The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe

by Andrew O'Hagan

  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’.

  I was glad to be back on Sutton Place. ‘You is bad and bad enough!’ said Vincent the doorman as he walked me around the streets one nearly spring-like day. ‘My, how you’ve grown. You is one fat li’l puppy.’ Vince seemed to know all the old ladies in the area, not just remembering their names – Miss Olsen, Mrs Taymor – but remembering their dogs’ names as well, all those Luckys, Butches, and Maximilian Schoenberg the Thirds. ‘And how’s your Claudius today,’ he would stop and ask. ‘Ripe as a week-old nectarine, I’d say. Lively as a sack of polecats, I’d say.’

  ‘Why do you talk like that?’ I said. ‘Why do you talk like some wide-eyed fictional black man, some daddy of the cotton fields?’

  ‘Ah, Maf Honey. You is sunny today.’

  ‘Oh, stop it. Can you hear me? Have you ever listened to your voice, Vince?’

  ‘Sunny side up and no mistake!’

  Vince once said something that Grace Higgens used to say upstairs at Charleston and Mrs Duff on the farm in Scotland used to say it, too. He said, ‘Don’t ask me. I’m just the dogsbody.’ That kind of talk made me growl with confusion. In those years your politics was the story of how you defined the individual against the power of the state. The whole thing became slightly hysterical, as things did with people, at a book party I attended with Marilyn later that day. The common obsession back then was totalitarianism, and for some reason – I don’t know, my private education, the life and opinions of your average dog – I always located the struggle between the individual and the state in the kitchens and on the backstairs, in the lobbies, houses, and apartments where we lived. Also on the streets where we walked. But the
workers didn’t always agree. They didn’t talk as if they agreed. As Trotsky once said of some haphazard victims, they had a tendency to increase the term of their own captivity.

  Yet Vincent had a full understanding of everyday comedy. He worshipped the writings and cartoons of James Thurber, a gentleman from the New Yorker who managed to understand dogs (and people) a lot better than most dogs (and most people). Thurber had gone so far into Vincent’s mind that the doorman had Thurber-like thoughts, seeing people as alarming creatures and dogs as questing beasts. After we came back from our walk we still had to wait an hour for Marilyn to come down to the lobby. Marilyn was late for everything: it was her creed, her prerogative, her style, and her revenge.* Vince was a connoisseur of other people’s lateness. He gave me a dish of water and then sat in his big chair to look at a library book, a story called ‘Extinct Animals of Bermuda’.

  There was some kind of demonstration on the Upper East Side, so the car had to go fifteen blocks downtown, cut across, and climb back up in the direction of the Plaza Hotel. It should have been a simple journey, but no journeys are ever simple. Anyway it was a lovely evening, the sort of fresh April evening when men of thirty suddenly realise they should go and buy their girlfriend a ring. At one point we got stuck in traffic trying to join Fifth Avenue and Marilyn suddenly asked the driver to stop. She fished in her pocketbook for a quarter, stepped out of the car – my owner in chiffon dress and mink – and asked the first man she saw to do her a favour. The man took his hat off when she stepped up to him. The driver lowered the window. The man was in a state of what they call disbelief. ‘Holy smoke,’ he was saying. ‘Are you who I think you are?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Marilyn. ‘Are you?’

  ‘Holy smoke,’ he said again. And then he said, ‘I’m William Ebert. I don’t know why I’m telling you that.’

  ‘Would you be a pal?’ she said. ‘Would you do something for me? I need to get back into this car.’ She held out the quarter and he took it right away. ‘Could you call the Plaza Hotel? The Oak Room. And just say Marilyn is going to be late but is on the way. We’re trying to hurry. The message is for Carson McCullers. Could you do that for me?’

  ‘Sure,’ said the guy. ‘Holy smoke. Give me that name again.’ He laid down his briefcase, took a pen from his top pocket and wrote it down, then he handed the pen and the piece of paper to Marilyn.

  ‘Could you write “To Jenny”?’

  ‘Is she your sweetheart?’

  ‘I want her to be,’ he said. ‘Her name’s Jennifer.’ Marilyn pulled the front of her coat around her after she’d written her name, as she handed back the pen and paper. People began to stop and point.

  ‘She’s a lucky girl,’ said Marilyn, stepping back to the car and blowing him one of her kisses. The car horns were beeping. The man shouted back at her as she stepped in beside me.

  ‘The Oak Room, right?’

  ‘Thank you, William,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll do it. I’ll do it right now,’ he said.

  By the New York Public Library I saw two butterflies going round the head of a stone lion. They landed on the bridge of his nose before dancing above the steps and stopping on a small tree by the roadside. The female was brown and the male was blue, shy of his orange chevrons. I put my face up to the open window and listened to them. The evening was moving into amorous dusk, but I could see the butterflies clearly and they spoke in the manner of Nabokov. ‘Translucent friend, I am sea-sick with longing. I admire your wings the colour of sapphire and your tiny breath, the ballet of your movements in the pensive air.’

  ‘Come,’ said the other. ‘Let’s tom-peep along the hedges.’

  ‘We will find an arbour in flame-flower.’

  ‘Tomorrow. Yes.’

  ‘There will be poplars, apples . . .’

  ‘A suburban Sunday.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There are small houses. Moist gardens.’

  ‘Let us go there.’

  They lifted off and the blue one caught my eye as they passed right over my head. ‘Take care of her, mon brave,’ he said.

