as well, and this was Pinker’s collar. You don’t inherit much
in this family. Mr Grant is seventy-five. We’re not that kind
of family. But Vita gave this to Mrs Woolf’s dog and now I’m
giving it to you.’ She made the collar small, taking it down
several notches. Then she fastened it around my neck with
the great ceremony that English people reserve for moments
of minor sentiment, and I was immediately glad to have its
story with me.
* As a diarist, Mrs Higgens was a minimalist. Feb. 5: ‘Bought cream buns with real cream.’
* The whole family was kind to dogs. In the first surviving letter written in his own hand, RLS makes affectionate mention of his dog, Coolin. Three years later he is still thinking of the dog when writing to his mother from boarding school: ‘I hope that Coolin is all well and that he will send me another letter.’
* He liked novelists who got out of doors. Defoe, Smollett, Orwell. He said novelists who didn’t like adventure should take up knitting.
2
A
s the man said, the truth is seldom plain and never simple, but this comes pretty close. Mrs Gurdin took me to London for a night at the Savoy then put me on a Pan-American flight to Los Angeles. With a group of other dogs I was placed in an existential vacuum called ‘the hold’. We were then put in quarantine at a new facility somewhere in Griffith Park, close enough to the zoo for us to hear the wazooms of the elephants. Years later, when I thought of this time I would recall how Sigmund Freud, on coming to London, had pined for one of his beloved chows, Lun, who was quarantined in Ladbroke Grove while the great doctor was being lionised in Hampstead. In that prison in Los Angeles, I yearned for someone to own me and miss me. I was no horse: I loved the idea of being owned, because, for a dog, ownership sets you free. I wanted someone to love me and I didn’t yet know her name.
‘Mason, Tommy. Look how cute. This is definitely the one I would take home. The little white one? Sir, can we buy him?’
‘I’m sorry,’ said the jailer. (It was always him. The crunch of his boots on the gravel was familiar. The whiff of cologne. They were heavy boots. It was heavy cologne.) We were outside, in a little fenced-off area. ‘These dogs are not for sale. They are in these cages for a reason. The zoo is that way.’ ‘You can buy things at the zoo?’
‘No. You want a pet store? Los Feliz is that way.’
Apart from his genius in the arts of imprisonment, the jailer made a strong impression with his love of stars and planets, which he talked about incessantly while feeding the dogs. He often knocked off at 2.30 and made his way to the Griffith Observatory, where he liked to fall asleep in the planetarium beneath the whirling cosmos. He was a twenty-six-year-old part-time employee with a good sense of what was visible and not visible to the naked eye. He was especially fascinated by the cool, distant, impervious stars and I’d say he was my first American friend. He worried about proximity, judging everything by how near or how far it was from him. Animals and outer space are excellent hobbies for such a person, for each is useful and comforting to humans with more than a passing interest in loneliness. Much of his conversation was about space animals, the poor beasts regularly sent into the sky as part of the respective space programmes of the United States and the Soviet Union. He enjoyed spending his afternoons thinking about those legions of chimps, monkeys, and macaques floating about the solar system, fulfilling man’s need to discover. The jailer’s natural patriotism led him to stress the American side of things: it was all happening in those years, so we heard a lot about Able and Miss Baker, the two monkeys who were the first creatures to travel into space and return, but there were many others – Sams, Hams, Enoses, Goliaths – shooting into the sky on Little Joe 2 as part of the Mercury programme, dozens of profoundly reluctant beasts gaining altitude, going sub-orbital, lost in space.
Mrs Gurdin, Maria Gurdin – ‘Muddah’, or ‘Mud’, as her girls called her – displayed all the imperial ruthlessness of her White Russian cousins. Just as the Romanovs at Ekaterinburg had sewn their jewels into the linings of their dresses, gems that the assassins’ fusillade soon embedded in their bodies, so Mud sustained an image of herself as a martyr to her riches, a modern Russian icon glittering in pain. When she came to Griffith Park to collect us one November morning, she wore a bright grey turban and extremely rickety peep-toe heels. She was quite different from the woman I’d met in England. In homage to the ravages of American motherhood, she wore too much make-up. No question: she believed motherhood was a kind of martyrdom, the make-up a show of coping. Muddah had what the poet Keats called ‘negative capability’: in England she had seemed to be the perfectly coiffed, white-gloved business lady, but in California she tottered across the lawn doing Joan Crawford at the apogee of her maternal ruination. You could actually scent her lipstick and her general unhappiness at five hundred yards. I would soon come to know very well the depths of anger that lay beneath Mrs Gurdin’s efficiency mode: the day we got our release from Griffith Park she came to fetch us in a rented bus which she drove herself, throwing open the back doors and tossing the dogs inside after the paperwork. Me, Myself and I? What do you think? I sprung into Muddah’s van like Tom Jones vaulting a garden wall.
