Man Writes Dog: Death and Rebirth in the Canine Memoirs
By Terry Caesar
There’s a New Yorker cartoon by Bek that features a woman pointing an angry-looking finger at a dog. The caption reads: “Sit. Stay. Make up for everything that’s wrong in my life.” Poor dogs. More has never been more required of them. It’s no longer enough for them to be man’s (or woman’s) best friend. On the evidence of the current proliferation of best-selling nonfiction memoirs about dogs, they are expected to be humankind’s saviors.
In memoir after memoir, it proves nearly impossible for an author to give a book-length account of his or her experience with a dog or dogs and not to present the relationship as one of great positive meaning. For example, Louise Bernikow’s Dreaming in Libro (2007) includes an account of the book tour for her previous book, Bark If You Love Me (2000). Bernikow is didactic: Dreaming is subtitled, “How a Good Dog Tamed a Bad Woman.” She takes fateful intimations or seemingly chance epiphanies seriously (she first saw her beloved Boxer, Libro, in the back of a police car) and so her relationship comes to have the character of something spiritual. As a reader critic on Amazon.com comments: “Libro is a Buddha in a brindle coat.”
How to assess such books? Fathers or addiction (drugs, booze, or sex—take your pick) might have become exhausted as foci for life writing. Not so for dogs. One reason is because these dog memoirs—especially in contrast to those about fathers or addiction—are irremediably optimistic in nature. No matter the breed of dog or its behavior, the animal always teaches the owner something, which is inevitably and profoundly valuable (sometimes ickily referred to as “life-enhancing”). But there are other, less obvious reasons.
First, the experience represented is extremely private. There is commonly no larger social world. Indeed, the human world either has been renounced (especially after the death of a spouse) or at least will be slighted for a deeper, more intense connection to the animal world. Often, the connection is at first unwanted or unacknowledged—the dog appears quite by chance or for inexplicable reasons; as Jon Katz writes in A Good Dog (2006), about agreeing to accept his beloved Orson when offered in an e-mail by a reader from Texas: “I couldn’t explain to my wife, Paula . . . why I wanted this other dog. I didn’t know myself. It was just a feeling I had.”
Not only does such an accidental appearance establish the dog as a potential bearer of “otherworldly wisdom.” It situates the dog’s very existence as a symbolic occurrence in the life narrative of the owner. “To me,” Katz remarks at one point in another memoir, The Dogs of Bedlam Farm (2004), “dogs offer a chance to keep working on the issues that prevent me from attachment to other human beings—impatience, judgmentalism, intolerance, anger. I hope dogs lead me toward, not away from, people.”
But does this in fact prove to be the case? Not only does such a desire run counter to the self-enclosed nature of the memoir itself—the possible expansion of emotions into the human realm is seldom actually tested. In dog memoirs, society has already failed. Rebirth must now come from elsewhere, and this is a second thing that must be emphasized about these books. They are not only popular because people like to read about dogs. People like to read about spiritual rebirth. Dog memoirs constitute one of the primary narratives of the drama of spiritual life in the United States today.
And there is a final matter: death. In order for something to live, something has to die. In dog memoirs, this would be the dog. (Whether or not there has been a previous death of a spouse.) These books are mainly about death—how to anticipate it, how to participate in it, how to survive it. Of course not every dog memoir includes the death of a dog—an inevitable subject, so dreaded that Katz gives preliminary assurances in two of his books that “no dogs die in this book”—but most do. Death is all but inescapable, if only to mark a space for closure, both to the intensity of the relationship between owner and dog as well as to the emotional life of the owner, who must at least learn to grieve in the process of gesturing toward a return to the human realm.
Dog memoirs are preeminently narratives of relation, and especially insofar as they ultimately come to embrace death, they converge with those about beloved human relations, such as Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) or Calvin Trillin’s About Alice (2006). But of course dogs are not human beings, and so memoirs about them strain the limits not only of our need to represent death but to represent animals—both as different and distinct from us. What are these limits? Suppose we take as an example Katz’s A Good Dog, the biggest seller (according to Katz himself in a new preface to the book) in his series of books about life on Bedlam Farm, established by him and his wife in upper New York. In A Good Dog, Katz decides to have Orson—the dog “Who Changed My Life,” according to the dedication—put to death.
First of all, characterizing Orson as “a good dog” is simply misleading—less an accurate assessment of behavior than an indication of hope—for it ignores the fact that Orson is, well, a bad dog from the start. He’s aggressive and recalcitrant. He refuses to learn commands, he fails to learn to herd sheep. He chases school buses, he shatters glass doors. Throughout, Katz is dedicated to the unremitting task of trying at once to make Orson good and to make good himself with Orson. He salutes the animal as most likely his “lifetime” dog: “His spirit seemed parallel to mine. There was a link, a connection, that I couldn’t explain. But I felt it nonetheless.” Yet the feeling, it seems clear, is forged on the basis of Orson’s being, say, the sort of dog who disdains puppies or who can’t seem to help chasing squirrels.
When Orson goes after a Seeing Eye dog, Katz poses the question: “How do you love a dog like that? And, more interesting, why?” A Good Dog proceeds through ignoring the second question and focusing on the first. Eventually you love an Orson by giving him not only standard veterinary care but special holistic therapy. You try not to judge Orson unfavorably in comparison to other, calmer or more instinctively gifted Border Collies. You cherish what you can—especially in Katz’s case, the times with Orson while riding an ATV, which the dog loves. But increasingly it becomes impossible to ignore how he is becoming “unraveled,” most alarmingly when he begins to “nip” people and then to attack them—once tearing off the T-shirt of a student helper and biting her just below the neck.
