Woolf Meets Dog

If I had access to artistic talent -- or, at the very least, a studio at my beck and call -- I would lead the way in the creation of the first ever animated film adaptation of Flush: A Biography. This book -- the only one Virginia Woolf ever wrote, to my knowledge, that is concerned chiefly with the adventures of a cocker spaniel - is simply crying out for the Disney treatment.

And I'm talking about the old Disney. The book would just be so fantastic for it! It has exactly the right amount of scary, and for just the right length of time. Flush's kidnapping by a gang of Victorian dog-thieves and extortionists -- known to cut off their prey's paws when their owners do not cough up the ransom -- is so vividly and unforgettably described.

Flush's anguish in captivity, likewise, separated from his mistress, Miss Barrett (the real, historical Flush, you see, was owned by the Brownings, thus catapulting him into the ranks of famous literary dogs, right up there with Boatswain) is so much the stuff of real child-terror. It demands that it be drawn with that particular Dumbo sense of pathos and horror that kept us all awake at nights for years.

The Scottish novelist Alasdair Gray once opined that the old, creepy Disney had the inestimable advantage of being "wise enough to contain believable nightmares." He goes on to cite some of the ones that are surely forever burned into the skulls of anyone who went to a theater or owned a VHS player at some point in the 20th century -- "the wicked witch's gloating mockery of the skeletal prisoner dead from thirst," e.g.

Oh god, don't bring that up, Alasdair Gray!  I'll be thinking about it for the next twelve hours, if not years. (Oh, fine, but just please don't say the words "Pinocchio" and "donkey ears" in my presence. Ever.)

But just as the nightmares in Flush are real enough to be credible, so too is the happy ending. It has as good an ending as any in life can possess. An ending in which the happiness is real, but the loss is real too. Because loss, even in the best of lives, is inescapable. Because the passage of time is inescapable.

And like any story that would make a great film for children, it is not really a children's story. Woolf's wry humor about the English class system, eugenics, gender, and the horrors of the Victorian slums (in which for a time thousands of people were living packed together in dilapidated former mansions rechristened "Rookeries") is everywhere present in the book, and is most certainly adult in orientation.

Sometimes, indeed, the wit is so ice-cold that only the most civilized of Bloomsbury could hope to pull it off. It is the sort of misanthropic, Swiftian humor that proceeds so far in its contempt for human vice it swings back around to a strange glow of humanism. "The cholera," notes Woolf at one point, reflecting on the Brownings' return to London in between their sojourns in Italy, had by that point "done something to improve the condition of the Rookeries."

Cementing the adult character of the book, of course, is the fact that the lessons Flush learns on his journey through Victorian life are not only dog-lessons. They are life-lessons. And they are ones that embody some of the larger themes of the rest of Woolf's work. There are some recognizable Woolfian fixations sprinkled throughout, that is to say, even in this book about a dog.

Flush is, after all -- much like Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse, like Clarissa Dalloway in the novel named for her -- at times thrust into the position of being the third wheel.

As Miss Barrett's pooch, Flush makes enormous sacrifices for his mistress. He "gives up the sun" in order to live beside her in her Victorian invalid gloom. Yet his status of emotional primacy in her life will nevertheless come to be jeopardized twice over -- first by the arrival of Mr. Browning, who threatens to supplant him, then by the Brownings' baby, who importunately claims his parents' attention.

Flush, to put it in modern parlance, is thus in frequent danger of being "friend-zoned." And this experience of being suddenly exiled from the bond of romantic passion between two people is more than a little reminiscent of what Lily Briscoe goes through -- when she is seated next to Paul at the dinner party that takes up much of the middle of To the Lighthouse.

Paul, who is newly engaged, is conceiving a project to wake up early the next morning to go hunt for a piece of jewelry that his fiancée lost in the ocean the day before. Lily says she would like to go with him, and he laughs shortly in reply, "as if" -- notes Lily -- "he had said, Throw yourself over the cliff if you like." Lily is scalded in this moment by what she calls "the heat of love, its horror, its cruelty, its unscrupulosity."

