The Zen Buddhists, it’s said, ask one question to indicate another: “Why did Bodhidharma leave for the east?” really means something like “What is the essence of Buddhism?” or just “What is the way?” (Bodhidharma was a Buddhist sage who ran out of India and headed for China.) Those of us who care about dogs—and The New Yorker—ask a similar straightforward-seeming question that also provokes several trick turns. For us, the question “Why did James Thurber always draw dogs?” really means something like “Why do dogs matter for writers?” or even “What draws writers to any of their strange obsessive subjects?” (Which is another way of asking, “What is the way?”)
For Thurber doesn’t just draw dogs. He writes dogs, sings dogs, owns dogs as Liebling owns Frenchmen, or Charles Addams mansard roofs. On the cover of this book, in so many pages inside the cover, it is Thurber who is the first man of the dog. There is even a charming work of concert music called “Thurber’s Dogs”—by Peter Schickele, of P.D.Q. Bach fame—and there probably have been more dogs called Thurber than have ever been named after any other American writer. There is even the Thurber dog: that melancholic, dubious bloodhound that he loved to draw, over and over.
So why dogs? The answer is simple: for Thurber, the dog chimed with, represented, the American man in his natural state—a state that, as Thurber saw it, was largely scared out of him by the American woman. When Thurber was writing about dogs, he was writing about men. The virtues that seemed inherent in dogs—dignity, peacefulness, courage, and stoical indifference to circumstance—were ones that he felt had been lost by their owners. The American man had the permanent jumps, and the American dog did not. The dog was man set free from family obligations, Monastic Man. Dogs “would in all probability have averted the Depression, for they can go through lots tougher things than we and still think it’s boom time. They demand very little of their heyday; a kind word is more to them than fame, a soup bone than gold; they are perfectly contented with a warm fire and a good book to chew (preferably an autographed first edition lent by a friend); wine and song they can completely forgo; and they can almost completely forgo women.” For Thurber, the dog is not man’s best friend so much as man’s sole dodgy ally in his struggle with man’s strangest necessity, woman.
Postcard from Thurber to Harold Ross
It’s a language, and a way of talking, that seems a little alien to us now. But it’s central to what Thurber is up to, and why he’s up to it. The war between men and women is his subject, and the Thurber dog is, so to speak, the third body in a three-body problem that fills his work. There’s the Thurber wife and the Thurber husband, and between them is the Thurber dog. The Thurber wife is certain, sighing, exasperated, and idiosyncratically knowing; it’s the wife who knows that the only good diners on the highways are the ones “not at an angle to the road.” The Thurber husband is daydreaming, frightened, and neurotic. The Thurber dog is between them: steadfast, melancholic, in every sense dogged, but complete in himself. When I write about food I write about hunger, M.F.K. Fisher said. When I write about dogs, I write about dignity, Thurber could have said, because dogs still have it and men do not.
We know now that the Thurber wife became the Thurber wife because of her confinement; her exasperation at the Thurber husband rises from her frustration at being only a wife. She became the Thurber wife because she could not become, as she can now, the Thurber boss; her bossiness is an expression of her being precluded from being an actual leader. The Thurber triangle is altered now. But that doesn’t reduce the intensity with which it was realized, or make less moving its third angle, that of dog and man. What gets to Thurber is not so much the dog’s eagerness, or the loyalty, or the bravery, or any other would-be virtue so much as the dog’s inherent and ordinary dignity.
Within the world of the Thurber dog there are many different specimens and varieties. Thurber dogs worth thinking about include the Boston bull terrier Feely, whom Emma Inch, the part-time cleaning lady, carries with her in her arms wherever she goes, and the poodle who threw up in Thurber’s car on her way to a dog show. Then there are the memorable dogs who filled up the cellar at 921 South Champion Avenue, only to emerge one night in “a snarling, barking yelping swirl of yellow and white, black and tan, gray and brindle as the dogs tumbled into the kitchen, skidded on the linoleum, sent the food flying from the plate, and backed Aunt Mary into a corner.” But the Alpha and the Omega, the two poles of Thurber’s dog lore, are dogs from his Columbus boyhood: Muggs the Airedale, portrayed in “The Dog That Bit People,” and Rex the bull terrier, memorialized in one of the New Yorker pieces collected in this book, “Snapshot of a Dog.” (Rex is actually what we now call a pit bull.) Muggs is the stubborn, stolid, unpleasant side of the nature that man and dog share, though with man now it must be kept under wraps. He bites. Rex is the noble, stoical side of that same nature. He fetches. (He fights, too, but the fighting is somehow more ritual than rage.)
