I turned to Gladys. This little reminder that youth can be more terrifying than old age. I could not tell Gladys what I rarely needed to tell Agnes. That it is hard on puppy legs to launch herself from six feet high banks down to a hard path – as she longed to do. That it’s unsafe to walk on broken glass, or worse still, consume it. Nor could I explain that eating discarded face masks found on the pavement in town is not a good idea. I had to watch for her, pre-empt things, distract and guide her away from danger without treading on her agency. Keep her secure without interrupting her joyous forever-present of seeming indestructability.
I must, as Marie Bonaparte did for her Topsy, “love this tiny life which deems itself eternal, since its running paws so cheerfully deny their inevitable stop, one day.” (Marie Bonaparte, Topsy: The Story of a Golden-Haired Chow, 1937)
The manner and suddenness of Agnes’s death haunted my first months with Gladys. If any tragedy should befall the innocent dog with life still ahead of her, I feared healthy mourning would not be possible. No, to borrow from Freud, it would be full-barreled melancholia for me. Between the two dogs, Agnes and Gladys, there might be a pitiful enactment of the great essay:
It was her fear of Topsy’s death, not to say its anticipation coupled with pre-emptive mourning that led Bonaparte (friend to Freud and psychoanalyst herself) to write her dog memoir. In 1935, a cancerous lump was discovered on the Chow’s upper lip. Topsy would be cured following treatment at the Curie Institute, but much of the book concerns Bonaparte’s meditations on death, Topsy’s and her own, mainly, although the wider context of 1930s Europe and the rise of Nazism clearly added to the morbid anxieties evident in numerous passages.
Of the import of losing Topsy as dog:
“People may say it is too much to cry for a poor dog… [but] When two creatures on this earth… have found each other, have loved each other, even though they be of different species, why must other affections, other duties, and work that a poor dog cannot understand, be strong enough to separate them?”
At times troubled by what she calls the painful tension (tension douloureuse) between human and dog, Bonaparte burdens Topsy with a series of competing ideas. Writing across the differences between them, she declares her “sisterly feeling” for Topsy. She states that her love surpasses the love she has felt for most humans while, at the same time, noting the mystery that is Topsy, the ultimate impossibility of knowing a dog:
“What will Topsy have loved when death comes to take her away?” And: “Topsy, the greatest philosopher, strive as he may, will never know the visions which pass through your little golden head.”
Bonaparte is wonderfully unafraid of contradiction. At times Topsy is her protector, a “talisman of life…She guards me and by her presence alone must bar the entrance of my room to a worse ill, and even to Death.” Yet in another passage, it is Topsy who threatens to bring death closer: “As a dog’s life is so short, to have one, to love one, is… gratuitously to invite death into one’s house.”
Poor Topsy! The reader can only feel some relief that her dog cannot know Bonaparte’s labile thoughts and scribblings. We are relieved too when Bonaparte remarks, finally, “I bless her… for not knowing that which I, alas, do know.”
Moreover, Topsy’s cancer takes her memoirist back and forward in time. Topsy becomes “the tragic messenger of the death my father suffered” (also from cancer, some twelve years earlier), and similarly, a portent of the cancer that would kill Freud. Indeed, both Freud and Topsy suffered from tumors of the right oral cavity. Bonaparte does not refer to Freud’s cancer in the memoir, but more than one commentator has suggested that the two sufferers – dog and founder of psychoanalysis – may have been linked in her mind. In any case, Freud responded positively to the project: “Just received your manuscript of the Topsy book,” he wrote to Bonaparte. “I love it; it is so movingly genuine and true. It is not an analytic work, of course, but the analyst’s thirst for truth and knowledge can be perceived behind this production, too.”
“Does Topsy realize she is being translated?” What a tender gift Freud gave us with this lighthearted question sent to Bonaparte.
Did he mean his own translation of Topsy into German? Most likely. But if anyone might read Topsy as Bonaparte’s own impossible desire to ‘translate’ her dog (and herself with dog), it would be Freud.
Moreover, we know that Freud loved dogs. There are dog references in his letters, photos, and theoretical works. Jofi, Freud’s Chow, attended his sessions with patients.
