Debuting a new column, called “A Dog’s Life.”
I was up late re-reading E.B. White’s gentle and loving book E. B. White On Dogs. If anyone shares my view of life with dogs, it would be E.B. White, whose writings about life on his Maine farm inspired the Bedlam Farm Journal. White writes about dogs from the perspective of what I call the Pre-Neurotic Era, the time when dogs were more or less permitted to live their lives and take their own risks, before they slept in bed and were given $39 billion a year in treats and dog food, before it was considered a capital offense to take your dog for a ride in the car in the summer (White, I must confess, did it all the time, so do I.)
Dogs were loved, but from a distance, and with perspective. They had their lives, we had ours, the two were not considered the same thing.
In the opening essay of the book, White writes about a beagle who left his Central Park South apartment every morning to chase rabbits and mice in heavy traffic while the beat cop stopped the cars so the dog could continue the pursuit into the park, and then stopped traffic again when he got tired out and returned. It wasn’t all that long ago, but it does seem another world in term’s of a dog’s life, and in terms of our lives with them.
In E. B. White’s world, dogs ate scraps, not dog food, hardly ever saw a vet, slept in the basement or barn (you housebreak a dog, he wrote, simply by separating them from your home for a day or so, an idea that would send Cesar to the hospital), slept in the basement, ran off by themselves. Dogs were not rescued, but adopted, and there is no mention anywhere of abuse, anxiety or depression. It was understood that most dogs were treated well, some were not. It was understood that dogs lives were no more perfect than ours.
White’s essays always get me thinking, as any good essayist does. Countless people e-mail me each week – every day – saying they like reading my blog even though they sometimes disagree with me. This would have astonished White who believed, as I do, that every readers deserves a good poke in the comfort zone every now and then, that’s what they are paying for.
White always understood that the point of a good writer is to get people thinking, not to have them sputtering in rage and nodding in agreement. I don’t need to be agreed with, I will never be on Fox News or MSNBC feeding my ideological clones their daily raw meat. it is not necessary or even desirable for me to be agreed with, and White understood this, it never had to be said. If you are not getting people to think, and are only telling them what they wish to hear and already believe, then what, exactly, is the point of existing for a writer?
So today I have the opportunity to get lots of people disagreeing with me, as did Mr. White. I can’t wait. He often wrote back to the many people complaining about him, “remember, there are 10,000 of you and one of me.” I say Amen to that, except in the age of social media, quadruple that at least. White had to wait until his magazine came out to annoy his readers, I can do it 24/7..
I have always been aware that my view of dogs is not in keeping with the times, I am not in the flow. My editors tell me this is why I will never be rich, I just can’t do the rainbow bridge thing and sleep at night. I am definitely not cute enough, one editor told me, would I consider buying a puppy and writing about it? I passed.
I see American dogs as having the best lives of any animals in the history of the world, yet all around me, there is this maelstrom of grief and angst, I sometimes think most dogs in America are continuously being tortured, abandoned, abused and kicked around every day, desperately in need of us to rescue them and stick them in crates for the rest of their lives to prove how good we are. Then who, I wonder, is spending all of these billions of dollars on gourmet foods, no-kill shelters, health care and insurance plans?
Here’s the problem for me, and for White. Like him, I have never had a dog who grieved, either for people or other dogs. I have never had a dog who suffered from separation anxiety. I have never had a dog who was depressed, who chewed up the furniture, who attacked other dogs, who could not be left in a crate when I go out to dinner, who was abused, who I had to bring on vacation with me, who made me feel guilty about going to work. Or who was my best friend, soul mate, child or the reason for my existence. I understand that the reason for this is not that I am superior in any way, but that I am a freak, an echo, a throwback in some ways to the older ways of living with dogs and loving them. I missed the train.
If the above paragraph does not give you plenty to disagree with (subscriptions can be canceled easily at any time), then you are perhaps a freak also, another oddball staring outside the tent in wonderment. You will not get rich writing about dogs either.
If you want to know how I really feel about dogs, or how your parents and grandparents did, you can always read E.B. White on Dogs, you will get to read a great book and also understand the simple, almost poignant thinking of the Pre-Neurotic Period of a dogs lives. White would not recognize the Neurotic Period or like it much. In this period, every other dog you meet has been abused, more than 300,000 are on Prozac for depression and anxiety, it is considered abuse to let a dog run free or go for a ride in July, and happy and healthy dogs are shunned as unhealthy and uninteresting. We seem to be transferring our many emotional troubles to dogs in a great meta-physical shift, if we can’t solve our own problems we can just project them onto our dogs and cats.
In the Neurotic Period it is, in fact, considered immoral to acquire a happy and healthy dog and pay for it, the new thinking has it that as long as any dog suffers, the happy ones have no place in the universe. People, on the other hand, are free to suffer as they wish, we just ignore them and pretend they don’t exist.
Whenever I get lonely or feel odder and more out of place than usual, I go and read E. B.White, usually about his farm “One Man’s Meat,” but sometimes about his dogs. Perhaps I just need to get more in sync with my time. He is my comfort writer, a reminder of my purpose and place.
I am happy to be a freak in E.B. White’s wonderful company. I may be crazy, but I work hard not to make my dogs a mirror of my craziness in an era when projecting our messy emotions onto a dog is considered humane and loving. I especially love White’s descriptions of his dog Ezekiel “Zeke,” who, when the fishing boats came into harbor in Maine, would go off on a three-day toot, returning sporadically with fish, lobster pots, thermos bottles and driftwood. White did not call the police or get turned in by his neighbors or sit up all night freaking out. He was proud of Zeke and happy for him. “He had a field day when the North East cruise was in there,” wrote White, cleaning up after them on shore. “For three days I never saw him when he didn’t have a Lily cup or a thermos bottle in his mouth. He is very quick and big, and those young sailors, broiling their lobsters and opening their hard boiled eggs, hardly stood a chance.”
In his book, White recalls the mass hysteria when President Johnson lifted one of his beagles up by his ears, one of the first signs that the old ways of looking at dogs was ending. “On several occasions as a boy,” he wrote, “I was lifted by my ears, and as far as I know I suffered no damage from these experiences. I am now sixty-four years of age, and in good health.”
White wrote for the New Yorker Magazine, and did not write A Dog’s Life on a blog or on Facebook where grieving, hysteria and alarm are the language of the day. A mere photograph of a dog sticking his head out of a car window prompts waves of concern and condemnation. Today, White’s notions of humor and perspective would probably not have been appreciated, he would have been skewered as an uncaring misanthrope. He is my brother. I love reading E.B. White, even though I agree with just about everything he says.
