The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe (15 page)

* Years after Marilyn was gone, I saw a picture of Raymond’s face on TV. It was a late-night special about soldiers lost in action in Vietnam.

10

V

ita Sackville-West once spoke of her admiration for a French tapestry showing Ulysses being met on the doorstep by his dog, Argos. I can see the brown colour of the wanderer’s tunic and the expression in his eyes when the dog recognises him. I felt I was playing both parts. It was the year of a song called ‘A Sleepin’ Bee’: we heard it one night as we walked past a joint in Greenwich Village and the music summoned our sadness and our hopes at the same time. Marilyn wasn’t well that season: to be precise, she had been in the doldrums and a danger to herself, sick with depression. I can’t pretend that I ever truly understand what ailed my owner; it was the human thing, that burden of self-consciousness that weighs down the day. Since finishing with Arthur, I think she felt she might always be alone. She felt she was bound to fail at everything and end up mad like her mother. There were periods of weeks when Marilyn just sat in her bedroom staring at the wall, never washing and never getting dressed. She told her maid one day that the most reliable items in her life were her dressing gown and her socks. It was hard for me to feel I was making a difference: worries just went round in her mind like those records she played after it got dark.

At Dr Kris’s suggestion, she was admitted to the Payne Whitney psychiatric clinic, a total disaster – it looked like her mother’s institution – but I took up sentry duty when she was moved to a private room at the Columbia University Presbyterian Medical Center. I loved being her guardian, but I wasn’t much good. She had been in her bedroom on East 57th Street with the curtains drawn for many weeks previously. She just wept. And during those long days and nights I absorbed her dark mood. It’s not always easy to keep one’s whimsical composure. So when I sat down by the bed at Columbia I was not so much like Argos as Garryowen, that mangy dog in Joyce’s novel who waits for what the sky would drop in the way of drink. I wasn’t exactly sitting there quoting the ranns and ballads of ancient Celtic bards, but I was gloomy, no mistake about it; I was like the old towser growling at the nurses.

Marilyn lay dreaming of her father. She lay in the wellmade bed and she couldn’t help passing her sadness on to me. ‘
Give us the paw! Give the paw, doggy! Good old doggy! Give the paw here! Give us the paw!
’ That was the Irish nurses all right and non-stop. The sad talk circled in my head for weeks. ‘All those who are interested in the spread of human culture among the lower animals (and their name is legion) should make a point of not missing the really marvellous exhibition of cynanthropy given by the famous old Irish red setter wolf dog formerly known by the SOBRIQUET of Garryowen.’ That was James Joyce in his book, loved, admired, and not quite read by my owner, and, to the same degree, unloved and mostly unread by my former owner’s sister, Virginia Woolf, who said the author went on like an undergraduate scratching his spots. Bitter, Virginia, like that, or so it was implied in the kitchen at Charleston, a house where her memory lay as heavy as the stones in her pockets, Grace always said.

Marilyn sat up in the bed, her skin stressed, her eyes clear, and she looked over at the window to see the snow was melting down on the streets. People need people, and they came and went, publicists, actor friends, and Dr Kris one day in a beautiful grey cardigan. She brought roses. ‘I’m sorry Marilyn. I did a terrible thing. That place was wrong for you and I know it now.’ The winter freeze appeared to linger in Marilyn just then, because the eyes she turned from the window were unforgiving.

