The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog by Andrew O'Hagan

Author:Andrew O'Hagan [O'Hagan, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Fiction, Literary, Biographical, Film & Video, Performing Arts, Contemporary Women, Dogs, Pets
ISBN: 0151013721
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2010-12-06T00:00:00+00:00

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ita Sackville-West once spoke of her admiration for a French tapestry showing Ulysses being met on the doorstep by his dog, Argos. I can see the brown colour of the wanderer’s tunic and the expression in his eyes when the dog recognises him. I felt I was playing both parts. It was the year of a song called ‘A Sleepin’ Bee’: we heard it one night as we walked past a joint in Greenwich Village and the music summoned our sadness and our hopes at the same time. Marilyn wasn’t well that season: to be precise, she had been in the doldrums and a danger to herself, sick with depression. I can’t pretend that I ever truly understand what ailed my owner; it was the human thing, that burden of self-consciousness that weighs down the day. Since finishing with Arthur, I think she felt she might always be alone. She felt she was bound to fail at everything and end up mad like her mother. There were periods of weeks when Marilyn just sat in her bedroom staring at the wall, never washing and never getting dressed. She told her maid one day that the most reliable items in her life were her dressing gown and her socks. It was hard for me to feel I was making a difference: worries just went round in her mind like those records she played after it got dark.

At Dr Kris’s suggestion, she was admitted to the Payne Whitney psychiatric clinic, a total disaster – it looked like her mother’s institution – but I took up sentry duty when she was moved to a private room at the Columbia University Presbyterian Medical Center. I loved being her guardian, but I wasn’t much good. She had been in her bedroom on East 57th Street with the curtains drawn for many weeks previously. She just wept. And during those long days and nights I absorbed her dark mood. It’s not always easy to keep one’s whimsical composure. So when I sat down by the bed at Columbia I was not so much like Argos as Garryowen, that mangy dog in Joyce’s novel who waits for what the sky would drop in the way of drink. I wasn’t exactly sitting there quoting the ranns and ballads of ancient Celtic bards, but I was gloomy, no mistake about it; I was like the old towser growling at the nurses.

Marilyn lay dreaming of her father. She lay in the wellmade bed and she couldn’t help passing her sadness on to me. ‘Give us the paw! Give the paw, doggy! Good old doggy! Give the paw here! Give us the paw!’ That was the Irish nurses all right and non-stop. The sad talk circled in my head for weeks. ‘All those who are interested in the spread of human culture among the lower animals (and their name is legion) should make a point of not missing the really marvellous exhibition of cynanthropy given by the famous old Irish red setter wolf dog formerly known by the SOBRIQUET of Garryowen.

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