  ‘I will,’ I said. ‘I’ll try.’

  And with that the butterflies looped over the taxi cabs to disappear against the silver bulk of the buildings. So far so good, the Lupine Blues lost in the sky above Manhattan.

  The last bit of the journey was boring. Marilyn looked briefly at her Russian novel, put it down on the seat between us and took out her mirror, fixing her lipstick and smoothing a dot of cream into the skin around her preoccupeyes, as I used to call her blue, worried eyes. So I used my time in the traffic to think of my Top Ten Dogs of All Time. The list changes from week to week according to which trait is uppermost in my mind – was loyalty the virtue of the week, or was it clever ness, bravery, athletic ability, or my old favourite, pure goodness?

  * I never understood why people made such a fuss about her lateness. When Gladys Deacon, the future duchess of Marlborough, was an hour and a half late in coming to an appointment with the playwright Jean Giraudoux, he felt that this was ‘the minimum time to wait for someone of her beauty’.

  greyfriars bobby

  A Skye terrier from Edinburgh. His owner was a nightwatchman and when something happened to him – okay, he died – Bobby visited his grave at Greyfriars Church for fourteen years. Bobby was a kind of saint, really. And sainthood is the kind of fame you want.

  lassie

  A brilliant collie. ‘Greenall Bridge is in the country of Yorkshire, and of all places in the world it is here that the dog is really king.’ That was Eric Knight, the author who first found Lassie in his head. She was then found by the people at MGM. Pal was the star who acted her. Pal made the character real and the role made Pal real. That is what happens in great acting. Sometimes Lassie got confused about who she was. No wonder, as she was always played by male dogs.

  jo-fi

  A world-inflecting chow from Paris. Managed to put Freud’s patients at their ease with Freud, while also manag ing to put Freud at his ease with Freud, a very much harder job.

  snoopy

  A very wise beagle. A novelist at heart. One of those that puts the create part into creature – a wonderful reader of Tolstoy. Apparently, he didn’t say much for the first two years of his life, which makes him very human.

  laika

  A brave Russian soul. Laika was a stray on the streets of Moscow, a stray as we all are, and was rocketed into space on Sputnik 2 in November 1957. She never came back, but she learned what her owners never could. Her deathcapsule orbited the world 2,570 times before it burned up on re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. I believe her memoirs would constitute a masterpiece to rival David Copperfield.

  flush

  London spaniels seldom had the sense to bite Robert Browning. This one did, and kept Virginia Woolf sane during an especially truculent season of the mind. Flush shows us at once how to live on several planes of experience, which is a gift to art and a gift to good sense.

  lady

  An American cocker spaniel, the girl of my dreams. She appears in a wonderful Marxist fantasy from Disney called Lady and the Tramp. She was typecast as the love object, but I always saw beyond that, appreciating the rare gifts of this most perfect canine being. If only she had met me things would be different.

  balto

  A Siberian husky. He took exquisite revenge on the notion that stupidity comes with servitude – and, in so doing, he ridiculed the instinct of people to rank themselves above other people, and other animals – by tramping a long way to save some human beings from diphtheria. His statue stands in Central Park to remind passing strangers that their dogs are probably kinder than they are. Some say that another dog, Togo, did most of the leg-work and that Balto just got all the glory. I choose to believe what I want to believe, which is a dog’s prerogative.

  pelléas

  A complete riot of a dog – a bulldog – owned by Maurice Maeterlinck – a riot of a Belgian. His master was a hero of
the simpler magics, making beauty and truth from a basic belief in the possibility of consciousness. Pelléas was the inspir ation for a great deal of tender, unforgettable prose on the part of the old man, who understood the wisdom of California. Pelléas is the great and ceaseless muse, with a powerful forehead like that of Socrates or Verlaine. ‘His intelligent eyes opened to look upon the world,’ wrote Maeterlinck, ‘to love mankind, then closed again on the cruel secrets of death.’

  bisou

  A cairn terrier who lived in Montmartre, Bisou watched the birth of modern painting. She was painted by Renoir one sunny day while playing with a model wearing a yellow hat adorned with fresh poppies. The people around Bisou imagined she was a silent witness, if any witness at all: in fact she was the most absorbent creature of her age, and, it is reported, a speaker to rival Oscar Wilde.

  11

  I

  n the Oak Room at the Plaza, the waiters tried to conceal their love of my owner and their loathing of me, which for a moment shook my faith in the working man. But after a while they saw the light and fed me a little plate of morsels, placing it next to me on the banquette. The girls were drinking Dom Pérignon. It was merely a private drink, a little relaxer, before they set off together for a book party they’d agreed to attend uptown. ‘Pre-drinks drinks,’ is what Marilyn called them.

  ‘Mercy, if he ain’t the Colt . 45 of Monroeville, Alabama,’ said Miss McCullers, ‘larkin’ aroun’ Europe with them nice ladies and their rich husbands. Babe Paley and Gloria Vanderbilt and Carol Marcus and y’all. He’s playing y’all like a bullfrog plays the summer pond. You should watch it. You should watch his tongue if you’re fixin’ to see the winter months.’

  ‘Oh, we know about Truman’s tongue,’ said Marilyn into her glass. ‘He’s wicked.’

  ‘Worse than that. He’d drown his own mother for ten minutes with a princess. Not even a princess, a lousy duchess. A lady-in-waiting. Gawd knows, the darn cousin of a ladyin-waiting.’