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

by Andrew O'Hagan

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Trilling said. ‘The dog that may embody the finer feelings. I believe Maximilian was the long-lived Tosca’s successor. Edel wrote that Maximilian appeared to have some of James’s authority.’ Lionel looked around as if it all came naturally. ‘Is Leon here?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Wilson said. Then he paused. ‘How are the Groves?’

  ‘Of Academe? At the same time vexing and propitious. We are running a course.’

  ‘Great books?’

  ‘That’s right. We aim to rehearse the old lost belief in the virtue and power of rationality. We count on order, decorum, and good sense to see us through.’ Everyone chuckled except Marilyn.

  ‘And you will add Freud, just to keep in touch with human frailty?’

  ‘Naturally: Civilisation and Its Discontents.’

  ‘Lucky them. Lucky students. I see all the little gods will be present and correct.’

  ‘Yes, Edmund. We dare not expect, in the first term at any rate, to bring ourselves to Arnold’s “fullness of spiritual perfection”, but we will do our best with the small talents at our disposal.’ Wilson swayed. He looked quickly at Mr Kazin.

  ‘It won’t wash, Alfie!’ he said.

  ‘Edmund.’ The old man turned back to Professor Trilling and narrowed his eyes.

  ‘Is the course in any sense American?’

  ‘In every sense.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. In every sense American. It is the spirit that moves us, Edmund. We are Americans teaching young Americans how to read.’

  Irving Howe shook his head.

  ‘No, Irving. They won’t be marching,’ said Trilling. Alfred Kazin shook his head. Trilling turned to him. ‘No, Alfie. They won’t be looking for something to get angry about. They will attempt to understand the place of moral authority in modern literature. They shall learn how to read and if they succeed at that then they will learn how to live their lives. We intend to look at Diderot.’

  Wilson took another slug from his glass. ‘It’s not American, Lionel. It’s English. It’s French. It’s German. And it’s more English than anything.’ Mr Howe took a step back, behind the sofa, as if to distance himself from anything that sounded like patriotism.

  As they proceeded to a gentle dispute – gentle on the surface, raging underneath – my ears twitched and I could hear all the voices at the party. The sound was that of old Europe boiled down to its modern sap, the sons and daughters of immigrants claiming America’s newness for themselves. Carson was Lula Carson Smith; Marilyn was Norma Jeane Baker; Mr Trilling was Lionel Mordecai, just as our old friend Lee Strasberg was Israel Strassberg. They were like children in the little garden of America, alert to something new in themselves and excited to be in an environment that might readily shape itself in accordance with their wishes, each of them investing all the while in a quantity of forgetting. Marilyn looked over her glass and felt they were all like the people in Arthur’s plays, only kinder, better suited to go places, with greater spirit. She was finally glad that part of her life was over. Yet she supposed she might always be on the lookout for what made couples work and what made couples fail. Tonight she had a fresh and simple thought: the couples who survive as couples tend not to get caught up in provoking each other with negative remarks. The truth of it was quite moving. I’ve seen some people, not far into their marriages, produce unhelpful statements, not to say hateful ones, indelible ones, on an industrial scale. Not the Trillings, though. Their quarrels were silent. Jamesian. They saved their hateful statements for other people, and even those would be wrapped in a doily made of the finest lace and scented with a vapour of good manners. But it didn’t always work. As usual, Diana was first to break.

  ‘France? England? That’s nice, coming from the author of Axel’s Castle. You know, Edmund. I think all that work you’ve been doing on American battles has gone to your head. Are you losing your mind? Or is it drink?’ This was Diana at her least controlled and Lionel sought to silence her with a single word and a bow of his head.

  ‘Diana,’ he said.

  ‘Look, Lionel,’ said Wilson. ‘I’m sure Mrs Trilling has an argument. She usually does. She’s not wrong, by the way. I’ve had enough whisky to refloat the Confederate vessels sunk at Gwynn’s Island.’ Wilson suddenly seemed unsteady on his feet and he stepped on my tail. I squeaked but nobody noticed. ‘Work, work,’ he added. ‘It kills the appetite for social display.’