In his Introduction to Topsy, Gary Genosko writes that “Freud’s consulting room, like his manner, was his alone. His devotion to Jofi was so strong that he did not entertain the idea of sparing an analysand a confrontation with his dog.” Peter Gay describes how “the dog would sit quietly at the foot of the couch during the analytic hour.” (Freud: A Life for Our Time, 1988). In Martin Freud’s memory of his father, Jofi would yawn and rise at the end of the hour – with such accuracy that Freud had no need to check his watch. (See H. Ruitenbeck, Freud as We Knew Him, 1973). Hilda Doolittle (the poet H.D.) not only wondered at Freud’s preference for dogs over cats but took exception to the Chow’s regular attendance at her own analysis: “I was annoyed at the end of my session as Jofi would wander about and I felt the Professor was more interested in Jofi than he was in my story.” (Hilda Doolittle, Tribute to Freud, 1956)
Freud’s remark that dogs display no ambivalence in their object relations has been much cited: “Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate.” (Freud, letter to Marie Bonaparte) Perhaps less commonly known is Freud’s own lack of ambivalence towards his dogs.
When Wolf, Anna’s Alsatian, bit Ernest Jones, Freud remarked that Jones “deserved it.” Indeed, Anna recorded – with a hint of jealousy – her father’s fascination and affection for Wolf, the first of the family dogs: “I did not give Papa a present for his birthday because there is no present suitable for the occasion. I brought only a picture of Wolf… because I always assert that he transferred his whole interest in me onto Wolf. He was very pleased with it.”
But it is Jofi the Chow, Freud’s own dog, who features most prominently in the Freud story. And following a series of painful operations for his mouth cancer, Freud found comfort in Jofi’s presence. In a letter to Bonaparte, he stated, “I wish you could have seen with me what sympathy Jofi shows me during these hellish days, as if she understood everything.”
When Jofi died in 1937, Freud – the thinker who gave us the great essay on mourning – shared his sense of loss in a letter to the German novelist Arnold Zweig: “Apart from any mourning, it is very unreal, and one wonders when one will get used to it. But, of course, one cannot easily get over seven years of intimacy.”
Jofi died in the same year Topsy was published. Freud undertook, together with Anna, its translation into German, completing the work in April 1938. Genosko (drawing on Anna’s own account) provides a poignant description of the circumstances (both personal and public) in which Freud completed the translation:
“…with the Nazi invasion of Austria (March, 1938), the climate of apprehension had turned to fear, and Freud found himself without any analysands, house-bound (ultimately put under house arrest), lonely, ill, and uncertain about his family’s future. It was in this state that he [in Anna’s words] took up ‘an old occupation, the work of translation,’ in order to ‘do a favor in gratitude for her [Bonaparte’s] unflagging helpfulness… it was not only the person of the author but, above all, the topic of the book which influenced Freud’s choice.’ This favor also in a manner of speaking ‘repaid’ Freud’s own dogs, Anna wrote, for their years of companionship. Her father, Anna explained, turned away from the violent and destructive world of his fellow men to that of animals… Ultimately, with the assistance of Bonaparte, the Freuds left Vienna on June 4, 1938, en route to London via Paris.” (Genosko, Introduction to Topsy)
A longer thread may be pulled from this account. It winds back to Freud’s question: “Does Topsy realize she is being translated?” And here we may join this question to Freud and Topsy’s shared vulnerability: their cancer. Moreover, it is clear that Freud, a Jew in Vienna, came to the translation during a moment of personal danger that reached beyond his illness, and beyond the loss of his own dog. And Anna’s suggestion that Freud turned away from the world of humans to that of animals finds a counterpart in the text itself:
“Far away, nations might clamour threateningly, money markets collapse, but you [Topsy] knew nothing of it all… Dogs are ignorant of the extent and bitterness of human quarrels, their quarrels being limited and short-lived… Topsy knew nothing of the complications of human quarrels, and only knew how to love me.” (Bonaparte, Topsy)
Aside from the overworked point, again, concerning the perceived lack of ambivalence shown by dogs in their relations, it is clear that both author and translator understood the perilous world in which the two cancers (Topsy’s and Freud’s) had occurred. Yet what Freud translated, in the main, was that tension douloureuse described by Bonaparte in her efforts to love and care for Topsy across the dog-woman divide. We are touching, again, on the question of shared vulnerability, but here through the project(s) of translation. In her essay on ethics/translation/empathy, Kari Weil states:
“Animals are often better readers than we are. Dogs owe their integration into our homes and our lives in part to their ability to respond, not only to commands, but also to moods and the silent expressions of our bodies… Such felt readings, moreover, are also translations, whether from one sense to another, or from words to touch or smell and back again.” (Kari Weil, “Empathy” in The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies, ECAS)
And drawing more specifically on Derrida:
“To be sure, some of the most difficult translations are those demanded by human-animal relations. They give us reason to marvel at the uniqueness of human forms of expression, even as they must be checked by all that we don’t know about non-human languages – whether of dogs or rats or ants.
