DOUCHKA, A TROUBLESOME and neurotic German shepherd, was the subject of Behind the Bathtub, a book that won the Prix Médicis (a major French literary award) in 1962. The author of this sober and touching memoir was Colette Audry, a French literary critic, screenwriter, and expert on the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom she often collaborated. She was a militant feminist, deeply involved in the anti-Stalinist left.
When she first acquires Douchka, Madame Audry is divorced and living in Paris with her teenage son. The dog’s parents, she discovers too late, were brother and sister, and as a result Douchka has various psychological problems, the most serious of which, from Audry’s perspective, is her furious barking in cars. In the company of Douchka, any trip, however short, becomes a nightmare. Sedatives are completely useless. So relentless and unbearable is the racket she makes that at one point Audry seriously considers having the dog’s vocal cords removed. The barking gets so infuriating that she often wants to throw Douchka bodily out of the car, and on one occasion actually opens the door and lets the dog fall into the road, leaving the desperate creature to run for two miles on swollen paws—a punishment the dog’s mistress bitterly regrets.
Barking is Douchka’s worst problem, but not her only one; in fact, it may not be going too far to describe the dog as barking mad. She’s nervous and needy and can’t be left alone, demanding Audry’s constant attention, dragging her away from her writing and political activism. When her mistress goes out at night to put up antigovernment posters in the Paris streets, Douchka manages to escape and follows her; for the activists, the dog’s anxious barking becomes a dangerous liability. As time passes, Douchka’s needs gradually compel Audry to give up most of her customary activities, and often prevent her from leaving her apartment. On top of this, Audry is convinced it would be wrong to “alter” her dog, and consequently, twice a year, she ends up “fighting off Douchka’s would-be admirers like an officious chaperon.”
As she gets older, Douchka grows increasingly disturbed, and Audry finds herself almost overwhelmed by the responsibility of caring for the creature. For a while, she considers putting Douchka to “sleep,” but is unable to go through with it, and she finally realizes that something must give. “I could neither cure Douchka or her neurosis,” she eventually admits, “nor myself of the enormous emotional burden she laid on my life.” For Douchka’s sake, then, Audry gives up “what no man had ever taken from me—my freedom of movement and decision,” and accepts the kinds of restrictions that, as a militant feminist, she’s battled against all her life. Yet once she’s stopped struggling, Douchka’s mistress starts to find that although in some ways her independence has been curtailed, the payoff is unexpectedly sweet. Now she can devote herself completely to the intractable Douchka, and she confesses that “loving her gave me a special pleasure: it was unlike anything else I have ever experienced, a mixture of responsibility, amusement, and gaiety, a small deep-rooted delight concentrated on her and her alone.”
Reading Behind the Bathtub is a mixed experience. The book is beautifully written but often very sad, and Douchka can be infuriating. It made me realize how blessed I am by Grisby’s placid nature and traveling chops. Sure, he likes to be around me, even to the extent of following me to the toilet and pushing open the bathroom door with his flat snout, but he’s never too clingy. At the beach, I’ll lie on a blanket and read while he plays nearby like a well-behaved child, paddling and exploring, safe in the knowledge that, should he need me, I’ll always be close by. When we walk in the woods, he’ll trot at my feet, but will fall back if he finds something interesting to sniff or chew. I don’t slacken my pace—I know that, before long, I’ll hear him panting and snorting behind me as he runs to catch up. In fact, when we’re apart, I’m sure I suffer more than he does, missing all the little signs of his presence—his small sighs and grunts, the sound of his claws on the floorboards, his jingling collar, his soft ears rubbing against my knees.
I try not to, but I often find myself wondering what he’s feeling in my absence, which, in J. R. Ackerley’s novel We Think the World of You, is the first step down the slope to madness and heartbreak. In this book, the narrator, Frank, upsets himself by worrying about the dog owned by his young lover, Johnny, who’s serving time in prison. Johnny’s German shepherd, Evie, is being “cared for” by the young man’s working-class family, whose treatment of her—she’s left alone in a small courtyard for ten hours a day—strikes Frank as profoundly cruel. He drives himself right to the edge of a nervous breakdown imagining the dog left at home alone, “hope constantly springing, constantly dashed.” He pictures how “she would gaze longingly at the lead on the wall, go over to it to investigate it with her black nose, employ all her little arts to draw attention to her needs, and get nothing, nothing . . . Day after day, day after day, nothing, nothing; the giving and the never getting; the hoping and the waiting for something that never comes.”
