Pets don’t get enough credit for their supportive role in the literary world. Take Toby, for example. This Irish Setter may have played a key part in the success of John Steinbeck’s classic novella Of Mice and Men, yet no one ever mentions him.
It was May 1936 and Steinbeck had been working on the book for two months when he made the fatal error of leaving the puppy and the manuscript alone.
On his return, he discovered that Toby had shredded half the book. And there was no other copy. In a letter to his editor, Elizabeth Otis, he said he was “pretty mad” but then conceded that “the poor little fellow may have been acting critically”. He confessed that he wasn’t sure if the book was any good at all.
The writer started again and Of Mice and Men went on to become required reading for generations of school goers. As for Toby, he got a spanking with a flyswatter for his troubles, instead of being rewarded for helping the writer to produce a better book.
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The Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard must have forgotten about John Steinbeck when he provocatively asked: “Has a single good author ever owned a dog?” in an article in the New Yorker a few years ago. He conceded that Virginia Woolf was a dog owner but said her dogs didn’t count because they were “too small and pet-like to cause fear in anyone”.
He clearly held a canine grudge after a neighbour’s dog had terrorised him as a child. Nevertheless, he once got a dog for the sake of his daughter and noted that he didn’t write a single line of literary prose during his two years of dog ownership. “Although I’m not blaming the dog,” he wrote, “I still think that in a certain sense owning a dog undermined my literary project.”
EB White’s pets clearly boosted his literary projects, given that several of them crept into his books. The creator of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little was once accused of not having a dog licence and wrote a highly entertaining letter to the licence officials, noting that they had asked for the dog’s name, sex, breed, and phone number.
“She doesn’t answer the phone,” he helpfully explained. “She is a dachshund and can’t reach it, but she wouldn’t answer it even if she could, as she has no interest in outside calls.”
Of course, some writers prefer cats and fortunately they are not prone to making confetti from manuscripts. Despite his machismo, Ernest Hemingway was a big softy when it came to cats, owning anything from 20 to 50, depending on what account you read. They prowled around the dinner table drinking from glasses and raising serious food safety concerns but this didn’t appear to bother his fellow diners.
And our own WB Yeats had an interesting relationship with a cat. His daughter Anne told the academic and Yeats expert Wayne K Chapman how one of the family pets was an extremely lazy white cat. When the poet was convalescing after an illness, the cat kept him company.
“He used to love to sleep with Father on his bed, having had a succession of owners who were invalids, preferring an indolent life,” she explained. But when the poet perked up again, the cat was very discombobulated. “As Father got better, the cat got suicidal and jumped out of windows until he was given to a blind sculptor.”
The cat was happy to resume his languid lifestyle and Yeats got a good story out of it all.
But when it comes to writers and pets, Lord Byron takes the biscuit – the dog biscuit, obviously.
At various stages in his life, the English poet kept monkeys, goats, a crocodile, eagles, horses and badgers so it was no surprise that he wanted to bring a pet to Cambridge when he enrolled there.
He sensibly kept it simple and opted to bring his favourite dog. However, the rules expressly forbade dogs so that was the end of the story. Or was it? The bold Byron turned up with a pet bear instead. The authorities scoured the rule book and on finding no reference to a ban on bears, he got to keep his unusual pet until graduating.
Lord Byron walked the bear around the campus on a chain, just one man and his bear out for a stroll. How the infamous lothario managed all his romantic escapades with a bear in his living quarters is anyone’s guess. But it must have been harmonious because there are no reports of any of his lovers exiting stage left, pursued by a bear.