Dog Years: A Memoir

Dog Years\ A Memoir \ \ By Mark Doty \ HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.\ Copyright © 2007 Mark Doty\ All right reserved.\ ISBN: 9780061171000 \ \ \ Chapter One\ No dog has ever said a word, but that doesn't mean they live outside the world of speech. They listen acutely. They wait to hear a term—biscuit, walk—and an inflection they know. What a stream of incomprehensible signs passes over them as they wait, patiently, for one of a few familiar words! Because they do not speak, except in the most limited fashion, we are always trying to figure them out. The expression is telling: to "figure out" is to make figures of speech, to invent metaphors to help us understand the world. To choose to live with a dog is to agree to participate in a long process of interpretation—a mutual agreement, though the human being holds most of the cards.\ What the interpreter must do is tell stories—sometimes to the dog in question. Who hasn't heard a dog walker chattering away to her pet, as if she were serving as a kind of linguistic mirror: "You are scared of that police horse," "Lola loves that ball!" Some people speak for their dogs in the first person, as though the dog were ventriloquizing his owner. There's inevitably something embarrassing about this; a kind of silly intimacy that might seem sweet at home becomes a source of eye-rolling discomfort to strangers.\ But most stories about dogs are narrated toother people, as we go on articulating the tales of our animals' lives, in order to bring their otherwise incomprehensible experience into the more orderly world of speech. Taking pictures of your pet serves much the same function; it isn't just about memory and the desire to record, but a way to bring something of the inchoate into the world of the represented. This is a part of the pet owner's work. In order to live within the domestic world, the dog must be named, read, and in some way understood.\ Of course, listening to stories about other people's pets is perilous, like listening to the recitation of dreams. Such reports may be full of charm for the dreamer, but for the poor listener they're usually fatally dull. The dreamer has no distance from the spell of the dream, and cannot say just how it mattered so, and language mostly fails to capture the deeply interior character of dreams anyway. We listen with an appreciation for the speaker's intent, but without much interest in the actual story.\ Love itself is a bit like that: you can describe your beloved until the tongue tires and still, in truth, fail to get at the particular quality that has captured you. We give up, finally, and distill such feelings into single images: the bronzy warmth of one of his glances, or that way of turning the head she has when she's thinking and momentarily stops being aware of other people. That, we tell ourselves, stands for what we love. But it's perfectly clear that such images explain nothing. They serve as signposts for some incommunicable thing. Being in love is our most common version of the unsayable; everyone seems to recognize that you can't experience it from the outside, not quite—you have to feel it from the inside in order to know what it is.\ Maybe the experience of loving an animal is actually more resistant to language, since animals cannot speak back to us, cannot characterize themselves or correct our assumptions about them. They look at us across a void made of the distance between their lives and our immersion in language. "Not a single one of his myriad sensations," wrote Virginia Woolf of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's cocker spaniel, Flush, "ever submitted itself to the deformity of words."\ Maybe they remind us, in this way, of our own origins, when our bodies were not yet assumed into the world of speech. Then we could experience wordlessly, which must at once be a painful thing and a strange joy, a pure kind of engagement that adults never know again. Can it even be called "painful" or a "joy," if the infant who is feeling those things has no terms for them, only the uninterpreted life of emotion and sensation? We suffer a loss, leaving the physical world for the world of words—even though we gain our personhood in the process.\ Love for a wordless creature, once it takes hold, is an enchantment, and the enchanted speak, famously, in private mutterings, cryptic riddles, or gibberish. This is why I shouldn't be writing anything to do with the two dogs who have been such presences for sixteen years of my life. How on earth could I stand at the requisite distance to say anything that might matter?