My Dog Tulip

Not much can get me out of the house on my day off anymore. Haven't been out to the movies in ages. The husband works on Mondays, though not very long, nevertheless, by the time he gets home, we mostly eat and watch something we've taped, or a rented DVD. Then we nap. Yes, we have become those people. We saved up and bought ourselves a ridiculous television -- size of a drive-in screen -- and what with that and an excellent sound system, right there in the room with our giant and very comfortable bed, we venture out hardly at all anymore. The very idea of putting on pants, just to seek out entertainment, has become rather foreign to us, specially now it's gotten cold out.

Last night though I got a call from a dear friend, asking if I wouldn't take in a matinee with him this afternoon. I had any number of things I ought to do today, including writing here, as well as writing up my introduction for tomorrow night's reading at the bookstore where I work, -- to say nothing of all the more practical tasks I had neglected all week; like getting tickets for some entertainment or other when our annual November guest is with us, airing the bedding in the guest-room, etc., etc., -- and yet all my friend had to tell me was the name of the movie, and I said, "Yes!" I had plans, you see, to get caught up, and even get something going in advance of the last minute, for once, but I threw all that up today and instead went to the movies, to see My Dog Tulip.

I am not quite a dog-person. I grew up with dogs. I've known and like many dogs. I've know dogs I liked rather better than their owners. There were at least one or two dogs I can honestly say I loved. But I have never owned a dog of my own, nor am I likely to, so long as I am happily married. We are not people, as it turns out, who live with pets. Neither of us has much missed four-legged companionship, at least while we have each other. (We've discussed this. After twenty-some years together, I find, there's very little one hasn't discussed. Should I out-live the husband, I might have a dog, should he out-live me, he might take a cat. All very vague, but no less telling I suppose for that.)

I like a good dog story, just as I like a good cat story, or any other species of story, but only as a good story. I am no more likely to like a book for a dog being in it than I am for a dog being absent. There is a whole literature, the existence of which would seem to have been thought necessary, and profitable, because people will read about dogs. Of such books I will say nothing bad. Come the retail Christmas season, and I will no doubt be glad of having something new in that line to sell. Doesn't mean I have any interest in reading the damned things though. Not the reason I read J. R. Ackerley's book, on which this new animated film is based, certainly, nor should the fact that it is a memoir of Ackerley's dog be a reason to recommend it to the readers of more usual dog books. It is not a more usual dog book. Ackerley, certainly, was not the writer of usual books.

In the first place, Ackerley was not himself a dog owner, until one day he was, by which I mean he was not the kind of Englishman one associates with hounds and hunting, or the sort of tweedy gent that discussed breeds and kennels and pedigree. His own was perhaps undistinguished, but I don't know that he thought much about it, or anyone else's, on four feet or two. Tulip was perhaps the first dog Ackerley owned, I don't remember now, but she was certainly the only dog he loved and respected so much as to write about, and in more than one book, first in the memoir, then in his novel, We Think the World of You, as well as in any number of his published letters and in his posthumously published diaries. His dog Tulip turned out to be the great love of his life. No one, including Ackerley himself, would ever have predicted such a thing.

J. R. Ackerley was a difficult character. He was obviously brilliant, as well as being a quite physically attractive man, and he lived most of his life believing the latter offered him more opportunities for real satisfaction than the former. He wrote, and was a successful magazine editor and producer at the BBC, he knew nearly everyone worth knowing, at least among the most interesting English writers of his time, certainly among the gay ones, and he traveled and fornicated across quite a wide path. His London flat, at one time, saw E. M. Forster dropping by with trade. It was an exciting, and in it's way, rather glamorous existence. In latter life however, Ackerley, himself always something of a loner, despite the wide acquaintance among the best and worst characters of his time, found himself alone. He did not much lament his loneliness. He treated his declining sexual prospects as a simple fact of life, and his romantic and personal disappointments as just so much hard luck, if not inevitable, given his prospects and his temper.

Then he met a man, and through that man, met a dog. He had hopes of a relationship for the man and ended up with the most significant emotional attachment of his life being with the dog. They lived contentedly together for sixteen years.

Ackerley did not think, or write about his dog as others might have done, at least in that time. The writer's curiosity was first peaked by, and then all but wholly absorbed in his dog. He treated her as he might never have done with another human being, very much as an equal and as his primary responsibility; sacrificing not only other friendships when these could not be counted on to make accommodation for Tulip, but also something of his own rather rigid dignity. When he took in the dog, and learned what it was to be loved with complete fidelity, he found himself forced to accept a new and necessary modesty. Can't be to sniffy when there's dog doo to be seen to on the stair, or piss to be scrubbed out of the carpet. It is Tulip's love that teaches the writer to love, and Ackerley's expresses this deep emotion not by sentimentalizing his dog, but by assuming, with an unexpected and charming innocence, that his dog, if no other, is simply fascinating. Amazingly, he communicates his fascination to his reader, all the while refusing to make of Tulip anything other than a real dog. That is what makes Ackerley's perhaps the best book about a dog, rather than the best dog book, ever.

And now, a couple of very clever filmmakers have produced a brilliantly animated film of Ackerley's book. While being absolutely true to the writer's voice, and to the man and his dog, what Paul & Sandra Fierlinger have done is to use the unique properties of animation to free the narration from the restrictions of fact. When Ackerley describes a scene, and employs a metaphor, or makes a joke, the filmmakers can take any part of that and draw out of it some new comment, some extension of the thought, so that, for example, where the memoirist suggests the ladylike qualities of his pet as she pisses, the Fierlingers can stand her up on her hind-legs, and put her in a frock, and yet show her still about her business, without losing the authenticity of either the observation or the dog. There is a whimsicality to this that relieves what might otherwise have been an unpleasantly graphic, and even distasteful representation of what is almost never less than affectionate on the page. It is a brilliant choice. The movie is full of these moments.

My friend intends to offer Ackerley's book as his next selection, for December, for either one or both of the book clubs he hosts. I've encouraged him to do so. The excellent new movie might induce some members in either club, who have already expressed themselves otherwise reluctant to read another "dog book," to recognize that this book, and this new film, are not really anything like. My Dog Tulip, the book and the film, are neither of them anything but a love story, wonderfully told, a love story, curiously enough, that happens to be between a gay man and an Alsatian bitch named Tulip.

What's not interesting in that?