‘Dr Kris,’ she said. ‘I guess you miss your husband very much, don’t you?’
‘Why this question?’
‘Yes. You must miss him very much. And your father, too, I guess. Do you miss your father?’
‘Marilyn.’
‘Goodbye, Marianne.’ The therapist stood at the side of the bed for a second, frostbitten, lost for words. Yet already Dr Kris was arranging the favourable terms of her self-pity. She pursed her lips and made a note to herself about individuals who think terminally. Her sister’s face fluttered through her mind, but she banished it, feeling stronger by the time she reached the door and closed it behind her.
By degrees I could get onto the bed, first hopping on a chair, then paddling among the blankets and scampering onto her, Marilyn’s fingers welcoming me. For long weeks she was propped up in bed reading Freud’s
Collected Letters
. Everything she thought and touched, including me, was infected by the old boy’s way of going on, as if the book was offering a signal of comfort about unhappiness and the battle we endure with ourselves. It makes us feel better to know that suffering is both common and routine: not only common but intellectually respectable, something that fails, for all the pain, to reduce a creature’s appeal. In that way the book comforted Marilyn through several weeks and I picked up some language and a few bad tropes. Of course, we’re all slightly too much like ourselves, and I found myself, during her reading of the Freud letters, taking the greatest interest in my own kind. The things that intrigued me most were not to do with the death drive, whatever that is, or the early tendency towards bum-worship, which canines know well enough, but were chiefly to do with Freud’s deeply affectionate silliness when it came to the comings and goings of his pet chow Jo-Fi.
In the apartment at Berggasse 19, Freud had begun to resent his wife’s slow-burning malice. Martha had all the cardinal virtues, but some vital part of her was disturbed by Freud’s commitment to his work. She couldn’t wash a cup without seeing it as an act of self-sacrifice, which becomes quite exhausting after a number of years. Freud tried to remember her abilities, her tenderness, her former beauty, to recognise how much of herself she must have held back in order to live with such a man and love him. But as time passed she had grown secretly dependent on religion, and, increasingly, she was able to experience none of the old pride or comfort in her husband’s preoccupations. Her silence formed a gloomy prospectus. He sometimes went from room to room in a state of confusion, and, of course, he blamed his own mother, which is a natural place for a man to start if he is shopping for someone to blame. Martha had a point, by the way: the man was not merely a hard worker but an embalmer, a museum-keeper, and that study was the great tomb of their lives. He said very little about any of it, but you could find the story between the lines of the letters, among the unsaid things.
For Freud, reliable companionship came at that time in the form of Jo-Fi, who appeared to share his instincts. The dog would lie on the rug or pad around his treatment room, always giving Freud a clue as to the mental state of his patients. Every old man requires a rescuing accomplice – or a saving lie, as Ibsen preferred – and for Freud it happened to be a fuzzy chow with tender and independent feelings. ‘I miss her now almost as much as my cigar,’ he wrote in one of his educated swoons. ‘She is a charming creature, so interesting in her feminine characteristics . . . wild, impulsive, and yet not so dependent as dogs often are.’
What a story Jo-Fi could have told, if her mind had given itself to the manufacture of personal history. The dog was an intuitive genius in the room, signalling by her manners the exact degree of a patient’s anxiety. At the end of fifty minutes the dog would yawn and stretch; if she’d been wearing a watch she would have pointed at it, so keen was she to ensure the old man was not worn down. Martha of course decided not to like Jo-Fi. She had her reasons. When Freud went to Berlin for medical treatment she put the dog in kennels and Freud wrote pathetic little missives, beautiful really, asking if anyone was visiting the abandoned dog. And once back among the antique statues in his study, Freud turned to Jo-Fi to give him comfort from his aching jaw. He allowed her to lie on a frayed blanket, next to a white bowl for water that sat on the floor beneath a cabinet of Egyptian gods. He wasn’t well and the dog knew it. ‘It is as if she understood everything.’
^*
Marilyn read the
Letters
