dog. As I get older I want to share more, hide less. That’s why I’m willing to invite others to come along on a walk with my pet, in the hope that the activity might act as ‘therapy’ for them, as it has for me. Dogs are good at therapy – so mine will help me tell this story of a love (affair). Or, rather, a tale of many loves.
It’s not easy to embark on anything resembling autobiography, although bookshops are flooded with usually ghosted ‘celebrity’ tomes and there seems to exist an avid readership for the recollections of (say) a footballer or his wife who are not yet 30. Too often that sort of thing is little more than an extension of newspaper or magazine gossip. What is written will be inevitably full of half-truths and blurred ‘fact’ as the celebrity dictates the view he or she wishes to present. Even the finest biography will be hampered by unknowing.
If the biographer feels impelled to smooth over instead of flay (and much flaying goes on these days, both in books and column inches, which I doubt adds to the greater good), how much more will the writer of a personal memoir feel the need to evade? As I was working on this book I was entertained (as well as appalled) to read a prominent newspaper diary item about my work in progress which shrieked ‘Revelation!’ – although not in so few words. The journalist predicted that I would be blowing the lid off relationships within my ex-husband’s family, and so on. Now I ask you, why would I want to do that? I agree with the nineteenth-century historian Thomas Carlyle that in writing biography sympathy must be the motivating force. I have no aptitude for slashing and burning, and am glad to say that I shall go happily to my grave never having learnt the arts of war.
A partial life is a slice of reality – a taste which leaves us wanting more. The multifaceted art of memoir suggests that even a few months within a life, when something extraordinary happened, can offer a story of almost mythic power. In the ‘new’ life writing (a fascinating topic now, especially in the United States) the freedoms of fiction have been introduced into autobiography and obliqueness is allowed. The writer can say, in effect: ‘This is what happened that summer, and afterwards. It’s not the whole story by any means, because much must remain private. Still, I offer this as an act of mediation. If it happened to you, this might help you survive. This might well stand between you and your nightmare.’ That is what I am trying to do in this book – although not without knowledge of the pitfalls.
At the end of 2003 I encountered a successful woman writer who had read in the newspapers about the end of my 35-year-long marriage. ‘I hope you’re going to write a book about it!’ she said with glee. I shook my head. ‘But you must!’ she went on. ‘Tell it like it was! And if you don’t want to write it as a true story, just turn it into a novel. People will know it’s the truth. You’ll do really well.’ When I protested that I hated the idea, she asked, ‘But why shouldn’t you?’
Maybe her counsel made commercial sense, but her avidity drove me further towards reticence. There is enough personal misery swilling around the shelves of bookshops without me adding to the woe, I thought. After all, any celebrity autobiography nowadays is required to take us on a turbulent ride from trouble to trouble – dodgy parents, colon cancer, mental illness, alcohol and drug abuse and the rest. The non-celebrity stories deal in poverty, ill-treatment, sickness and perversion to a degree that would astound even Dickens, who knew about the seamier sides of life. A publishing bandwagon rolls along fuelled by pain and suffering, with the word ‘misery’ going together with ‘memoir’ – like ‘love and marriage’ or ‘horse and carriage’. Happy lives, it seems, don’t make good ‘stories’. But some of the stuff published is not so much gut wrenching as stomach churning.
So this is not a misery memoir. No, this is a happiness memoir, although it deals with unhappiness and recovery. It is just one portion of the narrative of a few years in my life and in the life of one other significant person – the man I married in 1968. Other people close to us have been left out; I do not intend to embarrass either his second wife or my second husband, or indeed to reveal what members of our respective families said, thought or did. Still, since I told that person that I had no intention of writing about the dramatic break-up of my first marriage, things have changed – although my rejection of the notion of ‘telling it like it was’ is the same. For there is always more than one Truth. Because the experience and its aftermath would not go away, I found myself keeping a ‘quarry’ notebook for the novel which will remain unwritten, as well as my essential diaries and notebooks, and realized that my own process of learning from them would go on. In the end the impulse to write became like a geyser inside. The aim must always be to find meaning in what happened, for what else can a writer do? I have to agree with the screenwriter Nora Ephron who was taught by her writer parents unapologetically to view her own life as a resource.
So, yes, a memoir of happiness of sorts, because the good times and the bad are indivisible in my memory and roll on forever in the mind’s eye like a magic lantern show, or (to be more up-to-date) what Joan Didion calls ‘a digital editing system on which … I … show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now … the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines’. Writing about the deaths (within days) of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and her daughter, Quintana, Didion explains (in The Year of Magical Thinking) that the book is her attempt to make sense of the period that followed the deaths, which forced her to reconsider so many of her ideas about life, luck, marriage and grief.
Like Joan Didion I was forced to confront not physical death but a different sort of bereavement: the end of a way of life I had thought (somewhat smugly) would continue into a cosy old age. The shattering of that conviction made me confront a myriad of other certainties and set me upon a strange path through the woods – which led, after a while, to the decision to write this book.
‘No,’ I said to people during that process, ‘I’m not writing an autobiography – I’m writing a book about dogs.’ The oddness of that statement was enough to stop questions. It came to me one day that all the qualities we associate with dogs, from fidelity to a sense of fun, are ones I admire most in human beings. I also know that small dogs display those qualities in a concentrated form – pure devotion distilled to fill the miniature vessel. Of course, anthropomorphism is dangerous. It pleases us to attribute virtues to canine creatures, who have no moral sense, and when the decision was taken to erect a magnificent monument in central London to all animals killed in war, I remember thinking it feeble-minded to use words like ‘loyalty’ and ‘heroism’ and ‘courage’ about creatures who had no knowledge of such abstracts.
There’s a famous Second World War story about an American war dog called Chips who was led ashore by his master, Private John R. Rowell, when his outfit landed at a spot known as Blue Beach, on Sicily’s southern coast. They were advancing on the enemy lines in darkness, when they came under machine-gun fire from a pillbox which had been disguised as a peasant’s hut. The troops flung themselves to the ground, but the dog charged the machine-gun nest, despite the stream of bullets. Private Rowell said, ‘There was an awful lot of noise and the firing stopped. Then I saw one Italian soldier come out of the door with Chips at his throat. I called him off before he could kill the man. Three others followed, holding their hands above their heads.’
I doubt Chips was a titchy Maltese, a Yorkshire terrier or a papillon, although a feisty little Jack Russell might have done some damage, despite his size. Still, the issue is: can you call a dog ‘brave’? Was a contemporary writer accurate to assert that ‘this American war dog single-handed and at great risk to his own life eliminated an enemy machinegun position and saved the lives of many of his comrades’? Even the most passionate dog lover must admit that the soldier who acts does so in full knowledge of the consequences, carrying within his heart and mind images of parents, wife or girlfriend, children – and risking life despite all. But the dog does not. Men and women act from courage; animals merely act.
Is that true? I do not know – and nowadays I don’t really care. In her profound work Animals and Why They Matter the philosopher Mary Midgely points out that ‘a flood of new and fascinating information about animals’ in recent years has educated people who mentally place animal welfare ‘at the end of the queue’. She states her belief in ‘the vast range of sentient life, of the richness and variety found in even the simplest creatures’, and believes it irrelevant