My Dog Tulip Read online

  MY DOG TULIP

  J. R. Ackerley

  Introduction by ELIZABETH MARSHALL THOMAS

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS CLASSICS

  MY DOG TULIP

  J. R. ACKERLEY (1896-1967) was for many years the literary editor of the BBC magazine The Listener. His works include three memoirs, Hindoo Holiday, My Dog Tulip, and My Father and Myself, and a novel, We Think The World of You (all available as New York Review Books).

  ELIZABETH MARSHALL THOMAS is the author of The Hidden Life of Dogs.

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  MY DOG TULIP

  Copyright © 1965 by Joe Randolph Ackerley Introduction Copyright © 1999 by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

  All rights reserved.

  Reprinted by arrangement with the Estate of J. R. Ackerley First published in Great Britain by Seeker & Warburg 1956

  This edition published in 1999 in the United States of America by The New York Review of Books 1755 Broadway New York, NY 10019

  5 7 9 10 8 6

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ackerley, J. R. (Joe Randolph), 1896-1967. My dog Tulip / J. R. Ackerley.

  p. cm. ISBN 0-940322-11-0 (alk. paper)

  1. Ackerley, J R. (Joe Randolph), 1896-1967. 2. Authors, English— 20th century Biography. 3. Dog owners—Great Britain Biography. 4. German shepherd dog Anecdotes. 5. Dogs—Great Britain Anecdotes. I. Title.

  PR6001.C4Z468 1999 828'.91209—dc21

  [B] 99-14568

  ISBN-13:978-0-940322-11-0 ISBN-10: 0-940322-11-0

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  THE TWO TULIPS

  LIQUIDS AND SOLIDS

  TRIAL AND ERROR

  JOURNEY'S END

  FRUITS OF LABOR

  APPENDIX

  INTRODUCTION

  WHO WOULD IMAGINE that the bodily eliminations, impacted anal glands, and sexual dysfunction of an ordinary dog could inspire a story so delicate, so sensitive, so clearly understood, and so purely and delightfully composed as to rival an Elizabethan sonnet? This tiny book, first printed as a very limited edition in England in 1956, has won the praise of such literary giants as Julian Huxley and E. M. Forster and continues to pop up on lists of the best books about animals and even of the twentieth century. And yet the most striking and dramatic aspect of it is the outright banality of the story it has to tell.

  The subject of this wonderful book is an unspayed German shepherd bitch, Tulip, who was somewhat undertrained by normal standards, as she made free with rugs and furniture and sometimes threatened to bite. Otherwise, she lived an ordinary, quiet life in a London apartment. Her owner, J. R. Ackerley, seems ordinary too. Although he was for many years a distinguished editor and author in British literary circles, he appears in these pages simply as Tulip's owner, a bachelor taking his dog for walks and to the veterinarian, doting and worrying just as any other dog owner would do.

  If the book is remarkable, Tulip was not. She wasn't a Lassie or a Rin Tin Tin. Far otherwise, as I learned from a publisher who had actually met her. He said quite frankly that she was a terror, and though Ackerley doesn't entirely veil that fact, according to him he doesn't tell us the half of it. Evidently, her behavior was so awful that Ackerley's friends stopped visiting him, and, since he insisted on bringing Tulip with him wherever he went, they soon stopped inviting him to visit them. If they did once, they didn't make the same mistake again. They didn't want their cats chased, their rugs soiled, and their homes taken over. They seemed "to resent being challenged whenever they approach[ed] their own sitting or dining rooms," as Ackerley himself puts it.