Mrs. Dalloway feels something very similar when she observes the obsessive and grotesque attention that her daughter's tutor in modern history -- Miss Kilman -- focuses upon her charge, the young Elizabeth. Kilman, a great comic yet tragic creation if ever there was one, reminds Clarissa of her true feelings toward what she sees as two of the world's great evils: "Love and religion."

She proceeds to denounce both in terms familiar from Lily's invective: "The cruelest things in the world, she thought, seeing them clumsy, hot, domineering, hypocritical, eavesdropping, jealous, infinitely cruel and unscrupulous [...]; love and religion."

So too, Flush is burned. He is blasted by the eruption of love into the lives of the people around him. Minor tragedies that befall him -- scrapes and bruises -- that once would have earned him the cooing sympathy of Miss Barrett, soon begin to merit only sarcastic quips about his hyper-sensitivity and flair for the dramatic. These quips, of course, come no longer from Miss Barrett, but from the future Mrs. Browning. He notes too that she sometimes seems to pace or look around the room as if he were not even there.

He therefore comes up with a solution. He tries the reasonable approach of killing -- or at least seriously wounding -- Robert Browning. Twice he bites him. He even refuses a good faith effort on Browning's part to win him over with pastries, preferring to sink his teeth into the Victorian bard directly, rather than the cakes he brings. (But then, Sweeney Todd has already explained to us the downside of eating poet.)

When this approach fails, however, something beautiful happens. Flush realizes that of course he still loves Miss Barrett, soon to be Mrs. Browning, and must always do so. It was this very love, to be sure, that led to his jealous rage and violence against the age's great purveyor of narrative poetry.

Yet, Flush eventually comes to accept, this same love -- if it is real love -- also compels him to abandon his possessiveness. It necessitates loving the other people who are a part of Miss Barrett, who partake of her life. He even decides he is willing to eat the now stale pastries -- Browning's brownies, if you will.

It means, in other words, that Flush comes to accept Robert Browning, and baby Browning, and more than that -- he comes to love them too. I refer you to a passage I described in an earlier post, from Mr. Fortune's Maggot by Sylvia Townsend Warner. And I pause to point out that in that scene, in which Mr. Fortune comes to a conclusion so very much like Flush's, he choses to depict himself as a dog.

--

If this is an immensely well-told story and simply a great novel by any measure -- and it is -- that is perhaps not surprising, given its author. What takes us more off guard is how touching the book allows itself to be, how simple and poignant its truths.

There is something about dogs that permits even the most un-Victorian of artists occasionally to relax their strictures against sentimentality -- to let slip the stern mask of irony or invective.

I note that Robinson Jeffers, known chiefly for his cold reflections on the themes of stone, time, and the decline of the republican virtues, also happened to write one utterly, heartbreakingly sweet poem about a deceased dog, "The House Dog's Grave." There's one line in it that I cannot read without welling up each time.

Byron, likewise -- about as distant from the Victorians in one direction as Woolf was from them in the other -- thought that dogs represented an ideal of loving kindness that humans could never achieve. "Thy love is lust, thy friendship all a cheat," he complained, speaking of his fellow featherless bipeds, and contrasting them with the noble Boatswain (who in real life, it turns out, was rather a handful -- like his master).

I heard somewhere recently -- on a podcast maybe -- that psychopaths tend to be animal lovers (notice that I do not add "and vice versa" -- since that would be unfair). Supposedly, this is because animals offer the unconditional love that psychopaths expect from everyone, whereas human relationships tend to require compromise and a mutual give-and-take.

Well, in Byron's case, the shoe certainly fits.

Flush's story is so moving in Woolf's hands, however, not because it depicts the unconditional love of animals, however, but for what it has to tell us about the very conditional, jealous, troublous, and exhausting world of human loves. It has much to say not just about dog-life, that is, but about all life. It is a story of compromise and acceptance. The losses that have to be borne because we love. It is not a tale of total devotion calculated to appeal to the narcissists of the world. It is a story that shows both the beauty and heartbreak of the world as it is.

Plainly, then, this unjustly forgotten triumph deserves to be committed to animated cells. Had I the pen, or the staff, I would do it myself. The situation being what it is, however, all I can do is offer this pitch, in the hopes some executive will take it up. If you are out there, great producer, let it be known that I'm available to adapt the screenplay.