  ‘C-come now, Edmund,’ said Kazin. (The old habits were beginning to show.) Wilson looked at him with jowly contempt and the pity he reserved for immigrants who set too much stock by American ideals and promises. There was a touch of old Brooklyn, of Brownsville, in Mr Kazin’s attitudes, Wilson thought, just as there was an element of City College in his determination always to be ready with the correct answer. Wilson drained the glass and the ice clinked his teeth. Professor Trilling had travelled back to himself, to the place where other people’s bad behaviour merely confirmed his own certainty about how he himself must behave. Nevertheless, he wondered if he had kept Mr Kazin out of Columbia for good reasons, or just because he thought one Jew was enough.

  ‘I’m not making myself understood,’ said Wilson. ‘I am a ghost sometimes to my own opinions. I merely meant to say how unfortunate I find it that British values enjoy such automatic genuflection.’

  ‘Perhaps at la plage des intellectuels, they are. Perhaps in Wellfleet,’ said Irving Howe. ‘There’s Stephen Spender over there. He’s constantly thinking of Englishmen who were truly great.’

  ‘Stephen, yes,’ said Wilson. ‘Like so many Englishmen, he doesn’t know where he is going but he always knows the quickest way to get there.’ Lionel looked at Diana and pointed to his watch. Marilyn was thinking she must have bored the people, but she felt a nice cool breeze coming from the window. ‘I’m afraid the British are the blind leaders of the blind,’ Wilson said with his eyes almost closed, ‘and quite despicable for that. All those second-rate painters, academics, with their high, thin voices. Despicable.’

  Wilson leaned down at this point and placed his empty glass on the floor. He did it very slowly as the people around him were dispersing. ‘Don’t mind me, I’m just a citizen of falsehood,’ I said. He ignored me as he heaved his weight onto his back foot and grappled with the glass. It wasn’t too late, I said to myself, there’s still time, and then I jigged forward and made an effort to bite the fingers of his trailing hand. ‘OWWW!’ he said, most eloquently, ‘the buggering hound is at me!’

  ‘Take that,’ I said. ‘The patriotic gore. I’ll show you, vile man! I’ll show you to undersnizzle my people.’

  ‘Ow, ow,’ he said. ‘The vicious cur.’ He was inspecting his pink sausage fingers. He went quiet and his eyes were closed again. ‘Ow. The ineluctable modality of the tactile,’ he said.

  ‘Maf! I don’t know what to say,’ said Marilyn, lifting me up and looking to her hosts. ‘He’s usually so, um, reliable and not at all like this.’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about it,’ said Mrs Trilling at the door. ‘It was a pleasure to meet you. Your little dog has the most exquisite critical taste. We must find a place for him on the faculty.’

  When we got to 444 that night it was obvious from the behaviour of my owner that I was in deep disgrace. I tried to nudge her, make up to her, but she was listless with thoughts, regrets, and I’m sure she was busy deciding to take me with her less often in future. She sat down on a brass vanity stool and peeled off each of her false eyelashes in turn. Lena the housekeeper was ironing clothes and laying them in two giant suitcases. ‘Lena, would you be a dream and take Maf down to the park?’ said Marilyn. ‘He’s been very bad. I’m sick of him.’ Marilyn bit her lip and picked up a grey notebook she often took with her when she was working with Mr Strasberg. ‘He’s been . . . wilfully insubordinate,’ she said.

  ‘Really, Miss Monroe?’

  ‘Yes. He bit two people at a party this evening. Two big shots.’

  ‘Naughty Maf!’r />
  Marilyn brushed out her hair, before pausing and resting the brush on her lap. I looked at her and realised this was our love story, too. I guessed I would never feel so close to anybody in my life. Not just because of the feeling she gave me, but the other things. I believe she taught me everything about what it took to have empathy. I believe she was like Keats in that way: her small efforts spoke of beauty and truth, in ways that made her eternal. Watching her, listening to her thoughts, I was in love. She formed everything about me, including my sense of the novel. Even in anger, she looked at me and I understood the storyteller’s vocation. ‘A novel must be what only a novel can be – it must dream, it must open the mind.’ She took The Brothers Karamazov out of her bag and examined the back cover, sticking out her bottom lip and blowing upwards like a child to clear the hair from her eyes. It was weird to think all those people had opinions about Arthur.

