The Trouble with Dogs for a Writer

Dogs have never interested me, perhaps because we didn’t have a dog when I was growing up, and because I was afraid of those there were in the neighborhood, even of Alex, the good-natured and kindly golden retriever that belonged to the Kanestrøms and followed the children of the family when it had to but obviously preferred their father, whom I often saw it gazing up at with a devoted and expectant look, tail wagging. The problem was when I encountered it alone, for then it barked at me, and I couldn’t handle those barks, they overruled everything I knew about the dog’s temperament, and I would remain standing on the gravel path in front of the house, unable to walk past it and ring the bell. Dag Lothar often found me in that position, frozen to the spot outside their house while the nice dog stood there barking at me. It didn’t help that, as a human being, I was intellectually and, presumably, also emotionally superior to the dog—that I knew how to read and write, draw and paint, tie my shoelaces, butter my bread, buy sweets at the shop, and take the bus on my own—for the loud, aggressively monotonous sounds it made trumped all that; when I stood there facing it only those sounds mattered. The dog’s barks were like a kind of law, they marked a boundary I couldn’t cross, and it was the dog that enforced it. The kinship with my father’s law was obvious, since the feelings his loud voice awakened in me, all of them connected with an inability to act, that paralysis of fear, were the same as those produced by the dog’s barking. Defying the law wasn’t just unthinkable, it was impossible. That this was so made me a subordinate, which was something I knew even then, that I had the character traits of a subordinate, and more than anything else this has marked the forty years I have lived since then. A subordinate does what he is supposed to do from a fear of reprisal, which in my case has meant fear of anger and loud voices. Although I have sought out arenas where anger and loud voices are considered unsophisticated—first university, later the literary establishment—I have still been behaving as expected of me, for I have always had within me that fear of doglike aggression, and, whenever I have encountered it, in the form of an angry motorist, for example, or an angry girlfriend, every time I have yielded to it and become paralyzed. The only area where I have defied it has been literature. At times I think that is what literature is for, that literature is a place where one can express oneself freely, without fearing the law of the father, the law of the dog. That literature is the arena of the cowardly, the Colosseum of the fearful, and that authors are like pathetic gladiators who freeze up when a dog barks at them but retaliate and assert themselves and their rights as soon as they are alone. “Speak for yourself,” I hear other authors protesting. But I think I am right. Has a single good author ever owned a dog? Hamsun didn’t have a dog. Tor Ulven didn’t have a dog. Did Duras have one? I find that hard to imagine. Ibsen, did he have a dog? No. Faulkner? I believe he did. In that case, perhaps his position in the literary canon ought to be reconsidered? Virginia Woolf also had dogs, but only so-called lapdogs, which are too small and pet-like to cause fear in anyone, so they don’t count. As for me, I had a dog for two years, for the sake of our eldest daughter, who wanted a dog from the age of three, and whom I finally gave in to. The dog was infinitely kind but also infinitely stupid, and I completely lacked the strength and authority to teach it anything at all, so it jumped up on everyone it met, ate all the food it could find, including the food on our dinner table, it pulled on its leash as hard as it could whenever we took it for walks, it dug holes in the lawn, it was never properly house-trained, and it was so submissive and humble that I could hardly look at it without a feeling of irritation or even rage rising in me, the way it often is when one recognizes one’s own least attractive traits in others. It never let me out of its sight, and tagged along after me over to the house I write in, lay down at my feet when I was working, and, if I put on some music, it would sometimes begin to howl, often in the same pitch as the vocals. When we got a new baby in the house, it all became too much; the dog had to be walked several times a day, and it had to come with us every time we left the house—we eventually had a fence erected so that it could stay outside in the garden when we were away, but after a couple of months the neighbor came over and told us, in his circumspect way, that it had barked and wailed every time we had left it alone during all those weeks—so in the end I gave it away to a family that loves dogs and knows how they should be treated. Only afterward did it strike me that in the two years we had it I didn’t write a single line of literary prose, merely articles and essays, and although I’m not blaming the dog, and certainly don’t want to claim that I belong in the cohort of good authors, I still think that in a certain sense owning a dog undermined my literary project, which, since it is so largely autobiographical, somehow dissipated in a way I don’t fully understand but that, presumably, had to do with the dog’s character being so like my own, something I actually knew even before we got it, for the original title of my first autobiographical manuscript, which was later changed to “Argentina” and eventually to “My Struggle,” was “The Dog.”
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