He came to stay

As I write, and if airlines perform according to schedule, Charlie's owners are arriving at Cape Town International after a holiday of slightly more than five weeks -- during which Charlie has been keeping Simon company and me occupied. I may have mentioned before that Charlie and Simon struck up a friendship in the park -- if  charging up and down trying to up-end each other can be called a friendship (as I suppose it can: after all, some rugby players are friends -- or are they? I don't know enough rugby players).

I was not quite sure whether a meeting in the park  constituted grounds for cohabitation, but on balance thought that canine incompatibility manifested itself more promptly and unmistakably than the human equivalent -- in short, if dogs are  going to have a dogfight, they have it when they meet rather than after a year of marriage. So Charlie came to stay.
The stay has been, I suppose, harmonious -- and if I hesitate over that word, it's not because there was discord, but because harmonious may suggest something easier on the ear than Charlie and Simon's accord. In short, it's been noisy, muddy, bumptious and generally untranquil -- but hey, tranquility is for pensioners, not young dogs. Besides, they did have their tranquil moments.

In short, the visit has been a success -- unlike the one I stole the title of this posting from, the one Simone de Beauvoir drew on for her revenge novel called She Came to Stay. I must confess that I haven't read the book -- I have an aversion to de Beauvoir and Sartre both, on account of their shabby treatment of Camus, who has been my intellectual hero ever since he was everybody's intellectual hero (except Simone and Jean-Paul's, of course).
This is the Googlebooks synopsis:

Set in Paris on the eve of World War II and sizzling with love, anger, and revenge, She Came to Stay explores the changes wrought in the soul of a woman and a city soon to fall. Although Françoise considers her relationship with Pierre an open one, she falls prey to jealousy when the gamine Xavière catches his attention. The moody young woman from the countryside pries her way between Françoise and Pierre, playing up to each one and deviously pulling them apart, until the only way out of the triangle is destruction. "Behind the sympathy there is curiosity. . . . A writer whose tears for her characters freeze as they drop." -- Sunday London Times

What the synopsis does not tell us is that the novel is based on the real life menage a trois that de Beauvoir and Sartre attempted with a real-life gamine -- or really a menage a quatre, since Xaviere seems to be a composite of the sisters Olga and Wanda Kosakiewicz. Be that as it may, She Came to Stay was de Beauvoir's act of revenge, and in it she deals with Xaviere as no doubt she wished she could deal with Olga.. So much for The Consolations of Philosophy.
This is a far cry from Charlie and Simon, who have no philosophy and no notion of revenge. As Raymond Gaita says in The Philosopher's Dog,

about his dog Gypsy, 'I am ...certain that when she lies on her mat or sits at the front door gazing out to sea, she is not thinking of her sins or the problems of philosophy.'
The one thing that the philosopher can be sure of, in other words, is that his dog is not a philosopher. But philosophy being philosophy, not all philosophers share this certainty.:

In this novel, the uncertainty arises because a philosopher called Quincas Borba has a dog called Quincas Borba. This predictably leads to some heavy ontological speculation -- culminating in this one, at book's end, when both philosopher and dog are dead, the dog dying after the philosopher:

 ...seeing that the dog's death is recounted in a special chapter, you will probably ask me whether it is he or his late namesake who gives this book its title, and why one rather than another -- a question pregnant with questions that would take us far.

A question pregnant with questions ... there is, of course, the famous Chinese philosopher who dreamt he was a butterfly, and was never certain ever after that he was not a butterfly dreaming he was a philosopher. Perhaps Gypsy is a philosopher with a dog called Raymond?
But for everyday purposes, I am tolerably sure that Simon is not a philosopher (though I wouldn't vouch for Charlie: that dark-brown gaze of his is either profoundly meditative or extremely dim). One thing I am sure of, and that will have to be the moral of this blog: If you're going to have a menage a trois, do it with a couple of dogs rather than a couple of philosophers.   Ask Xaviere.