\ Last month five thousand people died here in New York; the ruins of the towers in which—with which—they fell smolder still. [I wrote these words in October of 2001; the dead had not yet been properly counted; it was impossible to find the bodies, and the lists of the missing were unclear.] When the wind is right, Chelsea fills with the smell of burning plastic, as if somewhere down in the rubble thousands and thousands of computers were slowly, poisonously burning, along with fluorescent tubes and industrial carpeting and the atomized pieces of corporate art that lined the reception room walls. My friends in other cities speak about the new war, the roots of this atrocity and its relationship to other atrocities around the globe; they worry over the notion of "evil," whether it's a reality or a concept with no use in the public sphere. I understand that such things matter, but for me they're nothing but air.\ I can't stop seeing the whitened boots of the rescue workers trudging back uptown, or sitting beside me on the subway benches. Their battered leather and shoelaces, cuffs and ankles are covered with a thick powder composed of atomized concrete: the pulverized stuff of two hundred floors of offices—desk chairs, files, coffee cups—commingled with the stuff of human bodies reduced to creamy ash. The rubble trucks rumble up Eighth Avenue, uncovered. The white grit blows out in troubled eddies, and snow gusts and coats our faces and hair. Somewhere in that dust are the atoms of Graham, a man I knew a little, and saw last at the end of summer, when he was laughing on the street, his tattooed arms flashing in the sun.\ \ \ Continues... \ \ \ \ Excerpted from Dog Years by Mark Doty Copyright © 2007 by Mark Doty. Excerpted by permission.\ All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.\ Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. \ \

\ From Barnes & NobleIn 1994, Mark Doty was standing at the worst sort of crossroads. His longtime lover was slowly dying of AIDS, and Mark was restlessly searching for some way to bring comfort to him in his waning days. The solution came with four paws and a wagging tail. Beau, a large golden retriever, arrived at the house malnourished and equally in need of emotional support. With the help of black lab housemate Arden and his two human companions, this lovably sloppy dog somehow brought peace and his own brand of surrealistic humor to this troubled home. A supremely touching memoir by a National Book Critics Circle Award winner.\ \ \ \ \ Publishers WeeklyDoty brings a mellow, soft-spoken dignity to the narration of his memoir, which chronicles the lives of the distinguished poet and author's beloved retrievers, Arden and Beau. The narrative thread comes together in the form of essays evoking the joy, tenderness, pain and loss in the compressed canine life spans of the two dogs. The four-legged drama takes shape amid the backdrop of Doty's human journey of grief and resiliency, particularly in regard to the loss of his longtime partner to AIDS and his subsequent glide into a new romantic relationship. Given Doty's literary pedigree, it should come as no surprise that he takes a meandering path in the autobiographic story line, pausing frequently to offer philosophical insights. The thoughtful pace and tone of Doty's audio performance brings to mind the spoken-word journals of NPR's This American Life. Audiences eager to cut to the chase for a classic inspirational dog saga may lose patience, but discerning listeners will appreciate Doty's perspective. Simultaneous release with the HarperCollins hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 12). (Apr.)\ Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information\ \ \ Library JournalPoet Doty (Still Life with Oysters and Lemon) celebrates the 16 lovely years his two beloved 70-pound Labs, Beau and Arden, gave him, but there's an ill wind blowing through the memoir. It concerns the inevitable truth that most dog owners only dimly accept—that they will probably outlive their canine companions. Against a backdrop of devastating human loss, both personal (the death of his partner) and public (9/11), Doty bears witness to the inexorable decline of his beloved retrievers. He well understands the risks he takes in writing about his pets while human calamity unfolds. Even so, he notes, "someone was here, an intelligence and sensibility, a complex of desires and memories, habits and expectations…gone from the world forever." This sad, sad book represents a curious blend of memoir, journal, literary criticism, and prose elegy, and it borrows some structural elements from drama and poetry. Its tone is plangent, its complex formal structure is like memory itself, and its exquisite pace reminds one of nothing so much as a stroll in the park with Fido. Poignant, intelligent, and quite simply superb; highly recommended for most collections, although the Emily Dickinson criticism may make it too literary for the Marley & Mecrowd.