  In 1965, when My Dog Tulip was published in the United States, Freud was in high vogue, and nearly everybody saw subconscious motivation in nearly everybody else. Popular theory at the time held that Ackerley let his dog act out his antisocial sentiments. But in my opinion, he did nothing of the kind. Any antisocial tendencies that Ackerley may display in these pages are the result of his being pro-dog. When people and his dog come into conflict, he sides with the dog, and most of his readers will applaud him for it. Some, including myself, can derive much satisfaction from learning how Ackerley diminished the kind of people at whose hands we and our dogs have suffered—the people who might be called the dog fascists. "What's the bleeding street for?" shouts an irate cyclist as the gracefully squatting Tulip fouls the sidewalk. "For turds like you," retorts Ackerley. Yes! cries the reader. That's exactly what the bleeding street is for— idiots like that cyclist who would have our beloved dogs risk their lives in traffic! Yet satisfactory as they are, such vicarious triumphs do not exhaust the appeal or explain the power of Tulip's biography. What, then, is its secret?

  Most of us who take a strong interest in animals came to do so because of our pets, with whom we feel a certain kinship. Our ardor has set off an avalanche of books about animals, almost all of them monumentally unsatisfying. Works with an ecological bent often treat animals as features of the landscape—fauna. Works with a biological focus tend to present animals for their generalized behavior, as if each were merely the epitome of its species. On the rare occasions that individual animals are discussed, they must have done a person or persons some service—like the famous Baldy of Nome who led a dog team that brought medicine to an isolated Alaskan community. Thanks to the general misimpression that animals are on earth for our use, the service, not the animal, becomes the focus. Worse yet, fictional animals are seldom animals at all. Bambi and Lassie take the prize for anthropomorphization, and even Stuart Little, for all his charm, is human, not murine.

  To see the shortcomings of these approaches, we might imagine them applied to human beings. When we read about people, we want to see them in our mind's eye, to know who they are and how they experience their problems and manage their relationships. We want insights we can apply to ourselves and characters with whom we can identify. But if the books about people were anything like most books about animals, every discussion of a character would be limited to questions of appearance and food supply, every biography would exhaust itself in a single act of heroism, and literature would be reduced to stories about Wonder Woman (the human equivalent of Lassie) and to amusing tales for children in which people, reverse Stuart Littles, behave like mice. In any case, none of it would provide either the pleasure or the complexity that we expect from reading, and no doubt we would soon lose interest and turn to other pastimes.

  Enter Tulip, threading her way down a sidewalk on the end of a leash, her long, black nose delicately reading, one by one, the messages sprinkled on the bushes by others of her kind. She is a slave, yes, as are all domestic animals, and must ultimately do as her owner wishes, yet she attends to her own needs as best she can within those confines. If she must add her mark to those she finds along the sidewalk, she calmly does so, splendidly ignoring the doings of our species, just as we would probably have ignored her had we happened to pass by. But thanks to Ackerley, we see her, and what an interesting creature she is! She has free will. She has preferences. She has personality. Perhaps she misbehaves occasionally, but only when her standards as a dog override our human ones.

  But the great thing about this book is that by presenting Tulip in all her matter-of-factness it preserves her mystery. Obviously Ackerley loves her deeply, but he never asks us to do the same (this is perhaps a first in writings about pet animals). There's a certain proprietary exclusiveness, a trace of jealousy in his attitude: it's as if he were saying, "I love her even if she's bad, and you can't." Nor does he ask us to understand her. He doesn't, and again, we can't. She's a dog, not a person
, and we don't know enough about dogs or other animals to fathom her ways. When she fails to find a mate of her liking, try as she will, we recognize her desire but her difficulty confounds us. What a dog might understand at once, we find mystifying. So we look on, fascinated, as she makes her innocent, determined way through the maze of requirements and prohibitions that our species inflicts upon hers. And yet so realistically and respectfully does Ackerley portray Tulip that we feel for her just as much as we might for any human heroine.

  Nobody who reads My Dog Tulip forgets it. It has no paradigm and belongs to no genre. No use to talk about its sensitivity, its underlying passion, its diamond eye, its devilish wit, and its flexible, compelling prose. Plenty of books about people have these attributes, or at least some of them. But very few writers with Ackerley's ability use their talents on subjects which are as remote from human understanding as a member of another species, or, for that matter, as humble as a dog. Tulip is an individual, as unknowable as she is familiar, and as such she is all dogs, all pets, and, in the end, all animals in their marvelous complexity, among us but not of us, with their intricate, mysterious lives.

