When I was a child I read all of the dog and horse books in my school library. So did my friend, Kate Doyle. When I recently opened the copy of Lad, A Dog, from my bookshelf, I found Kate's name pasted inside the book. I realized that I must have borrowed this book from her sometime so far back that it must count as stealing at this point. Sorry, Kate. Luckily, we are still friends, and she is one of the few that, like me, read as many of Albert Payson Terhune's books as she could get hold of--we are talking circa fourth and fifth grade. Terhune published these books in the early half of the twentieth century, and we went to a school that had very old books on the shelves. Terhune lived on a farm in New Jersey back when it was still thought of as deep countryside, and he wrote beautifully about collie dogs. The lead character was Lad, and in the series came Lad's son, Wolf, and his wife, Lady--they were family to those who read these books. The dramas of the farm, and the collies, who were so intelligent and loyal and psychologically complex, were Jack London in New Jersey---but though any dog book fan has read White Fang, and The Call of the Wild, these books were domestic dramas rather than adventure stories. In some ways they succeeded because you could just barely imagine, from an apartment in New York City, that these dogs would have the same issues with you, if you were lucky enough to live in the county and raise collies. The books were old fashioned, and though I have never owned a collie dog, I notice the narrower skulls that have been bred for fashion since Terhune’s time, and when I lived for a short time in the country, I got a Border Collie pup who had a broad, intelligent forehead, like Lad's, and I thought of Terhune. The dogs were the stars of the show, and the "master" and "mistress" of the dogs were wallpaper compared to the main characters. I guess that is why we loved them. Honestly, we didn't care much about the humans in these books, and Kate had a collection of china dogs that we would play with for hours when we were children, pretending to rescue sheep, or fight off intruders, and somehow, one of these dogs would always come out a hero. It is important, it seems to me, to remember the hours spent playing with these little dogs. They were certainly more than toys to us. It was an ongoing story we returned to every day, inspired by Terhune, and the characters of the dogs he wrote about kept us playing hour after hour. We were trying out how we ourselves might behave if we had to rescue a flock of sheep on a hillside, or defend our family on "The Place." Would we be "noble"? Would we give in to our own fear? Lad showed us the way. There were many different endings to our games, and for my part, though I tried my best to be be worthy of Lad, in the end, I was Wolf.
When I was a child we had copies of the old Andrew Lang Fairy Tales in the house, along with the usual Brothers Grimm. Lang published twelve popular collections in the late nineteenth century, each of a different color. My sister and I had The Blue Fairy Book and The Yellow Fairy Book. They are a good size for reading aloud to children, hard covers about the size of an adult palm, with illustrations. The Yellow Fairy Book has an imprinted gold cover, with a barefoot fairy reaching up toward the sun, rays shimmering out. There is a bird flying up out of clouds and an incongruous rooster perched on a narrow tower in the lower right hand corner. The illustrated cover is embossed, a child can trace the lines with her finger, and touching it now, I can pretend to remember doing exactly this. The smell of the book is from a century ago, paper delicate as wings, formal black endpapers framing the stories and illustrations. In this collection is what Lang calls an Iroquois tale, "The Dead Wife," about a couple who live happily together, deep in the woods, far from the rest of the tribe.
"One day, when he was away hunting, the woman fell ill, and in a few days she died. Her husband grieved bitterly, and buried her in the house where she had passed her life; but as the time went on he felt so lonely without her that he made a wooden doll about her height and size for company, and dressed it in her clothes. He seated it in front of the fire, and tried to think he had his wife back again."
One year later the doll comes to life, lights a fire and cooks for the man, but she tells him that he may not touch her until they have seen the rest of the tribe. Two more years pass, and he asks her to come back with him to their original home, so that they can finally be rejoined as man and wife. They begin the six-day journey, but when they are one day away, a snowstorm comes and they stop to rest, make a fire and sleep their way through the snow.
"Then the heart of the man was greatly stirred, and he stretched out his arms to his wife, but she waved her hand and said, “We have seen no one yet; it is too soon. But he would not listen to her, and caught her to him, and behold! He was clasping the wooden doll."
It is the same lesson we have been taught again and again. It is Orpheus and Eurydice. There are limits to what love can do and grief can create. Death is the fact that longing cannot alter. My own husband was happily married for twenty years. He waited a full year after his wife's early death to consider another woman. It is both my fortune and my misfortune that I was the first he "stretched out his arms to." I have kept company for years now with her photographs, her paintings (they are both abstract painters), the objects she placed in her home. After two years he dismantled the memorial shrine in his living room. At three years he began to put away some of the photographs. At four years he gave away her clothes. At six years he buried her ashes.
The books we read as children are maps for the people we are still becoming.
It’s an invitation and a dare. The pages of this small, nearly square book are thick like an artist’s sketchpad, and each chapter is divided by a drawing: a cliff with a cabin on the beach. The sea with moon and clouds. The characters in the book are a hunter, a mermaid, a bear, a lynx and finally a boy. But there are no figures in any of the drawings. They are places to enter, caves to peer into; there is a bow hanging from the branch of a tree for the reader to pick up and try for herself, the arrows are leaning against a log just below. The book was published in 1965, at a time when traditional families were fracturing, and new ways of forming a family were being explored. The Animal Family is a love story not only between the Hunter and the Mermaid, but between all of the different creatures that find their way home together. As Jarrell writes, “The hunter and the mermaid were so different from each other that it seemed to them, finally, that they were exactly alike; they lived together and were happy.” It is a book that offers not only escape but solace. Each of the characters enters a world they have never known before, and there is an acceptance that much will never be understood.
There are times when a book can be your home, a shell that you carry on your back. A book with pictures is even better; you can build a whole landscape with that. You are in some hard places, the waiting room at the hospital, the departure lounge at the airport on your way to something unimaginable, to name just a few. But if you have the right book you can pitch a tent and build a fire, right there on the shore of disaster.
Very proud of my mom, Jean Valentine, a poet who recently recorded this oral history with the Woodberry Poetry Room while she was in residence at the MacDowell Colony. Link to listen here….