Simon in Disgraceland

The invitation, as I mentioned in my last blog, said 'Dogs welcome.' The occasion was a J.M. Coetzee Festival in Richmond in the Great Karoo. Suppressing a slight scepticism as to the potential festiveness of an occasion dedicated to J.M. Coetzee, I accepted the invitation, packed my case and all Simon's paraphernalia (which took up most of the space in the car), and collected my friend Andre, who had kindly agreed to come along to help manage Simon. Not that Simon required much managing, at least at first. He lay in the back of the car very contentedly for the  duration of the seven hours plus that the trip took, with occasional pit stops. So everything was fine -- until we got to the guest house. The landlady had been warned of Simon's imminent arrival, and seemed grimly reconciled to his presence. Simon, however, took some persuading to get into the room; it is possible that it was the particular shade of pink that the room was draped in that scared him (I don't as a rule have much pink about at home), or perhaps the plethora of artificial flowers; either way, he balked, and had to be more or less dragged into the room. Once there, he made his dissatisfaction very clear:

(The tin, by the way, contained Simon's food). Despite Andre's valiant efforts to subdue Simon, we decided that, in the light of his destructive abilities as demonstrated in the previous blog, we should lock all pillows in the cupboard and all blankets in the bathroom. Even then, we felt that that it was unsafe to leave him unattended in this particular room, so he went with us for lunch at Die Vet Muis -- a restaurant I can recommend to anyone stopping over in Richmond, by the way: avoid the Wimpy on the N1, take the turnoff into Richmond itself, and there you'll find Die Vet Muis, serving excellent venison pie with pumpkin fritters for R55. Another plus from our point of view, was that they had tables on the stoep, so there was no problem with the fact that we had a largish Dobermann with us.
I had naively assumed that we'd be able to leave Simon in the room while we attended the Coetzee sessions, but for reasons sketched above we decided against this. So for the first afternoon, I attended the sessions, while Andre baby-sat Simon. It was clear, though, that this would not really be practicable for the all-day sessions on Saturday  -- even if Simon could tolerate being cooped up in a guest house bedroom for a whole day, Andre couldn't.  So we decided that Simon would go along to Disgraceland, as the festival was called:

Yes, I know, it looks like the town jail, with J.M. Coetzee as the Wanted man. The venue was in fact a bit more benign than this looks. Here's another shot:

And this was where we spent Saturday, listening to papers on Coetzee. I can't claim that Simon was an attentive audience, but I will say that he was very well-behaved, sitting quite still in the front row, only occasionally gnawing at his chew-bone rather audibly. I thought it only appropriate that a Coetzee festival should contain at least one live dog, as an implicit corrective to the Disgraceland perspective. This would have been a better story if Simon had more dramatically manifested  his resistance to that perspective, but I was only too grateful for his docility. I'll do it again, but next time check out the guest house colour scheme in advance.

The dog that lived happily ever after

One of the great pleasures of last weekend's Franschhoek Literary Festival was listening to and talking to Justin Cartwright, whose new novel, Other People's Money, I referred to in my last blog. One of the things he said, very much in passing, was that what most people seem to remember of  his heart-wrenching novel White Lightning, is Piet the Baboon; and yet, he said, Piet had been a bit of an afterthought, not part of the original conception. Moral: as all actors know, never share a stage with an animal. And, I might add, you allow the animal to die at your own peril. (What, after all, is it that most people remember of Disgrace? But I'm keeping Disgrace for a whole blog to itself).  I experienced something of the same thing with my first novel, The Children's Day.

The novel was semi-autobiographical. though I took very many liberties with my own history. One incident that was based on actuality was the tale of Dumbo, the protagonist's dog. I meted out to Dumbo the fate of the real-life Dumbo: found playing with a meerkat, he was suspected of having contracted  rabies, and duly destroyed. I'm putting very baldly what most people seem to have found the most affecting part of the novel. One reader told me that she was never going to read another of my novels: 'I'm sick of reading of dogs being put down.' (This was soon after Disgrace devastated its readers.)
Having learnt my lesson (which seems to be, if you have a dog in your book, allow it to live; though heaven knows, literature and children's literature in particular is crawling, as it were, with dead dogs), I took a much more upbeat line in my next novel, The Reluctant Passenger: 

This dog clearly is a survivor. In fact, the dog in the shopping trolley doesn't actually appear as a character in the novel: he is more in the line of a ruling metaphor. Here is the relevant passage, narrated by my rather thin-blooded central character, Nicholas (I had a Dobermann called Nicholas at the time). He is here talking about his inability to finish Middlemarch:

My friend Gerhard says my attention span is adjusted to the sonnet rather than to the nineteenth-century novel, but I don't seem to find poetry very interesting either: there's such a lot of unassimilated emotion around for so little reason, as far as I can see. Gerhard says the point of the sonnet is exactly that it tidies up the emotion, but I'm not sure that uncontrollable passion succumbs that easily to a few quatrains and a rhyming couplet. I once saw a man transporting his Rottweiler through a No Dogs Allowed area: the beast was clearly well trained, and stayed put, but you could see that all it really wanted to do was chew the wheels off all the trolleys in the universe. That's the sonnet. 

