MEMOIRA lyrical memoir of love, loss, despair, depression and death expressed through the author's passion for dogs, writes Joyce Hickey
THERE ARE, I know, some people who don't care for dogs. Who don't feel odd going for a walk without holding a lead. Who are unmoved by a thunderous welcome or a thumping tail, a long, non-judgmental look or a companionable slobber. But even the most un-doggy person would be touched by Dog Years, the third memoir by American poet Mark Doty. It's a lyrical account of his life with two retrievers and his various experiences of love, loss, despair, depression and death, lightened by insightful humour and by intelligent delight in doggy details. "The great evolutionary success of the species," he notes, "lies in their ability to convince us of our need for them. They have accomplished this by making themselves extraordinarily appealing."
The story, which spans nearly 16 years, opens and closes with Arden, an endlessly endearing black retriever who Doty rescued as a puppy and who outlived Beau, his second foundling. The narrative is not always chronological but follows a thread from Vermont to Provincetown, on the salt marshes of Cape Cod, and ends in Manhattan, where both dogs spent their latter days. It charts the decline and death of Doty's partner, Wally Roberts, from Aids-related complications, his new life with another writer, Paul Lisicky, and how the dogs accommodated the changes.
Doty's passion for dogs shows in the details with which he defines character; the way they gaze at seemingly empty spaces, how they know what to say without uttering a word; the particular tang of salty wet dog; how one shows his contempt for vets by spitting out the treats they offer; and he likens the large vet in Provincetown to a Newfoundland, in the way those dogs are "vaguely apologetic for their size". Even Doty's description of the cover of this book is considered: "Beau's on the back; Arden, typically, is right in front." He compares how they display their love for their humans, one focusing inwards and approximating a hug, the other looking away while offering his hindquarters for a scratch. There's also an episode where he feels a deep connection with a "retrieverish" dog on a Mexico street and frets for a long time after that he did not take her home.
After Wally's death, Doty wrote a memoir, Heaven's Coast, which followed his collection of related poems, My Alexandria, and helped him in some way to deal with his grief. In one of the most poignant parts of Dog Years he gives a brief but searing account of Wally's passing and a deep sense of the sadness he and Arden bore. By an odd turn of fate, in Wally's last days, Doty revisited the animal shelter where he had claimed Arden some years before, and, though he acknowledges it was hardly a sensible time to rescue a dog, he was in turn claimed by Beau, a boisterous golden retriever, when he "put the beautiful weight of his head in [ his] hands".
Doty describes how, in the raw days after Wally's death, the dogs held him together; how "a walk is a walk, and must be taken". How the pair lolloped away on the sand or careered along the path after some untold treasure; how Beau habitually tugged a glove from Doty's hand, insisted on holding his own lead and swiped a neighbour's toy seagull and worried it until the squeak wore out.
There is anguish in the description of Beau's last days; in the journey home from the vet when he fell and Doty carried him home, like "a Biblical shepherd holding an errant lamb", stopping to rest his arms along the way. I've done that weeping walk, one hand pushing a buggy that held a new life and the other cradling a beloved, collapsed old mutt nearing her end. And so I wept for Beau too.
THERE'S A DISARMINGLY frank description of Doty's descent into despair and his desire for death and here, as elsewhere, he quotes Emily Dickinson: "I like a look of Agony/ Because I know it's true". He evokes the blanket of quiet over Manhattan as the Twin Towers imploded, the city's uncertainty in the aftermath of 9/11 and how the mood was captured by a drag queen as Judy Garland; in You'll Never Walk Alone, "she's singing her way out of suffering". And against this backdrop is Arden's failing health; his panic attacks and his weakening body a mirror of Doty's own anxiety, both treated with medication.
I still keep that empty lead on a hook under the stairs. And Mark Doty has a toy wolf cub on the bed, taking up a fraction of Arden's space but keeping it warm for one who'll fill those big pawprints.
Joyce Hickey is an Irish Times journalist
Dog Years By Mark Doty Jonathan Cape, 216pp. £11.99