll always be close by. When we walk in the woods, he’ll trot at my feet, but will fall back if he finds something interesting to sniff or chew. I don’t slacken my pace—I know that, before long, I’ll hear him panting and snorting behind me as he runs to catch up. In fact, when we’re apart, I’m sure I suffer more than he does, missing all the little signs of his presence—his small sighs and grunts, the sound of his claws on the floorboards, his jingling collar, his soft ears rubbing against my knees.
I try not to, but I often find myself wondering what he’s feeling in my absence, which, in J. R. Ackerley’s novel We Think the World of You, is the first step down the slope to madness and heartbreak. In this book, the narrator, Frank, upsets himself by worrying about the dog owned by his young lover, Johnny, who’s serving time in prison. Johnny’s German shepherd, Evie, is being “cared for” by the young man’s working-class family, whose treatment of her—she’s left alone in a small courtyard for ten hours a day—strikes Frank as profoundly cruel. He drives himself right to the edge of a nervous breakdown imagining the dog left at home alone, “hope constantly springing, constantly dashed.” He pictures how “she would gaze longingly at the lead on the wall, go over to it to investigate it with her black nose, employ all her little arts to draw attention to her needs, and get nothing, nothing … Day after day, day after day, nothing, nothing; the giving and the never getting; the hoping and the waiting for something that never comes.”
“I—I can’t bear to think of her,” Frank confesses to Johnny one day, during a prison visit. “Her loneliness. I can’t bear it. It upsets me.” His suffering is made worse by the fact that every time he gets up to leave after visiting Evie, she becomes hysterical, jumping up and down and looking at him with desperate hope. “It always affected me with a sensation of hysteria similar perhaps to her own,” says Frank, “a feeling that if I did not take care I should begin to laugh, or to cry, or possibly to bark, and never be able to stop.” Even after he’s adopted the dog and taken her into his home, Frank still worries about her during the day, when he’s at work and she’s at home alone. “That she was awaiting my return I had no doubt at all,” he says. “I knew that she loved me and listened for me, that whenever a knock came at the door her tall, shell-like ears strained forward with the hope ‘Is it he?’” In a similar fashion, Thomas Mann puts himself in the mind of his setter, Bashan. When Mann leaves for work every morning in the city, he confesses that “a pang goes through my heart—I mount the train with an uneasy conscience. He has waited so long and so patiently—and who does not know what torture waiting can be! His whole life is nothing but waiting—for the next walk in the open—and this waiting begins as soon as he has rested after his last run.”
If Douchka, Evie, or Bashan were human beings waiting anxiously all day for one person to come home, we’d probably describe them as being “in love,” perhaps even to an obsessive degree. But is this kind of love the same as human love? Marjorie Garber, in her book on the subject, makes the case that “dog love is local love, passionate, often unmediated, virtually always