“I—I can’t bear to think of her,” Frank confesses to Johnny one day, during a prison visit. “Her loneliness. I can’t bear it. It upsets me.” His suffering is made worse by the fact that every time he gets up to leave after visiting Evie, she becomes hysterical, jumping up and down and looking at him with desperate hope. “It always affected me with a sensation of hysteria similar perhaps to her own,” says Frank, “a feeling that if I did not take care I should begin to laugh, or to cry, or possibly to bark, and never be able to stop.” Even after he’s adopted the dog and taken her into his home, Frank still worries about her during the day, when he’s at work and she’s at home alone. “That she was awaiting my return I had no doubt at all,” he says. “I knew that she loved me and listened for me, that whenever a knock came at the door her tall, shell-like ears strained forward with the hope ‘Is it he?’” In a similar fashion, Thomas Mann puts himself in the mind of his setter, Bashan. When Mann leaves for work every morning in the city, he confesses that “a pang goes through my heart—I mount the train with an uneasy conscience. He has waited so long and so patiently—and who does not know what torture waiting can be! His whole life is nothing but waiting—for the next walk in the open—and this waiting begins as soon as he has rested after his last run.”
If Douchka, Evie, or Bashan were human beings waiting anxiously all day for one person to come home, we’d probably describe them as being “in love,” perhaps even to an obsessive degree. But is this kind of love the same as human love? Marjorie Garber, in her book on the subject, makes the case that “dog love is local love, passionate, often unmediated, virtually always reciprocated, fulfilling, manageable. Love for human beings is harder. Human beauty and grace are fitfully encountered: a child grows up and grows away, a lover becomes familiar, known, imperfect, taken for granted.” Our complicated bond with our dogs, argues Caroline Knapp in Pack of Two, is profoundly gratifying because “dogs occupy the niche between our fantasies about intimacy and our more practical, realistic needs in relation to others, our needs for boundaries and autonomy and distance.”
Dogs know instinctively how to show their feelings for us, but it’s hard to know how to love them back. Some dog owners spend thousands of dollars on designer doghouses; some ruin their pets’ health with too many treats; some take their pals to sheepherding boot camps, or run them through agility trials every weekend. I do none of these things; I simply love to be with Grisby. I love to kiss and pet him, but while he seems to understand the point of my affection, he doesn’t always appreciate getting it as much as I enjoy giving it. This often makes me feel a little Humbert Humbert–ish, especially when Grisby’s sitting on my lap in the car and I have access to parts of his body that are normally inaccessible to me, like his soft piebald underbelly. Should I feel ashamed of myself?
The question remains: Do dogs “fall in love” with us the way we do with them? According to John Bradshaw, the author of In Defense of Dogs, the experience isn’t exactly the same. When a dog licks your face, says Bradshaw, it’s gathering information about you from your breath and sweat glands, learning when you had your last meal and whether there might be any bits of it left over. This is a gesture it’s instinctively programmed to go through every time it comes close to another friendly mouth, whether human or canine. In other words, when Grisby nuzzles my face, he’s displaying not affection but the same kind of instinctive curiosity that leads him to sniff a drain or stick his nose into the trash, though—from his point of view at least—my face is rarely as rich or rewarding. “Dogs are obviously attached to their owners—in the sense of their behavior, in the sense that they follow them around,” Bradshaw concedes, finally getting to the crucial question: Does your dog actually love you? At last, he gives me the answer I’ve been dying to hear (“Of course it does!”), but it’s too glib for me to take seriously. It’s too easy, too ingratiating: a sop to Cerberus. Dog love is more complicated than that.
After all, whatever word we might choose to describe them, our feelings for our dogs—and their feelings for us—may be gratifying, but they can also be painful and tormented, even more than our emotions for other human beings. In We Think the World of You, Frank is devoted to Evie, but his dedication is selfish, peevish, and sometimes even toxic. “I loved her; I wished her forever happy,” he admits, “but I could not bear to lose her. I could not bear even to share her. She was my true love and I wanted her all to myself.” As this novel testifies, love for dogs can be confusing, contrary, and full of terrible suffering.
