Recently a new breed of memoirs has begun scratching the surface of our emotional relationship with dogs. Poets, philosophers, journalists and even science writers are revealing their intimate histories with canines. They've been helped by commercial splashes like John Grogan's Marley and Me, which has become a small industry in itself.
So why are writers suddenly sitting up and taking notice? The latest of these books, a dog memoir/ science-odyssey crossbreed by Jon Franklin, might just have the answer. Franklin believes that when humans emerged from the last ice age, they struck an evolutionary deal with dogs (or wolves, as they then were). We gave them access to our remarkable forebrains; and in return they gave us instruction in the world of emotions. Dogs were hired as our "emotional caddies". They would help us understand the world of feeling.
It's an appealing theory – and provides some clue to why writers are turning to dogs to understand human experience. "Dogs think with their emotions," writes Franklin. "They live the life the poets struggled for, the felt life." They run rings around the Romantic poets when it comes to emotional experience. Perhaps this is why Rilke would gush that the painter Cezanne watched "as a dog watches"; the poet saw in the painter an attentiveness, a nowness, that could only be described as canine.
These recent memoirs have tapped into a huge appetite for books which explore the role that dogs play in our lives. And the writers certainly aren't holding back. In The Dog Years, Mark Doty admits that his golden retriever Arden helped save him from suicidal depression. "He was a vessel," he writes. "Himself, yes, plain, ordinary, and perfect in that sloppy dog way – but he carried something else for me, too, which was my will to live. I had given it to him to carry for me." For Doty, his dogs were "the secret heroes of my vitality".
There were similarly bracing confessions in Mark Rowlands's The Philosopher and the Wolf. The book is an account of 11 years that Rowlands spent living with a wolf named Brenin, who he comes to see more as a brother than a pet. "Much of what I know about life and its meaning I learned from him," he wrote. "What it is to be human: I learned this from a wolf."
And in case you failed to reach the end of John Grogan's Marley and Me because you were chewing the sofa with grief, its closing sentiment echoes Franklin's view that dogs have something deeply serious to pass on: "Marley taught me about living each day with unbridled exuberance and joy," wrote Grogan, "about seizing the moment and following your heart".
But one question niggles. These memoirs have discovered that the most powerful insights about dogs (and ourselves) come from our everyday interaction with each other. So why have the classic novels about dogs insisted on them having wild adventures without humans? Jack London's The Call of the Wild stars a dog who rediscovers his ancestral wildness and ends his days happily howling at the moon. The Plague Dogs by Richard Adams features dogs fending for themselves in the Lake District after escaping from an animal research centre. And The Incredible Journey by Sheila Burnford tells an epic tale of two dogs and a cat travelling 300 miles through the Canadian wilderness. All of these novels are fantastic reads – but they spend more time romanticising dogs than illuminating their ordinary magic. When will novelists start playing ball?