\ —Robert Eagan\ \ \ \ \ Kirkus Reviews"The fact that I know that stories of faithful dogs are kitsch does not in the least diminish their power," notes poet and memoirist Doty (Still Life with Oyster and Lemon, 2001, etc.), who goes on to write something rather amazing. With the idea of comforting his terminally ill lover, Wally Roberts, the author headed to an animal shelter to adopt a cuddly puppy as a playmate for their black lab, Arden. He ended up with a rambunctious golden lab named Beau, who became a "golden anchor" after the "reverberant, disordering loss" of Wally's death. Arden and Beau saw Doty through his terrible grief: Life went on, walks had to be taken and meals served. Time passed, and the dogs accepted Doty's new lover, first grudgingly and then enthusiastically, with Arden forming a particular bond with the now-familiar Paul. But then both dogs fell ill, Arden with Lyme disease and youthful Beau with a neurological infection that eerily echoed Wally's: difficulty walking, paralysis, followed by death. Arden lived to the ripe age of 16, his elderly presence a constant pleasure for Doty and Paul. A catalogue of the lab's late-life pleasures (the beach, biscuits and "demonstrating, through a nonstop, willful exertion . . . that he can still climb the three flights of stairs to our apartment") round out the tribute. While Doty is clearly fond of animals, his boundless affection is tempered by graceful observations. His warm commemoration of the lives of Beau and Arden makes a fitting companion to his previous chronicles, in prose and poetry, of Wally's illness and death. A profound reflection on hope, and a song of praise for the dead.\ \ \ \ \ Entertainment Weekly"Doty pays loving tribute to two retrievers…DOG YEARS is a warm, thought-provoking discourse."\ \ \ \ \ Los Angeles Times"This is Doty at his best....Doty does in fact make the unsayable sayable, bringing the ungraspable within our reach."\ \ \ \ \ People Magazine"A tender reflection on love and loss, this is MARLEY & ME for the cerebral."\ \ \ \ \ USA Today"Lyrical and sensitive…Doty poetically expresses what many have felt but few can articulate."\ \ \ \ \ Chicago Sun-Times"I was charmed, moved, often fascinated…Doty manages to make inner lives just a little more knowable."\ \ \ \ \ Out Magazine"Doty writes unsentimentally but affectingly about the solace and companionship dogs provide...the hope...they bring into a home."\ \ \ \ \ People“A tender reflection on love and loss, this is MARLEY & ME for the cerebral.”\ \ \ \ \ The New Yorker"Tender and amusing…Doty brilliantly captures the qualities that make dogs endearing."\ \ \ \ \ San Francisco Chronicle"Potent and expressive...The weight of Doty’s adoration for his pets is expressed with...eloquence throughout."\ \ \ \ \ Houston Chronicle"A meditation on how we can live with hope…Dog Years wrestles with the Big Questions."\ \ \ \ \ Minneapolis Star Tribune"No human has ever loved his animals as Mark Doty has…Doty possesses a particular brilliance...[A] stirring chronicle of love."\ \ \ \ \ New York Times Book Review"A dazzling, tactile grasp of the world... both arresting and touching."\ \ \ \ \ New York Magazine"Doty is at his best…exploring the mirrorlike quality of a dog’s gaze or the inextricable duality of hope and despair.."\ \ \ \ \ BookPage"DOG YEARS points out what is...magical about life with animals…A...twinkling landscape of the human heart."\ \ \ \ \ Palm Beach Post"A great poet can break your heart, sometimes with a single line. Mark Doty proves it twice over….Utterly unforgettable."\ \ \ \ \ Pam Houston"Life-affirming, lyrical, and profoundly affecting…Only Mark Doty could have written a dog book...that covers so much ground."\ \ \ \ \ John Freeman"Frankly and beautifully told…DOG YEARS respects Beau’s and Arden’s singularity. Doty describes them lovingly, with poetic specificity."\ \ \ \ \ Amy Hempel"Evocative, compassionate, a love story both intimate and grand, this is a beautiful book."\ \ \ \ \ New York magazine“Doty is at his best…exploring the mirrorlike quality of a dog’s gaze or the inextricable duality of hope and despair..”\ \ \ \ \ Washington Post Magazine"A wounding yet arresting memoir about living with his dogs…Doty’s gorgeous prose and piercing meditations...are simply sublime."\ \ \ \ \ Ken Munger"By turns, comic, heartwarming, sentimental (in the very best way) and ultimately heartbreaking."\ \