So the Rottweiler in the shopping trolley encapsulates the novel's central concern with the tension between passion and constraint, in broader terms between nature and art. (He is also one of the reluctant passengers in the novel, but that's another branch of the metaphor.) There is, though, a real dog in the book. He is a bull mastiff called Tornado and he belongs to Nicholas's neighbours. Nicholas doesn't really like Tornado because, as he says, he can't meet the emotional expectations of a dog. But in a complicated run of events, Tornado actually saves Nicholas from a would-be hijacker, and so he feels a grudging kind of gratitude to the beast. Thus, when the neighbours  decide to move to Perth for the health and safety of their new baby, Tornado is in jeopardy: if they can't find a home for him, he'll have to be put down. This is where I made amends to Dumbo and Nicholas made amends to Tornado: he adopts Tornado and they live happily ever after. Well, as far as one can tell. (This is one of the differences between my novel and Disgrace.)
Would that all dogs were so lucky. Catching up on Justin Carwright's earlier novels, I came across his very funny but rather poignant  'American' novel:

Cartwright's protagonist is in fact a Brit who grew up in the US, and has been asked to deliver the address at a reunion of his old school in America. He consents, on condition that he can make satisfactory arrangements for his dachshund Herbie. Now this warmed my heart; I complained in an earlier blog that even the great Henry James commits the cardinal sin of introducing a dog in the early reaches of The Portrait of a Lady and then forgetting all about it. Not so Cartwright: he knows that we're watching out for Herbie, and that he'd better keep us informed. In the event ... well, read the book, but hell, did it have to end like that?
If you look carefully, by the way, you'll see that the cover of Leading the Cheers looks rather mangled. That is because Simon, fed up with my retreating behind a book so soon after returning from three days in Franschhoek, grabbed the book and mauled it, thus unwittingly also avenging poor Herbie.
And yes, you'll want to know what happened to Simon while I was doing the Literary Festival. Well, he was well looked after by two house-sitters. He seems, though, to have felt the need to express his feelings in a tangible manner:

That was once a pillow. Tornado rides again. Passion triumphs over restraint.
There is another literary festival next weekend, this time in Richmond in the Great Karoo. I was invited to attend with this intriguing rider : 'Dogs welcome.' I shall take the invitation at its word and take Simon to his first books event. It seems appropriate that the festival is mainly about J.M. Coetzee, with particular attention to Disgrace. Simon will no doubt make a contribution. Watch this space.

Why bankers don't have dogs.

I wouldn't say this to just anybody, but given the likely readership of this blog, I feel safe in confessing that my way of keeping my interest sharp and perceptions clear in an art gallery is to count the dogs. Once you've noticed one dog, you're amazed to discover how many there are, and in what disparate genres of painting, from the earliest religious paintings through to cubism (no dogs in abstract expressionism, but not much else either). Of course, all that this demonstrates (or, more precisely, illustrates), is that the mutual reliance of dog and human is not a recent fad (though some breeds of dogs, of course, are distinctly faddish): it is a simple feature of everyday life through the ages. This, then, would also be why so many books contain dogs: books, especially realist novels, are taken to reflect life, and dogs have become a part of human life.
This being so, it's interesting to come across a book that, though entirely realist in every other way, has (almost) no dogs in it:

I might in fact not have noticed the absence of dogs (it's not altogether my sole literary criterion), had the author not drawn our attention to. At one point in the novel, Julian and Nigel, two bankers up to no good (the whole novel is a pretty devastating indictment of bankers and all their works), are sitting in Julian's garden plotting their way out of a tight spot that they've landed in entirely through their own malfeasance:

Two people are out exercising their dogs. As they pass Julian and Nigel, sitting wrapped against the early chill at a table under the mulberry tree -- just coming into leaf -- they wave cheerily. Dog people, Julian thinks, have an idealised vision of a world in which everybody is matey and loves animals and likes a chat.