  ELIZABETH MARSHALL THOMAS

  THE TWO TULIPS

  SOME YEARS AGO, when I was walking with my dog in Fulham Palace Gardens, we overtook an old woman who was wheeling a baby carriage. She was chatting cheerfully to the occupant of it, and it was therefore, perhaps, not unreasonable of me to be surprised to find, when I caught up with her, that this too was a dog. He was lying upon his back, propped up by pillows, with a rug tucked round his middle,— just above the top of the rug the edge of a thick bandage was visible. Very comfortable and peaceful the little dog looked as the old woman trundled him along among the flowers, chatting to him in that bright, encouraging way in which people address invalids.

  I made some sympathetic remark to her as I passed, and she was all agog to tell me about her troubles, how the poor little dog had been so seriously ill with an internal tumor, but how he was well on the road to recovery now, thanks, oh thanks—she could not thank her enough—to the wonderful lady vet who had operated on him and been so clever and so kind, for had it not been for her, the little dog, who was such a good little dog, would undoubtedly have died.

  "Wouldn't you, love?" said she to the invalid, who lay back motionless against the pillows, with his paws folded on his stomach and a very solemn expression on his small pointed face.

  This conversation made a deep impression upon me. I was then quite new to the dog world, for my present dog was the first I had ever possessed, and there was much that I did not know and wished to learn. It astounded me to hear that dogs underwent major operations and had their stomachs opened and shut as we do, and I tried to picture this little mongrel lying upon the operating table, under the glare of the head-lamps, with the grave faces of surgeons, nurses, and anesthetists bent over him. What on earth would happen to my dog, I wondered uneasily, if she should ever develop anything so serious as an internal tumor? Who would care to operate on her? Before parting from the old woman, I did not fail to take the name and address of the lady vet who had been "so clever and so kind."

  MY OWN DOG is an Alsatian bitch. Her name is Tulip. Alsatians have a bad reputation; they are said to bite the hand that feeds them. Indeed Tulip bit my hand once, but accidentally; she mistook it for a rotten apple we were both trying to grab simultaneously. One of her canines sank into my thumb-joint to the bone: when I held it under the tap afterwards I could see the sinews exposed. We all make mistakes and she was dreadfully sorry. She rolled over on the grass with all her legs in the air; and later on, when she saw the bandage on my hand, she put herself in the corner, the darkest corner of the bedroom, and stayed there for the rest of the afternoon. One can't do more than that.

  But if you look like a wild beast you are expected to behave like one; and human beings, who tend to disregard the savagery of their own conduct, shake their heads over the Alsatian dog. "What can you expect of a wolf?" they say. ["Don't let that dog near me!" shouted a tramp to me one day on Brook Green. "They ain't to be trusted!"

  "You don't look particularly trustworthy yourself," I replied, and might be thought to have hit a nail on the head, for he at once fumbled a jack-knife out of his miscellaneous garments and, opening it with some difficulty, flourished it after me.]

  Tulip made no conspicuous effort to improve this situation. If people were inclined to look at her askance she gave them every reason to do so. They distrusted her; she suspected them. In fact she repudiated the human race altogether—that is to say the remainder of it. I could do with her whatever I wished—except stop her barking at other people. In this matter, she seemed to say, she knew better than I. Yet she behaved always with exemplary dignity and good breeding wherever she went, so long as she was let alone: it was when anyone approached her, or even gave the impression of being about to approach her, that she spoke her mind. She spoke sharply and loud, and she had a good deal to say, though what precisely her mind was I did not know. In truth, although I was very anxious to know, I was less anxious to find out. Her sweetness and gentleness to myself were such that it was almost impossible for me to believe that these were not the prevailing characteristics of her nature; but the language she used to others certainly sounded pretty strong, and bad language, as is well known, does not always stop at that.