Bumps. A great many bumps. And what a wonderful lesson in the price of devotion Her Ladyship offered during the ride into the valley and the township of Sherman Oaks. Let me tell you: Mrs Gurdin was a high priestess of devotion, a fan of fandom, an actor’s mother indeed, fully charged up and quite mad with the émigré’s love of American possibility. Yes. There she was at the wheel in her blazing turban, shouting her Russian curses out the window as she battled through the traffic with a bus full of British dogs. On the seat beside me, a dark, lugubrious Staffordshire bull terrier was trying to establish a mathematical formula that could prove Mrs Gurdin was happy in her life, despite the obvious. ‘If you added her minor portion of talent to her major degree of des per ation,’ he said, ‘multiplying it with the exact quantity of her need for revenge and then dividing it by the standard vanity, I think you could show that Muddah is actually quite content.’
We passed the Greek Theater at the edge of Vermont Canyon Road. Mrs Gurdin was pulling erratically on the steering wheel: she was keen to avoid the freeway and trying to calm the barking. ‘I’d say the mammy had anger enough for half the town,’ said the Irish wheaten terrier. ‘Would you look at her now, the devil couldn’t put a mark on her. The big face on it. I’m not kidding: the face would cool soup. Take the thick ness of that nail varnish she’s got on. Ahh, now.’
‘I say,’ said an Old English sheepdog sitting in the row just behind me. ‘Frightfully nice to be out of the old dungeon, what?’
‘I think I’ll fair miss your man, the jailer,’ said the wheaten, staring into a run of palm trees as we crossed Los Feliz Boulevard.
‘Me too,’ I said.
‘Steady on!’ said the sheepdog. ‘It’s jolly nice to be free. That jailer fellow was awfully strange.’
‘I think he was a little paranoid,’ said a Labrador with north London eyes. I gather she was bred by a psychotherapist who mainly treated rich ladies who wanted to kill their maids. ‘Wasn’t there something a little needy about his schmooze?’ ‘How do you calculate that?’ said the Staffordshire.
‘Well. It was as if he was asking us to reject him,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it possible that his deep insistence we find him interesting was evidence of something self-hating in him?’
‘Ahh, now,’ said the wheaten.
‘Some people have a deep-seated fear,’ said the Labrador, ‘a fear that the animals know more than they do. It makes them feel inadequate.’
‘Oh, come on,’ I said.
‘Stuff and nonsense!’ said the sheepdog.
‘You’re all in denial,’ said the Labrador. ‘Human beings often worry that the animal kingdom, so called, is looking at them and talking about them and . . .’
>
‘Judging them?’ I suggested.
‘Don’t you think that’s possible?’ she said, pawing the window and then bedding down in the seat. We were now on Franklin Avenue and everybody outside was wearing sunglasses. ‘If you take the sum total of a person’s paranoia,’ said the Staffordshire, ‘and divide it by their natural sense of dominance, subtracting a variable amount of humility before adding a stable degree of self-preservation, then you can prove that human beings never really succumb to the truth of what their imagination might tell them. They are never defeated by the truth.’
‘Woof!’ said a little schnauzer, quite excited and given to acting the fool at the back of the bus. ‘I mean, precisely.’ The schnauzer had spent the first two months of his life in a porters’ lodge in Cambridge.
‘I’ll give you woof,’ said the Irish wheaten.
‘Be good dogs in there!’ said Mrs Gurdin, twisting round with a manic, unhappy smile. ‘We’re on the Highland, coming on to the Hollywood Boulevard.’