next to a vase of yellow roses, which stood beside her on the bedside cabinet. When it comes to the story of people’s lives, isn’t it strange that we seldom know them in their quiet, reading moments? Freud wrote to his friend Marie Bonaparte of ‘the affection without ambivalence, that feeling of an infinite affinity, of an undisputed solidarity’ he felt for the dog. I suppose it was Mme Bonaparte who invented the idea of the psychoanalytic house party, patients and doctors mingling over lunch and whispering in the garden as waiters came round with little toasted breads smeared with foie gras. And I suppose Freud was lonely inside his own life, lonely amid the neatly upholstered world of his domestic loyalties. The dog answered a private summons. That is often the way. The princess Bonaparte wrote a book about her own sweet chow, Topsy, and Freud seemed to love it as he loved his sculptures, his grave-robbings, his tokens of extinction. The man had an unusual appetite for hungry selves, and the story of Topsy appeared to meet his needs in the raw. The matter set up new opportunities and new associations. He would spend several weeks translating ‘Topsy’ with his daughter Anna. He was clocking in for love, perhaps, and it turned out to be his most personal work.
Nobody in Freud’s family ever understood how he had come to know Spanish. The story has to do with his oldest friend from school, the bold Silberstein, who stirred a great deal of affection in Freud, especially as the doctor entered his old age. Silberstein wrote a letter addressing Freud by a name he had used when they were bosom buddies: Cipión, the name of the second dog in Cervantes’ wonderful tale
El Coloquio de los Perros
, ‘The Conversation of the Dogs’. The two boys had appropriated the names Cipión and Berganza, the dogs who engage in a philosophical dialogue as they lie outside the door of a famous hospital. For Cervantes, it was an early shot in the battle for the novel,
^*
but for Freud it was something altogether more intimate and local, the story bringing to mind the brotherly love and affection that had made him happy in his early days. The boys learned enough Spanish so they could speak as the dogs. ‘
Tu fidel Cipión, perro en el Hospital de Sevilla
,’ wrote the young Freud in closing those humorous letters. He and his friend were the Academia Cartellane, a secret society of boyhood and doghood, a part of Freud’s life that was lost to the past and buried under adult requirements. Silberstein became a wise old banker. And Freud continued to imagine him as his boyhood
amigo
, the lives ahead of them unknown. There would always be nostalgia concealed in Spanish words. He would whisper them to Jo-Fi. He spoke them to Anna, too, the daughter he called ‘puppy’.
On her last day at Columbia-Presbyterian, Marilyn talked on the phone for hours and then her friend Ralph Roberts came to take her home. He was accompanied by a smart young publicity girl from Arthur Jacobs’ office called Pat, who had a certain college freshness about her. Some of the press guys had gathered outside, apparently, but Marilyn looked healthy and she was ready for the questions and the flashes. She lifted a camel-coloured coat from the bed and I stayed on in the room for a second when they walked out. A field of light was coming through the cold window. Marilyn had left Freud’s
Letters
on the cabinet beside the bed.
They forgot me for a full five minutes. I walked over and lay on a bare mattress in a room across the hallway. There were bedbugs. I saw them and immediately assumed they were little Karamazovs. I don’t know whether it was the general environment, or the condition of the people they’d been close to, but the bedbugs had a perfectly Russian attitude, seeming to doubt the reliability of everything. ‘We admit it is our time,’ said one of the bugs in a mournful way. ‘Russian values, if we may speak of anything so nebulous and bourgeois as values, are understood, in America as elsewhere, to be a central feature in what we might call the great duality and contradiction of the age.’ He meant the Cold War. ‘The Americans envy us. They are fascinated by Russian literature.’
‘And what has that to do with you?’ (Sorry to have been so rational, but on these visits I’d spent a lot of time around very rational young doctors. And the times were paranoid: I thought they must be spies.)
‘We are weaned in hospitals. In flop houses. In asylums. In cheap hotels and in housing projects. Our soul is Russian.’
‘But you are Americans, right?’
‘No,’ said a tiny voice. ‘We are bedbugs.’

* Kafka said, ‘All knowledge – the totality of all questions and answers
– is contained in the dog.’ This is typical Kafka overstatement, of course. I’m afraid it is part of the Prague wizard’s charm always to over-endow the meek. If Kafka had spent time with Dr Freud, I wonder if they might have sought to out-dog one another.
* I am bound to say it opened a great tradition, a habit of style and substance, where animals speak of humans. Of course, the tradition is older than Cervantes, but he made it a cornerstone of what is called prose fiction. The habit may have come and gone, mainly gone, but along the way it has earned a place in the annals of instruction and entertainment. For George Orwell, it was a realist’s strategy. For Mrs Woolf, it was a way of having fun with her poetic impulse, making a joke of the describable. They would have pointed to others – Swift, of course. But it is the Russians who have proved most loyal to the great tradition: Chekhov, with his little Pomeranian at Yalta who sees how the woman’s beauty excites the man’s hatred; Gogol, with his little dogs nattering in the street; and Tolstoy, who manages to tell one of his stories from the point of view of a not-very-nice horse, ‘Strider’.