  No doubt the reason why I took the constant care I did take to protect her from being put to the test of showing how far she would go, was that I had to admit I had an inkling; but the two bus conductors and the postman whom she had already bitten could hardly be accepted as a true sociological sample of her feelings for mankind. They had all been doing things, like coming soundlessly upon us in sneakers, or striking the bus a sudden sharp rat-tat alongside us with their ticket racks to make it move on, of which it is in the nature of dogs to disapprove; in any case she had not hurt them, but merely taken them by the sleeve or by the arm; and though one of the conductors had rolled back his cuff to display the wound, he himself seemed disappointed that there was nothing to be seen but a small white dent in his flesh.

  When children are called difficult the cause is often traced to their homes, and it was upon Tulip's first home that I blamed her unsociable conduct. She had originally belonged to some working-class people who, though fond of her in their way, seldom took her out. She was too excitable, and too valuable, to be allowed off the leash; on it she pulled. For nearly a year she scarcely left their house, but spent her time, mostly alone, for they were at work all day, in a tiny backyard. She could hardly be expected, therefore, to learn the ways of a world she so rarely visited; the only "training" she ever received was an occasional thrashing for the destruction which her owners discovered when they returned home. Alsatians in particular do not take kindly to beatings; they are too intelligent and too nervous. It was from this life, when she was eighteen months old, that I rescued her, and to it that I attributed the disturbances of her psyche. Thereafter it was clear that if she could have her way she would never let me out of her sight again.

  It is necessary to add that she is beautiful. People are always wanting to touch her, a thing she cannot bear. Her ears are tall and pointed, like the ears of Anubis. How she manages to hold them constantly erect, as though starched, I do not know, for with their fine covering of mouse-gray fur they are soft and flimsy; when she stands with her back to the sun it shines through the delicate tissue, so that they glow shell-pink as though incandescent. Her face also is long and pointed, basically stone-gray but the snout and lower jaw are jet black. Jet, too, are the rims of her amber eyes, as though heavily mascara'd, and the tiny mobile eyebrow tufts that are set like accents above them. And in the midst of her forehead is a kind of Indian caste-mark, a black diamond suspended there, like the jewel on the brow of Pegasus in Mantegna's Parnassus, by a fine dark thread, no more than a penciled line, which is drawn from it right over her poll midway between the tall ears. A shadow extends across her forehead from either
side of this caste-mark, so that, in certain lights, the diamond looks like the body of a bird with its wings spread, a bird in flight.

  These dark markings symmetrically divide up her face into zones of pale pastel colors, like a mosaic, or a stained-glass window; her skull, bisected by the thread, is two primrose pools, the center of her face light gray, the bridge of her nose above the long, black lips fawn, her cheeks white, and upon each a patte de mouche has been tastefully set. A delicate white ruff, frilling out from the lobes of her ears, frames this strange, clownish face, with its heavily leaded features, and covers the whole of her throat and chest with a snowy shirt front.

  For the rest, her official description is sable-gray: she is a gray dog wearing a sable tunic. Her gray is the gray of birch bark; her sable tunic is of the texture of satin and clasps her long body like a saddle-cloth. No tailor could have shaped it more elegantly; it is cut round the joints of her shoulders and thighs and in a straight line along the points of her ribs, lying open at the chest and stomach. Over her rump it fits like a cap, and then extends on in a thin strip over the top of her long tail down to the tip. Viewed from above, therefore, she is a black dog; but when she rolls over on her back she is a gray one. Two dark ribbons of fur, descending from her tunic over her shoulders, fasten it at her sternum, which seems to clip the ribbons together as with an ivory brooch.

  She had been to three vets already for various reasons. It was a measure of my naiveté in dog affairs that my first consultation with a vet was to inquire whether she was in heat. The question was never settled, that is to say by him, for when he was finally able to make himself heard, in his bleak surgery, above her deafening challenge and my own vain exhortations to her to calm herself, all he said, in a cold voice, was, "Have you any control over your dog?"