A voice came from the other side of the bus, from a Jack Russell-style mongrel who had kept himself to himself in the quarantine facility. He seemed to know a thing or two about life, and he spoke, when he spoke, with a kind of plain honesty. Most dogs are socialists, but the schnauzer said the mongrel was a workerist kind of dog with a chip on his shoulder, a New Masses throwback, one of those pups who go on about the vanguard of the proletariat. It was rumoured that Mrs Gurdin found him in Battersea.* ‘The truth is people know we’re looking at them,’ he said, ‘and the smart ones know we’re talking about them. People aren’t stupid. They only behave as if they were.’
‘Golly,’ said the sheepdog.
‘I’m serious, man,’ said the mongrel. ‘They worked it out for themselves a long time ago. They just don’t listen to what they’ve already worked out. It’s us that got listening. It’s us that remember. Every system of exploitation depends on the fact that the exploiters will forget what it was that allowed them to enjoy a natural advantage. That’s the way it is. The same way people can tell a lie for so long they believe it is the truth.’
He paused to scratch his ear.
‘It’s there in Aristotle,’ he continued. ‘He laid it out about animal intelligence.’
The schnauzer butted in. ‘He wrote that we have “something equivalent to sagacity”. In Historia animalium. He said humans and dogs do indeed have much in common.’
‘He wrote that we’re endowed with memory,’ said the mongrel. ‘We live on a social footing.’
‘Good for the gentleman scholar,’ said the Irish wheaten. ‘He had the wisdom about him. But he also wrote that the elephant could eat nine Macedonian medimni of barley at one meal. La! It’s hardly testimony of our equal powers. Your man also put in that the pig is the only animal that can catch measles. La! Aristotle.’
‘Grauman’s Chinese Theater to the right!’ Mrs Gurdin was shouting from the driver’s seat. ‘This is where the stars put the hands and the feet into the cold cement.’ The bus was still swerving about the road, the dogs growling and arguing while padding about the seats. The vehicle was high with the odour of body heat, saliva, and perfume.
I frizzled and chooked in my seat as I worked to rootle out the thought I was trying to reach. ‘Everything man touches is changed by invention, technique, and artificiality. I think . . .’
‘That’s what we’re saying,’ said the Staffy.
‘Yet animals are the great subjects and the great appreciators of art in any time.’
‘Now yer talking,’ said the wheaten.
‘Precisely,’ said the schnauzer.
‘Jolly good show!’ said the sheepdog. ‘About bloody time somebody threw down the gauntlet.’ The other dogs looked at him and he became, well, if not sheepish then sheepdogish.
‘People lead the way,’ I said, ‘and we follow. But how we follow. The great leader in this respect was Plutarch not Aristotle.’ Some boos and low hisses and general disputatious hubbub and lots of ‘come on’ followed on from this, quickly broken up by Mrs Gurdin.
‘Would you animals pipe down back there!’ she said. ‘Is very much like menagerie!’ The bus crossed Fairfax and seemed to tumble, all its atoms alive, onto Sunset Strip. We could see the cars outside and the sunlight dashing off everything.
‘You can say what you like,’ I said. ‘It was Plutarch, the genius from Chaeronea . . .’
‘Down with practical ethics!’ said the Staffy. There was now much excitement pervading the bus.
‘While Aristotle was benevolent in relation to us,’ I said, ‘he basically saw us as feeders and breeders.’
‘For shame!’ cried the sheepdog.
‘Here’s to feeding,’ said the mongrel. ‘Here’s to equal portions.’
‘It was Plutarch who recognised our speech,’ I said. ‘He allowed us the power of “picturing”. Isn’t that something? He has us talking and dreaming.’
‘The Interpretation of Dreams,’ said the Labrador, snuggling into her seat. ‘Perhaps we should provide copies for the men going into space.’
‘Or the people who made the Bomb,’ said the Staffordshire. ‘If you take the sum total of the world’s ambition and divide it by the general happiness of the greatest number, then go on to subtract all ideology and add the maximum quantity of economic fairness, it will quickly establish . . . what?’
‘That nobody would be human if they had the choice to be something else,’ said the mongrel. He licked his paw. ‘Anyhow,’ he added, looking up at me with humour in his mismatched eyes. ‘You seem to have plenty of opinions.’
‘Breeding, old cock. Breeding,’ I said.
Mrs Gurdin had taken us on a detour. (Her life was a detour.) Fairly close to the Los Angeles Country Club, she turned the wheel and pressed on the gas in a burst of excitement. She always liked to see the greenness of the lawns. Lucky her. I caught her eye in the mirror and she said, ‘How are you, little one? Soon you’ll see an English garden as it ought to be done.’
