Artist Bill Wegman and authors Lisa Birnbach, Stefan Merrill Block, and Susan Orlean speak candidly about the dogs in their lives and in literature. The reading assignment for this episode was J.R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip, a polarizing dog memoir that sparked a cult following. While Merrill Block praises what he perceives as Ackerley’s restraint from projecting on the dog a human psychology, Birnbach finds the story to be anthropomorphic to an obscene degree. At turns awed and repulsed by Ackerley’s style and focus, the speakers try to make sense of their own canine love stories.
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Stefan Merill Block is the author of The Story of Forgetting and The Storm at the Door. Dogs haven’t featured prominently in his work — yet. He describes his Chachi as a very loving and very needy roommate.
Susan Orlean‘s most recent book is a biography of Rin Tin Tin. She is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she wrote about her own dog.
Artist William Wegman began photographing his dog Man Ray in 1970. He was devastated that he wasn’t with Man Ray when he died. He dreamt about him coming back to life, and still does.
Lisa Birnbach is the author of True Prep. A few years ago, she adopted a dog on a whim from a shelter. She had no affinity for the animal whatsoever. In fact, she was scared of him.
The host of this episode of AT is The New York Review of Books, a fortnightly publication covering literature, culture and current events. Read the latest issue here or browse the classics they publish, including My Dog Tulip.
1. Here are the anal glands. And this is how dogs tend to them.
2. See shelf.
3. Read a review of Ackerley’s memoir, We Think the World of You.
4. Odd character indeed.
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In September 1918, an American soldier named Lee Duncan found “a frantic German shepherd female with a litter of five puppies” in the Meuse Valley of France. Duncan was an animal lover whose immediate instinct was to rescue the forlorn dogs. He managed to do so — in the circumstances, it wasn’t easy — and to get the dogs back to his base. He “knew he couldn’t manage all the dogs,” so he gave away the mother and three of the puppies, and “kept the two prettiest, a male and a female, for himself.” He named the dogs after dolls that were then popular good-luck charms: The female became Nanette and the male Rin Tin Tin .
When I was very young, my grandfather kept a Rin Tin Tin figurine sitting on his desk. I wanted desperately to play with it, and even more desperately I wanted to have a German shepherd dog of my own, a dog just like the star of “The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin”, which debuted on television in 1954. I knew nothing about Rin Tin Tin other than that he was the perfect dog, and that he was a character on television. When by chance I learned that Rin Tin Tin was a real dog, not just a television character—a real dog with a real life that was extraordinary—I was drawn into the story and eventually to the idea of writing this book. After digging through hundreds of pages of archives and files and photographs, I came to understand that this was not just a story about a dog, or even the many different dogs who make up the Rin Tin Tin legacy; this is a story about a beloved icon who has played a role in decades of American popular culture.
So begins Susan Orlean’s sweeping, powerfully moving account of Rin Tin Tin’s journey from orphaned puppy to movie star and international icon. Orlean, a staff writer at The New Yorker who has been hailed as “a national treasure” by The Washington Post, spent nearly ten years researching and reporting her most captivating book to date: the story of a dog who was born in 1918 and never died.