  A cool breeze was coming off the river. I felt bad, not ashamed, just egotistical and unhelpful, the kind of dog you wouldn’t want to share your life with, like one of those mutts in Conan Doyle. Lena tied a scarf around her head and from the back she looked like Marilyn: I wondered what her own domestic life was like, her husband at home and her children sleeping by now, the house very clean I supposed. Her family thought her work was so glamorous, the sort of work you could talk about to people who liked news. The Greensboro Bridge lights were strung like lights on a Christmas tree. God, I felt misunderstood. Picked-on. Some animals are respected for their artistic conscience, like Congo, the talented chimp, who painted pictures admired by the likes of Miró and Picasso.*

  A dachshund came sniffing round the bench as his owner smoked a cigarette, the dog more jowly and misanthropic than Edmund Wilson. Then another came, a Dobermann as handsome as any dog in Landseer. ‘They never know who they are or what they want.’

  ‘Who’s that, skipper?’ said the Dobermann, giving me the eyes of friendship.

  ‘Them,’ said the dachshund. ‘People.’

  ‘Ah, to hell with that,’ said my friend. ‘I’ve had three dinners today and I’m not complaining. Nice night out here. Let people own their troubles. Have a heart. What’s with the sad face, buddy?’

  ‘I got on the wrong side of the old girl,’ I said. ‘I took a chunk out of a bore at a party. Two bores. What the hell? They were asking for it. Anyhow, she bawled me out. Then in the car home she starts going on about how she misses her last dog, Hugo. The ex-husband took my predecessor to live in Connecticut.’

  ‘That’s too bad,’ said the Dobermann. ‘To get hit with the old dog routine. I mean, that’s tough.’

  ‘I knew the old dog,’ said the dachshund with a heavy expression. ‘Hugo. Boring as a week in Amagansett. Bit of a pedagogue. Loved Ibsen.’

  ‘Oh, can it, Marty,’ said my friend. ‘Can’t you see our friend’s suffering over here. He’s caught a dose of the old self-pity, if I’m not mistaken.’

  ‘Just a bit,’ I said. ‘My owner’s been in hospital. She’s terrific, though. Smart as buttons.’

  ‘Ah, self-pity. The great romance.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ said the jowly dachshund.

  ‘Love your accent,’ said the Dobermann, with a little lick at my ear and a sweet harrumph. ‘Just remember you’re in good company. Biting, I mean. Don’t do it too much or it’ll start affecting the dinners. There’s always consequences if you bite. Remember Cardinal Wolsey’s dog called Urian? He bit the hand of Pope Clement VII. He caused the Reformation. That’s what my boss says, anyhow.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Absolutely. Hey, have you ever met the Queen of England?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘But the owner has. She’s got a million corgis or something. I have to say: I’m sad tonight. She won’t forget it easily. She gets hurt. What do you do with a person like that?’

  ‘Ride it out, buddy. We know people love their dogs even when they try not to.’

  ‘Learn to loathe them,’ said the jowly dachshund, pacing before the fence. ‘Life is better in the doghouse. They’re not our friends. Don’t fall for any of that “man’s best friend” baloney.’

  ‘Ahh, shurrup,’ said my friend. He turned to me. ‘Forgive him. He lives with a guy who can’t stop putting up buildings. The guy’s got an edifice complex. The owner worries a lot, that’s the deal.’

  ‘I’m sure it’ll pass,’ I said. ‘But tonight I’m Citron, the dog on trial in Les Plaideurs. Did you ever get Racine?’

  ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘My owner’s a priest over at Our Lady of Peace. Nice guy. Cares a lot for detective stories. Private eyes, that kind of thing. I don’t think Racine would do it for him.’

  A little street cat paused above the sandbox. ‘The Puppiad,’ she said. Her tongue seemed gymnastic as she spoke her Alexandrines, and she licked her face and twitched her ears.

  * Incidentally, Congo did not return the compliment. The chimp considered himself a social realist and accused Miró of fashioning ‘subconscious Catalan doodles’. In May 1960, I saw Congo on television with Desmond Morris. The naturalist was busy talking about abstract impressionism when Congo, dabbing the canvas in a rhythmical way, mumbled that the picture was in fact a portrait of his late mother.

  The dog steals a capon and finds himself in court, Before the judge Dandin, I’m happy to report.

  So punctiliously he pontificated,

  That the Norman mob were instantly elated.

  The puppies were brought in to plead their father’s case, But who will beg for you, young Maf, in your disgrace? You need an advocate, why not Swifty Lazar?