‘You know we’re in a desert,’ I said, looking over at the mongrel for common sense.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Water is really the great scarcity here, though you’d never think it. They imagine it’s lush.’
‘The whole place is an oasis.’
‘Or a mirage,’ he said, turning again to look through the window, surveying the expanses of dryness that lay beyond the French chateaux and Italian villas. Down in the canyon there was smoke, brush fires, and just as I spied them a helicopter came over the Santa Monica mountains and began spraying water, a ghostly vapour. The dogs’ tongues were busy with talk and panting in the heat and I noticed a bead of sweat appearing from under Muddah’s turban to roll down her cheek. ‘Why is it so hot today?’ she said. ‘It is goddamn late November.’
You must be able to see Ventura Canyon Avenue from outer space, the street and its swimming pools, the bursts of bougainvillea covering the Gurdin house and the lights blinking on the Christmas tree. I imagine that if aliens converged on Earth they might make Sherman Oaks their base: the place just seemed ready for them, ready for extraterrestrials, ripe for UFOs; but that was before I discovered Texas. (Don’t let me get ahead of my story.) A pair of fat robins were sitting on a telephone wire outside the house when we arrived. ‘Ah, poor shmucks,’ said one of the robins. ‘I wonder how long these ones will last.’
‘Jesus,’ said the other. ‘She looks more broken-hearted than usual. Look. She’s all set. Muddah is on. And Nicky Boy just went in half an hour ago, drunk as a Russian sailor. I was in that big tree over there, and I saw Nicky Boy falling out of a cab, singing a song and calling for the old balalaika. Holy smoke. Now all these dogs.’
‘Why does she do it?’
‘I guess she’s sick in the head. She wants to give them out to people for Christmas.’
‘Poor limey shmucks.’
‘Don’t talk to me. Don’t talk to me about Christmas. I’ve never seen it any worse than it is around here, the way they torture eac
h other into having a good time.’
The robins shook their heads.
‘That little white guy won’t last a week.’ I looked up and caught the two of them mid-sentence, inclining their little grey heads together. ‘Cover your ears, kiddo!’
‘I bet you three berries, three berries, he won’t last a week. He’s got “Christmas Present” written all over him.’
‘Oh, boy.’
‘Yeah. The lady of the house, the Empress of All the Russias, she keeps a waiting list. A waiting list as long as your wing. She knows people go crazy for these English dogs. Some fat kid with four scooters is gonna be hugging the life out of that white one in no time.’
Imagine the scene. Seven pups are chasing one another round a garden of winter blooms, flowering magnolias and pepper trees with grey berries, the pups peeing and barking and shouting. Mrs Gurdin opens the front door and we shoot through her legs into a house that smells liberally of candlewax. For me, the decor will always be the thing and will always begin with the flooring. Natalie Wood’s family home in Sherman Oaks was a vision of interior decoration in a state of distress, the site of a shotgun wedding between American lightness and Russian morbidity, the tone of the carpet smiling hysterically at the frowning pictures, the optimistic ice-box sending breaths of milky freshness into the curtains, heavy with stale cigarette smoke, yellow brocade, and dire memories of St Petersburg. ‘Nice digs,’ said the mongrel. He looked at me.
‘You must be joking,’ I said. The little farmhouse touches were making me dizzy.
‘What’s wrong with your muzzle, prince of Malta?’
‘The pictures! The wallpaper!’ I padded into the dining room and found a stone cat. The urgent, thrusting ugliness of the place left me panting as I wandered the rooms, avoiding several lifetimes of horror, ornaments in brass, frothing oceans of filigree, and tartan rugs. Tartan! In several of the alcoves, there were little shrines either to Nicholas II or to Natalie Wood, the elder daughter of the house, with portraits, in each case, surrounded by pots of plastic flowers, icons, and votive candles. In Natalie’s shrine – the actress was still only twenty-two – there were a number of plaster cherubs, porcelain eggs, as well as a small crucifix made of ivory, brought years before in one of Muddah’s large trunks from Harbin. A nearly invisible, shy Hawaiian maid called Wanika had the job of keeping the shrines going each day and parts of the night.
The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe Page 2