“For Derrida, translation, like empathy, is both necessary and impossible: necessary because we are always bound to an other – giant, man, beast, dog – who precedes us and awakens us to our senses. It is impossible because of what, in the other and ourselves, remains opaque to translation… It is through attention to the necessity and impossibility of translation that empathy can become an ethical force.” (Weil, “Empathy” in ECAS)
The complex set of translations that is Topsy (dog, dog with Bonaparte, dog with cancer, dog in a sick Europe, and finally, dog in book), that both author and translator were psychoanalysts, Jofi’s death, that sickness and death hovered truly over these projects, the larger historical context – all these make a memoir that is, at first glance, a deceptively simple read. At second glance, it challenges our conception of relations with others – human and animal.
Topsy and Jofi, like Agnes, are with the ghosts. But these are welcome hauntings during plague years. The animals that, to borrow from Haraway once more, ‘have humans’ – are seeing more of those humans than before the lockdowns. We can’t know how our relations with animals may be altered by the plague times, but certainly, Derrida’s invocation of Bentham’s question remains powerful:
“The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” (Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 1789).
Bentham’s question has featured in the history of animal rights activism, but of course, it lends itself to wider issues: the meanings of compassion and freedom, survival of the planet and of those species currently threatened with extinction, questions of political justice and agency, the personal and the political, and finally, the ways in which our neglect of animals diminishes us as human-animals, and therefore our politics too. The point about my life with Agnes, for example, is not that I ever understood her dogness, but that her dogness challenged me to be a better human.
“Empathy across difference requires imagination,” remarks Kari Weil. Our relations with animals afford us an opportunity to “confront the prejudices that have kept empathy out of politics.” And she rightly cites Derrida’s plea for a “new experience of this compassion” that can “awaken us to our responsibilities and obligations vis-à-vis the living in general.” (Weil, in ECAS)
Agnes is gone. But Gladys, now nearly two years old, stirs. What I must do, now, is stop writing and go for a walk with her.
Bonaparte checks her writerly ambitions by noting that Topsy prefers to inhale the “scented June air, whilst I strive laboriously to trace signs on this paper. Should I leave my cupboards full of immortal writings… they would only be what they already are… even for Topsy today: a worthless heap of the cellulose which men call paper.”
Gladys stirs.
Wonderful reading at the the close of a very hot “dog day,” listening from the porch the distant thunder of an approaching summer storm. A flow of prose that opened before me the evening after last night’s dream that featured the appearance of my long passed litter mates who possessed our lives here for sixteen years. What clowns, what children. What a surprising apparition.
Knowing how you love your dog and how I have loved mine resists really knowing what we love. It is the love alone and what attentiveness it inspires that counts in the end—and the questions: Did they love us? If so, did the shape of their love resemble ours in any way. Did they, my pups who never parted each other’s company, ever, love each other in the same symbolic way that we love?
It’s the kind of mystery of love that mirrors the love of a book. Who can define that? It is purely the object of the content that we want near, for no particular reason. The pleasure of the read, enough.
As for this reading on this evening, it was that pleasure in its voice that filled me with something like a little love, like I would read it again to feel good, a warmth, a familiarity.