I must stop and fondle my dogs

Happy International Dog Day

Aug 26, 2024

A couple of weeks ago, I marked International Cat Day with a collection of letters honouring our impossibly nonchalant friends. Well, believe it or not, it’s already International Dog Day, so it’s time to switch sides and celebrate the simpler of the two species—a bunch of (mostly) loveable idiots who couldn’t plot if they wanted to, lack memory spans powerful enough to hold a grudge, and love us with a loyalty that knows no bounds. Enjoy, and tread carefully if you’ve recently lost one of these magnificent beasts.

(Please note, some of these letters can be found, in full, in the pawsome book, Letters of Note: Dogs.)

Minor tragedy stalked. I don’t know whether I told you. My setter pup, left alone one night, made confetti of about half of my book [Of Mice and Men]. Two months work to do over again. It sets me back. There was no other draft. I was pretty mad but the poor little fellow may have been acting critically. I didn’t want to ruin a good dog for a ms. I’m not sure it is good at all. He only got an ordinary spanking with his punishment flyswatter. But there’s the work to do over from the start.

John Steinbeck
Letter to his editor, Elizabeth Otis
27th May 1936

—A Life in Letters, edited by Elaine Steinbeck

My bulldogs are adorable, with faces like toads that have been sat on.

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette
Letter to Jeanne Muhlfeld
June 1902

—Letters to Colette, edited by Robert Phelps

You asked about Minnie’s name, sex, breed, and phone number. She doesn’t answer the phone. She is a dachshund and can’t reach it, but she wouldn’t answer it even if she could, as she has no interest in outside calls. I did have a dachshund once, a male, who was interested in the telephone, and who got a great many calls, but Fred was an exceptional dog (his name was Fred) and I can’t think of anything offhand that he wasn’t interested in. The telephone was only one of a thousand things. He loved life—that is, he loved life if by “life” you mean “trouble,” and of course the phone is almost synonymous with trouble. Minnie loves life, too, but her idea of life is a warm bed, preferably with an electric pad, and a friend in bed with her, and plenty of shut-eye, night and days.

E. B. White
Letter to the ASPCA
12th April 1951

—Letters of E. B. White, edited by Martha White

Georgia O’Keeffe with Chow, 1975 (Photo by Juan Hamilton, via Georgia O'Keeffe Museum)

When the two weeks were up, there was a very very slight movement in the tail almost nothing. So again I called the vet. As he looked the dog over, he said that it would be hard for the dog to drag those legs always. You were there. We talked a little and decided to put him to sleep and call it his end. He had had a good life. He looked so beautiful as he sat there with us. When I think of it now I even get an odd feeling in my stomach. He was given a shot and lay quietly down. He was put in the back of the car.
It was all that a man could do to lift him in.
We drove out into the White Hills—dug a hole under a small sized cedar bush and put my beautiful dog into it and covered him with earth and many rocks. I like to think that probably he goes running and leaping through the White Hills alone in the night.

Georgia O’Keeffe
Letter to Todd Webb
20th November 1981

—Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona

Last week a friend of mine in the embassy called Paul Scott Rankin went on leave. He left behind him for me, to take care of, his enormous brown bulldog called Winston. I said I didn't mind; he looked all right. But Winston is no ordinary old dog. He is stupid and lecherous and cantankerous and all the time he grunts and snorts and slobbers. Paul said, let him sleep in your bedroom and he will be all right. He snorts all of the time, but you will find that pleasant and soporific. So the first night Winston slept in my bedroom. He snored and grunted and made a great noise all night, and I slept very little.
In the morning I took him into the embassy and let him sit in my office. But he farted continuously and with great gusto. Once he did it whilst I was dictating to the secretary, and I had to turn him out on the spot so that she wouldn't think it was me. But he scratched on the door and I had to let him in again and open all the windows. He continued to fart regularly and contentedly for the rest of the day, and I was very cold with the windows open. Once when I went out of the room to see someone, I came back to find him sitting on top of my desk amidst piles of secret papers and red boxes which had G.R. in gold on their lids. I threw him off and he farted again.