After Orson rips the sleeve of a neighbor boy, Katz considers his choices: a more secure kennel for Orson, a new home, more specialist care, or euthanasia from the local vet. After careful deliberation, he chooses the last. His choice is unprecedented in dog memoirs, and has resulted in two things: increased sales and a steady volume of criticism from outraged readers. In his new preface, Katz tries to not so much to defend as to restate his decision, in terms of the actual circumstances in which he made it. What Katz doesn’t seem to realize, however, is that writing a dog memoir in the first place is to enter into a formal contract with potential readers. Euthanasia violates the contract.
The pain that Katz records in raising Orson accords perfectly with experience in dog memoirs. The owner’s frustration is understood as care. Even his or her anger can be comprehended as one aspect of love. Normally, such feelings continue even unto death. The death of Ted Kerasote’s Lab mix, Merle, in Merle’s Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog (2007) is as agonizing and protracted as any in the current literature and thereby fulfills the expectation that the animal’s death will be represented as the logical outcome of all the devoted emotion—both the owner’s and, through him, the dog’s—preceding it. However, euthanasia flies in the face of this logic. To read of the animal’s death as a function of the owner’s will—especially in comparison with owners who, like Kerasote, will go to any expense, any length to keep their dog alive—is to be shocked. Many of Katz’s readers are clearly unable to recover.
In fact, Katz doesn’t use the word euthanasia; he doesn’t use the word murder. (He speaks only once of the decision “to have [Orson] killed”.) He doesn’t describe Orson’s death—or rather, how it can be characterized or explained—by any one word, and of course we must be mindful both of the poverty of our own cultural vocabulary for such an action as well as the author’s own suffering in deciding upon it. I would explain the outraged response of so many readers differently. Not only at the end does A Good Dog disclose an author’s spiritual life more troubled than we have been led to suspect. In having the dog killed rather than cared for, Katz risks being accused of substituting both suicide and murder for the author’s presumed rebirth.
Emphasizing the rare depth of his identification with Orson, Katz writes at the end of his book: “Orson radically altered my life: He came at a pivotal time and provoked—with no conscious part in the process, I’m sure—a series of actions and reactions that caused me to change almost everything about the way I lived and worked and thought.” Well and good. According to the symbolic terms of the dog memoir contract, the animal represents the owner. But then we see the result of the equation when Katz decides to kill Orson: He decides to eliminate the “animal” portion of himself. (In Katz’s case, the unconscious impulse to take chances, to be ornery, willful, or spirited.) So, we might also understand this as Katz’s decision to commit suicide.
While no amount of authorial commentary will banish the action being comprehended precisely in this way, Katz continues to write as if to counter it:
Orson reenergized my work. He reconnected me to nature, brought me to the farm, introduced me to the pleasure of other animals, led me to true friends, cracked open my consciousness, deepened my spirituality and sense of possibility.
But after Orson’s death, such words appear to testify more to a psychological contraction of an individual psyche rather than expansion to a wider spiritual realm. Such a wider area is what the dog memoir is founded upon, for it is crucial that the dog not appear as finally some “episode” in the human’s development.
Put another way, it is important that in speaking of the dog’s importance to him, the owner should be understood as providing far more of a tribute than an apology. The memoir, after all, functions not only as the owner’s autobiography; in addition, it effectively becomes the dog’s biography. As Raimond Gaita states in The Philosopher’s Dog (2002), “We do not write biographies of animals.” The stories we do tell do not add up to biographies because the animals make no choices. “Life neither presents them with nor denies them opportunities,” Gaita says. “They cannot rejoice in their life nor can they despair of it.” What this means is that the author of a dog memoir is under an obligation to reveal another’s story—even if that of another species—as its own and not exclusively that of the person who wields the only available language.
If in one respect Katz commits his own suicide in killing Orson, in another respect he murders Orson, because he simply cuts short the biographical dimension of A Good Dog. In effect, Katz stops writing and kills his subject. That Orson never had a separate life apart from Katz does not mean the dog’s life could not be considered apart from his owner. After Orson’s death, Katz’s “shaman” suggests that, notwithstanding the “timeless” connection between Orson and Katz, “animals often find a way of getting humans to let go when it’s time. He had simply had enough.” Of course this is possible. Anything is, or was. The time for more possible life, though, perhaps a life away from Katz, has ended.
In choosing to kill Orson, Katz rewrites Orson’s biography in terms of his own autobiography for a final time. Nothing more of Orson’s biography can show through. In theory, it might seem to matter if the being is a dog rather than a human being. In practice, this doesn’t appear to be the case, and the risks of deciding to sever the relation might apply with greater force if the “other” is a dog, who is finally helpless and cannot even speak.
In the end Katz is an owner who appears not to have loved his dog enough. He also emerges as an author who has chosen death rather than rebirth. His choice begs the question: Have we really returned to a darker age when a spiritual awakening—a rebirth—requires blood sacrifice? Perhaps our own suffering is not enough. Certainly, our current need to be saved by our dogs puts enormous pressure on the biographies of—and by—our best friends. •