Dog people, the implication is, are a bit simple-minded, really -- exactly the sort of people that would entrust their money to the  likes of Julian and Nigel, and be left the poorer and possibly the wiser for it. Bankers like Julian and Nigel, on the other hand, are too savvy to trust anybody: their only relation with trust is to exploit it. And what creature more trusting than a dog? But the problem, from the banker's point of view, is that a dog's trust is totally unexploitable: dumb creatures that they are, they have no money to invest. So what's the point, really, of a dog? Except,of course, in keeping dog people's idealised vision of the world intact for long enough for Julian and Nigel to cash in on it. Other people's dogs may yet lead to other people's money.

In that  other world, then, where everybody is matey (in fact, in the park, where dog people go to be matey and have a chat) Simon met Charlie, the Golden retriever. They got on so well that Charlie's owner brought him over to visit Simon at home. The visit was a great success:

 Yes, I know it looks like nature red in tooth and claw rather than a play date, but in fact no blood was drawn. It was a fair fight -- until Charlie discovered the remains of Simon's chew bone and appropriated it:

Possession, Charlie seems to be saying, is nine-tenths of the law. As for Simon:

Moral: Thou shalt not entrust thy money nor thy bone to a plausible stranger.

Skulker

Another literary quiz: in which novel does Skulker feature? (You'll gather that he's a dog.)

Okay, here are Skulker's five minutes of fame. The speaker is telling how he and a friend peered through a window and saw two howling children inside:

... and in the middle of the table sat a little dog, shaking its paw and yelping, which, from their mutual accusations, we understood they had nearly pulled in two between them. The idiots! That was their pleasure! to quarrel who should hold a heap of warm hair, and each begin to cry because both, after struggling to get it, refused to take it. We laughed outright at the petted things, we did despise them! 

No, the heap of warm hair is not yet Skulker. But the laughter of the two outsiders looking in alerts the children inside, who start screaming for their mamma  and papa, and soon the family bulldog is let loose upon them, and grabs one of the intruders by the ankle:

'The devil had seized her ankle, Nelly; I heard his abominable snorting. She did not yell out -- no! She would have scorned to do it, if she had been spitted on the horns of a mad cow. I did, though: I vociferated curses enough to annihilate any fiend in Christendom, and I got a stone and thrust it between his jaws, and tried with all my might to cram it down his throat. A beast of a servant came up with a lantern, at last, shouting --
     "Keep fast. Skulker, keep fast!"
     He changed his note, however, when he saw Skulker's game. The dog was throttled off, his huge, purple tongue hanging half a foot out of his mouth, and his pendant lips  streaming with bloody slaver.'

Yes, the speaker is, of course, the young Heathcliff looking in, with Catherine Earnshaw, on the young Lintons. And the Lintons keep dogs as pets and as protectors of their property, Thrushcross Grange. The interesting thing here is that although the   trespassers are seen as a threat, all the violence is inside the house: the children tearing their dog apart, the 'beast' of a servant, the slavering dog. And on discovering that Skulker's prey is a little girl, accompanied by a boy, Mr Linton, who is a magistrate, says: 'Don't be afraid, it is but a boy -- yet the villain scowls so plainly in his face, would it not be a kindness to the country to hang him at once, before he shows his nature in acts, as well as features?'
So Skulker, the law and the gallows are there to ensure that the Grange remains inviolate. In the event, Heathcliff is not hanged, and he duly goes on to show his nature in acts, as well as features. In order to gain power over the Lintons, he woos Isabella, she of  the heap of warm fur, and elopes with her. As he gloatingly describes it:

She cannot accuse me of showing a bit of deceitful softness. The first thing she saw me do, on coming out of the Grange, was to hang up her little dog [...] But no brutality disgusted her -- I suppose she has an innate admiration of it, if only her precious person were secure from injury!

So the little dog, rather than Heathcliff, gets hanged. One of the things that make Wuthering Heights such an unusual novel is that we can't really take sides here: yes, Heathcliff is clearly a monster, but is that worse than the pallid complicity of the infatuated Isabella? Is hanging the little dog worse than pulling it apart in a contest?  (Ideally, of course, one would do neither, but Emily Bronte does not do the middle ground).
But, although  Heathcliif may hang dogs, he prefers them to humans. When he has at last taken possession of Wuthering Heights, the place is overrun with them, and when the hapless Lockwood pays his courtesy call, he finds a pointer bitch with a litter of puppies in the kitchen:

I took a seat at the end of the hearthstone opposite that towards which my landlord advanced, and filled up an interval by attempting to caress the canine mother, who had left her nursery, and was sneaking wolfishly to the back of my legs, her lip curled up, and her white teeth watering for a snatch.
My caress provoked a long, guttural gnarl.
'You'd better let the dog alone,' growled Mr Heathcliff, in unison, checking fiercer demonstrations with a punch of the foot. 'She's not accustomed to be spoiled -- not kept for a pet.'