  To get you out of jail, and tell you who you are.

  Lena picked me up and kissed me on the head. ‘Okay, Maf Honey. Bedtime.’

  ‘Goodnight fellas,’ I said over her shoulder. The dogs nodded and sniffed the ground around the bench, the river shining at their backs and a horn sounding over the East River.

  12

  W

  ilshire Boulevard. In the parking lot of a Jack-in-theBox chicken joint, a young marketing guy was interviewing people about their buying habits. ‘We was middle class before we had a car,’ said a bald Phil Silvers-type with chickeny fingers. The Gray Line tour had pulled up behind the man and you could hardly hear him for the grunting of the bus.

  ‘What – straight purchase?’ asked the guy with the clipboard.

  ‘I don’t know. All I can tell you is my family got cars and didn’t think anything about it. Nice cars. My folks got a small house and a big car on the same day.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Pasadena. My father worked for the US Termite Control Corporation.’

  ‘They bought a car and a house?’

  ‘Yes, sir. My mom and pop took me and my sisters down to Knott’s Berry Farm and Ghost Town to celebrate the new house and the new car. You know, down in Buena Park? We had a chicken dinner then, too.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Yes, sir. We did. And we stayed in a motel down that way to celebrate.’

  ‘You celebrated the new house by staying in a motel?’

  ‘Indeed we did, sir. My father’d been in the army. South Pacific. He came back to California and he said he wanted a house and a car and a washing machine, and that’s what we got. So, we had a celebration the night everything came through. We took the car and went to a motel with a swimming pool.’

  You can’t drive on Wilshire without thinking of the Roman Empire. Maybe just in the summer, when a layer of warped heat hovers over the road, the straight road that goes from civilisation to the sea. I thought of grapes. I thought of olives. I thought of tough guys in sandals. There was also a sense that the humid day might give way at any moment to annihilation, not Gaulish arrows but Russian missiles, raining down on the scene of enjoyment from a perfect blue sky. The palm trees shivered in the midday sun. Marilyn had me on her lap in the back of this long black car and we were cheerful, ready for chicken in a bun. ‘The last thing like this I’m going to eat, okay buddy?’

&nb
sp; ‘You look great,’ I said. She did, she looked great, ready for sunshine and melody.

  ‘I’ve got a picture to make. I’m losing all that New York puppy fat, okay puppy?’

  On the way to Doheny Drive that day, she asked Rudy, her driver from the Carey Limousine Company, to stop at Mullen & Bluett so that she could buy some new bedclothes. ‘I guess it’s sad to be buying sheets just for yourself,’ she said. ‘But that’s the way it is, Rudy. That’s the way it is.’ On the door of the apartment the nameplate said ‘Marjorie Stengel’, which was actually the name of Montgomery Clift’s secretary. She had to keep the world back. She never had a fan in LA to compare with someone like Charlie in New York, no one clever and full of the future like him. Some of her possessions were in boxes, otherwise the Doheny apartment was an empty space with a bed and a few books. On an upturned orange crate she laid a pile of scripts. The New York sojourn had awakened her once again to her potential, which is a happy place to land when things have been rough. That’s what she thought. Marilyn ate bok choi, drank water, and looked after her skin.

  Her beautician worked out of two rooms on Sunset Boulevard. She was Madame Rupa, a woman who found it hard to believe an animal who lived in Hollywood was not a veteran of showbusiness. ‘Can you make a dance or do a song for me?’ said Madame Rupa.

  ‘He’s very silent,’ said Marilyn.

  ‘No talent?’

  ‘I guess he’s thoughtful.’

  ‘That’s no good! We want dancing. Acting! Can he cry like Shirley MacLaine or speak a few words like the horse on television?’ There was music playing in the room, a song called ‘Ae Mere Pyare Watan’, a patriotic song from a film called Kabuliwala. ‘A beautiful song about how we miss our homeland when we are far away,’ said Madame Rupa, mixing a special mask for Marilyn out of Bayer aspirin. She would crush the pills in an old, traditional-looking mortar, adding water until the mixture was creamy. ‘Bayer Works Wonders!’ said Madame Rupa.

  ‘Gee,’ said Marilyn. ‘We know a few face-aches who could use this, don’t we Maf Honey?’