Muggs, though irredeemably bad-tempered, is still an essentially benevolent presence, since it is his essence to do what he likes: “He was sorry immediately, Mother said. He was always sorry, she said, after he bit someone, but we could not understand how she figured this out. He didn’t act sorry.” This perfect sequence of observations marks the Thurber sound: simple to the point of bareness, they’re funny because they make no effort to bridge the man/dog gap, and because they leave no simpler way with which to say what must be said. (A lesser writer might have written, “You never sensed in his behavior any regret,” instead of “He didn’t act sorry.”) Resolutely unsentimentalized, Muggs makes a pass at everyone, even his mother—Muggs has the simple dignity of the unpersuadable. He may be difficult, but he isn’t absurd. Rex is the other side, as dumb as a post, but as resolute as one, too: “There was a nobility about him. He was big and muscular and beautifully made. He never lost his dignity even when trying to accomplish the extravagant tasks my brother and myself used to set for him.” His readiness to do anything he’s asked is what makes Rex matter:
That reminds me of the night, way after midnight, when he went a-roving in the light of the moon and brought back a small chest of drawers that he found somewhere—how far from the house nobody ever knew; since it was Rex, it could easily have been half a mile. There were no drawers in the chest when he got it home, and it wasn’t a good one—he hadn’t taken it out of anybody’s house; it was just an old cheap piece that somebody had abandoned on a trash heap. Still, it was something he wanted, probably because it presented a nice problem in transportation. It tested his mettle. We first knew about his achievement when, deep in the night, we heard him trying to get the chest up onto the porch. It sounded as if two or three people were trying to tear the house down. We came downstairs and turned on the porch light. Rex was on the top step trying to pull the thing up, but it had caught somehow and he was just holding his own. I suppose he would have held his own till dawn if we hadn’t helped him. The next day we carted the chest miles away and threw it out. If we had thrown it out in a nearby alley, he would have brought it home again, as a small token of his integrity in such matters.
Rex’s story ends with one of the most moving (because so quietly done) elegiac set pieces in American writing:
Even death couldn’t beat him down. He died, it is true, but only, as one of his admirers said, after “straight-arming the death angel” for more than an hour. Late one afternoon he wandered home, too slowly and uncertainly to be the Rex that had trotted briskly homeward up our avenue for ten years. I think we all knew when he came through the gate that he was dying. He had apparently taken a terrible beating, probably from the owner of some dog that he had got into a fight with. His head and body were scarred. His heavy collar with the teeth marks of many a battle on it was awry; some of the big brass studs in it were sprung loose from the leather. He licked at our hands and, staggering, fell, but got up again. We could see that he was looking for someone. One of his three masters was not home. He did not get home for an hour. During that hour the bull terrier fought against death as he had fought against the cold, strong current of Alum Creek, as he had fought to climb twelve-foot walls. When the person he was waiting for did come through the gate, whistling, ceasing to whistle, Rex walked a few wabbly paces toward him, touched his hand with his muzzle, and fell down again. This time he didn’t get up.
Integrity, even grouchy growling integrity, in a world that doesn’t value it; nobility in a time that doesn’t want it—what Thurber’s dogs do is absurd or even pernicious (they bite people, or drag junk furniture for miles) but demonstrates the necessary triumph of the superfluous. Which is what dogs are all about; it is the canine way. Nothing is less necessary than a pet dog, or more needed. Thurber’s theme is that a dog’s life is spent, as a man’s life should be, doing pointless things that have the dignity of inner purpose.
And perhaps this is why the most memorable images of the dog that Thurber left us are contained within his wonderful, mysterious series called “The Bloodhound and the Bug.” The bloodhound tracks the bug, finds the bug’s hideout in a mouse hole, and then leaves the bug alone. It’s not that the pleasure is in the pursuit so much that the wisdom lies in the knowing when it doesn’t matter. “The best way to get along with his kind of people,” Huck Finn writes about his crazy ranting father, in one of the best and wisest proto-Thurber sentences in American writing, “is to let them have their own way.” The deep wisdom of permanent inaction is one Thurber’s men take from their dogs. By legend, the best answer to the question of why Bodhidharma left India is a lovely non sequitur: “That cypress tree in the corner.” The best answer to the question “Why did Thurber draw dogs?” may be “That fly left unmolested, over there.”