New York is a strange place for dogs. As I walked back from an early morning art-world breakfast — black coffee and untouched fruit, untouched granola — the apartment buildings of the Upper East Side were disgorging perfectly groomed hounds and their staff for their walks in Central Park. I’m used to south London dog-walking, the shuffling between apology for our puppy, the avoidance of Staffies and the odd five-minute conversations with other park-goers.
It is shambolic. I think of the Pont cartoon of ‘the British love for dogs’ — the total displacement of human life by a motley, shaggy array of dogs — and see a great cultural difference. This anthology confirms the difference. These New Yorker dogs make jokes about Frank Gehry, psychoanalysis, politics, self-identity and blogging. Many of the dogs are on couches. Not sagging Home County Chesterfields but good Park Avenue Woody Allen couches. ‘And only you can hear this whistle?’ asks the shrink of the dog.
The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs is large and heavy and comes with a lugubrious Thurber bloodhound on its crimson cover. This makes sense as Thurber is essential to the whole enterprise. The editors have been wise and the book is charged with his writings and cartoons. He is the Godfather, the man who understood what the dangerous addition of a dog to a household might mean. I tried his advice column on dog behaviour out on some random children and they were enchanted. It was first published in 1930, and it endures.
There is a slightly patrician air about some of the inclusions. Arthur Miller, John Updike, Charles Simic and John Cheever appear in the contents list and we’re not even trying. Because we are the New Yorker. And then there are the inclusions that are so bizarre that they make you suck your teeth. Anne Sexton, the formidable, self-eviscerating poet, the other Plath, on dogs? But the poem isn’t really about dogs, of course, but about intimacy and peril. That is part of the healthy astringency here. A very short story, ‘Chablis’ by Donald Barthelme, anatomises a relationship through the acquisition of a puppy: ‘My wife wants a dog. She already has a baby. The baby’s almost two. My wife says that the baby wants the dog.’ The voice of the narrator holds steady almost to the end: ‘What is wrong with me? Why am I not a more natural person, like my wife wants me to be? I sit up, in the early morning, at my desk on the second floor of our house…’
In these poems and fictions dogs can be interlopers, interlocutors, mirrors of behaviour. And in the essays the same thing occurs. Jeffrey Toobin writes on Leona Helmsley (photographed in sunglasses, clutching a small white dog to her like a handbag) and her trail of ruin — ‘embittered relatives, fired employees, and, fatefully, unpaid taxes’ — and her toxic will. This left $12 million for the care of her Maltese bitch, Trouble. When Trouble died the dog was to be ‘buried next to my remains in the Helmsley Mausoleum’, at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, in Westchester County. The remaining eight billion dollars were to be spent on ‘the provision of care for dogs’.
But the point of this ghastly story unfolds slowly through the essay. It is about how to comprehend the genuine valuing of animal life in the context of other moral priorities. Adam Gopnik contributes the finest essay in the anthology. It purports to be about his daughter and her dog but ranges into the current literature on dog psychology and ends by thinking through the meaning of empathy.
I usually hate anthologies. They are lazy and ramshackle ways of constructing books, and passive aggressive ways of giving presents to those people you do not like enough to actively risk a choice. But this one works triumphantly. It is a proper lens on New York life through, inter alia, a dog emporium on Lexington Avenue called Canine Styles, the legislation on leashing and freedom to roam, on picking up after your dog, the K-9 Unit of the New Jersey Department of Corrections for searching for illegal cell-phones, obedience training, and beagling in Long Island in 1941.
Above all it works because there is tremendous writing. Because of the amused insouciance, the self-deprecation, the gentle unfolding of a structural irony, the skip and reveal of the final sentence, the knowledge of Not Too Much that seems intrinsic to the New Yorker. And cartoons.
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