Roald Dahl
Letter to his mother
1944

—Love from Boy: Roald Dahl's Letters to his Mother, edited by Donald Sturrock

We also have a poodle puppy. We called him Marx to remind us that we had never read Marx and now we have read a little and taken so strong a personal dislike to the man that we can’t look the dog in the face when we speak to him.

Eileen Orwell
Letter to Norah Myles
1st January 1938

—George Orwell: A Life in Letters, edited by Peter Davison

Virginia Woolf with her dog, Pinka, in 1939 (Photo by Gisele Freund/Photo Researchers History/Getty Images)

I write surrounded by barking spaniels—Leonard and the old lady next door are forever lifting them up to judge their sex and points. Why is decency in complete abeyance with dogs?

Virginia Woolf
Letter to Molly MacCarty
8th June 1930

—Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol.4, edited by Joanne Trautmann & Nigel Nicolson

I thought the other day that a large rat had managed to insert itself into the plaster above my bedroom and workroom. I was, however, surprised that it apparently slept at night and worked in the day, causing its greatest din around high noon.
However yesterday, much to my surprise, I deduced from the sounds it emitted that it was a dog, or rather several dogs, and evidently training for a race, for they ran round and round the tin roof. Now I don’t know how these greyhounds climbed up the wall but I know dog racing is against the law of California—so I thought you’d like to know. Beneath the arena where these races occur an old and harassed literary man is gradually going mad.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Letter to his landlady
29th July 1940

—A Life in Letters, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli

I love gazing into things. Can you imagine with me how glorious it is, for example, to see into a dog, in passing into him, to ease oneself into the dog exactly at his center, the place out of which he exists as a dog, that place in him where God would, so to speak, have sat down for a moment when the dog was complete, in order to watch him at his first predicaments and notions and let him know with a nod that he was good, that he lacked nothing, that no better dog could be made. For a while one can endure being in the middle of the dog, but one has to be sure to jump out in time, before the world closes in around him completely, otherwise one would remain the dog within the dog and be lost to everything else.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Letter to Magda von Hattingberg
1917

—Rilke and Benvenuta: An Intimate Correspondence, edited by Magda von Hattingberg

Socks and Buddy Clinton at the White House, 1998 (Photo via Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)

What does it feel like to be the President’s dog? It must feel neat. Did you ever get petted by the Spice Girls? Do you like haveing a cat live with you? I have a dog and a hamster I want a cat but my Dad dons’t. What’s your favorite person that lives with you? What’s your favorite food? I onece ate dog food. I didn’t like it. How is Socks doing? Tell Socks I said Hi. Buddy will you send me a picture of you it would make me very happy and can you send me a picture of Socks if it’s OK with you?

A young girl named Alice
Letter to Buddy Clinton
1999

—Dear Socks, Dear Buddy: Kids' Letters to the First Pets, edited by Hillary Rodham Clinton

I hope to God that when you hit my dog you had for a moment the sick, dead feeling in the throat and down to the stomach that we have known ever since. And that you feel it whenever you think about speeding down a winding country road again. Because the next time some eight-year-old boy might be wobbling along on his first bicycle. Or a very little one might wander out past the gate and into the road in the moment it takes his father to bend down to pull a weed out of the driveway, the way my puppy got away from me.
Or maybe you’ll be real lucky again, and only kill another dog, and break the heart of another family.

Richard Joseph
Letter to the man who killed his dog
August 1955

—A Letter to the Man who Killed My Dog, by Richard Joseph

I dislike very few things, but I dislike those heartily. Tactlessness annoys me – also rudeness, & inability to understand, also crass stupidity, & people who are pleased with themselves. Also spiders, caterpillars, slugs, frogs, toads, loud voices & nasty coughs.
I must stop and fondle my dogs.

Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (who would later become Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother)
Letter to D’Arcy Osborne
22nd March 1924

—Counting One’s Blessings: The Selected Letters of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, edited by William Shawcross

Finally….

At Letters Live on 9th March 2018, four years after the death of her beloved dog, the magnificent Sue Perkins kindly agreed to read aloud a letter she had cathartically written to her late, furry friend. It really is worth six minutes of your time.