 The child is father to the man. But once again, where are our sympathies really here? Not, I think, with the effete Lockwood, who has just in the previous paragraph told us how he humiliated a young woman by making eyes at her and then, when she responded, 'shrunk icily into [him]self, like a snail.'
Wolf or snail? Pet or predator?
Here is Simon at my hearthstone, attacking one of my guests. Note how the timid advances of the guest unleash the slavering beast beneath the skin:

Or perhaps Simon just prefers women:

Liquorice and Lost Ground

Here is Liquorice:

And here is Lost Ground:

Liquorice is the aptly-named shiny black Labrador belonging to my neighbours. During my Year Without a Dog, I got into the habit of taking Liquorice for walks, a habit that, now that Simon has arrived, I am still observing. Liquorice is, like most Labradors, angelically mild and infallibly gentle. So that when I came to write my latest novel, Lost Ground (published last week by Jonathan Ball, now available at all good bookstores, or, failing that, at Kalahari.net -- and that was the commercial break), and needed a sympathetic, supportive canine presence, Liquorice came to mind, and I borrowed him for my novel. He is the only character in a novel of mine whose name I did not change to forestall a libel suit -- or no, there was Dumbo, in my first novel, about whom more in a later blog. Liquourice, it must be said, is not a plot mover; he is there, as I said, purely to provide sympathy and support. There are, however, two other dogs in the novel, and they do actually have a part to play in the plot. There is Cedric, the Maltese, who is The Dog That Did Not Bark in the Night; and then there is Kerneels, an amiable mongrel, whose role in the plot I can't divulge without spoiling the story. Oh, yes, and at one point there is a cameo appearance of 'an elderly gentleman with a doddery Dobermann.' That was my Hitchcock moment, written while my lamented Nicholas was still alive, though, yes, doddery.
It has occurred to me that, not surprisingly, all my novels feature at least one dog somewhere, some of them quite prominently. Future blogs will be dedicated to these sharers or my fictional space. Simon will be taking a back seat, I suppose, though I will usually manage to smuggle in a photo or two. Here, for instance, is Simon with Liquorice:

The little girls in the background, by the way, are about to have their tentacled balloon snatched. (See the previous blog.)

... nor thy neighbour's tentacled balloon.

I know this is neither original nor profound, but what is about other people's toys that makes them so much more attractive than our own? The Lord in His Wisdom knew all about it, and tried (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) to put an end to it once and for all in the Tenth of the Ten Commandments: 'Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's.' (Incidentally, what a fascinating hierarchy of desire, starting with the neighbour's house and ending with his ass).
Simon has been provided with a veritable cornucopia of toys:

(The cornucopia is in fact an Edgebaston wine box.)
You'd think Simon would be satisfied. But what happens? The neighbour comes to visit (well, neighbours, but I'm sure the Lord had a kind of collective neighbour in mind):

( The neighbour's dog, by the way, is a black Labrador called Liquorice, who will soon figure in this blog.) The neighbour's little daughter has recently acquired a new toy, which I can only describe as a balloon with tentacles, one of those ingenious inventions made possible by technological advance attendant upon the Space Race. Simon, whose attention is normally exclusively focused on poor long-suffering Liquorice, sees the tentacled balloon, and immediately covets it. For a Dobermann, as for King David of old (I'm thinking of Bathsheba, I think) to covet is to grab:

So Simon ends up looking like one of the Things from Where the Wild Things Are, and a little girl ends up in tears -- as, mutatis mutandis, the Lord warned would happen, although I think He intended for the covetor rather than the covetee to be smited (ungrammatical, but smitten sounds inappropriate).
BUT enter Space Age Technology: the tentacled balloon miraculously survives twenty minutes in the Jaws of Hell, and after a merry chase, is restored, gob-covered but otherwise unharmed, to its rightful owner.
Moral: what's a bit of coveting between neighbours?