Like many dog books, Behind the Bathtub ends unhappily. While she’s still quite young, Douchka is bitten by an infected rat, grows sick, and one night crawls to the place where she always used to hide when she’d been reprimanded—behind the bathtub. It’s a heartbreaking scene. Audry describes it clearly and without sentiment, struggling to understand the unique nature of the wordless, cross-species relationship the two females have shared. Reading this part of the book, I found myself wondering whether, when Grisby dies, I’ll look on our relationship with sorrow and regret, or whether memories of him will fade away fast as I move on to my second dog. Perhaps I’ll look at my photographs of Grisby the way I look at pictures of former lovers, wondering, as I toss them into the trash, what I ever saw in him, and how I could have deluded myself for so long.
The Prix Médicis is traditionally awarded to underrated authors with the aim of boosting their literary reputations and launching them to the next level of their careers (prizewinners have included such acclaimed writers as Monique Wittig, Elie Wiesel, Hélène Cixous, and Bernard-Henri Lévy). Yet the prize did little for Colette Audry, and some even ridiculed the committee for giving this important award to “a dog book.” Sadly, this brave and serious work of autobiography has long been out of print; its critical reception is illustrative of our uneasy cultural relationship not only with dogs but also with those who write about them. Many French reviewers were unable to take Behind the Bathtub seriously, dismissing it as a minor or negligible work.
Despite England’s reputation as a nation of animal lovers, response to the British edition (Douchka—The Story of a Dog) was equally condescending. According to one Sister Mary William in Best Sellers: “The book is easy reading and, I suppose, pleasant reading for dog lovers.” Sister William added sneeringly: “It seems to me that five dollars is quite a price to pay for this sentimental journey into the past of dog and mistress even though it . . . is said to have been a best seller in France.” Naomi Lewis in the Observer called Douchka “an angry, tormented book,” and Robert Nye in the Guardian described it as “run-of-the-mill animal stuff, all right if you can stomach it but otherwise about as appetising as cat’s meat and dog’s biscuits.” Francis Wyndham, reviewing Douchka in the New Statesman in 1963, was of the opinion that Audry “presumably writes that aggressively colloquial prose often favoured by intellectual French women” and suggests that “books about animals often seem unduly egotistic” because “there isn’t that much that can be written about them.” Finally, in her 1990 obituary of Colette Audry, Maryvonne Grellier in the Guardian completely mischaracterized Behind the Bathtub as “based on a childhood episode when she found the family’s pet dog dead behind the bath.”
We still make fun of women like Colette Audry who love their dogs “excessively.” (But who decides how much love is “too much”?) There seems to be an unstated assumption that this love is being “wasted” on an animal, that women who devote themselves to their dogs are slightly unhinged. For this reason, many women keep such feelings to themselves—but such emotions may be far more common than we think. The website Dogster includes a regular feature called “Doghouse Confessional,” where readers send in their secrets about their dogs. Past columns (all by women) have included “I Love My Dog More Than I Love My Husband,” “I Put My Dog’s Happiness First,” and “My Dog Has Outlasted All My Romantic Relationships.” If such feelings are widespread, moreover, it should be cause for celebration, not concern. You might love your dog more than you love your husband, but loving a dog doesn’t mean you stop loving people; in fact, evidence suggests that love for animals encourages a broader sense of general empathy.
Even today, despite the increasing importance of dogs in our lives, books about them are invariably dismissed as sentimental and lighthearted, lucrative but simplistic, the lowest form of literature. Alice A. Kuzniar, the author of Melancholia’s Dog, opens her thoughtful book on human-canine kinships by remarking that the subject of dogs is presumed to be unfit for serious scholarly investigation; “it is held,” she writes, “to be sentimental, popular, and trivial. . . . Whenever I had to explain and justify to what I was devoting years of research and writing, I felt embarrassed.” Why can’t we let ourselves take dog love seriously? Is it because, if we did, we’d have to think seriously about other nonhuman animals, including those on our dinner plates? One way to keep these anxieties at a distance is to make fun of people who’ve got their pets out of all proportion; this is how we can restore the balance, reassuring ourselves that of course, although some people take their feelings for dogs too far, we know dog love isn’t “real love” (if it were, what would stop us from choosing dogs over people?). This, at least, is the only way I can possibly make sense of one reviewer’s perplexing summary of Behind the Bathtub: “Beneath the story of Mme. Audry and Douchka lies, almost hidden, the terrible tragedy of a loveless life.”